SWOT analysis is a tool to help businesses create their strategy by determining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the company. SWOT analysis is applicable for businesses of all sizes and useful to do when starting up a new business, before making strategic changes in the operation of the business or phasing in new elements. It is particularly important in fast-growing and highly competitive industries, such as wellness, and requires deep knowledge and understanding of the company and the exact industry.


Always start by defining your company's strengths. These elements are the key to your success and give you guidelines on how to operate your business. Basically, these are the fundamentals, the pillars of your company, and the rest of your SWOT analysis depends heavily on this part. For example, your company has the best-trained massage therapists, provides full-service, has friendly and helpful staff and it is located in a quiet and safe neighborhood with parking lots.


Besides your strengths you have to be aware of your weaknesses. These can motivate you to constantly improve your services by trying to reduce their impact on your business or totally eliminate them. For example, your weaknesses may be small space for the services, a low budget for advertisements and marketing, a small number of employees or no emphasis on specific customer groups in the local community.


Explore all the opportunities that you can potentially face during your operation at any time. This gives you a more complex picture if you look at opportunities from a business owner and a customer point of view. Opportunities can be a newly created business community in the area as a potential customer group, new technologies and techniques in the industry with that you can modernize your services or new advertising opportunities via the Internet.


Just like the parallel of strengths and weaknesses, you should compare the opportunities to threats.Threats are the challenges and problems that you can face during the operation, and you have to be aware of them to avoid or eliminate their negative impact. For example, there are too many competitors in the area, the local community consists of low-income families that cannot afford wellness services or you have low budget for implementing new techniques and services.