Business analysis has always been a dreaded activity—especially among marketing practitioners. This is not surprising considering that a lot of marketers are right brained people. Being creative and artistic, they would more intuitively spend their time brainstorming and creating innovative ideas to entice consumers to use their brand. However, as marketers and sales people develop plans, a constant underlying question on their mind is: “Will this idea work and build the business?”. This is an important question to ask—even more so now that the market is so volatile due to the pandemic and businesses just cannot afford to waste resources on plans that do not work. The key to developing good business strategy and plans are anchored on sound business analysis. While a few businesses might get lucky to come up with an enticing consumer plan without the benefit of doing any business analysis, this type of risk-taking usually does not work. Businesses that take this kind of risk tend to end up wasting valuable resources, stagnate, and eventually start losing revenue and market share. Conversely, businesses that take a more informed and strategic approach to these plans through business analysis are able to uncover and capture better opportunities. What is Business Analysis? Business analysis is: the fact-based understanding of the business… to uncover the real reasons behind its performance… in order to develop plans to grow the business These 3 parts guide how one should approach business analysis. In Acumen, we use the W8 framework as a guide in doing business analysis. The W8 framework is also divided into 3 sections, namely: What is happening? Why this is happening? What now?