 This is the home page for ReferenceUSA. ReferenceUSA is a great way to discover details about existing businesses in the United States, especially those that may be difficult to find information about, such as private companies. You can find data on companies that you know about, but you can also discover companies that meet your criteria. It's like a giant phone book, but with more data and search capabilities. ReferenceUSA is useful for three things. Finding data about small businesses, performing geographic competitor searches, and discovering subsidiaries. To begin with, I'm going to click the green search link. This takes me to the basic search page. This is a useful tool if you know the name of the company you want to learn more about. Let's do some small business research. For example, say I'm interested in learning about the Dahlia bakery in Seattle. When I click View Results, I see that there's only one entry, so I'm going to click on the name. Here on this page, you can see that there is contact information. There are industry codes assigned. There's a profile. And there's some more details about the company. Some of the data is incomplete. Let's take a look at the business expenditures. At the top of the chart, it indicates that these are estimated annual expenses. If I want to see the local competitors for the Dahlia bakery, I can do that through the Advanced Search screen. I'm going to scroll up and click New Search. I'm then going to click on Advanced Search. I'm going to search for other bakeries in the same zip code. To set up that search, I'm going to check the box next to keyword SIC NAICS. And then I'm also going to check the box for zip codes underneath geography. Now, I know the NAICS code for the bakery industry, so first I'm going to click this radio button next to search all NAICS. And then down below, I will enter the NAICS code. As a reminder, NAICS codes and SIC codes are numbers assigned to different industries. They're useful when researching businesses. If you don't know what a code is, you can use this tool up here to help search by keyword. I'm going to scroll down and enter my zip code here. Now I've built the components of my search, and I'm going to click the green View Results button in the top right corner. Now I can see the details of the bakeries that are in that zip code. These are my local competitors. One of the strengths of ReferenceUSA is that it makes it easier to see if a company is a subsidiary of another company. Let's search for Cascade Behavioral Health, which is located in Tequila. If I look at the business profile, I see that the data is incomplete. Down here, it lists only three employees, which sounds very unlikely. Scrolling down the page, I see that they only have sales volume for one year. This is not very helpful. However, if I go back to the previous page, I see the Cascade is a subsidiary, as indicated by the fact that there is an upward-facing arrow here. If I click that, I can see the parent company, which is Acadia Healthcare Company. When I visit the page about Acadia, I find a lot more data present. Underneath Corporate Employees, I see the number is in the 40,000s. The total sales volume is over 3 billion. If I scroll down to the business size history data, I see that it's more complete. When you're researching a company, it helps to find the parent company, as there will likely be a lot more data available about the parent company. Sometimes, in examining their data, you'll find more insight into the subsidiary you're interested in.