Every business has its risks and opportunities, how do we determine them? SWOT Analysis comes to the rescue. SWOT Analysis is used to determine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a business, person, product, or anything else.

Anyone can use SWOT analysis for any situation both business and personal. Let's see where to start and how to end. (Template included)

Objective

What are you trying to achieve or find out? Do you want to understand how you stand out from your competitors? Analyze where your risks and opportunities are?

Why having a clear objective is important?

Why do you want to buy a car?

• To save time while traveling?
• To drive more than 2 people at a time?
• You don't want to rely on people for transportation?
• Do you simply just like to own one?

It could be any one of these reasons and the reason differs from one person to another. Identifying the objective helps perform a SWOT Analysis with a strong basis. If you do not want to end up with broad results, you must ask questions about every logic

For example, You can do a SWOT Analysis for the opening of your new Bakery Shop near your University to find out how you can drive more footfalls into your shop compared to your competitors.

SWOT explained:

You can use the template available here, but let me break this down really easily for you.

Recognizing your Strengths.

• What edge do you have over the other shops?
• What is your value proposition?
• Which is your revenue-driving point?
• What is your packaging like?
• How personalized is your customer service?

Identify 4-5 key points that make you and your product unique and drive sales through that. That's the S in SWOT Analysis.

Recognizing your Weakness.

• Where do you lack compared to your competitors?
• Is your food prep and packaging time more than your competitors?
• How crowded is your shop?
• What is the difference in the quality from your competitors?
• How badly do you receive customer feedback?

Similarly, identify 4-5 key points that could cost you more than a few customers, and figure out how to turn that around. That's the W in SWOT Analysis.

Recognizing your Opportunities.

Fixing your weakness list is your new list of opportunities, you can also add the trends that are happening around food to your advantage.

• How can you drive more footfalls utilizing your current consumers? (eg: Shoutouts on social media, tagging the shop on social platforms, etc)
• What can the decrease in sugar price do for your revenue?

Using external factors to profit your business can be done by identifying weaknesses and converting them into opportunities or factor-in other external factors such as economy, festivals, celebrations, discounts, offers, etc... That's the O in SWOT Analysis.

Recognizing your Threats.

What kind of threat could cause any kind of damage to your shop? Identify that and cover as much as risks as possible.

For example, Your shop might be located in an area where buildings get flooded when it rains, do you have Insurance? How do you plan to protect the goods?

Your customer might have an allergic reaction to your product and could threaten to sue you, how often do you have a health inspector or food inspector inspect your food? Taking precautionary actions can help you in the future. That's the T in SWOT Analysis.

Learn how to create your marketing strategy here (template included)

SWOT Analysis can be used before launch or after launch or even just as a market research tool. Always remember to do this analysis every once in a while to understand where you stand in the market.

-Anusha