Number of Employees Intuition

When reading a CIM, there is often data on the # of employees (e.g. 2,000). However, currently, that number doesn’t tell me anything. How can I develop an intuition for these things?

For example, how many employees are there typically in a Walmart grocery store (including client-facing, supporting, and management jobs). What is the breakdown? How about # of employees in a typical manufacturing plant? Not talking precise numbers here, but just intuition (I.e. estimating the difference between 2,000 and 20,000 ppl).

Since companies typically report total number of employees, where can I get breakdowns by geography and responsibilities for different sizes of companies in different industries? Alternatively, how can I develop an intuition regarding the numbers?

4 Comments
 

If someone has a legitimate answer to this, god bless you.

I do not think you're really going to find exactly what you're looking for. Estimate wise, what we often do (LMM PE) is Revenue per Employees. We'll compare our own companies, or data from past opportunties to get a ballpark guesstimate. We will group by industry usually to try and get more precise, but this is more art than science obviously.

Also, since you have the CIM you should in theory have some access to management/sell-side IB to ask them this question.

Hopefully this helps slightly, but I do hope that someone else has a lot better answer than I do that I can also take.

 

It is really hard to benchmark this metric across businesses as there could be different levels of automation within companies. But then you can have so few employees left that the customer service suffers. Therefore, there is no precise intuition but it makes sense to check some ratios within the same industry (e.g. revenue per employee) for direct comps.

 

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