business matters
become a swot... help your business
It’s a classic start to most management courses… do a SWOT analysis on your business (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and all will be revealed so that you can move your business forward. But are they worth the
effort and can they really help? YES… depending on what you put into them.
D
oing a SWOT can either be extremely depressing or extremely beneficial… depending on how positive
you are and how honest you’re prepared to be about you and your business. You see if you pretend that
everything is hunky dory and tickety boo then you’re simply asking for trouble. For while you must always see the positives of your business the
bottom line is that no business is perfect and there will always be things that can be improved. And not necessarily big things… often it is the little things that drag companies down… like poor staff communication or shoddy displays… both easily resolved but until you’ve identified them likely to cause ongoing problems.
Where do you start? With a blank sheet of paper for each heading, a plentiful supply of coffee, tea or something stronger… oh yes and total peace and quiet… this is not something to be done in-between getting the morning orders out and prepping up the afternoon ones. If you want to take it wider
then involve your team, but we’d actually suggest owners or managers should do their own SWOT first and then bring in the team so that you have some pointers in place and can get a dialogue going otherwise you could end up with long silences.
But if you are doing it as a group effort/team building exercise do it away from the shop rather than run the risk of interruptions. Make sure you’ve got a follow
up procedure in place. There’s no point coming up with a million and one brilliant ideas if they just get lost in the ether. Once you’ve identified what you need to do have an action plan chart and delegate jobs with clear dates on when they’ve got to be done by. But if a project slips don’t
be disheartened… sometimes things simply don’t happen as quickly as you’d like but keep the momentum going by holding regular meetings.
What do you put on it? Each business will be different but we’ve done what we think could be a typical SWOT analysis on an average florist with our observations. Having read ours, do your own and you could easily see how changes need to be made.
>> F&wb Spring 2013 51
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