SWOT Analysis

When customers stop walking in, every missed sale hurts—SWOT can help turn that around.

We are negotiating some interesting times, and when things are interesting, consumer confidence tends to fall along with spending.

These things come and go; sometimes the market is buoyant and at other times less so. Many of us recall the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID pandemic remains fresh in our minds. These were challenging events, but flooring retailers largely emerged from them unscathed.

Regardless of market conditions, our goal as retailers remains to get more than our fair share of the business.

Even in periods of difficult trading, most flooring businesses have sufficient opportunities to generate the sales needed to flourish. The problem is that we squander far too many of those opportunities. We can survive in good times with a conversion rate of 40-50%, but during periods when fewer people visit our shops, that conversion rate is insufficient.

Sales are the primary engine of our business, and every sales organisation can improve in this area. But what else can we do to further improve performance?

In the last years of my banking career, I worked with a manager whose principal business tool was the SWOT analysis. Over the course of working with him, I must have sat in dozens of meetings where we used the whiteboard to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats when analysing business opportunities.

Since my days in banking, I have found SWOT exercises an excellent tool for improving our businesses and setting strategic goals.

It’s outside the scope of this article to have an in-depth discussion of the SWOT process; for that, please visit http://surl.li/oqkhq.

SWOT analysis will not provide your strategic goals, but it will inform or influence what they should be. SWOT isn’t the only tool, but it’s inexpensive, easily understood, and encourages participation.

The beauty of SWOT is its simplicity; everyone understands what strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are when discussing our business. For that reason, I suggest including all your team in the exercise. I can tell you from our experience that the exercise uncovers issues and ideas that we wouldn’t have thought of as owners. In fact, you will likely end up with more action points than you can handle. We learned early on that we had to prioritise those things we could implement easily and quickly and maybe only three or four more challenging long-term items. We communicated the action points so people didn’t feel their ideas were being ignored.

You might even conduct one SWOT analysis with your entire team and then hold separate SWOT meetings for each of your key departments, such as sales, office, and installation. By doing this, the departments can drill down on issues specific to them without losing the involvement of the others in the larger group.

An example of an issue that emerged from a SWOT analysis was the aging of our installer pool. Out of that came the idea of a programme aimed at unemployed people to find apprentices we could add to our team. It turned out to be a game changer for our installation capacity.

If, through your SWOT analysis, you identify issues with your systems and processes, we would be happy to have you join us in an online meeting to explore how RFMS can help improve this aspect of your business.

Whatever the outcome, SWOT analysis is a great way to involve your team and create an environment where they can share ideas they might have been sitting on for years.

Chris Ogden is a consultant and Managing Director of RFMS Australasia (RFMSanz.com), a supplier of IT solutions for the flooring industry. Chris has an extensive background in all aspects of the flooring industry, and he can be contacted at cogden@rfmsanz.com.