Speaker 1: What are good and effective ways to collect information on a company? So from my time working as a consultant and later as a project lead at McKinsey, I want to share my insights, my tips and tricks on exactly this topic of company research, which I hope will be helpful for many of you as well. These techniques will prove very helpful if you're currently preparing for job interviews, or maybe you already signed a labor contract and are preparing for the first days, weeks or months at your new employer. These infos will also be relevant if you're a consultant who wants to prepare for a new project, for a new client and wants to get up to speed with this new company in a faster way. So welcome to another coffee break here on my channel Firm Learning. My name is Heinrich and on my channel I want to help you to become successful in the first years of your career. So with no further ado, let's get into it. And today I want to share with you four tips what you can do to do some company research. And all these tips have in common that first, you can do them from home. Second, you don't need any access to any databases. So it's pretty much for free. And third, it's very easy and straightforward to do that. So also no significant time investment required. And stick until the end because especially the last two, I think, are quite juicy and important. So make sure you're not missing them. And the first tip is to read the news on the company. And while this might seem a little bit obvious, you would be surprised how many people I talked to, also I worked with, who were not even aware about the last news publications about a client, for instance, that we just started working for. And now to go a bit beyond the obvious, let me share two specific tools that you can use to really simplify and facilitate this news research. The first tool is the Google News Platform. So this is a search machine from Google specifically dedicated to news. So if you're typing in the name of your company here, you will likely find much better results regarding the news than if you just type in the company name in the overall Google search bar, because here all search articles that you get are news articles indeed. The second is Google Alerts. And this is pretty cool because here you can define a search term. And whenever there's a new search result on Google popping up for the term, you will get an alert, for instance, an email that Google sends you with the overview of all the new articles that came out. And here you can also tailor this to decide whether you want to have this really live whenever something new comes in, or whether you want to have a collection of results once a day or once per week. Depending on how common your search term is, you might want to go for the one or the other. But this is really something I would recommend you to do also for your current employer or maybe also your current client project that you are doing. Make sure that you have a Google Alert activated. And this can also be pretty cool for your team. So imagine you are a consultant, your partner has a meeting with a board member later that afternoon and you have the Google Alert activated and get the news that there's a new article that was released in the local press of where the company is from. Here it can be a pretty cool move to be the one who first knows about this, shares the article with the team, with the partner, and then helping the partner to have a great meeting with the board member because now the partner has an icebreaker. And maybe the article is even about a difficult topic, a difficult situation that the company is facing. For sure, it would be important for your senior leadership, for your partners to be aware of what's currently going on at the client. And this can be a little piece of enabling that. Next tip is to read the annual report of that company. So if you're not aware, an annual report is a report that every publicly traded company needs to release once per year, at least in most countries, where they give an overview about their business activities, their financials, their strategy. It's really super insightful and a great source of information. You can usually find annual reports in the investor relations section of the company's website, or if you just Google annual report plus the company name, usually will directly pop up. Information that's typically included in these reports are information on the overall company strategy, some key business results that were achieved, future focus initiatives, what the company wants to accomplish in the future, and report on industry trends and business risks that the company is facing. Information on personnel and also remuneration of these people, and also basic financials such as profit and loss statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, and often also all types of other performer ratios. These reports are usually extremely detailed and really a great source of information, also with infos on competitors, on overarching industry trends. So definitely something that can inspire many other types of analysis that you also do. Next is a tip which is maybe the most insightful one and can give you access to information which is not that easily found, for instance, on just Googling certain things. But before we dig into this, let me introduce you to the sponsor of this week's video, DataCamp. DataCamp is an online learning platform where you can improve your data analysis skills. And you know that this is something I talk about all the time. This is really a crucial part of your skill set. If you want to succeed in any consulting role, then I trust in many roles in industry and for sure in banking as well. With DataCamp, there are no previous data skills needed to get started. You can learn from things as basic as Excel 101 to more advanced technical things, like for instance, database manipulation and SQL. So for sure, if the things that I show you here in this video are over your head, you really have no idea what this is all about. There are some also very introductory courses on Excel and DataCamp which