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If your company completed the 2018 Business Profile & Financial Performance Report survey this spring, you should have received the results by now. If you have not, search for an email from this address: mchaffin@industryinsights.com. It would have arrived on June 7.

The email leads you to two reports: a customized company report and an industrywide report. The reports are designed to give you a quick overview of how you compare to the industry with the option to take a deep dive into the data.

In the company report, for example, a one-page summary breaks out 17 key criteria such as net profit margin, payroll as a percent of net sales, and cash cycle, and characterizes your performance against other survey respondents in broad terms—weak, strong, fair, or good.

To make sense of those characterizations, go a few pages further into the results, and see your company data compared to all respondents, the most profitable respondents, and respondents who are in comparable sales categories as you.

You can learn whether you pay your sales manager, chief engineer, CFO, and a handful of other key people more or less than your counterparts. Or, you can assess your employee productivity compared to others through measures such as net sales per full-time equivalent employee.

An analyst who reviewed the data described it as a tool that not only shows a company’s strengths and weaknesses but offers “insights into which levers to pull” to implement change.

In addition to data in profitability, productivity, and financial management, the reports offer overviews of how members conduct business and what’s most on your minds. We learned that 38.2 percent of your sales are direct to dealers. About a quarter of your sales are to OEMs, and about 18 percent are wholesale-to-dealer. About 5 percent of your sales are through an independent manufacturer’s rep. And, 3.5 percent are direct sales online. (That percentage increases to 6.8 percent when the data breaks out companies considered most profitable in the survey results.)

While Association staff cannot see company data, it will use the rest of the statistical information to shape programming and provide services to members. We will host a session on workforce development at the Marketing & Distribution Convention in Minneapolis this year (Oct. 30 to Nov. 1) and bring in experts to help members move toward a greater presence in online equipment sales.

If you participated in the 2018 Business Profile & Financial Performance Report, thank you. If you did not, you have another chance. The Board of Directors decided last week to fund a second year of the study. The board sees the data has an outstanding service to members seeking to run the most efficient, productive, and profitable operations they can. Stay tuned for details on the 2019 survey. Industry Insights likely will launch the project in April.