Last month, I wrote about SWOT analysis and the importance of doing one for your Online Business. As you know, the 'W' stands for "weaknesses", and I believe it's the most important point to examine - mostly because it tends to get glossed over.

It's incredibly easy to mentally rebut any weaknesses that your mind (or customer) throws at you, discarding points that are highly valuable and should be considered. While the intention of the SWOT exercise is not to mentally bash yourself into manic depression, it is important to be brutally honest with yourself. You need to send yourself to weakness bootcamp and get your perceptions into shape.

Reasons and Excuses

Have you ever been explaining yourself to your boss/spouse, only to have them cut you off with: "I don't want to hear your excuses"? Naturally you think to yourself: "they're not excuses, they're reasons!" Reasons that you're late, reasons you forgot their birthday, reasons you missed that deadline. Reasons to you, sure.. but they're excuses to the listener.

When examining your weaknesses, you need to think of every reason as an excuse.

Being Harsh

Not many people in your life who would be willing to spend some time to help you identify your business weaknesses would also be willing to be completely honest with you. Some might call it tough love, and in a business sense that's exactly what you need. So if you're not going to get it from someone else - you gotta give it to yourself. Give yourself no excuses and don't be afraid of being harsh.

Now... Brainstorm. Go Go Go!

Put on some happy music. Eat an ice cream. Smile from ear to ear. And then write down everything negative you've ever thought about your business. Everything you've heard from customers, friends, family. Everything you've ever even imagined that perhaps someone might have thought. Hold nothing back, pull no punches, let it fly!

I don't recommend you spend too long doing this; it can get quite depressing. In fact it probably should be a bit of a downer if you really care about your business and you're doing the exercise properly.

Other Sources of Honest Feedback

The best feedback you can ever get is from your own customers. Surveys, customer feedback forms, emails and letters, face to face dialogue - all of these forms of feedback are incredibly valuable. It can be as simple as asking a customer you've just served - "How are we doing? Were you happy with our service today?" Soliciting feedback from customers is the best way to get feedback you never would have thought of yourself.

Sifting the Truth

By now you'll have a large list of negative things about your business. They may be real or imagined, fair criticism or unfair attacks. Which means that now you have to whittle it back to the real and the fair, so that you know what needs action. Thankfully, there's a few tactics to doing this accurately and objectively.

1. Ask a friend.
This is different to asking for feedback. If you express the flaw and say: "do you agree?" then they're not going to shy away as much as they might if you asked them to express the opinion themselves.

2. Can you say the opposite is true?
This is a nice test of the objectivity of someone's criticism. If you can say that the statement is true and it's opposite is also true, you may be dealing with a subjective truth. This doesn't mean you should ignore the criticism; it simply means you should weigh up how common each side of the equation is.

3. Leave it for a while.
Leave your list of unhappy thoughts and come back to it the next day. A fresh mind can look at feedback with a new perspective, and a little thought and sleep can do wonders for clear thought.

4. Ask your customers.
This is easily the best method. Using a structured survey (Likert Scale, anyone?) is the best way to find out of the customers agree with your feedback. Of course, you will need to transform each criticism into a reasonably objective statement. Then you can use a Likert scale on a survey to ascertain your customers sentiment. Very objective, very effective - but a little time consuming. If you have enough customers though, it's worth it.

5. Write a rebuttal.
Don't agree with a point? Write a rebuttal for it - explain why it's wrong, give clear reasoning and examples. Pretend you're justifying yourself to someone else, trying to convince them that you're right. This method forces you to examine exactly why you don't agree in a structured and logical manner. Once you're done, leave your rebuttal and examine it a few days later, or show a friend - did you convince them?

There is one drawback to writing a rebuttal - you can't argue with your customers. If they think it's wrong, it's probably wrong, and most of them will walk away without even expressing their thoughts to you. So always think in terms of first impressions, and never rely on an explanation - just use the rebuttal as a way to examine the issue at hand.

And then...?

Collecting honest and valid feedback about your business is important, but understanding your weaknesses is pivotal in strengthening and growing your business. It's all about taking a good, hard look in the mirror and identifying the areas in which you can improve. As you dig deeper, you'll realize that it's not a painless process - but at the end of the day, your adjusted perceptions and new found understanding of your business will help you set more realistic targets and better develop winnning strategies.