Company searches for smaller businesses – are they useful and how do they work?

Undertaking a company search is something that a business of any size can do. You might think that searching company information on competitors or suppliers is something that only the bigger businesses can afford to do – but it’s just not true.

If you’re a small business, you can do a company search right now and find out the information on credit, ratings and other details on your competitors, suppliers – or even your own business.

But why are they useful for businesses, and how do they work?

Why Are Company Searches Useful For The Smaller Business?

Company searches have unique advantages for smaller companies that bigger companies don’t have. You can get details of a business that is bigger much more readily than you can with a small business.

What this means is that there are plenty of opportunities for competitor research and the development of a solid competitor strategy. Being a small company has the following advantages:

• Niche – By being small you can more easily fill a niche in a market. Finding that niche by looking at the competitors in your sector and finding out what they are not doing well is a great way to find a niche – something bigger businesses can’t so easily do.
• Local – If you’re a small business you will probably be focussed on local clients and customers as you expand, by looking for local businesses you can assess their success by looking at their company accounts, credit limit and rating.
• Changeable – There are plenty of ways that small business company searches can be beneficial, but if you’ve found a new route in your business development as a result of your company searches you can quite easily change them.

Using company searches to find out information on a business is very useful for all companies, but there are a lot of advantages for smaller businesses that big companies don’t enjoy.

How Do They Work?

Well, basically you have to find some information to form an insight – and then you make that insight into an objective.

So, for example, if you research a competitor and find that they have better accounts than you – but they provide a similar kind of product – you could quite easily modify your existing products so that they were more in tune with the desirability of the competitor.

You would then measure the results, with the ultimate aim being a positive gain. Some insights are more helpful than others – and you can easily find yourself amazed at a small insight that had big results and the big one that had less.

Business Insights For Business Growth

There are many ways to grow a business, one of which is forming insights from the valuable information yielded from company searches and acting on them. So, when you make your own company searches as a small business – remember that there are always insights to be had.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to find more great stuff check out the rest of our blog – especially the ‘Company Search’ section.

By Alex Novakovic at MadeSimple – Find Alex on Google+