Analyzing Your Business Weaknesses

By analyzing your small business weaknesses, you will be able to identify any problems, deficiencies or limitations that put the business at a disadvantage, and may cause the business to perform poorly.

The weaknesses may or may not make the business vulnerable, depending on how attractive the missing skills; capability or resource is in the market.

The internal weaknesses represent competitive liabilities, and might include:

• No clear direction,
• Old or obsolete equipment,
• Missing skills or core competencies,
• Internal operating problems,
• Shortage of working capital or under-financed operations,
• High costs, etc.

Again, being brutally honest, list all of the weaknesses you can identify in the weaknesses section of the SWOT Analysis Template.

How to Analyze your Weaknesses

Follow the same procedure for your weaknesses. Does the fact that you are weak in one or more areas of your operations give you competitors, your suppliers, or your customers an advantage over you? Which weaknesses are the most critical or damaging to your position within the industry?

Rank your weaknesses the same way you did your strengths, and focus on the top three or four. Now look at each one and work out what you can do to minimize or eliminate the weaknesses.

The greater the advantage your weaknesses give to others, the more urgent corrective action is.

Do you need to write procedures, provide training to other members of staff, backup data on your systems, hire new staff, invest in new technology, find new sources of financing, improve your processes, re-focus on or re-visit your business concept or …?

What ever it is that you identify by analyzing your small business weaknesses, write it down on the SWOT Analysis Action Sheet before you move on to your