PESTEL, SWOT & Porter's Five Forces Guide

In SWOT analysis process, opportunities refer to external factors that could positively influence the business performance of a company. Threats are external changes that could cause problems to a company and negatively impact a company's performance.

In order to identify opportunities and threats, you need to conduct macro-environment scan to find out the possible trends and changes in the demographic, economic, technological, social and political environments that could affect your company or industry in the future.

Here are some recommended resources below that you can consider using to identify opportunities and threats:

• Library databases. You can find industry reports, country reports, consumers reports in the below library databases recommendations.
• Statistics Canada. You can find the most recent demographic information from the census conducted by Statistics Canada.

You may ask the following questions to help you explore the opportunities and threats from the external environments:

• What technology trends in the industry could be used to advantage? or are the new technologies threatening  in your business?
• Are there current social trends that might be of benefit to the industry? Are any social changes affecting the company's customer base? Do current customers have unmet needs? If the customer base is changing, what can be offered to these new customers?
• Have any economic or regulatory changes occurred recently that affects the way your industry operates?
• What negative trends in the environment may impact a company's performance? 
• What are competitors doing that could pose a threat?