Researching Private Companies

What is a private company?

A private company does not raise capital by selling stock to the general public and is not traded on an exchange. In private companies, the stockholders are usually the principals in the company - founders, family members, employees, and sometimes large investors (venture capitalists). No disclosure of information is required of a private company and whatever information it makes available is strictly up to the individual company.

Generally, more information is available on the largest private companies. Although even the largest private companies in the United States provide much less information about themselves to the general public than the average publicly held firm.

ReferenceUSA (aka American Business Disc) [patrons will need a valid LAPL library card to access this database outside of an LAPL branch] offers a database of over 12 million public and private companies. The database's interface allows you to combine search criteria to search by company, industry, geography and business size as well as other special criteria. Most entries offer the following information: name, address, phone, line of business, whether the company is public or private, top executives, year founded and location type. There is also a link to a location map from Mapquest. Additional improvements include news stories about companies and listings of court filings against a company.

The Forbes 500 Top Private Companies list gives the top 500 private companies and their ranking. Clicking on the company names gives more information and a brief write-up on the firm. The Forbes Private 500 includes well-known names in American business such Domino's Pizza, Fidelity Investments, Hallmark Cards, Hearst, Kinko's, Kohler, LL Bean and Mars. The website has links to lists going back to 1996. A similar list is Inc. Magazine's Inc. 500 which is an annual list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the United States.

The Thomas Register is a large index of manufacturers. You can search on the name or the product of the 155,000 US and Canadian companies in its database. Gives address, phone number and description of products. In some cases, links to on-line product catalogs are provided. This is a good site to visit if you want to know what a company does, or if you want to know which companies make a certain type of product. Gives name, address, phone, fax, brief description, number of employees (range) and year founded.

Other sources of information on private companies:

• The Big Book (formely Superpages.com) - Names, addresses, phone numbers and business sectors of over 11 million U.S. businesses.
• Infospace - A complete yellow pages guide for the United States: you can search for businesses by name or category. They claim to have 12 million businesses and organizations in their database. Also has a host of other features, including reverse telephone lookup.
• Department of Commerce US Exporters' Yellow Pages - Short profiles of about 20,000 US exporters. Each entry has address, phone, fax and brief product line info.