When starting out a business, you have to study every aspect of it. Internal aspects are the profit projections, funds needed, the concept but the external part have more or less the same importance because these are the elements that surprise and can close down your business. SWOT analysis, its a simple tool made to understand your position within the market you are entering. So my example is about restaurants in Kuwait; back to SWOT which stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats. The Strength and Weakness parts are what you provide as location, or strong accounting standards, or you got a certain hygine expert(which i doubt in Kuwait). I will be concentrating on the OT parts of SWOT in this post, The Opportunity in the Kuwaiti market is huge, 67% of the population is teenagers and thats a large market to tackle. But what about the Threat, Kuwait Ministry of Health is creating a large budget to tackle fast food restaurants in Kuwait, health campaigns all over Kuwait will be targeting young teenagers from universities to middle schools. So as you can see the Threat here is greater than the opportunity, so if your thinking of starting a restaurants you have to consider going against the government budget of millions compared to the small budget you got! Unless the restaurant you setting up is a healthy one, like Low Fat. Low Fat is a smart concept of a restaurant, he is on the starting point of the curve, and any promotional ads from any entity in Kuwait, it can be a magazine or the government awareness campaigns, he is the one with the advantage. “in simple terms, he’s ridding the wave” This idea came to mind when i passed by Holiday Inn downtown, and saw another burger joint. All burger joints in the states are losing profits, Mc Donalds is loosing profits and only investing in healthy food restaurnats like Pret in the UK. So its really a matter of time before business owners here realize the down turn in profits due to a more health conscious society. Take a look at subway, 5 years ago nobody knew about, but now everybody is like lets go to subway instead of McDonalds, the Health epidemic is growing by the day in Kuwait and is going to catch up too, another example of eternal opportunites and threats is the apartment building in Kuwait, now non Kuwaitis canot purchase there own apartments but, still Kuwaiti owners are investing millions within apartments buildings, because a law will be passed favoring non Kuwaitis to buy apartments in Kuwait. So who here has the advantage, the one waiting for the law to pass then build apartments, or the one already building and anticipating the law? and tip apartment building now are being sold quite cheaply and will explode when the law passes, just for people thinking of buying apartments!, as you can see projecting the future of a certain flow of the business is as important as the concept, the food, the people running the business.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Rental space & Real estate, Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.