15.01 – Checking Your Internal Systems
To improve performance, it’s essential to have systems in place that help measure your progress. The following sections provide tips for evaluating how you spend your time and how to stay on top of your markets.
Keeping Track of Your Routine
A good way to determine if you’re allocating enough time to improve performance is to track how you spend your time over a month. Record the work you do and the time spent on each major task. Mark each task with ‘R’ for routine, ‘S’ for strategic, or ‘I’ for improving performance.
- Routine Tasks: These include activities like meeting a customer, delivering a product or service, or onboarding a new employee.
- Strategic Tasks: These involve significant decisions, such as shifting activities from production to marketing, forming a joint venture, or acquiring a competitor.
- Improvement Activities: These are focused on getting more value, reducing costs, or increasing yields from your existing business.
Most business owners spend 95% of their day on routine tasks and only address improvement and strategic issues when they face a crisis. For example, entrepreneurs often don’t focus on cash flow until it becomes a problem. Proactively introducing new procedures for collecting cash before issues arise can prevent such crises.
If less than 30% of your time is spent on improving your business and strategic issues, it’s time to re-evaluate your priorities.
Analying Market Position
A SWOT analysis helps consolidate your understanding of your competitive market position. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This analysis is a powerful tool used by many businesses to regularly assess their position.
Discovering Strengths And Weaknesses
A strength or weakness is an element crucial to customers, known as critical success factors. Identify the top five factors critical for success in your market. For example, a retail bookseller might focus on location, range of books, hours of operation, knowledgeable staff, and ambiance. Rank how well your competitors perform in these areas and compare them to your performance. If competitors score poorly, this may be an area where you have a strength.
Keeping An Eye on Opportunities And Threats
Not every idea or innovation is an opportunity to grow your business. An opportunity must be attractive, durable, and timely, adding value for the buyer or end user.
Estimating the life span and timing of an opportunity is challenging and requires entrepreneurial skill. Look for opportunities that offer maximum benefit with a high probability of success. The benefits sought may change over time—from focusing on cash flow in the early years to prioritizing fast growth and high margins later.
Threats can come from various directions, including changes in political or economic climates, new legislation, hackers, and demographic shifts. Focus on threats with the greatest potential impact and likelihood of occurring.
Doing The Analysis
Conducting a SWOT analysis involves asking different groups for their thoughts on your company’s greatest strength, most glaring weakness, biggest opportunity, and greatest threat.
- Determine Your Own View: Identify your business’s best feature, greatest weakness, opportunities to gain more customers, and the biggest threat.
- Gather External Opinions: Consult other entrepreneurs, your management team, newest front-line staff, and a customer focus group.
- Analyze Differences: Compare the views of each group. If there is a significant disparity, identify ways to bridge the gap.
The question “So what?” is useful for focusing on the most important issues in your SWOT analysis. A completed SWOT provides a framework for developing your marketing strategy.
Use this online SWOT analysis template to create and share your analysis with colleagues and valued stakeholders. This free tool helps you weight different factors for relative importance.
