Analyzing your business

In order to keep your small business competitive, you need to analyze your business to make sure you are staying a step ahead of the competition. If you are just barley keeping up with them, your business will not be able to last too long. So what does it mean to analyze your business so you can continue to stay in business for many years to come? You must start with a few basic questions pertaining to your business:

1. What is your business? Why do you benefit your customers?
2. What is your industry? How many competitors do you have? Do you deal primarily with other small businesses or are you trying to compete against larger chains? How does your product compare with your competition?
3. What products or services do you have to offer?
4. What are your strengthens and weaknesses? Do you have a strong product or is your company strong due to the employees you have working for you?
5. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition?

As you go through the different questions you will be able to understand what type of business you have and if you are actually keeping in touch with your customers. It will also help you understand if you are holding strong against your competition. There are 4 basic components you need to concern yourself with when you are analyzing your business:

Strengths
The first thing you need to concern yourself with is your business strengths. What is it that sets your business apart? Is it an amazing product or service? Perhaps your business is able to retain customers for many years, which is a difficult feat to master for many small businesses that do not see the value in their existing customers and focus mostly on attracting new ones.

Weaknesses
If you don't identify your businesses weaknesses, it won't take long for another company to identify them. You must be able to figure out where your business needs to improve before you have competitors that identify it and expose it.

Opportunities
What opportunities does your business have? Are you currently designing a new product or service that you plan to release to the public? You must be able to understand all of the opportunities that are at hand and in the near future for your small business so you market to your customers and properly handle all of these changes.

Threats
Do you have competitors that are threatening to take over your business? Are you concerned about the way they are attracting some of your customers and stealing them away from your business? There are several threats you need to watch out for. You need to prepare your business for future threats if you want to sustain your business for many years.

Although you may have a monopoly on your niche market, you are always going to face competition one way or another. It is important to try and make your business as good and successful as possible. Start following industry trends and keep up with the information your competitors are putting out there. Use tracking software to find out when information pertaining to your business is being posted online. This will allow you to do damage control if negative information is posted and you need to repair your small business image in a hurry.

Improve upon the mistakes your small business has made in the past in order to create a long-lasting business for the future. Here are a few ways you can analyze your business:

• Build and compare your company image to your competitors


• Product development , advertising, product promotion


• Public relations


• Sales and strengthening customer relationships