A Guide to doing a Business Health Check (Part 1)

One of the obstacles that a start-up businessman or entrepreneur must face when he wants to start a programme to enhance, improve or develop his business is with his decision on where to start. It is quite easy to find the weaknesses or faults of a company. But the real difficulty lies in identifying the priority issues of a given company and then use it strictly so that will help further develop their business or start-up company so that the time and effort can be allocated appropriately.

Various business consultants, advisers and development agencies offer different business diagnostic methods to assist businessmen in identifying the key issues that a business must address in order to help identify priority directives for development. These various methods have their specialised uses for particular business situations, organisation types and size and should be studied and selected meticulously before being implemented.

The SWOT analysis, is one very popular yet effective method that has been used by many businesses and taught in various business schools. An acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, the SWOT analysis employs a simple framework used to analyse a business and can be used to perform a business “health check”.

Looking at all the important aspects of a business is very important. This includes the how customers are treated during the course of business operations, significant changes in the industry, market growth, strategic direction, product development and organisational culture.

It can be quite daunting looking at these issues and factors from a macro level that a structured framework like a SWOT analysis can be a big help. Being a framework it can also be implemented a number of ways. Below is a quick and easy method for making a SWOT analysis.

How a SWOT analysis works:

The SWOT analysis framework aims to observe the many aspects of the business from two very different complementary perspectives.

* This framework looks at the environment -- basically what is going on outside of the business. These usually contain factors where managers only have a limited control. Are these factors also affecting your bin

* The business internals are also observed. These are the issues and aspects of the business that a manager can use in order to make decisions and exert influence.

THE PREPARATION

The first thing that you should do is to set realistic expectations about what you would like to achieve with this exercise. There is a mistaken belief that a SWOT will solve the problem. It will not. But it can help identify a business’ key concerns and comforts which can then lead a businessman to take the appropriate action in order to resolve the problem.

Allow yourself a lot of time to complete this process. Remember that the more complicated your organisation or lacking of information, the longer it may take to finish this part of the process. You can schedule a specific time to assemble your senior management team to work on this uninterrupted in order to more effectively fulfill this part of the process.

Business Issues
Business Plan
Countries
Finance
Marketing
Start up
Strategies
Taxation
Technology


Back