If you're a small business owner, startup, or solopreneur, taking a step back to assess your current business position is essential to laying the foundation for business growth. By evaluating where your business stands, you can make better decisions about how to expand, improve, and stay competitive.
In this news update, we'll cover practical ways to assess your business landscape, including a step-by-step SWOT analysis, insights on conducting market research, tips on understanding your customers, and guidance on how to perform a business health check. These tools are essential for ensuring your business is on the right track before planning your next steps.
Why Assessing Your Business Landscape is Important
As a small business operator, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of running your business. At LeadinGrowth we believe it is essential to take a step back and evaluate your current position. Doing this gives you the clarity to make informed decisions about how to move forward, improve operations, and stay competitive. Assessing the landscape helps you:
Identify strengths to leverage for growth.
Spot weaknesses that could hinder your progress.
Recognize opportunities to explore.
Uncover potential threats and develop strategies to mitigate them.
Without this foundational knowledge, growth strategies are more likely to miss the mark. Now, let’s explore how you can start this assessment, beginning with one of the most effective tools: a SWOT analysis.
How to Conduct a Simple SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a simple but powerful tool to evaluate your business's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. For many small business owners, though, it’s unclear how to effectively conduct one. Here's a detailed guide to help you get it right:
Strengths
What does your business do well? Focus on what makes your products or services stand out. Do you have a signature wine blend, a loyal customer base at your farm-to-table restaurant, or a well-established network of local retailers? Think about what sets you apart from competitors, whether it's unique products, loyal customers, or specialised expertise. Ask yourself:
What advantages does my business have?
What resources do I have access to?
What do customers rave about?
Focus on what makes your products or services stand out. Do you have a signature wine blend, a loyal customer base at your farm-to-table restaurant, or a well-established network of local retailers?
Are there specific products that customers tell you they love?
Weaknesses
Identifying weaknesses is crucial because they can limit your business growth. This could include outdated systems, limited marketing, or a skill gap. Example: A dairy farm struggling to meet the growing demand for plant-based milk alternatives. Take a helicopter view of your business. Where could your business improve? Be honest here. Identifying weaknesses is key to growth.
What processes aren’t efficient?
Where are you loosing time? Money? Resources?
Are there skill gaps within my team?
What negative feedback do I receive? From staff, suppliers and from customers.
Opportunities
Opportunities might come from market trends, new technologies, or gaps in your competition. Staying aware of these helps you tap into new areas of growth. Example: A small vineyard that begins offering vineyard tours and tastings to capitalize on the rise in wine tourism. Ask yourself, what trends or market conditions could you capitalize on? Opportunities might include an emerging market need, a gap in the competition, or advancements in technology.
Are there underserved customer segments?
What new technologies can I adopt?
Are there any emerging consumer trends you could take advantage of?
Is there potential for partnerships or expansion?
Threats
External factors like new competitors, economic shifts, or changes in regulations can pose a threat to your business. Identifying these allows you to prepare ahead of time. Threats in food, wine, and agribusiness can come from many directions—climate change, rising production costs, new competitors, or changes in regulations. Identifying them early allows you to plan and mitigate risk. Ask yourself, what external factors could pose risks? Understanding threats helps you develop plans to mitigate them.
Are new competitors entering your market?
What is disrupting or changing how the market operates?
Are economic factors or changing regulations affecting your industry?
Is customer demand shifting?
Once you’ve completed your SWOT analysis, take time to prioritise each item and create action steps. For instance, capitalise on your strengths, work on minimising weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and develop plans to address threats. Conducting a SWOT is a powerful way to understand your current position and get a clear snapshot of your business.
Market Analysis
Understanding Trends Affecting Your Business
Now that you’ve analysed your business internally, it’s time to look outward. Market research helps you understand external factors affecting your business—such as industry trends, competitor behaviour, and customer preferences.
A market analysis helps you understand external factors that affect your business, such as industry trends, competitor activities, and customer behaviours.
Identify Key Trends
Keep an eye on what’s happening in your industry. Are there new technologies disrupting the market? Is there a shift in consumer preferences? The food, wine, and agribusiness industries are heavily influenced by trends like organic farming, rise in plant-based foods, increasing demand for gluten-free products, sustainable practices, or a rise in experiential offerings such as farm-to-table dinners or vineyard stays. Join a library and access industry reports, consumer research and trade publications, also use Google Trends to identify key movements that could impact your business, use social listening tools with your social media to help you to track customer market changes. Attend local events related to your industry—like food and wine festivals—note what visitors are attracted to, see what draws a crowd.
Analyse Competitors
Understanding what your competitors are doing well (and where they fall short) can reveal opportunities for your business to grow. Study your competitors to learn what’s working for them and where they might be vulnerable.
