Finding Competitors

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- taxpayer-funded subscription database - requires city library card outside of library

- librarian-created Find the Best resources page

Knowing who and where your competitors (or potential collaborators) are is an essential piece of information for any business.  Compiling such a list in the past used to involve many hours of work but that is no longer the case as the library subscribes to a national business and residential directory entitled ReferenceUSA.  The library paid $6612 for the latest annual subscription.

How powerful is ReferenceUSA? $6612 powerful.  There is no other freely available directory that allows for combined searching by company name, executive name (first and/or last), line of business, estimated sales, number of employees, geographic filtering ranging from national to street level, searching within a user-defined geographic radius, etc.  The directory is searchable in forty one different ways.  Finally, ReferenceUSA supports the downloading of records into a spreadsheet format of your choosing.  Unbeatable.

Reference USA. You will need a valid Spokane Public Library card number in order to search the database from outside the library.

An additional tool is the Corporate Reference Library.  The EFIS Corporate Reference Library is a very sophisticated, yet user friendly on-line database that opens up a plethora of corporate information and history (name changes, acquisitions, acronyms, corporate family connections and stockholder equity) on one easy to read screen. The Corporate Reference Library is updated continuously and has access to the latest available data.

Corporate Reference Library.  Only accessible through library computers

The library has a number of additional resources to search so if you don’t find what you were hoping to find, contact the Business Reference Librarian at the Downtown Library by email or call 444.5336.