31-12-2015, 04:12 PM
Entrepreneurship is a professional that should be embraced by people. Are you embracing it? Of course, successful people inspire us. They make us believe that we can achieve what they have achieved. They increase our hopes of becoming successful. There are myths about being an entrepreneur, don’t be misled by them. Being an entrepreneur will not make you to take an off whenever you want.
I have never heard any successful entrepreneur say that it is easy to be successful in business. Not even Steve Jobs said so! All I hear from these successful entrepreneurs, "be focused, persistence, work hard and have passion." Until you start your entrepreneurship venture is when you realize what it entails to be an entrepreneur.
Some of us want to transform our ideas to businesses immediately after graduating from Entrepreneurship Colleges. On the other hand, there are some entrepreneurs who did not complete college. From their college dormitories, they launched their business ideas with the help of their friends. Today, these entrepreneurs have employed many people and are offering internships to college students.
Young entrepreneurs face challenges when starting their businesses. You won’t know these challenges until you get started. If you fear failing, then entrepreneurship is not for you. Kindly find something else to do. This is because an entrepreneur is a person who is willing to take risks. He is not afraid of taking risks. Entrepreneurship is all about taking risks. What differentiates between entrepreneurs who are successful from those who aren’t is the occurrence of risks undertaken. Entrepreneurs learn more from their failures than their successes. "I didn't fail I just found a 1000 ways of how NOT to make a light bulb-By Thomas Edison."
What is the importance of SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis to an entrepreneur? To know the importance of SWOT, let us discuss it in details.
1.) Strengths–As a young entrepreneur who is getting started you should analyze your strengths. What is it that will make you to be ahead of your competitors? How good are you in selling your business idea? Will you be persistence and focused during challenging times? Your strengths will help you to become a success entrepreneur.
2.) Weaknesses–Analyzing your weaknesses will enable you to come up with a strategy of overcoming them. Entrepreneurs make mistakes since they are human beings. No person is perfect, we all have weaknesses but it is upon us to identify them so as to overcome them.
As a young entrepreneur, identify your weaknesses and turn them to be your strengths. For example, if you are not good at hiring and managing employees you should hire someone (personnel manager) who is skilled in hiring and managing employees effectively.
3.) Opportunities–As you continue running your entrepreneurship venture you should identity opportunities that arise from it. The opportunities that you will identify will make your business to thrive in the market.
4.) Threats–Scrutinize your business thoroughly in order to identify possible threats. Every business has got threats. If you identify these threats you will be able to prevent them from occurring. Or, you will prepare a contingency plan to take care of them if they occur.ntrepreneurs become the most successful people in the economy. Every business starts with an entrepreneur, and many that succeed do so through self-evaluation. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. SWOT analysis helps you judge the feasibility of an idea or company. For entrepreneurs, this allows you to decide if your idea is really worth pursuing. It helps build your company by recognizing where you need work and where you excel.
Definition
“SWOT analysis is a general technique which can find suitable applications across diverse management functions and activities,” says Chartered Management Institute as reprinted in "Entrepreneur" magazine. It is most appropriate in the early stages of marketing planning. The analysis takes internal resources and capabilities, such as strengths and weaknesses, and external factors, such as opportunities and threats, into account.
Factors
Utilizing SWOT analysis examines strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The company’s core competencies that make up its strengths include proprietary technology and market position. Weaknesses are company conditions that may lead to diminished performance such as obsolete equipment or heavy debt. Outside conditions that may prove advantageous to a company, such as a specialty niche skill, are opportunities. Threats are outside conditions that could prove detrimental to the company, such as population shift, new technologies or increased competition.
Related Reading: Definition of a SWOT Analysis Function
SWOT analysis is a methodical process. You must make sure to limit the number of issues considered in each category to select the most important ones. It starts with a list of all the issues that affect your business: internal, external, real or perceived, pragmatic or objective. The goal is to avoid evaluating, just write down everything you can think of. Next, you sort them into the SWOT categories. Natural Entrepreneur states: “sort each category first by relative importance, and then by reality.” Make sure you have proof for every claim and that you do not pass the blame for an internal weakness to an external threat. Finally, you will reduce the lists to the most critical elements and remove any duplicates or variations of the same problem. Having each staff member complete his own SWOT analysis allows you to compare notes and pay attention to all the issues; this becomes the basis of your strategic planning.
Advantages
The SWOT analysis provides a framework. It pushes you to analyze a situation and work together with your complete staff to develop the best strategies and tactics to move your business forward. It promotes group participation and provides a basis for assessing core capabilities.
Disadvantages
Some opponents suggest that SWOT analysis is only an overview that is not suitable for today’s dynamic business world. If done improperly, SWOT can be ineffective. If employees generate very longs lists or fail to prioritize, the process becomes excessively time consuming. It is most important to focus on analysis rather than description and remember to use the analysis in all planning and implementation stages.
About the Author
Dana Griffin has written for a number of guides, trade and travel periodicals since 1999. She has also been published in "The Branson Insider" newspaper. Griffin is a CPR/first-aid instructor trainer for the American Red Cross, owns a business and continues to write for publications. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English composition from Vanguard University.
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What is a SWOT analysis, and how can it help me?
A: Marketing is probably the most fun aspect of small-business management. It involves direct communication with your customers and clients and allows you the opportunity to share what you bring to the marketplace in a creative way. Unlike most other elements of your business, marketing does not have rigid boundaries. You can be as formal as you like by mapping out marketing plans and strategies, or you can practice grassroots/guerrilla marketing as your budget allows. But before you begin any marketing campaign, you should perform a SWOT analysis of your business. This acronym stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
At the foundation of your marketing plan are the products and services you offer, along with the personal talents and abilities that you possess. If your products or services have features that are unique to the market, you offer unparalleled customer service, you have lower prices, or you have specialized education or training that your competitors do not, then these things would be attributed to your business's strengths. Make sure that each of these elements is pointed out in your marketing pieces and you convey these strengths to both current and potential customers in your marketing pieces.
