Analyze Your Firm as a Starting Point for Business Development Planning

In an earlier entry, we mentioned conducting a SWOT Analysis as part of your business development strategic planning. Let’s take a look at how this will be of benefit to your practice.

SWOT Analysis—short for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—is a strategic planning technique that offers insight into your practice and those of your competitors.  This process will help breakdown your practice and identify ways to maximize your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses. By examining the opportunities and threats you can identify new service opportunities to pursue, identify highly competitive new services you may want to avoid and recognize steps you can take to avoid losing clients to your competition. Taking that information, formulating a plan and executing on that plan will help you grow your business by design by matching your services to your current clients and new prospects.

The benefits to your practice include:

• determining practice growth potential,
• evaluating the competitive marketplace,
• concentrating your marketing and business development activities in the most beneficial areas,
• identifying possible threats and ways to minimize them.

An old baseball maxim says that, to be successful, you have to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” That can also apply to your practice. By analyzing and planning, you will know what areas to “hit” and what areas not to “hit” while you are executing the strategy developed during the process.

Taking time every quarter to measure your performance and adjust accordingly will help you build a much stronger and much more valuable practice. The SWOT Analysis can be an effective tool during that process.