SWOT Analysis for Your Service Business

When should you do a SWOT analysis?

If you’re thinking about offering a new service, expanding to a new market, or changing your prices, just to give a few examples, a SWOT analysis is a great way to get a lay of the land before you commit to any one idea. Maybe you find out that a competitor has a monopoly on the new service you want to offer, but there’s a gap in the market in another area that you can swoop into.

In general, there’s no wrong time to perform a SWOT analysis. It is a good exercise to reveal business opportunities and threats, and it makes you aware of strengths and weaknesses that you need to remedy or use to your advantage. Go figure!

How to perform a SWOT analysis

Our biggest piece of advice here would be to involve other people in your analysis. If your business is small enough, involve everyone. And if your business has multiple departments, involve customer facing employees like field workers and admin staff, sales people, etc.

More people means less blind spots, and a better SWOT analysis.

Grab a notepad, assemble around a whiteboard, or grab a pile of sticky notes and set up next to a blank wall. Set up four rows or quadrants, and go through each of the factors as a team, then see what your various perspectives reveal to you about your business.

We break down the four factors in the following paragraphs.

Internal Factors (Strengths and Weaknesses)

These internal factors in your table will be made up of things directly under your control as a business manager and company owner. It’s hard to take advantage of external factors before ensuring that your internal factors are on point.

Luckily for you, internal factors are easier to identify, and they can be broken down into four easy components:

• Financial resources, like income jobs, revenue, franchise, and investment opportunities
• Physical resources, like your brick and mortar location, equipment, and other material inventory
• Human resources, aka employees
• Miscellaneous resources like current policies, programs, and procedures your business has developed. Any internal protocol tools that you’ve purchased, or business software systems to help with invoicing or client management (like Jobber) that you subscribe to would also belong here.

READ MORE: How to write a price increase letter