LIST YOUR STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES
Conducting a proper SWOT analysis for your business is easier than you might think BY MICHAEL MOORE
T
o position your business in your particular market, you need to know who your competition is, and what they’re doing. A great way to gain insight is to run a SWOT analysis on the major competitors in your market. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. If you’ve already done that, some of the insights you gained will be useful in analyzing your own business. If you haven’t, don’t worry. You’ll have a chance to gather useful data about your competitors while analyzing your own company. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your own business can be easier — you have access to all of the information you
18
Benefits of a written job description? It helps you in the hiring process by providing employees with your expectations as well as assisting with evaluating future performance. need. It can also be harder — it’s tough to be objective about your company.
VITAL TOOL SWOT analyses are a vital tool for business and marketing. They help you to organize important information about your company and your market, before launching a new action plan. Anyone
HVACR BUSINESS JANUARY 2022
can make decisions based on hunches and what seems obvious, but similar to a general in wartime, you need the best information you can gather, to create a winning strategy. By the way, you can enlist others. If you have a management staff, or a business partner, or a few key employees you trust, you can recruit your team to help you
build your SWOT lists. It’s fairly common for business owners and managers to avoid sharing financial details with their service (and sometimes sales) departments. Knowing where the business stands, however — what’s going great for it and what elements are acting against it — can help your staff to understand the importance of their roles to the business’s health. When people feel included and valued, they are more likely to work hard to make the whole enterprise more successful.
VISION If you don’t have a vision for your business, there’s not much point in analyzing whether your current situation
www.hvacrbusiness.com
