Stop guessing. Start knowing.
Let me ask you a question, and please be honest with yourself when you answer it. How is your plumbing and heating business actually performing compared to other plumbing and heating businesses in the UK?
Most owners I speak to will give me one of three answers. “Pretty good, I think.” “Hard to say really.” Or, if they’re being properly honest, “I’ve got no idea.”
In my eyes, none of those are good enough. Because if you don’t know how you’re performing against your competitors, how can you possibly know what to fix, what to leave alone, and where the biggest opportunities for growth and profit are sitting in your business?
That’s exactly why we produce the Together We Count Benchmark Report. It takes your numbers, compares them against thousands of other plumbing and heating businesses in the UK, and tells you in plain English where you’re winning, where you’re average, and where you’re being beaten.
Let’s dive into what it actually does and why it matters.
A benchmark report is one of the most powerful management tools a plumbing and heating business owner can have access to. It compares your financial performance, line by line, against thousands of other plumbing and heating businesses operating in the UK. Not a vague “industry average” pulled from a magazine article. A proper, structured comparison that places your business on a scale from worst to best across every measure that matters.
Consider this for a moment. If you knew, for an absolute fact, that the top 25% of plumbing and heating businesses in the UK had a gross margin twenty points higher than yours, what would you do about it? You’d want to know why. You’d want to know what they’re doing differently. And, most importantly, you’d want to know how much extra profit you’d be banking every year if you could close that gap.
That’s the power of benchmarking. It moves you from guesswork to certainty. From hoping you’re doing okay to knowing exactly where you stand.
Most owners I speak to will give me one of three answers. “Pretty good, I think.” “Hard to say really.” Or, if they’re being properly honest, “I’ve got no idea.”
The Benchmark Report is a detailed, fully personalised document that compares your business against thousands of other plumbing and heating businesses in the UK across the measures that genuinely drive profit and cash. Let me walk you through the main sections.
Your sales
We look at your sales growth and your margin of safety. The growth side tells you whether you’re gaining market share or losing it. The margin of safety tells you how far above your breakeven point you actually are. If you’re trading uncomfortably close to breakeven, you’ll see it on the page in black and white, which is often the first time business owners realise just how exposed they are.
Your profitability
This is where the report tends to wake people up. We benchmark your gross margin, your operating margin, your net profit margin, and your growth in net profit. For most plumbing and heating businesses, the gap between their margin and the upper quartile margin in the industry represents tens of thousands of pounds of profit they’re leaving on the table every single year. The report shows you exactly how much.
Your people costs
Your team is almost always your biggest cost, so it deserves proper analysis. We benchmark your sales per pound of employee cost, your average employee cost, your sales per employee, and your profit per employee. This tells you whether your team is genuinely productive compared to the rest of the industry, whether you’re paying the right amount for the work you’re getting, and whether the structure of your business is helping or hurting your bottom line.
Your cash and gearing
We benchmark your current ratio, your quick ratio, and your interest cover. In plain English, can your business actually pay its bills if things tightened up? Are you carrying too much debt for the profits you’re making? These are the numbers that lenders look at, that suppliers look at, and that you absolutely should be looking at too.
Your assets
How efficiently are you turning your assets into sales? How long is your stock and work in progress sitting around before it generates cash? How quickly are your customers paying you? The report compares your asset turnover, stock days, debtor days, and the proportion of your total assets tied up in debtors against the rest of the industry. Slow stock and slow debtors silently eat your cash flow alive, and most owners don’t see it until the bank account starts looking thin.
Your return on investment
Finally, we benchmark your return on investment and your return on capital employed. These are the ultimate measures of whether your business is genuinely working for you, or whether you’d actually be better off with the money sitting in a savings account somewhere.
We don’t just hand you a wall of numbers and leave you to it. Every measure in the report is colour coded so you can see at a glance exactly where you stand.
Green means you’re performing better than average. These are areas to be proud of. Yellow means you’re around the middle of the pack. Not bad, not great, but probably worth a closer look. Red means you’re performing worse than the rest of the industry. These are the areas costing you money and the ones we want to talk to you about.
For every measure, the report tells you the worst score in the industry, the lower quartile, the median, the upper quartile, and the best. It tells you your own score. And it ranks you against the other plumbing and heating businesses in the comparison, so you know exactly where you sit on the ladder.
Then comes the bit that genuinely changes how owners think about their business. For every measure where you’re below average, we calculate the precise pound and pence value of closing the gap. So instead of just being told “your gross margin is low,” you’re told something more like “if your gross margin matched the upper quartile, you’d have an extra X amount in additional profit every single year.” That number is real. It’s specific to your business. And it tends to be the moment the conversation gets serious.
