How to make a list

I have thought that the most interesting things are ‘The company lists’. The LA Business Journal releases the lists every week. LABJ published the lists of the other 90 kinds so the company received the survey once a year. The lists classified about 16 categories - Finance, Professional Services(Law Firm and Accounting Firms), Business Services(Employee Benefits Consultants, Franchisers), Hospitality&Travel, Entertainment, Real Estate.

I really want to know how to make them. Deciding the ranking is very difficult as well as high risk for the medias. If they made a something mistake in the lists, the public trust of the media suffered a heavy blow. So Korean medias didn’t make the lists alone. Sometimes they announced the lists but they were made by special agency.

I learned how to make the lists last two weeks. First off I was surprised enormous database and cautious advance preparations. The lists were based on the survey. It started about six week ago. Because the survey was related on business performance, it needed a lot of time for the accuracy. The second reason is that the person in charge of the survey changed about 25%.

They used ‘DataJoe’ for survey. It is an amazing tool. It enable to do everything on the web. It sent the survey e-mail to the companies, the receiver filled up. No survey paper and no DHL.

If it ended to fill up, it got into shape all data automatically. After one click, we could see the arranged data. It contained the function of Excel so we could arrange ‘revenue’ or ‘net profit’.

Especially it provided the format of publishing. It is no need to copy&paste for printing newspaper. If we had to pill up or copy&paste for printing, sometimes terrible mistakes like mistype occurred during this process.

For this specialty, about 70 companies(include 16 business journals) use DataJoe. Of course it is not free, they paid about 20% of the lists’ revenue.

The most important thing is verifying. There is possibility to expand their revenue or the operating profit. Because the title, the industry’s No.1, is the temptation hard to resist.

So LABJ made an effort to verify. For example, in case of bank they compared typed number with the FDIC’s number. But sometimes there is no public information. At a time like this, they used to verify through the competitors. Most of them had a lot of information of their competitor.

I will try to make the lists of Korean company. But I’m not sure in here or in my country.