Map out your situation

How are you?

If your business is struggling, you may feel stressed and worried. Entrepreneurs tend to keep these worries to themselves and want to solve everything on their own. Share your concerns and questions with someone you know well. There are also organisations that can help you deal with stress caused by financial problems. 

How is your business?

With a strengths and weaknesses analysis or SWOT analysis you can see at a glance where opportunities lie for your business and what needs extra attention. Name the strengths and weaknesses of your company. These are internal factors, such as your product or the expertise of your staff. Then identify which environmental factors are opportunities or threats for your company. These are external factors. Think of increasing digitalisation, declining customer loyalty and rising energy prices. Put all the strengths and weaknesses from both the internal and external analysis into a table.

You can go one step further: give the points from your SWOT analysis a relative weight and put them against each other in a confrontation matrix, a combined table. This table confronts the most important strengths and weaknesses of your company with the most important opportunities and threats from the market. It shows you how your company connects to the market. In the final step, you draw conclusions and determine your strategy.

How are your finances?

To know how you are doing financially, you need a financial overview. You can make this yourself or with the help of your bookkeeper or accountant. An in-between overview using a profit and loss account will help. Also, list your debts.

A financial overview gives you a first indication of the viability of your business. Calculate key figures, such as profitability or solvency, an indication of your long-term ability to pay. Liquidity is an indication of your short-term payment capacity. In subsequent steps, you examine how the new business model improves these indicators and the viability of your company. The video below tells you more about how to determine the viability of your business.

KVK Advice Team

Do you have questions about a new business model or the Business model canvas? Call the KVK Advice Team Bel 088 585 22 22.