Consider:
What are they offering that you’re not?
What’s their pricing strategy?
How are they positioning themselves in the market?
What are their customers praising or complaining about online?
How does their unique selling proposition compare to yours?
Explore Market Gaps
Once you've analysed competitors, look for underserved customer needs. A simple way to do this is by reviewing competitor reviews or forums to find out what people are asking for but not getting. Host tastings, surveys, or feedback sessions with customers to learn what they’re looking for but can’t find elsewhere. Look for unmet needs within your target audience. Is there a product or service that your competitors aren’t offering but customers are seeking? This could be your chance to stand out.
By understanding the broader market, you can better position your business to take advantage of trends and avoid being blindsided by changes.
Understanding Your Customers: Key Metrics to Track
Your customers are at the heart of your business. Understanding your customer likes, dislikes, habits and preferences are the cornerstone of any business. But beyond general knowledge, you need to understand the numbers that tell you who your customers are, what they want, and how they interact with your business.
Demographics and Psychographics
Who are your customers? Collect information like age, location, income, and interests. Whether you’re running a vineyard, a farm gate, or a food production business, engaging with your customers helps you fine-tune your offerings. You can gather this data through tastings, surveys, social media insights, or customer feedback forms.
Customer Behaviour
Look at how customers are interacting with your business. Are your customers returning for more? If so, why? If not, why not?
Understanding your repeat business and customer loyalty metrics helps you improve the customer experience and foster long-term relationships.
Key metrics to consider:
How are customers finding you? (Search engines, social media, referrals)
What products or services are most popular?
What’s the average order size?
Customer Retention and Loyalty
Retaining customers is just as important as acquiring new ones. Look at repeat purchase rates, customer satisfaction scores, and the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers. It’s not just about getting new customers but keeping the ones you have. Track your repeat purchase rate, customer satisfaction scores, and the lifetime value of each customer.
By understanding these metrics, you’ll gain insights into where to focus your marketing efforts and how to better meet your customers’ needs. Send out customer surveys and track your Net Promotor Score (NPS) to see check that it is growing.
Conducting a Business Health Check
Finally, a business health check ensures you’re not missing any critical areas. A business health check is essential to ensure your operations are running smoothly and your business is ready for growth. A business health check allows you to evaluate whether your business is financially sound, operationally efficient, and well-positioned to grow. Just like a regular health check-up, this step helps you catch potential problems before they become major issues.
Here’s a simple four-step guide for conducting a business health check:
Financial Review – Are your finances in order? This gives you a clear picture of your financial health and reveals areas where you might need to cut costs or invest more. Cash flow is king in any business, but especially in agriculture and food production, where seasonal cycles can cause financial fluctuations.
Review key financial metrics such as profit margins, production costs, dept levels and cash flow regularly. Understanding your financial position helps you plan for future investments.
Operational Efficiency – Assess your workflows. Are there bottlenecks or inefficiencies that slow down your operations? Evaluate whether your equipment, processes, or team are optimised for peak performance. Streamlining processes can free up resources and time.
Evaluate your workflows to see where you can save time and money. Ask yourself:
Are there bottlenecks in your production or delivery process?
Is your team able to work efficiently?
Employee Satisfaction – If you have staff, it’s important to assess their engagement and satisfaction levels. A motivated, happy team is more productive and committed to your business’s success.
Your employees happiness impacts your business. Conduct 1:1s, surveys or informal check-ins to see how your team feels. A motivated team is more productive and committed to helping your business grow.
Customer Feedback – Make sure you're listening to your customers. Finally, assess your relationship with your customers. Are you consistently communicating with them through social media, email newsletters, or in-person events? Engaging your community, whether through a farm open day or a wine tasting event, strengthens your customer loyalty.
Collect feedback from your customers regularly to see how they perceive your business. This can help you improve your offerings and overall customer experience. Consider hosting regular events or farm tours to showcase your production process and build a deeper connection with your customers.
Download a comprehensive Business Health Check from LeadinGrowth.
Your Next Steps for Business Growth
Assessing your current business position, whether you’re a farmer, winemaker, tourism operator, or marketer, is the first step toward unlocking business growth. By taking the time to assess your business’s current position, you’re setting yourself up for sustainable growth. Start with a SWOT analysis, conduct a market assessment, understand your customers, and don’t skip a business health check. These foundational steps will help you make informed decisions about where to invest your time, energy, and resources.
Need further guidance on your business growth journey? LeadinGrowth is here to help small and medium sized businesses take the next step with strategic planning and expert support. Contact us today to learn how we can help you unlock your business’s full potential.
Book a free consultation to see if you and LeadinGrowth are a fit to go on a business growth journey together.
Comments