TOWS analysis: turning your SWOT into actions

Somewhere in your office there is a SWOT on a flipchart sheet or in an old email, and nothing in the business has changed because of it. A SWOT tells you what is true. TOWS asks what to do about it. Take the same four lists and pair them across, each strength against each opening, each weakness against each threat. Every pair is a question and the answer is a move. You get four short lists of moves, and you keep two or three.

Where does a SWOT stop?

A SWOT is a description. "Strong local reputation" and "online reviews are thin" are both true, and neither tells you what to do on Monday. Many owners finish the exercise, feel they have thought hard, and change nothing.

TOWS is the same grid read differently. It is only as good as the lines you feed it, so check the SWOT first. A line like "good team" cannot be paired with anything. A line like "two physiotherapists with the same patients for years" can. If you have not written one yet, the worked SWOT for an invented tractor-implement dealer shows weak lines being cut.

How do the four pairings work?

Draw a grid. Down the side, list your strengths and weaknesses. Across the top, list opportunities and threats. Each box is a question.

The last box is the one owners often skip, and it matters a great deal. It is where a real weakness meets a real danger, and the honest move is often to stop doing something or to shrink it.

Worked example: a made-up physiotherapy clinic in Belagavi

Imagine a clinic with two physiotherapists. Here is the SWOT, cut down to what can be paired:

• Strengths: the same two therapists treat patients throughout; most arrive on a doctor's referral.
• Weaknesses: no one answers the phone while therapists are with patients; no list of past patients, so no one is called back.
• Opportunities: a new housing area has opened ten minutes away; two local doctors have asked whether the clinic takes referrals for post-operative care.
• Threats: a bigger centre nearby has started advertising; patients stop coming once the pain eases.

Now pair them.

Strength with opportunity. Referral patients plus two doctors asking: write a one-page note for each doctor saying what the clinic takes and how to send a patient. Visit both. One of the two doctors never replies, and that is allowed to be the result.

Strength with threat. The same therapist each visit, against a bigger centre: say so on the clinic's Google profile and in the waiting room. Do not claim better results. The clinic cannot prove that, and the rules on health advertising differ by state and body, so check with your own adviser or regulator.

Weakness with opportunity. Unanswered phone, new housing area: a new neighbourhood may well call before it visits. Put one person on the desk for set hours and put those hours on the profile.

Weakness with threat. No patient list, and patients drifting away once the pain eases: start the list now with name, number and date of the last visit. The front desk can then call people the physiotherapist wants to review.

Four moves. The mistake the owner nearly made was starting an advertising campaign to answer the bigger centre, which would have sent calls to a phone nobody answered. TOWS put the desk and the list ahead of the spend.

Sentence stems keep the pairing honest. For each box, finish one of these:

• Because we are good at [strength], we can take [opening] by [action].
• Because we are good at [strength], [threat] hurts us less if we [action].
• We cannot take [opening] until we fix [weakness], so first [action].
• [Weakness] and [threat] together mean we should stop or shrink [activity].

If a stem will not finish with an action you could start on Monday, the SWOT line behind it is too vague. Go back and sharpen the line, not the move.

How do I choose among the moves?

Score each move on three plain questions, a yes or no each:

1. Can we start it with the people we already have?
2. Does it fix something we know is leaking, rather than something we think might?
3. Will we know in a few weeks whether it worked?

Take the moves with three yeses. In the clinic, the doctor note and the phone desk pass. The advertising idea fails the second question, because the leak is the phone, so it waits until the desk is fixed.

Two moves sometimes pull against each other. Here the housing-area push needed the desk staffed in the evening, and the doctor visits took the owner out of the clinic in the morning. When that happens, give the move that fixes a leak the first slot and the move that opens a new door the second. The clinic owner took the desk first and did the doctor visits on Saturdays. The advertising idea went on the parked list, to be looked at once the phone was answered every time.

When is TOWS not worth doing?

Skip it when your problem is not strategy. If the clinic's real trouble were rent or a therapist leaving, a matrix would be a distraction. Skip it also if your SWOT lines are vague; pairing vague lines gives vague moves, and you will feel busy without learning anything.

It is a poor fit for a one-person business with no staff to carry out the moves. There you want a list of next actions, not a matrix. And it does not replace numbers. If you cannot say how many enquiries you get or how many become orders, a TOWS will rest on opinion. Count first.

Turning it into a short plan

Today, write each chosen move with an owner and a date, on one page. Review it when the date arrives, not when you remember. If the exercise raises a bigger question about where the business should grow, business growth strategy describes how we approach it. The sales process hub shows where each move sits between enquiry and order. When you have your four lists and want a second pair of eyes on the pairing, tell us what you need.