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Unfortunately, there is not a source that will give a comprehensive overview of the “Event Planning,” “Event Organizing,” “Corporate Planning,” or “Party Planning” industries. The best bet is to search for these phrases to find articles in databases such as Business Source Premier, Business & Management Practices, and Business & Industry.
Some informaton can also be found in a few reference books. Event Planning is a popular home-based business or small business. The following books have some good information:
One way to measure how well a company is performing is to compare its financial ratios with the average ratios of its industry peers. There are three print sources that do this quite well. All are listed below, and the most current editions are located at the reference desk on the fourth floor. The first two books are organized by SIC code and give some of the more commonly used financial ratios. The third books is organized by NAICS.
Similar information can be found in Research Insight, which is a database that is available only on Alden Library computers. This database is very powerful, but it is also quite complex. A tutorial on using Research Insight is available at http://www.library.ohiou.edu/electres/databases/rsiguide.
Two other online databases can be used to compare the financial ratios of different companies. Mergent Online allows you to do an advanced search for companies with the same SIC code and then create a comparison report. There are a number of different ratios that can be used as comparison criteria when creating this user-defined report. The report that is created can be exported into a Microsoft Excel format.
Market Insight allows a user to look at comparisons of companies that are in the same peer group. To find this comparison, simply do a Company search for your company’s ticker symbol. When the company information is loaded, there should be a link on the left side of the screen for “Peer Group”. This will compare some basic finacial information of companies in the same industry. While the information won’t be as in-depth as data from the sources above, it may be a little easier to retrieve and comprehend.
I'm Chad Boeninger and I write this blog for the students and faculty of Ohio University. I cover business research issues, databases and other resources, current business trends and topics, and much more.
