HOW TO START AND MAINTAIN A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS
Starting and maintaining a business appear a battle to many prospective entrepreneurs like you. No business owner loves his/her business run down but grow. The world’s growing entrepreneurs today make millions of dollars every hour with something you too can do.
Imagine how great you’d be seeing yourself in a round table with Bill Gate and other successful entrepreneurs around the world.
As an employee? No! I mean you won’t be sitting as an employee. My dear, you’d sit there comfortably as a successful business owner like them. Believe me, it is super easy.
Does it appear an uphill to you? It’s only natural. They’ve been in the same shoes too. But that naturalness can only put you to tears if you don’t take a step today. Your business can neatly run down and can amazingly grow depending on how you treat what I discuss in this article.
What type of business do you or want to venture into? Food and Nutrition? Software Management? Insurance? On/Offline Business? Any one you choose is a good choice. But, mind you, your success or failure depends on one thing. And that is SWOT.
‘My friend, I’m tired of this business. I’ll quite.’ Do you know why some business owners keep saying this? They’ve not known about SWOT.
My dear, let’s quickly dive in and let me teach you how to do it.
What is SWOT?
SWOT, an entrepreneurship theory, is the analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a business/a business owner. For every successful business/business owner you see around you, I’m cocksure that the owner has beforehand established a strong analysis of his or business’s SWOT.
A number of start-ups assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to build strong entrepreneurial opportunities that’ll prepare them for futuristic threats they might likely encounter.
Thus, we have Business SWOT Analysis (BSA) and Personal SWOT Analysis (PSA). Here, I’m going talk about BSA.
You may be wondering why is BSA so important? Before we go in deeper, take your pen and write down what you’ll learn about SWOT properly. Now. Let me take you in a bit deeper.
What’s Your Business’s Strength?
See, there are several factors you can use to measure the strength of your business. Do you have enough fund that’d suffice for a unique product or service amidst your good numbers of competitors? Does your location really support the product you sell and/or service you render?
Even if your offers are incredibly amazing than your competitors’, what’s your organisation’s unique sales strategy that’ll promote your sale regardless of your sale’s cost? Are your products/services costlier than theirs?
Yes. That’s not a problem. Your product/service is worth that amount you put to it. So, let not that cast any worry in your mind. You’d sell amazingly than them.
So, How Do You Analyse Your Strength?
Let’s say you’re a graduate of Pharmacy with 5-year work experience for a pharmaceutical company in London. So far, you’ve got some handsome amount of money to start your private pharmaceutical company in a village in South-East Nigeria where the cost of living is low. At this time, there’s a national ban of drugs from oversea. Yes. You’re a kind of very, very great.
Why are you great, my dear?
It’s because your strength is very powerful. First, you’ve attained enough academic proficiency to establish coupled with your half-a-decade experience abroad. With these, you’ll consistently produce drugs of high-quality standard which will quickly gain (inter)national medical acclaim.
Again, you have enough capital. Right? There’s also national ban of drugs which is surely a very powerful way to reduce competitors coming from oversea.
Mind you, their products might be much more standard than yours due to adequate technological aids they enjoy abroad. And this is part of your weakness which I’ll discuss later.
Lastly, your location supports the feasibility of the business as it’s very helpful to reduce lavishing your fund which may impede the smooth funding of the business. With this powerful strength, you can imagine the kind of sales hedge you have above your competitors which all together create the basis with which the rigidity of your pharmaceutical company would consistently grow.
I’m Sorry, But You Must Know Your Weakness Too
Like you‘re cognisant of your strength, you must be very much aware of your weakness too. Do you know why?
It’ll prevent you from losing sales unnecessarily. Through content marketing, prominent websites like Hubspot, Upwork, BBC, Udemy and others analyse their strength and weakness through Web Analytics — a technical tool used to calculate numbers of visitors, subscribers, hours of stay at the site and whether or not visitors actually move to buy or request their incredible offers.
I know you might be thinking now that you don’t have a website. What else? You don’t market your product or service online. We’re still together.
How Do You Evaluate Your Weakness?
To analyse your weakness, let say of the same pharmaceutical company, you’d experience a limited technological support coupled with erratic electricity supply in that village. And do you know what these bring? Directing your fund to somewhere else — getting reliable source(s) of power.
Another weakness of this business would be transportation. I believe you already know 90% of your products (drugs) would be consumed in the urban area. Thus, though the cost of living of that village may be low compare to city like Lagos, Port-Harcourt, Abuja, etc., you still have to sacrifice provision of reliable transportation means for your products to reach the target consumer.
Having these in mind, imagine how very prepared you’d be compared to just diving into this den of fox without these cutlass and gun I just gave you. Now, do you have any opportunity?
Let Me Show You Your Opportunity
Up to this level, I believe you’ve understood how to analyse your strength and weakness. So, the opportunity your business has depends on some factors like change in government policy, your affiliation to agencies, technological advancement, your social belongingness, higher demand, etc.
Now, How Do You Measure Your Opportunity?
Let’s maintain our pharmaceutical company for evaluation. Your opportunity now could come in form of change in government policy. The government of Nigeria, for instance, might divert the attention of their support to health. This way, you’re at a considerable advantage that you won’t even imagine.
How? The government will support internal production of drugs. Thus, your sale will rise to the zenith and this would cater for reduction of your financial weakness.
Another way, what if you’re affiliated to some agencies that organise seminars where you learn how to productively maintain such business? You know that’s another blessing. You might even get to use sophisticated equipment that rapidly increase your production rate. The outcome? The touch of your product rises to many more consumers (inter)nationally. Guess something, dear. You’re making cool money.
But, you must be strictly aware of your threats to prevent gradual or total rundown.
So, what’re Your Threats?
Yes. You have a number of threats which you must beforehand get rid of. You should totally and continually get rid of them as soon as you discover them. Depending on the form it takes, threat reduces the performance of your company. It even mars the sales such that you might experience an untold loss if you don’t take proper care.
This Is How to Analyse Your Threats
For your pharmaceutical company, a threat may be the lift of international ban of drug which you’ve first built your strength on. Do you know the result of this? You get more standard competitors. Thus, you must always prepare to standardise your product in order to meet the international standard too.
You don’t need to worry. After all, you’ve got ample experience working relevantly abroad. Therefore, utilise that experience to curb this teeth-gnashing threat.
Then, don’t forget you set up in a remote area. Bad road may hinder the free flow of transportation. If you don’t tackle this, don’t forget you can’t consume your products all yourself. So, you can sacrifice constructing good road to your company. Make use of your opportunities with the aid of your affiliations and social belongingness. They’d be very much helpful than you expect.
In addition, the erratic power supply is another threat that’ll neatly disturb good production of drugs. Don’t be panic. This is the technological era. And, at least, the ample opportunities you’ve established have got you some money. Turn to a reliable source of electricity supply like generators and solar power supply.
Conclusion
My dear start-up(s) who want to be successful, you can succeed if you want to. Success in business is tied to using the four pillars of a successful business I discussed above. I believe Mark Zuckerberg would have run down his IT business (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram) if he hadn’t mastered and still mastering his business’s SWOT properly well.
Is your business not the one evaluated above? Don’t worry, SWOT is applicable to any business you own or want to start. Just try it NOW!
