50 Top Counties in Contractor Sales

Famed baseball philosopher Yogi Berra was quoted as saying, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” It’s true in life and in the electrical market. And in the $100 billion electrical market, when distributors, manufacturers and reps need to watch where sales are growing, a great tool is looking at electrical sales potential at the county level.

EM’s editors crunched their sales-per-employee data to see which of the 3,000-plus counties in the United States are growing fastest in terms of 2017 electrical contractor sales potential and learned that the 50 largest counties in the nation account for $18.8 billion in sales potential from electrical contractors (see chart).

When you compare electrical contractor county employment data from 2012 through 2Q 2016 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you learn that while national electrical contractor employment increased almost 17% cumulatively over this time period to 851,903 employees, a surprising number of the Top 50 counties added electrical contractor employees at an even faster clip over that time period

Utah County in the Provo, UT, CBSA (Core Business Statistical Area) grew a whopping 113% with an additional 2,858 electrical contractor employees, and three counties in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood CBSA each grew more than 40% from 2012-2Q 2016 — Adams, Arapahoe and Jefferson counties. While more current electrical contractor employment data isn’t currently available from BLS at the county level, EM’s editors estimate that the 10,100 additional total construction employees that BLS says joined the ranks from June through November include an estimated 1,300 additional electrical contractor employees.

The key takeaway from all these data gymnastics is that when you consider that each additional employee hired by an electrical contractor represents $61,512 in new annual sales potential from that company, the increases shown in the chart represent some serious increases in electrical sales potential from electrical contractors, which can easily represent more than 50% in an electrical distributor’s overall annual sales.