How on Earth to put together company profile for a private company?

To all other readers: This is the typical day of IB. Mission impossible daily with mostly data mining and BS benchmarking

To OP: Try doing some newsrun, spend a quarter to half page on some BS like Company Milestones or Recent Development. If it is some large size company, perhaps you can find some market share data by third party and put a ranking chart. Put some key products name on website and add BS descriptions. Find some info about the C-suite, put the photo + title + 2 bullets each, etc.

Call the company and mention that you're doing a research project. They may be able to provide you with some "About Us" literature that can be heavily leveraged.

If you need to fill space, (i) list of key management, (ii) maps, (iii) logos, (iv) awards and (v) recent news are the way to go.

(i) List of 2-4 most important people at the company and 1-2 sentence bio on them. If not provided by the website, use Linkedin

(ii) If they don't list locations out on the website outright, go to the careers section of the website. A lot of times, in addition to listing all of the locations where jobs are available, you'll be able to see all locations

(iii) If its a B2B business model, see if they have testimonials and then fill up a quadrant with the logos of the clients who wrote testimonials. That'll take up some space as well

You're welcome

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(1) webpage:

What you need to focus on -> about us / our services or products / management team / press releases

All of the above can usually fill ~two quads

If you are really struggling finding more info, you can add the news into a separate quad and just call it recent news or recent developments

(2) factiva run -> this goes along with the press releases section of the web-site

(3) equity research -> search for the name of the company as a keyword, it may come up in some reports (e.g. as a competitor to a public company and sometimes with a bit of details around how the two companies compete , what they do etc)

(4) on google run: “company name” filetype:pdf or “company name” inurl:aws filetype:pdf

(5) check of the company has public debt or rates debt. In this case it will have reports from moody’s or S&P

(6) if European, check companyhouse. Private companies still report financials if they have over $10m sales but make sure you are looking at the topco

(7) general google search. If it’s a tech company, let’s say, there is a plethora of websites with descriptions and reviews of software products and features by company

(8) finally check sector-specific databases your team has access to and mergermarket

A day in the life of an IB analyst. 1 word: pictures

Whatever you can summarize with pictures or graphics do that. Segments, products, services, etc. Makes it look pretty and takes up room

Also google. Try to find some articles they might've been mentioned in

Call the CEO out on LinkedIn for not having revenue, then he’ll clap back with an actual figure.. then estimate costs/multiples based on comparables

Use some research reports on the industry/sub-industry for an Industry Overview section...should take up a few slides

Find a comparable that has more information on their website, take their broad claims and assume that the company you are profiling also does the same. Obviously reword your findings.

Hahaha, thanks all. I imagined as much - good to know I wasn't alone in this. Good stuff.

A couple of quick suggestions:

• Go on LinkedIn and check number of employees - beware, sometimes companies with similar names get counted when they shouldn't be. Can also highlight key execs with bios (Chair, CEO, CFO, etc.)

• If the company is sponsor backed, the list of sponsors, and the team at the sponsor that covers the portco (similar to the execs summary) - also their investment critera will give you some goal post stats

• Search senior management and see if they did any interviews. You'd be surprised how sometimes they'll just have an online video or press clip that actually has some good info. Like a Youtube video with 301+ views.... Lol

• Triangulate numbers - for example, in a news clip, they may mention that they sell x units annually or how many customers they have. If you take that and compare to their wholesale or retail prices, you can ballpark their topline revenue. Another SWAG I've seen is estimating revenue per employee to ball park topline

• Inc 5000 or industry rags sometimes have good info, including revenue. FYI - Information is often self-reported.

• Glassdoor, Manta, Owler, Zoominfo etc. - sometimes there are nuggets of information here, but often it's usually not great.

• Job boards - look at their postings. Like a press clipping, there is usually some good stuff like a description of the business, number of employees and location of offices (which you can turn into a map)

• Website's privacy statement - usually has company's full legal name, headquarters, contact information etc. if the website itself is on the thinner side

• If the company is UK based, also check out Companies House. European financial reporting drives me crazy, but this is one helpful resource. A lot of information, even for small private co's.

If you can't find the financing rounds on CapIQ, they're most certainly on news publications on the website

I have to do this all the time, looking into private fintech companies to partner.

Crunchbase is your friend.

Laughs In Mid-Market Banking