Welcome to my weekly articles on business building. These weekly articles are designed to stimulate thinking about the process of creating a valuable business, about getting yourself personally prepared, and about getting your business exit ready and exit attractive for that future buyer.
In this article I introduce the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats ) Analysis. As a business owner you need to have a clear understanding of: where you are in the marketplace, what opportunities are available that you could take advantage of, what the various threats there are that could derail your plans, what potential weaknesses are that are stopping you from achieving you plans, and what you strengths are, so you can capitalize on these to grow your business. This article provides an overview of the process, some best practices for undertaking a SWOT, and some of the limitations of the process to be aware of.
Most owners get one chance to get it right and being ill prepared should not be an option, yet most owners cannot sell the business they built (only 1 in 10 are actually successfully) because they did not build a salable asset. If you must sell your business to fund your future lifestyle, ask yourself – do you want to be the one that does, or one of the nine who could not?
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