Our 2009 Business Benchmarking survey provides remodelers with a baseline for comparing themselves with similar companies. We would have preferred to express job costs and overhead expenses as a percentage of revenue, but as was the case two years ago, the data was inconsistent, due mostly to overly casual reporting on the part of respondents. This also means that we’re unable to provide reliable averages for annual revenues and gross or net profits. 

That said, we received 326 responses from REMODELING readers, and the data we do have is still quite useful. This report looks at job costs and overhead amounts as a percentage of total expenses, which still provides a valuable baseline for comparison.

Variety by Volume

Companies of different sizes operate differently, so we have once again divided responses into five groups based on annual revenues that are representative of our respondents: under $250,000; $250,000 to $1 million; $1 million to $2 million; $2 million to $5 million; and more than $5 million. (For easy comparison, these categories correspond to the groupings used in our December 2007 report.)

Each of the following pages is devoted to one group, starting from smallest and working up to the largest. The most useful numbers to you will be those on the page that corresponds most closely to the revenue of your company, but looking at figures for other revenue groups will give you an idea of how a remodeling company’s expenses vary as its volume grows.