Understanding Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities for Growth, and Potential Threats in Your Business

SWOT Analysis

In your personal life or within a team or company, it is important to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth, and threats. Being aware of what you are good at versus what you could improve on is what will push you towards success.

In business, you and your team should be consistently evaluating how to improve the way you do things and be prepared to handle threats that could damage the company’s profits or its image. A great tool to stay aware in your business is the SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Strengths

The first step is to establish your strengths as a team. Understanding what you do well is just as important to understanding what you don’t do well.

What advantages does your team have over your competitors?
How is your business unique from others?
What tangible assets offer your team strength?
Areas of strength in your customer service

Weaknesses

The next step is to establish what you don’t do well as a team. This could be individual areas that are lacking whether it is in performance, lack of growth, lack of customer service or customer engagement, or lack of resources.

What internal performances are lacking?
What areas are your competitors doing better at?
What resources is your team lacking? (Funding, new products, staff?)
Are there areas in your customer experience that aren’t going well?

Opportunities

When establishing opportunities for growth in your business or team, you will be identifying external opportunities that could impact your business or team positively. In this section, you are looking at areas that could grow or be improved. As your business scales, so does your quality of service and internal processes.

How you plan to grow your business/team
Tangible assets that you want to grow. (Example: if you have one Spirit Box, you may want to expand this business by getting a snack machine and a beverage machine.)
How could you improve/grow your customer’s experience

Threats

Threats are external factors that could harm your business/team. Within any business, there will always be external threats such as new competitors or a shift in the market.

Environmental changes that could impact your business and its profits
Legal or contract changes
Negative customer experience
Funding cuts

Application to Spirit Box or your school store

At the start of each school year, going through a SWOT analysis with your team will help prepare your Spirit Box business for the upcoming school year. Awareness of what your strengths and weaknesses are are crucial for you to grow as a person or as a business. Fill your SWOT analysis out for your team as well as for you personally. We created a SWOT analysis example as well as a template for you and your team to fill out. Once your team has this completed:

Create a vision for your team
Create SMART goals around your vision
Take your goals and turn them into a plan. Fill out your team’s calendar to put your goals into action.

Now, you are all set for a new school year! Go and do!

Understanding Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities for Growth, and Potential Threats