YOU HAVE TO KNOW how to identify the opportunities and threats affecting your business in order to set up the necessary measures to react.  This analysis will help you discover new opportunities and threats and learn how to manage and get rid of them effectively.  When it comes to opportunities, you need to identify them so that you can make good use of them.  Identifying the threats in advance will help you put the necessary measures in place before the problem or issue reaches your proverbial doorstep.  This will keep your business from closing down due to major threats that couldn’t be combated effectively.

You can identify the opportunities and threats affecting your business by analyzing and monitoring the internal and external markets.  For instance, when it comes to economic and technological developments, these may offer the best opportunity for you to increase your production, service provision, and overall business expansion.  If there is any occurrence of these trends, you should find out what opportunities will be available to you, then establish the best way to tap into, and take advantage of, these opportunities.

If there are new scientific and technological developments, you need to find out how these will affect your business and what the opportunities that will be available to you are.  You have to monitor and tap into these in order to stay ahead in the industry.  This is important because if you are left behind by your competitors, you may end up losing your clients to them.  These innovations can also help you in the growth of your company; for instance, in the speed and quantity of the production.

Internal factors may also provide the business with growth opportunities.  For instance, if you have well-trained professionals, you may consider setting up new business branches and transferring your top professionals to run these businesses.

If you realize that you don’t have enough well-trained manpower to facilitate the expansion of your business, you could initiate the necessary measures to deal with this.  You may decide to hire new employees or train the ones that you currently have.

If you have a lot of resources and finances, you can put these to use expanding your business by way of increasing your production, markets and operations branches.  You can also use the money to introduce new business lines for your business.  You can analyze your audited reports so as to effectively monitor them.  If you notice that you have made a lot of profits, you can use this money to expand your business.

Other resources that can provide you with new business opportunities include manufacturing facilities and machinery.  Consider the equipment that you already have and find out how else you can utilize this equipment in order to expand your production of goods and services.

You can also identify the opportunities and threats affecting your business by considering your customer feedback. For instance, if you sell coffee vending machines and you realize that your clients have been asking for vending machines for cold drinks and snacks, you may consider expanding your business to provide these services.  Sometimes, your clients may comment that they like your services and products, but can’t access them easily.  This is a good opportunity to expand your business by creating more branches in order to get close to your market.  The hard part has already been accomplished in that you already know that if you expand, your customers will follow. Your clients may also ask you to provide services that work in hand-in-hand with what you are currently providing.  For instance, when it comes to the coffee vending machines, your clients may also request that you sell disposable cups with the machines.  Or maybe that you sell fresh coffee that they can buy with the machines.  These are also opportunities for expansions.

When you learn how to identify the opportunities and threats affecting your business, you will be able to facilitate the growth and success of the business.  For instance, if you find out that you are facing threats due to competitors, improve your business quality, add incentives or make necessary adjustments in order to stay ahead in the business.  You should also monitor the changes in the internal and external environments that may threaten your business.  For instance, economic and political crisis may greatly affect your business.  You should set up corrective measures that can help curb problems arising due to these issues.

Internal factors that can threaten your business include employees and resources.  If you don’t have motivated employees, production automatically goes down.  However, there are threats that you can avoid by just simply talking to your staff members and ensuring that they are treated well.  You need to encourage (or enforce) open communication lines between your management and your employees.  If your employees have any grievances, listen to them and try to solve these amicably.  Employee’s threats are serious.  They can lead to a labor strike or even the collapse of the company.  They will also impede on any expansion plans that you may have.

If your company is large, you can set up a team to help you identify the opportunities and threats affecting your business.  This team’s work is to analyze different opportunities and threats that may affect the business well in advance.  They, then, have to come up with the necessary measures that will be put in place to help deal with the threats and maximize on the opportunities.  This team will be monitoring the internal and external markets so as to identify the opportunities and threats and offer an immediate response.