We asked respondents to compare their 2020 first quarter revenues to 2019 first quarter. We wanted to figure out if this year started strong or about the same. This is the one area we expected to see significant changes from the March 30 survey to the April 13 survey. Understandably, respondents are pretty pessimistic about growth, but perhaps not as pessimistic as you would have thought by listening to news reports.
Not surprisingly, survey respondents are changing plans on the fly and their confidence in the future is not strong
We conducted the second survey from Monday, April 13 through Thursday, April 16, and 193 people responded. We broke our report into four areas:
- Demographics
- Overall attitude
- Revenue changes
- Project and employee changes
The Revenue Changes section is below. Follow links in the sidebar to see the other sections.
If you have questions or would like to provide feedback, please contact Paul Deffenbaugh, editorial director, pdeffenbaugh@moderntrade.com
Revenue Changes
(Note: Click on plus sign to enlarge images.)
This chart is hard to read, but it shows the answer to two questions. The first is how much respondents saw their revenue change between first quarter 2019 and first quarter 2020. Those are represented in top bars of both groupings. The top grouping is from the March 30 survey and the bottom pair from the April 13 survey.
The second question we asked respondents was how much their revenue would change from the first quarter to the second quarter.
In both cases, first quarter revenues were down compared to last year, and respondents said the second quarter of 2020 would be worse than the first quarter. That isn’t surprising given the current economic environment, although it should be noted that nearly 25% of respondents predicted second quarter revenues would increase with nearly 2.1% saying they would be more than a 50% increase.
We also asked respondents how much they had revised their 2020 revenue projections. In March, about 25% of respondents had actually increased revenue projections. But by the time of our April 13 survey, that confidence had declined with just under 20% predicting revenue increases.
At the other extreme, not much has changed, although a significantly larger percentage say they’ve revised downward between 5% and 25% their revenue projections.
We also asked contractors how confident they were in their 2020 revenue projects. Comparing this survey to the previous one, you can see there was almost no difference in confidence, although you can see a slight uptick in those who say they are very confident or extremely confident.
