An interesting thing happened to Pavement’s Pavement Repair Top Contractor list from 2014 to 2015 – it declined in number but exploded in repair-only sales.
Pavement started the list in 2014 with 75 contractors reporting repair-only sales of $141,152,385. But for the 2015 Pavement Repair list, fewer contractors qualified – so the list was reduced to the Pavement Repair 50 – yet repair-only sales jumped substantially to $269,158,362. That’s an almost 48% increase in repair-only revenue despite a reduction of 25 companies on the list.
The decline in the number of contractors on the list is difficult to account for, but one guess is that as larger contractors respond to the survey in general, those contractors might not break out “pavement repair” as part of the their sales efforts. Instead it’s possible (and likely) that many contractors, especially contractors that do a lot of paving work, lump pavement repair in with paving dollars. So because they don’t call out what percentage of work is pavement repair, they can’t qualify for the pavement repair list.
Clearly pavement repair is a support service, with only two of the Pavement Repair 50 generating more than 50% (51% and 55%) of company sales from pavement repair. In most other cases repair accounts for less than 30% of a contractor’s gross sales.
That said, it’s clear as it was last year that pavement repair is a service provided by contractors across the pavement maintenance spectrum: 55 (73%) of the Pavement Repair 50 generate sales from sealcoating, 44 (59%) generate sales from paving, 43 (57%) provide striping service, and 16 (21%) contractors provide sweeping.
WHERE THEY WORK
As a group the Pavement Repair 50 work across all types of pavement. All 50 of the contractors report performing work on parking lots, 39 contractors work on roads, 26 companies work on driveways and 14 work on highways.
And the customer mix directly reflects those figures:
- 50 contractors work for commercial/industrial customers
- 44 contractors work for multi-family property customers
- 33 contractors work for municipal customers
- 19 work for single-family customers
Contractors who participated in the 2015 Top Contractor survey can expect to receive the annual analysis and report in August.
Contractors who miss out on this year’s report can participate in the 2016 Top Contractor Survey which will be open online from January 1 through April 30, 2016.
