Analyzing Your Small Business Strengths

While you are undertaking your SWOT Analysis, analyzing your business strengths will help you to identify all the attributes of the business, the things that it will be good at, or characteristics that gives it an important capability.

It might be important expertise, a valuable or scarce resource, a skill or a capability that gives the business a competitive advantage.

The internal strengths represent competitive assets and might include:

• Core competencies,
• Adequate financial support,
• Economies of scale,
• Cost advantages,
• Proven management,
• Manufacturing capability,
• Innovative product design,
• Innovative delivery systems, etc.

Take a good hard look at your business proposal and your skills and knowledge, and list all of the strengths in the strengths section of the SWOT Analysis Template. A word of caution - be honest about your strengths. If you cheat on your SWOT, you will only be hurting yourself.

How to analyze your Strengths

Look at your list of strengths and consider which ones really do give you a competitive advantage. If you have any on strengths on the list that do not give you an advantage, cross them off, but only if they would not be a weakness if they were missing completely. These strengths might be nice to have, but they are not critical, so leave them for now.

Which of your strengths is your most important? Rank your strengths from 1 - ? (Depending on the total number on your list), with 1 being the strength that creates your greatest competitive advantage.

The top three or four on your ranking are the ones you need to maintain or protect. Do any of them represent a single point of failure? If you lose a particular employee, or a system crashes, or for some reason you need to take a break from your business, have you suddenly lost that competitive advantage?

If so, you really need to work out what you can to minimize the risk to your business.

People do get sick or leave and systems do crash, so you can count on it happening at some point in time, and you can’t expect your competitors or your customers to ease up on you just because you are having a bad day (or days).

Do you need to write procedures, provide training to other members of staff, backup data on your systems, hire new staff, and invest in new technology or …?

What ever it is that you have identified while you have been analyzing your small business strengths, write it down on the SWOT Analysis Action Sheet before you move on to your business weaknesses.