A SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, is a tool that can help you assess the current state of your land surveying company. It’s a good way to determine where your business stands in relation to competitors and what areas need improvement. The goal is to identify both internal and external factors that impact your business as well as potential opportunities for growth.
There are many ways to approach producing a SWOT analysis but I'll cover just a sample for this blog entry.
What is SWOT?
SWOT is an acronym for a framework that helps you analyze the internal and external factors that affect your business. It stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The SWOT analysis tool helps you to identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can develop strategies to eliminate or reduce your weaknesses, and promote your strengths.
A SWOT analysis involves determining what makes your business successful in terms of both tangible (physical) and intangible (professional) assets. You may also want to look at how other companies are performing in the same industry as well as how they are growing their business using different marketing techniques.
A SWOT analysis is an important tool to use as you grow your land surveying business and stay competitive.
A SWOT analysis is a technique for identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It can help you identify the internal and external factors that affect your business. A SWOT analysis is a useful tool for measuring the effectiveness of an organization's strategy.
For example, let's say you are launching a new land surveying business and want to use this tool as part of your marketing plan. You could use it to determine whether or not there is enough demand for land surveyors in your area—that would be an opportunity! You could also identify potential threats such as competitors offering similar services at lower prices or government regulations that affect how much money people are willing to spend on surveying services.
To write your own SWOT analysis:
1. Identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for your business. This can be done by brainstorming questions such as: What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? What opportunities do we have? What threats do we face?
2. List each one of these factors across the four quadrants of a table (see example below).
5. Consider how your strengths can help you overcome weaknesses or threats (e.g., if you are a small company that doesn’t have access to capital from banks).
6. Finally, consider what you can do to increase the impact of your strengths and reduce the impact of weaknesses or threats on your business.
Develop the strengths of your land surveying company.
Strengths are things that your competitors don’t have. These strengths can be tangible (i.e., a website with lots of traffic and good SEO) or intangible (i.e., great reviews from previous customers).
You can also define your internal training and setup as your strength as it is fairly unique if this is not available outside your company. But you have to also review if it is of quality to make you stand out. If your training or onboarding of new staff isn't as special as any other company I would not consider it as a strength.
Try to link your internal activities that you do that you feel is exceptional as your strength. As mentioned above, anything such as your internal system or process can be your strength as long as it is unique to your business.
Get feedback from customers and internal stakeholders.
Another way to identify internal weaknesses is to ask your customers and internal stakeholders to give you their feedback on how they perceive your company. You can do this by setting up interviews, or asking the customers a few questions after they receive their project results.
You will want to ask them about the following topics:
- What are the strengths of your company?
- How could you improve?
- What did their experience with your products and services feel like?
Take the time to understand the market.
- Understand the market you are in: You may be an expert in your field, but that doesn't mean you can understand every market. Your customers will have expectations from their interactions with other businesses and organizations. If you're not aware of what those expectations are for a land surveying company, then you may have some trouble meeting them.
- Understand the competition: You need to know who the competitors are in your industry and how they compete with each other (if at all). The best way to find out about this is through online research—Google is your friend!
- Understand your customers: It's important that you understand as much as possible about who are clients are and what they want when they hire a land surveying firm like yours. This will help guide some decisions regarding pricing structure and marketing strategy moving forward so that everything aligns with where customers want or need it most (and where they're willing to pay for it).
Focus on the opportunities for your land surveying company.
The second step in writing a SWOT analysis is to focus on the opportunities for your land surveying company. This will help you understand what opportunities are available, as well as which ones are most important and should be prioritized.
The opportunity is something that is external to your land surveying company. Have you identified a GAP in the market such as a unique way of deliverying the service or identified a customer segment to target that you believe has just arisen from a change in law or requirements (BIM would have been one in the last couple of years). It is still one but I think you need to refine your offering if you're going to enter it now.
