The submitted paper concentrates on the methodical aspects of measuring the relationship between potential competitiveness factors and the corporate competitiveness. We employ methods of statistical pattern recognition, particularly the sequential forward flow search algorithm (SFFS). The algorithm is applied on data from 432 companies. For these companies there was known their financial performance and there was up to 683 (each company) potential factors of this performance in our database. The text therefore summarizes the known approaches, describes the SFFS algorithm and proves its contribution to this field of research. An undeniable advantage of this method is its low demands on data: it does not require the normality or an a priori model. Also, it is able to evaluate relationships among many variables at once in acceptable time frame. The article presents the drawbacks of this method as well.