The achievement of business success requires many skills. Amongst these are the skill sets to assess the business environment and to capitalize on, and risk manage, that environment.

The business environment includes the marketplace, yourself and your business partners, and any external factor that may positively or negatively affect the level of your business success. Today we are going to look at three aspects of the environment; transformation, opportunities and obstacles, and two groups of environment handling strategies; consolidation strategies, and exit strategies.

1. The Amount Of Transformation Required To Reach Your Goal

Achieving any goal requires change. It is important when setting business goals to determine the amount of change required. If the change is great it may be better to break the goal down to sub-goals in order to make success more accessible.

Start with the question; why hasn't the business already attained that goal? This will help determine exactly what needs to be changed as well as the amount of change needed.

It is important to determine how those changes can be accomplished in the current environment by looking at the opportunities and threats in the environment and the strengths and weakness within the business.

2. Opportunities, Strengths And Advantages

Every environment provides opportunities to those who develop the skill of seeing them. Every business has its own strengths and its own advantages over other businesses. The wise business manager can determine the best combination of these opportunities, strengths and advantages and then implement strategies to maximize profit at this point in the environment.

Even in the toughest times, when most businesses are in trouble, there are always some businesses that are prospering. If you develop the skills for assessing opportunities, strengths and advantages and the habit of acting on that assessment by taking appropriate goal directed action, then your business will always be one of those that are prospering.

3. Obstacles, Threats And Limitations

The environment always contains opportunities and it also always contains obstacles. Your business always has some limitations at any particular point in time and there are always threats to your success and profitability.

Since we know that these "problems" will always exist the wise business manager develops the skill of recognizing them early and develops and implements risk management strategies to guide the business through the difficulties while at the same time the business is focusing its efforts on profiting from the opportunities.

4. Consolidation Strategies

A business requires change in order to grow but constant change can be destabilizing. The wise business manager determines when it is appropriate to consolidate the gains made so that those gains become a strong foundation on which to build the next campaign of positive change.

A thorough understanding of the business environment can help determine the best point at which to consolidate and the best strategy to implement that consolidation.

5. Exit Strategies

No matter how skilled the manager is, or how well the environment is analyzed for opportunities, and threats, or how good the consolidation strategy may be, there is always the possiblity that things don't go to plan.

For this reason there is a golden rule that needs to be followed in every campaign; never enter any business campaign without a predetermined exit strategy.

The best time to determine strategies for how to exit a campaign with the minimum of difficulty or loss is before the campaign starts. This is when you are calm and clear thinking. If you wait until things are going wrong and the pressure is at a peak you are far less likely to find the best solution.

That was a brief introduction to capitalizing on the business environment. Now it's up to you to put aside some time to use these five points to help you look at the current environment for your business and determine how you can capitalize on that environment to increase your business success.