To identify opportunities from the SWOT analysis you need to look at the internal and external factors that are driving the market. For example, you might identify emerging trends like cloud computing that could affect how you process your survey. If there's no threat of competition for the time being then it may be worth entering a new market segment.
The third step is to identify threats that could put your business at risk and then develop strategies to mitigate them.
One of the most important external threats is competition. You need to be aware of competitors that offer similar services and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. It's also worth looking at prices as well as any benefits they might be offering customers. If there are a lot of competitors, you should also take into account how much it would cost to compete with them by creating your own website or setting up social media accounts. This can allow you to keep track of changes in the market so you can stay one step ahead!
Another important external factor is government regulations on land surveying companies like yours. Government legislation may require businesses like yours to follow certain rules when carrying out work on behalf of clients such as monitoring or reporting activity levels related to safety hazards found during site visits (e.g., asbestos). You could also find yourself having problems if your employees don’t have proper training for working with hazardous substances because this could lead someone being injured badly enough to never work again.
Health and safety is always an oversight when looking at your SWOT analysis.
Competition (direct or indirect)
Competition is one of the most common threats that a business faces. It can be either direct or indirect, but it always makes you feel like your business is in danger.
Example of indirect competition: The client has already signed a contract with another firm and they are already working on the project, so they don't need our services anymore.
Example of direct competition: A similar company offers better services at lower prices, which means we have to reduce our prices in order to win more clients or lose clients who were loyal to us until now.
Carrying costs
Carrying costs include the cost of holding staff when there is no work and can be a significant economic cost for a business. For example, if you have 2-3 staff on payroll doing nothing, those are carrying costs because they are not generating revenue or profit. Carrying costs may be reduced by:
- reducing your payroll staff;
- using subcontractors; or
- increasing turnover (numerous times per year).
Major suppliers
If you are a land surveyor, it is very likely that most of the tools and equipment used in your business are purchased from suppliers. The same applies to software, hardware and other products. Knowing who these suppliers are, how much they charge you for their services, what kind of services they provide and how dependable or unreliable they are can help you determine if there are any external threats facing your company.
The major supplier threats include:
- Supplier price fluctuations: If a supplier’s prices change suddenly due to an increase in costs or other circumstances beyond its control (such as war), this will cause a strain on your finances as well as lead time for purchases made by other departments within the organization. This would require immediate action on your part so as not to cause delays in production or delivery dates promised by other departments.
- lack of finance to obtain new equipment
- inability to repair equipments on time (* cough* * cough FARO)
Government regulations, taxes and economic situation.
The government regulations, taxes and economic situation of your area are very important for you to consider. You need to know what your business will be up against when it comes to regulations. The same goes for taxes, especially if you want to own multiple properties and hire employees. The economic situation is always changing so be sure get a clear picture of where your company stands at this moment in time.
The risk associated with these factors can have a huge impact on the success of a land surveying business.
Reduce the risks to your land surveying company.
Your land surveying company is likely to face a number of risks. With the right tools and strategies in place, you can help reduce the risks that your business could face.
A SWOT analysis can help you identify potential threats, threats that are already present and opportunities for your land surveying company. By identifying these elements, you will be able to develop a plan to manage them effectively.
The key here is planning ahead - make sure that you have a backup plan if things go wrong or an alternative option if something isn't working out as well as it should be. This way, if anything does go wrong with your business or marketing strategy then there won't be any issues because everything has been thought through in advance!
Take action to eliminate weaknesses in your land surveying company.
In order to develop a plan on how to improve your land surveying company, you will need to first make a list of the weaknesses that you want to address. You can do this by simply writing down all the possible problems you think your business has and sorting them in order of priority.
Then, identify the root cause behind each weakness and develop an action plan for how you will address each one. Finally, take action immediately so that your land surveying company’s weaknesses don’t become bigger problems later on!
Conclusion
Now that you have completed your SWOT analysis, it’s time to take action! Use this information to develop a plan of action that aligns with your goals and helps you achieve them. This can be done through business planning or brainstorming sessions with your team.