As an experienced business consultant, thought I would risk the wrath of my peers and show you how to use one of the consultants most powerful and useful tools The SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats.

Strengths and weaknesses are the internal factors of your business. Opportunities and threats are external factors that affect your business.

First of all get a large writing pad and put a large ? in the center of the page. Then put the titles Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats around the cross one in each sector.

Now strengths and weaknesses are internal factors as we said above. They are found in the following:

1. Management structure: such factors as relying too much on the owner. Needing more managers etc.

2. Your workforce: including employee turnover and difficulty of finding skilled staff.

3. Sales: strength of sales, how reliant your sales are on external factors (think ice cream seller), cyclical sales.

4. Operations: your internal efficiency, speed of manufacture or delivery.

5. Financial: cash flow, time to collect on invoices, ease of obtaining loans.

Your opportunities and threats can be found in the following categories:

1. Threats of new entrants to your market: Could a big box retailer open up near your business. Do you hold a patent that puts a brake on competitors?

2. Suppliers bargaining power: Can you suppliers force you to take large deliveries. Are suppliers difficult to find? Is supply readily available.

3. Customers influence: Do you rely on just a few customers? Can some of your customers insist on lower prices? Do you have a lot of late payers?

4. Competitors: Is competition very strong? Do you have a near monopoly?

5. Substitution: Are there lots of other products that could be purchased rather than your? How unique or superior are your offerings?

Now you need to grade these SWOTs. There are two ways to do this pictorial and numerical.

Pictorial: Place each of the SWOTs so that the more troublesome the problem is the farther away from the ? you place it. The better the factor then the closer to the ? you place it. View the grid and look at solving the outlaying problems first. The tighter the display is to the center of the ? - the better shape your business is in.

Numerical: Give each item an rating from 1 to 5 as to its importance to your business with 5 being the most important. Also give each factor a rating from A to E as to its impact on your business, with E being the highest impact. Now investigate all the Es and 5s if they are bad factors then change or mitigate them. If they are strengths and opportunities then build upon them. Obviously the more high strengths and opportunities combined with low weaknesses and threats the better your business is.

So why do this? Well going through this exercise forces you to look deeply into your current and potential business. It also provides a model of how strong your business is and areas that you should be concentrating on. And thousands of business consultants cant be wrong!

Lee Lister

Lee Lister is Management Consultant and Program Manager with more than 25 year's management and consultancy experience and more than 20 year's program and project management experience in projects for Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leisure and Government bodies. She also have more than 10 years bid management experience ranging from bids for medium companies to large international and infrastructure bids.

British born, Lee received her BA(Hons) Financial Economics from the University of Essex. She went on to work in or for a considerable number of countries within Asia and Europe as well as Australia and the United States. While building a name for herself through helping company restructure, change management and project management consultancy, Lee became a well-known figure for her skills in analyzing, problem solving and trouble-shooting. She has consulted for many major industries, including banking, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, leisure and governments from many different countries. Some of the companies who have benefited from Lee?s expertise are Hewlett Packard, Siemans Nixdorf, Electrolux and the Philippines government.

Whilst working in the Far East she became a recognized expert on preparing and evaluating large World Bank Proposals (infrastructure projects within developing countries). These accomplishments called upon the skills of bid and project management, risk assessment, contract negotiation and supplier management and required dedicated work to very tight time scales. This expertise was acknowledged by an invitation to be the principle speaker at an International Business Development Conference in Washington, USA. She has also consulted at very senior level in several countries.

She owns and manages two companies, Biz Guru LLC in the USA and Biz Guru Services Ltd in the UK as well a considerable number of profitable web sites. She works almost entirely via the internet, visiting clients on site during major consultancies and training. Her Internet skills span from when major companies first started to consider obtaining their own web sites. During these years, she has kept up to date with the rapid changes on the internet, including the dot com boom and the resulting bust ? which her own web based companies survived.

She regularly consults, writes and lectures on business, bid management and marketing and has published numerous courses and books.