ATI Research Guide

This project is about how to search company data, get business insights from Internet and UT business database, it incorporates six sections: company profile, industry, financials, customer, competitor and methodology

1. Comapny

When starting company research, the first step is to study the company itself to get the company basic information.

2. Industry

Industry analysis helps researchers determine the company external market environment.

3. Financials

Investigating the company's financials can effectively understand the operation of company business activities.

4. Customer

Analyzing customers is an important way to help companies accurately find the core needs of and design best products.

5. Competitor

Competitor analysis helps evaluate competitors to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of competition.

6. Methodology

Provide business model and framework to analyze the information that has been collected from previous steps.

Company

As the first step in company analysis, we need to have a basic understanding of the company we want to research on. The key information we need to know for a company are as follows:

  • Company History: Company development process and key milestones;
  • Company staff organization structure: founder, BOD, c-suite, employee and stakeholder;
  • Product service research: Determine the company's product positioning through product types and product pricing;
  • Other aspects: ESG, etc.

Industry

Industry analysis is comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the industry's economic conditions, product production, sales, consumption, technology, industry policies and other industry factors. Industry data can be got from public resources like google search, social media, news database such as Factiva, EBSCO, and business database like IBIS World, MarketLine, BCC research, Statista in UT Library database.

Financials

Basic financial knowledge is the first step to understand company financial statements. I did research about how to understand financial report and some important financial ratio. Then, I summarized how to efficiently get financial data for public company and private company, respectively. Useful data sources are as follows:

  • Public company financial data resources: SEC fillings, Google search, Mergent online;
  • Private company financial data resources: Google search, Crunchbase, Owler, etc

Customer

The purpose of customer analysis is to find the target market that will be best for company to enter, and understand the demand of the target market, in order to fully satisfied the certain unique needs of consumers in the target market. Customer analysis should be researched according to the following framework:

  • Customer segments: customer can be divided into different groups based on customer geographics, demographics, psychographics, behavioral;
  • Business database: Census, SimplyAnalytics, Mintel, etc.;
  • Primary research method: interview, focus group, etc.

Competitor

Competitor analysis is an important way for companies to measure their competitiveness and business value. An analysis of the status and future trends of competitors can ensure that companies are in line with market and business trends. In this sections, I provided how to use database for competitor research:

  • Database for private companies to find competitor: industry report, Mergent online and ReferenceUSA;
  • Database for private companies to find competitor: Industry report, Owler, ReferenceUSA and Mergent online.

Methodology

In final section, I introduce how to use our existing data obtained from previous sections to respond to the problems or challenges faced by companies we want to research. This section includes:

  • Analytics tools: SWOT, Five Forces, Five C, Four P and BCG Matrix;
  • Ivy case system: a business problem system about how to react with 4 key scenarios and 5 other scenarios;
  • 21 ways to cut down the cost