The Clifton Review 

The Clifton Review is a tri-weekly column that examines the question of the Clifton project along with the evolution of the war between two billionaires. We covered the start of this war with articles describing the battle over easement rights, the mysterious burning of a home, the blocks to rebuilding, and countless questionable court filings.

While the 2018 series salutes fashion mogul Peter Nygård’s Golden Jubilee detailing his rags to riches story, his incredible business success over these past fifty years and an inside look at how he did it, The Clifton Review will also continue to address current affairs as they relate to the good of The Bahamas.

A Tool for Studying Business Risks

By P.J. Malone

So you’ve seen signs that your business is in trouble. Where do you begin to address threats to your business?

A key method for addressing threats begins with understanding the threats in a context that makes them easy to work with and allows for a more comprehensive approach.

It can take the form of a SWOT analysis and fits well with looking at risks from the various areas covered previously in “Determining Your Business Viability”.

The SWOT analysis is a great tool that you can use for further studying both the external and internal risks for your business, and it provides a key to formulating strategies for addressing it.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strength and weaknesses refer to those internal factors within your company while opportunities and threats relate to factors external to the company.

When determining your business strengths, you simply look within your organization at the things that tend to make it easier for your company to do business or achieve its business goals.

An example of a great strength a company can have is if your staff is highly skilled. A skilled workforce can lead to less errors and faster production times, which is a great boost to a business. Other areas of strengths could include, reputation for quality product or service, a great business location, or maybe loyal staff members.

Weaknesses, on the other hand can be a bit elusive if you are not prepared to look honestly at your business and see what could be working against your business. One weakness could be a poor accounts receivables process where you struggle to collect monies owed to the business.

Other weaknesses could include high inventory of products that are becoming obsolete, poor customer relations, or inability to consistently purchase resources from suppliers.

Opportunities are those gifts that are usually right in front of our eyes that we may still fail to see cause it’s not what we are used to. Yet, they can represent the biggest potential for business growth and profits. An example of an opportunity can be a new church being built on the same street as a ladies’ hat shop; however, this example is a bit more obvious than others.

Other opportunities include little competition or poor quality of competitors’ product, new technology coming on stream that your company can easily adopt, or your company’s ability to offer add on services due to the unique skills of individuals working within your organization.

As discussed before, threats can come from several areas, and when not dealt with, can debilitate a business. A threat can include the relocation of a university, for example, if your business is a fast food restaurant nearby that relies on the students from that university to patronize your business.

A type of threat not often discussed is a political threat. If a new political party has spent time on the campaign trail promising to tax businesses more for some reason or another, a business should pay attention to that and determine how to protect itself should that political party become the government of the day.

The most common threat businesses tend to notice is a similar business opening near them or with the intention to compete with them. There can be many subtle threats also such as more and more people changing their buying habits—like shopping online as opposed to going to shopping malls and other stores, or watching movies at home versus going to the theatres.

The key is to not stand idly by while these threats endanger your prospects.

The question is what to do when faced with such risks and threats to a business and how can this tool help? We’ll discover the answers in our next edition.