Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

Try industry associations. Also, Googling will produce some results.
Enter “name of industry: market size or total sales or ???”

Hoovers and Dun & Bradstreet have databases with private company information and some industry info.
www.hoovers.com
https://www.dnb.com/us/

Best of luck,

- Steve

Good Q Shelley... Type of business is vital info.

e.g. if retails you can survey shoppers at competotor establishments about spending, count heads at competing stores (and own stores) to assess traffic. Traffic x average head spend = retail revenue.

Plenty of ways to skin a cauliflower so long as you know it's not a potato.

ChrisB

Zahid mentioned the approach I'd suggest, and it has been very effective in similar situations for me and for a few of my clients: start talking to people in the industry and see what they recommend. I've done projects like this where I interviewed a dozen "experts" and uncovered more good information than I could have gotten in the New York public library in a year.

Find customers, suppliers, former employees, friends of former employees, anyone who might know something about the industry. Ask them who else they know that might have some ideas or other useful information. Follow-up on all the leads.

If you do this in earnest, you'll be surprised at how quickly the input begins to converge on an answer, and how much more you can learn by asking around than you would ever have imagined.

BTW, this is one of the great "secrets" of effective management consulting. Most people never think of this obvious approach, and it can set you apart from others who try to do everything by the book -- even when the book hasn't been written yet.

(See "Rasputin For Hire" -- www.rasputinforhire.com -- for more on this and other non-standard approaches.)

There may be some useful (and free) info on www.census.gov . It won't give you a mailing list, but there is demographic info in several business categories.