Use our SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Template to identify each of these characteristics for your business so that you can better understand what you’re doing well, what you could improve, and which external factors could affect your business.
Understanding SWOT
Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that you have some control over. Strengths might include highly trained and experienced staff, strong brand awareness or a great location. Examples of weaknesses could be quality issues, logistical problems, or poor service standards.
External factors tend to be outside your control. For example, a threat might be a competitor trying to lure away your best employees, whereas an opportunity could be a new technology changing how a process is done.
Common uses of a SWOT analysis
A SWOT template has many uses and not confined to just your business, for example you could use this template to assess a main competitor, a new market, or a new product.
Being able to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business and various projects are essential when fine-tuning your strategy.
If possible, combine complementary sections for greater impact, for example:
- Match opportunities to strengths such as coordinating new market entry (opportunity) with existing strong brand awareness advantage (strength).
- Match weaknesses to opportunities, such as improving logistics (weakness) to meet a new market (opportunity).
- Match threats to strengths, for example, tackling a price-leading market entrant (threat) with a PR campaign highlighting brand trust (strength).
- Prioritise solving any weaknesses and threats, for example, you have outdated equipment (weaknesses) and a new faster and cheaper competitor with new technology (threat) has just entered the market.
Complete the template to identify the practical steps you can take to build a better business.
