When did you last sit down and do a SWOT analysis on your business(es)? When did you last do a SWOT analysis on yourself?

They may sound like the same thing, to a large extent, but they are not. You may be the only employee of your business, but your business will still have its own distinct opportunities and threats, and you will probably still have opportunities, strengths, weaknesses and threats that apply to more areas of your life than just your business. Or at least you should!

What is the benefit of doing a SWOT analysis on yourself and your business? Well, analysing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and those of your business can give you a fantastic sense of perspective.

If you are losing focus it can really help to centre your efforts.

It can help to give you a better sense of perspective. It is very easy and very common in any area of our lives to get caught and bogged down in the minutiae of every day routine. We trot through the door in the morning and check our emails, we then plod along doing many of the same things, we develop check boxes and ways of doing things, not necessarily the most efficient or best ways of doing things, but what we have drifted into through habit.

Rory tells a story of when he was working as an industrial engineer in South Africa, he was employed by a shoe factory and he was doing time trials on the floor. One of the workers had a real routine. He would pick the shoe up, bang it on the table, put it in the holder, do his bit to it and place it in the finished pile. Where he banged it he had worn a hole. The banging was not necessary to the job, but it was part of his rhythm, and he liked it. He resisted change. He did not want to learn a different part of shoe manufacturing, although being more highly trained would have brought him more pay and better job security.

How often are we like this, caught up in our own habits, or even perhaps victims of our own pessimism. Sometimes we are not necessarily happy with the way things are going, but we do not see how it could be different.

Taking the time to think outside our habits and really analyse the situation and the possibilities, both positive and negative is liberating and energising.

We should use our SWOT analysis as the first step in planning goals, both long and short term. It is sometimes useful to do SWOTs of various sections of our business. This can particularly apply to a business� web page. It can have opportunities, strengths and weaknesses that are particular to it.

It has the opportunity, for example, to sell overseas, which most Tasmanian based businesses would not have otherwise. It also has the potential threat of the competition of all the other businesses in the world that provide the same service or product. A business� web presence is worth careful detailed planning, in which a SWOT plays an important part.

Just to give you an idea how life changing a SWOT can be, it was our SWOT combined with some financial projections that brought it home clearly to us that although we were running a personalised puzzle business that sold on line, our real skills were not in puzzle making, but in web marketing.