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 over the course of our surveying. What we found, though, was a solidification of revenue projections, indicating that the big hits to job and revenue changes came at the beginning of the shut down.
Not surprisingly, survey respondents are changing plans on the fly and their confidence in the future is not strong
We conducted the final survey from Monday, May 11 through Thursday, May 14, and 109 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 almost identical to the responses we got in our second survey. Of course, we’re in second quarter, so the year-over-year revenue changes in the first quarter are complete. But what was surprising is that the drop off from first quarter revenues to second quarter revenues hasn’t changed much since the first survey, and none since the second.
More than 70% of contractors anticipate declining second quarter revenues with 16.7% of them saying the decline will be greater than 50%. In the April 13 survey, just over 75% indicated declining revenues with 14.3% saying the decline would be greater than 50%. That’s a marginally better outlook than in the second survey.
Over the course of our three surveys, you can see very little change in revenue projects. If anything, contractors are slightly more optimistic about business in the most recent survey than they were in the second survey. We didn’t have enough respondents in this survey to really dig into the breakout, so drawing conclusions about smaller percentiles is not accurate, but the overall picture shows a solidification in attitudes and an understanding about the current business climate.
Apparently, no matter when you ask contractors if they are confident about their revenue projections, they will give you the same response regardless of situation. Across all three surveys, we received nearly identical responses to our query about whether contractors were sure of their revenue projections.
