What Is a Small Remodeling Company, Anyway?

Have you ever thought about what being a small remodeling company means?

I started to think about the connotation of the word “small.” I even went to the dictionary to look it up. And sure enough, “small” did not have the positive message that I was hoping for. According to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, one meaning of small is “Being of slight consequence; feeble in influence or importance; unimportant; trivial; insignificant; as, a small fault; a small business.”

Wait! A small business--insignificant? Unimportant? That is definitely not the meaning I was expecting! And yet, that was exactly why the word “small” was bothering me. It just doesn’t fit. It’s not what small business is all about. And I’m sure it’s not what your company is all about. So I set out to find another word that meant small but had a positive ring.

Interestingly, the US Census Bureau does not define small and large businesses. Instead it provides “statistics” that it says “. . . allows users to define business categories in any of several ways.” You can visit those statistics on-line . Looking at the statistics for nonemployers (those companies that do not have employees), I find that these companies account for over 75% of the firms in the U.S. but only account for 3 ½% of the revenue. That makes sense. And that’s not even counting the companies who have a couple of employees. So I guess if I was looking at the pure number of small companies versus large companies, defining a small company as insignificant is a misnomer. But looking at revenues, it’s not!

Now the US Small Business Administration does define small versus large businesses. And checking the Specialty Trade Contractors found in Subsector 238 under Construction, I found that the cut-off for small versus large is $13 million. Wow! That’s a lot of money! I dare to say that many remodeling and trade contractors would never come close to making $13 million in a year.

And then I became curious as to how many remodeling and trade contractors do actually make more than $13 million a year. I checked out Qualified Remodelers Top 500 listing for 2007 and found that only 69 contractors out of 500 fit that bill. That’s a little over 13% of the list. That leaves a good 86% of the Top 500 remodeling companies in the country that are considered small businesses.

So now I’m seeing that “small” as in small remodeling company cannot have a negative connotation when a majority of the businesses in this industry fall in that category.