Weaknesses are those internal elements that keep you from offering the same level of products or services as your competitors. These can be found in product attributes such as size, price or quantity, or in service levels such as delivery time, customer satisfaction and warranties. You may find that you have only a few weaknesses compared to your competition, or you may find that you have many. Determining your business's weaknesses will help you to improve upon your products and services in the future. It's not wise to point out your weaknesses in your marketing pieces if you know that your competition can do something better.
Opportunities can be both internal and external circumstances that you have yet to take advantage of but are attainable in the foreseeable future. Opportunities can be bulk discounts available through your suppliers, coming across a great price on equipment at an auction, seeing an ad for classes that are available to further your professional education, or customers who have been dissatisfied dealing with your competitors. Opportunities are only beneficial when they are taken advantage of.
Threats, on the other hand, are those things that your competitors do better. They may offer lower prices, faster service, a wider selection of products or services, or have more financial backing. In any case, you must determine which of these elements pose the greatest threat to the survival of your business in the marketplace and determine how you will counterattack them. Can you lower your prices or increase your product line? Can you increase your capital or speed up delivery time? These are all things that you have to analyze and then change based on the opportunities that your business faces. You may not be able to compete with some threats. That's just part of business. In that case, you have to make sure that the things you can do better, your strengths, continue to ring clear in your marketing pieces.SWOT analysis - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
What is SWOT analysis?
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
SWOT analysis involves identifying your business’s strengths and weaknesses, and examining the opportunities and threats which may affect you.
SWOT analysis can be used to analyse your organisation and its environment.
Carrying out a SWOT analysis can help you identify changes that can be made to improve your business.
Carrying out a SWOT analysis
To carry out a SWOT analysis effectively, it’s a good idea to get a team together, drawn from across the business, for a brain-storming session. Consider each of the four SWOT areas in turn, and make note of all the ideas, suggestions and comments which are made. These can be reviewed and edited after the brain-storming session.
Brain-storming session
A good method to use is to take a large sheet of paper, or a whiteboard, and split it into four sections, as demonstrated in the following table.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Now you need to fill the four sections with your ideas. See below for guidance:
Strengths.
Strengths are those features of the business which allow you to operate more effectively than your competitors. For example, a strength could be your specialist technical knowledge. You need to consider your strengths from your own point of view and from that of your customers' and clients'. You must be realistic and honest.
Try answering the following questions:
What is it that you do well?
What advantages do you have over your competitors?
What makes you different from your competitors?
Weaknesses
Weaknesses are areas capable of improvement. Are you lacking skills or new products? Do you have a higher cost base or lower productivity than your competitors? You must face any unpleasant truths about your business and be realistic.
Can you do anything better?
Do you do anything badly?
What should be avoided?
What causes problems or complaints?
Opportunities
Can you identify any new opportunities for your business? Are there any interesting trends which you can take advantage of?
Examples of opportunities include:
Changes in technology and markets, eg the Internet
Changes in government policy or regulations / legislation
Local and global events
Potential new uses of products and / or services
Use of marketing or promotional techniques to boost the business
Social factors, eg population fluctuation, lifestyle changes, etc.
Threats
Threats can be external or internal, and are anything which can adversely affect your business. External threats could be inflation, new legislation, or a new competitor in your market. Internal threats could include a skill or staff shortage within your organisation.
Try answering the following questions:
What obstacles face your business?
What are your competitors doing?
Are there any changes in products, services or technology which could threaten your business?
Do you have any financial problems such as bad debt or cash-flow difficulties?
After SWOT analysis is complete
Once you have completed your SWOT analysis, it is essential that you make note of the following:
What must you address immediately?
What can be handled now?
What needs researching further?
What needs to be planned for the future?
Once these have been identified, you should create an action plan to ensure that something is done! Assign someone to each point and set deadlines. Review the results of your analysis regularly to determine if anything has changed and what has been achieved.
Points to remember
Use SWOT analysis as a guide, but remember that it can be very subjective. Be aware that two different people might come up with two very differing analyses – so don’t rely on SWOT analysis too much.
SWOT analysis can be used in conjunction with other tools for audit and analysis, such as PEST analysis and Porter's Five-Forces analysis.
Personal SWOT Analysis
The career objective that I have in my life is to have started my own business or be a owner of business. The information that follows will be presented in a SWOT analysis format that describes me and more in depth with my current career objective. My first topic will touch on my strengths, followed by my weakness, then opportunities, and finally threats to me not reaching my objective.
Strengths
My biggest strength toward reaching my objective is my tack that I am on in college. I am a 4 year student here at Wayne State and 2 semesters away from obtaining an accounting degree. This is important because having an accounting degree I have learned a lot about how to handle a business finances, assets, liabilities ect. Another strength that I posses is that I am a pretty patient person. I am willing to work my way up through a organization and learn from experiences that I would have during my time. If I were to start my own business I could carry those experiences with me and help me make good decisions while running my own business. I have really good communication skills and interview very well, this is good because when I start off and begin to step into the business world I can impress people have opportunities to start off with a well paying job.
Weaknesses
A major weakness that I have that will not only affect my career but also affects me in my everyday life is that I have a very short attention span. This is not good because at anytime while I am doing something I get easily sidetracked. It is very frustrating at time but I can’t help it. Although, I considered my education as a strength I also consider a part of it as weakness. I will graduate with an accounting degree and I have taken some classes in finance but I think I could use some more. How invest my money smart is something that I want to do so that I can make a profit. But with the classes that I have taken while obtaining my degree never really got into...