Are those questions you ask yourself? Are the answers of interest? Do you think insights like that might help your business?
We do, but apparently we’re almost alone.
Check out the overview of the 2017 Top Contractor lists that starts on page 14. The first thing you’ll notice is that, because of reduced participation, we had to reduce the size of each list from 75 to 50 companies in each industry segment. And once again we don’t even have a sweeping list.
And we have to admit, we don’t get it. The Top Contractor survey is brief and takes only about 10 minutes to complete. Yes, we do require verification so that is an extra step, but the verification makes the results even more valid and of more value. Yes, you do need to provide your gross sales dollars but those dollars are not revealed to anyone. They are used only to determine whether a company qualifies for a list and to generate a total sales number for the industry.
But look at just some of the information the Top Contractor survey generates:
· A benchmark of industry-wide sales for year-to-year comparison
· A benchmark of segment-only sales for year-to-year comparison
· Overall profit margin tracking
· Profit margin tracking for each industry segment
Where else can you get this information? We don’t know of any place, which is one reason we started collecting it.
And what can you do with it? Well, we’ve been told that loan officers like it. But also consider this: If you‘re a striper and you earned a 7% margin last year, is it valuable to know that at least 73% of your competitors generated a greater margin than you did? And that 48% generated more than twice the margin you did? Maybe there’s a good reason you’re earning less – markets are different, after all. But maybe you’re underselling your services and maybe there’s room to tweak your pricing without much risk.
We think there’s value in participating in the survey – for contractors of all sizes – because the information generated can benefit every company and the entire industry. So let us know if there’s an easier or better way to do this or if there’s information we aren’t collecting that we should.
And for those who participated, thanks very much; for those who haven’t, we hope you’ll reconsider. There’s real value in those numbers.
