Performing a SWOT Analysis for Your Coffee Shop Business

Understanding how your coffee shop will operate within its market is key to the long-term success of your business. A SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) is a way of crystallising your thoughts into actual tasks that you can carry out. A SWOT analysis can be used in a number of contexts, but the most useful is measuring how effective your marketing has been and how useful your business plan has been helping you manage your coffee shop.

A SWOT analysis can help you plan your coffee shop is much more detail, thus identifying any problems that you must address before you start trading. Setting clear objectives is a core business tool that you should use in every aspect of operating your business. Used alongside your business plan, a SWOT analysis can guide and support the decisions you make now about every aspect of your business.

SWOT & Business Development

As part of planning and operating your business it’s a good idea to put set times in your diary throughout the year to perform a SWOT analysis on your business’ development. In this context your SWOT analysis would have these components:

Strengths
Look at your business plan and highlight what strengths your business currently has. This can be anything from unique products or services to highly qualified staff. From this starting point the rest of the SWOT analysis will balance your business’ strengths with the other factors that impact on its operational activity and its overall success in the marketplace.

Weaknesses
The converse of your business’ strengths is its weaknesses. Try and be as honest with yourself as you can. This element of the SWOT analysis is important to get accurate, as it is often the basis for changes – sometimes radical – to your business plan and your marketing strategy.

Opportunities
You know your business sector and so can spot trends that could offer your business new markets in the future. Opportunities could also come from your competitors if they have new products or services your business could capitalise on. But also focus on the detail of your business. Look at ways to reduce costs or how you can use new technology are all opportunities to explore.

Threats
No business is an island. Every enterprise will have a wide-range of threats that can come in many forms. Your competitors are obvious examples of a threat, but also consider the wider market your business operates within. Look at your customers base and how pricing could adversely impact on your business.

SWOT Checklist

Before you start to think about your SWOT analysis in earnest, use the checklist below to guide your activities:

1: Focus your SWOT analysis
Try not to make your SWOT analysis too broad. You can use SWOT to answer just one question that may be important to your business planning and future expansion. Making SWOT too broad diminishes its effectiveness.

2: Action plan
It’s easy to complete dozens of SWOT plans, but you must always include details on how you will take action on the conclusions that your analysis has revealed. Don’t procrastinate especially if your analysis has uncovered a major flaw in your business. Act now!

3: Be honest
The SWOT analysis results will only be as accurate as the data that you include. It’s very easy to overplay your business’ strengths and downplay its weaknesses, but you must resist this temptation.

4: Group analysis
Often, using a group to brainstorm the content of a SWOT analysis can open avenues you would not have thought of if you had completed the analysis alone. This is particularly the case when you are looking at the threats and opportunities components of your analysis. Two – or more – heads are definitely better than one when it comes to producing a useful SWOT analysis of any part of your business.

SWOT analysis a business tool that all owner/managers should get used to using on a regular basis. The analysis is a great way of focusing your thoughts as well as measuring the effectiveness of any component of your business. Your business plan guides your enterprise, but SWOT can help that plan become as informed and proactive as possible.

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