Company SWOT Analysis and Strategic Opportunities

The strategic opportunities and company SWOT analysis section of your business plan will describe ways in which your company is meaningfully different from competitors, and provide an honest assessment of your risks to help reduce potential threats to your business' success.

Strategic Opportunities

• Indicate specific opportunities for your business that fit with your strengths and interests and exist within the current market conditions.
  
• Describe how you compete in your industry.
  
• Describe the distinct identity of your business. How is your business different from competitors in a way that is meaningful and advantageous?
  
• Indicate openings in the market that can be filled by your talents and abilities.
  
• Determine what your company does not do. If you spread your time and money resources too thin trying to chase every angle of your industry, you will likely struggle to able to effectively pursue your target customer.

Company SWOT Analysis to Assess Risks vs. Opportunities

• SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
  
• Provide an honest assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that impact your business to determine possible threats to your success and determine ways in which you will minimize those threats.
  
• Create an honest evaluation of risks to demonstrate to potential financial backers that you have carefully considered all possibilities and understand the scope of challenges that you could face.

Depending upon the nature of your business, risks may include:

• Market risk: The market may not respond to your products and services.
  
• Execution risk: You may not be able to manage the growth of the company because sufficient resources are not in place.
  
• Competitive risk: The competition may change significantly. Think carefully about the ways competitors will respond to you entering the market.
  
• Technology risk: Your technology may not work as well as you imagined.
  
• Product risk: The product may not be completed on time, or may not work as you imagined.
  
• Capitalization risk: You may significantly underestimate costs or over estimate income.

Assess the significance of all of these risks as they relate to your business and determine the strategies you will use to minimize the impact of those risks.

Additional Resources
Business plan outline with links to further information about each section
The Successful Business Plan by Rhonda Abrams book review