Monitoring the market can help you avoid unprofitable investments or unnecessary hiring that later becomes an unpleasant lay-offs.
Statistically the market can be monitored with such a process, which obviously contains numerous simplifications, so I invite you to be flexible:
- I identify the VAT numbers that I consider most similar to what I do. I do not rely on the official classification of economic activity. If I have the number x, relying only on x becomes limiting.
- I search them online to find the turnover of the last available year. Here we can already find an obstacle. If in your sector there are predominantly partnerships rather than corporations, this article is not for you because obtaining the turnover data, by year, will cost you much more. You will need to purchase the data rather than recover it
- I start creating a spreadsheet with company name column, VAT number, year, turnover, profits, # employees and other columns of your choice
- attention: only one column per “year”, not one per year, otherwise the aggregation operations will become complicated
- I find at least 10 names. If there are less than 10, I consider more indirect competition.
- at least 3 years of history for those 10 names.
- an example of expansion: if I work in the restaurant business, I will also include McDonald’s. Does it make you turn up your nose? Yes.
- I fill in the columns with data I find on the net. You will need at least two websites.
- I make a pivot table with year and total turnover, which in a way traces the situation of your market. You could also add median turnover, but it depends a lot on how many names you have and other things
- set one, two reminders to update the sheet every year
this process has a big problem: if you do it in the year 2025, you will have the data of 2024. The problem of the quality of the data that comes back, in this case of timeliness. The size of the market must therefore be weighed for this delay, which has significant strategic repercussions. This aggregated online data must be balanced with offline intuition.
Obviously this whole process can be automated not so much for the time it requires, exaggerating 4 hours a year, but to free up reminders and reduce forgetfulness. Or to avoid arguments with some administrative person who doesn’t want to have an extra task. If you’re interested we can talk in a first free call that you can book with the top right contact page.
In the case of this site’s activity, I have 3 competitors who are more in line with what I do, 8 if I expand to medium-sized businesses. If I also expand on how I consider the competition, I find 49 names.