Bricklaying is a tough enough business as it is. There's no point in making it financially hard on yourself as well. If you want to make your business productive you'll need to keep your people working efficiently get new work, juggle all the jobs, somehow fit in the small repair jobs and make sure your workers have all the right materials at the right time.

To work out how much money you should be making, you'll need to set income targets minus the cost of materials. And find ways of getting your materials more cheaply and keeping other costs down. You'll also want to work on ways of getting larger jobs, since larger jobs return more profits because you'll be doing less running around. The guide shows you how to put all that together and get the best return from your time and effort.

Survey Results

These are the results of a survey of bricklaying contractors. These results should not be considered to be representative of all bricklaying contractors in Australia. However, they will allow business owners to identify strengths and weaknesses in the ability of their business to generate revenue, control expenses and earn sufficient profits. This is done by identifying these elements of business performance and comparing them with benchmark performance levels currently being achieved by the sample of businesses in this survey.

Most of the bricklaying contractors in our survey were from the eastern states of Australia. New South Wales was the most heavily represented area, while there were no firms located in Tasmania, South Australia or the Northern Territory in our sample.

Businesses from rural areas (population under 20,000) and from regional cities or towns (population over 20,000) represented around 55% of the entire group. The rest were suburban-based businesses.

The following table will give you a snapshot of the variance in results found in your industry for various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Each KPI (shown in rows) should be considered independently of each other. For example, a business with a high percentage gross profit would not normally also have a high relative percentage of their income spent on wages.

For each KPI, the table shows the average, high and low results found in the business surveyed. The KPIs should not be 'added together' under the high and low columns as they do not necessarily relate to the same business.

The KPIs show the 4th highest and 4th lowest actual result for each performance indicator. The range of values shown therefore covers the middle 80% of reported results.

*(bos) before owners' salaries and benefits

So, how does your firm 'stack up' against these averages? These results will give you an idea of where your business falls in relation to the sample and give you a better understanding of your relative strengths and weaknesses.

The remaining expense items each represented less than 2% of total income on average; however some businesses reported some larger results for such items as:

• Sub Contractors of up to 9.24%;
• Advertising and Promotion of up to 3.53%;
• All Insurance of up to 5.39%;
• Interest, Bank Charges of up to 6.35%;
• Other Depreciation, Lease & Hire Purchase of up to 5.84%;
• Staff On Costs of up to 5.20%;
• Telephone and Fax of up to 4.13%.

To summarise this, larger businesses had:

• Higher net profit per working owner
• Higher staff costs, but much higher levels of staff productivity meant that the increased wages were not the result of inefficiencies
• Lower non-salary overhead costs, and in particular, lower vehicle costs.

The more profitable businesses:

• Had higher gross and net profit margins
• Had higher staff productivity levels
• Had lower non-salary overhead costs
• Tended to generate more revenue and gross profit per job
• Had much better higher asset productivity
• Could better withstand a fall in business income.