Company report

This memo will provide you with an overview and guidelines for your next project.

Purpose

The purpose of the company research project will help you in three areas. First, you will develop or further refine your researching skills. Second, you will gain important insights into factors that lead to a company’s success. Third, you will demonstrate your ability to clearly communicate information to a target audience.

Project Overview

Your company research and its accompanying report will focus on how well a company has fared over the last year. You will use four factors to base your conclusions on: two will be required and two you will get to select.

Factors for Analysis

Each of you will consider four factors to determine how the company has fared over the last year. Everyone will take into account company financials and ethics. You will also choose two other factors to research. These may come from the list below or you may come up with your own.

Company Financials

Broadly speaking, company finances can be interpreted several ways. Examples include revenue, stock price, EBIT, EBITDA. These areas can tell us a lot about company performance, but are only one aspect of how the company has fared.

Ethical Considerations

In addition to finding out how a company has fared financially, you will also consider how it behaved ethically. Ethics can be looked at through the lens of corporate social responsibility, corporate governance, or environmental impact (often referred to as ESG).

Other Factors to Consider

The list below provides you with additional ideas on what factors to consider for your research. You will need to pick two of these or (for ones not on this list) run ideas by me.

· New products or services

· Innovation (customer facing or employee facing)

· Employee pay and benefits

· Job opportunities

· New locations

· Mergers or acquisitions

· Employee satisfaction

· Operational improvements

· Industry at large and/or competitors

It should be noted that the list above of additional factors to consider is written in a positive manner. This assumes that the company is moving forward or increasing in success. However, you may find from your research that the company is not faring positively (i.e., negative growth, fewer locations, etc.). Keep this in mind as you conduct your research. You are trying to find out how the company is performing positively or negatively.

Resources for Conducting Your Research

Think back to the presentation you were given by the school’s librarian. Though you won’t remember everything, know that the Nestle Library’s resources are an excellent source of information. Here are a few things to keep in mind when looking for certain types of information.

Databases

Below is a table of research topics and their corresponding databases.

Research Topic	Database
General company information and overview	Mergent Online, Business Source Complete, and Hospitality & Tourism Complete
New and current events	Factiva
ESG (Environmental, social, and governance)	MSCI ESG Direct
Financials	Capital IQ
International company information	Orbis
SWOT analysis	Mergent Online and Business Source Complete
Restaurant industry	Technomic ignite
Industry/competitors	Capital IQ

I would suggest that you look to a SWOT analysis to help you get started thinking about the issues facing the company. This may help you select the third and fourth factors for your analysis.

Presenting Your Research

Because the goal of your research report is to inform your audience, clearly writing and designing your report will be of top concern.

Report Sections

You report will need to have (1) a cover page, (2) an executive summary, (3) a table of contents, and (4) and an end notes section. You may also include appendixes as needed. We will cover some elements of formatting in class; but if you are not familiar with report formatting, I would suggest viewing some tutorials on YouTube by searching MS Word report formatting.

Citations

We will be using a modified form of the Chicago Style to format your sources and citations. The Harvard Business School’s Citation Guide is one of the references you should use to format your sources. You will use the end note feature in MS Word to cite each of your sources. Make sure to use Arabic numerals for your end notes. Unfortunately, the default setting for end notes in Word is lowercase roman numerals. You’ll need to change it to Arabic numerals!

Graphics

To aid in the readability of your report, you will be required to include at least four graphics. These may come in the form of tables, graphs, charts, maps, etc. These can be particularly helpful to visualize data. We will share more on selecting and creating the right type of visual based on the type of data in class.

Length

The length of your report should reflect the scope (i.e., the breadth and depth) of the topic you are writing about. Remember the principle of concision we have been discussing this semester: a document’s length should be no longer nor shorter than it needs to be. However, that can be a bit of a black box when it comes to deciding how long the overall report should be.

We should always consider the needs of our audience when making this decision. So, my recommendation would be based on an ideal breadth and depth of content to fully explore the topic of how well your selected company has fared over the last year. Thus, I believe that no more than 10 pages nor no fewer than 6 pages would do the trick. Now you might be thinking, ‘that was an awkward way to phrase that.’ Why not just say between 6–10 pages? Because I want you to stop thinking in terms of page requirements as you have encountered them before and begin thinking of the amount of content as a function of what your audience needs.

Submission

Please submit your reports as a PDF document. This will allow you to lock in all of your formatting so that nothing changes if the document is opened up in a different version of Word than the one you composed it in. I don’t want all of your hard work to go to waste as document design is one of our evaluation criteria.

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