I trust can help you. They have over 300 courses with interactive learning. And you can also learn on the go with a mobile app that they have. Personally, I very much like the introduction to SQL course, which already helped me several times on my own projects when I needed to interact with databases. So give it a try. And I trust that working with DataCamp indeed can fast track your data analysis skills. And these for sure are so crucial in any consulting role, but also many other related roles as well. So if this piqued your interest and you would like to try out DataCamp, then invest in yourself. Check out DataCamp via the link in the video description and you will get access to the first chapter of every single course for free. But let's continue. And as I said, the next tip I find especially insightful, and this is leveraging local business registers. Because while annual reports are great, they're often only available really for the largest publicly traded, publicly listed companies. But even for the smaller ones, many of them need to release business information on a regular basis. And this is exactly what you can get access on on these local business registers. These registers will have different names in different countries. In Germany, for instance, it's the Bundesanzeiger. So usually if you just type company register and then your country into Google, you will likely find the name of the company register of your country and then can search for it in a similar way. Similar to annual reports, these company registers often contain information on financials. They often contain the last audit reports. They might contain information on the ownership structure, on the management team and on employee figures. Often this information is less detailed than in the annual reports. And the width of information that needs to be released often depends on the company size. So you often have different levels of detail available depending on which type of company exactly you're looking at. And what makes these registers even more powerful is that nowadays there are all types of meta registers, all types of meta search machines that have connections to several of these local country registers and then combine all the information. So for the EU, for Europe, it's, for instance, northdata.com. Here you can just type in the name of a person or type in the name of a company and you get all types of information also from different countries here. So if you're ever interested, for instance, in the business activity of any of your family members or relatives or friends, you can just type in the name of that person into, for instance, northdata.com and you see all the companies they're affiliated to, wherever they're managing director or in similar positions. This is all the information that you will have. So just for demonstration purposes, probably most of you will know the YouTuber Ali Abdaal. Ali, if you're watching this, love your content, great channel. So if you just try out typing his name into Northdata, you see now all the companies that he has founded to set up his businesses. But of course, you can also do this with actual companies. So for instance, you could type in Siemens and then really get access to a plethora of information that I trust will really help you to understand what exactly happened with this organization in the past, what was going on and do some research based on that. Last but not least, let's talk about the importance of researching industry trends. So here I trust it's not even that difficult to do that. You can just type the industry of interest plus industry trends in the Google search bar and they get all types of reports. As stated earlier, you can also use annual reports to really get this information, read what the company themselves are writing about this. So I rather want to talk about why this is so great and why this is so important. And from my experience, researching industry trends are great icebreakers in conversations with clients. So for instance, in the construction industry, which is the industry that I currently work in, there's at the moment a huge shortage of wood. So let's imagine you're a consultant working for a construction company. So in one of the first meetings with your clients, you could ask them, you know, there's this huge shortage in wood. How is this affecting your company at the moment? What does this mean to you? This can really be a great icebreaker for your conversation. And the best thing is that things like this also portray you as knowledgeable. If you openly talk about industry trends like this, surely you know something about the industry. Surely you're more than just a young graduate fresh out of university who has no clue what he or she is doing, right? So these are the little tricks that help you in conversations with clients. Researching the industry, being able to share little bits and pieces like this can really make the difference in how you are perceived by your clients and are able to build client relationships. But now let me hear from you. What is your advice on how to do company research in a straightforward way? Trust your insights will help not only me, but everyone else in the firm learning community as well. So please leave a comment with your insights in the comment section. As always, if you took any value out of this video at all, please hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm and also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications to stay up to date on all my content. I once again want to give a shout out to the sponsor of this week's video, Datacamp. If you're interested in Datacamp, check out the link to them in the video description. And of course, also big thanks to all the members of Firm Learning for your support. If you want to hear even more from me, I'm also present on LinkedIn, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok. Links to all of them in the video description. I'm Heinrich. I'm releasing new videos every single Saturday here on Firm Learning. Looking forward to seeing you again next week. Until then, bye-bye.