The report is genuinely useful from the moment you open it, and it gets more useful the more you act on it. Here’s what most business owners do with it.
First, they read it and have a slight reality check. The colour coding makes it impossible to ignore the red areas, and the pound figures attached to closing the gaps make the cost of doing nothing painfully obvious.
Then they prioritise. The report itself flags up the three measures that give the greatest cause for concern, with suggested next steps for each one. It’s not a vague “you should improve.” It’s a concrete starting point.
Then they take action. Sometimes that means fixing pricing. Sometimes it means looking hard at how productive the team genuinely is. Sometimes it means tightening up debtor management or stock control. Sometimes it means refinancing expensive debt. Whatever it is, the report points the way.
And then, the following year, we run another report. Because benchmarking isn’t a one-off exercise. It’s an annual habit, and the businesses that grow fastest are almost always the ones who track these numbers year on year and act on what they see.
We’ve made the Benchmark Report available in three ways, so whatever stage you’re at, there’s a route in.
Option 1: a free benchmark report when you book a discovery call
If you’re a plumbing or heating business owner and you’ve never had a conversation with us before, we’ll produce a benchmark report for you free of charge as part of your discovery call. We’ll need a copy of your latest accounts, we’ll process the report, and we’ll walk you through the findings together on an online meeting.
There’s no obligation, no hard sell, and no catch. Even if you decide not to work with us, you keep the report. The reason we offer it for free is simple. We’re confident that once you’ve seen what your business actually looks like compared to the rest of the industry, you’ll want to talk seriously about working together. And if you don’t, you’ve still walked away with a properly produced piece of management information that will make you better at running your business.
If you’re already on our Full or Advanced Accounting packages for your year end accounts, the Benchmark Report is included as a bonus. You don’t need to ask for it. You don’t need to pay extra. We produce it as part of your annual review and walk you through it as standard. It’s one of the reasons clients on our higher packages get genuinely better value than clients on the entry level package: you’re not just paying for compliance, you’re getting the strategic information that helps you actually grow.
If you don’t want to switch accountants but you’d still like the Benchmark Report produced for your business, we offer it as a standalone, paid service. You send us your accounts, we produce the report, and we deliver it to you with a walkthrough call. It’s a fixed fee, no surprises, and no obligation to do anything else with us afterwards. Get in touch for the current pricing.
Note that the Benchmark Report isn’t just a piece of paper. It’s a genuine challenge to how you currently think about your business.
Most plumbing and heating business owners are far too close to their own numbers. You’re in the van, you’re on the tools, you’re answering the phone, you’re chasing the next job. You don’t have time to lift your head up and look at the bigger picture. That’s normal. But it’s also expensive, because the bigger picture is exactly where the biggest profit opportunities sit.
The report does the lifting for you. It puts your business on a national scale. It tells you, without any flattery and without any sugarcoating, where you’re strong and where you’re weak. And it gives you the concrete starting point you need to actually do something about it.
In my eyes, every plumbing and heating business in the UK should have a benchmark report produced for it every single year. The cost of not knowing is always higher than the cost of finding out.
How long does it take to produce?
Once we have your accounts, the report itself is typically ready within a few working days. We then book an online meeting walkthrough so we can talk you through the findings rather than just sending you a PDF and hoping you make sense of it.
What information do you need from me to produce the report?
Your latest set of statutory accounts, ideally the most recent full year. That’s it. We pull the rest from our benchmarking database and our specialist knowledge of the plumbing and heating industry.
Will my information stay confidential?
Absolutely. Your data is used only to produce your individual report. It’s never shared, sold, or disclosed to any third party. The benchmark database we compare you against is anonymised and aggregated, so no individual business is ever identifiable.
How accurate is the benchmark comparison?
The comparison is based on real, filed accounts from thousands of plumbing and heating businesses across the UK. It is not a survey, not a guess, and not a generic small business average. The data is sector specific, properly cleansed, and updated annually, so the numbers you’re being measured against are the actual numbers your competitors are putting up. That’s what makes the report genuinely useful rather than just interesting.
Who compares my business in the benchmark?
We compare your business against thousands of other plumbing and heating businesses in the UK, matched by SIC code. SIC codes are the Standard Industrial Classification codes used by Companies House to identify what a business actually does, and they let us compare you only against businesses operating in the same industry as you. The SIC code for plumbing and heating businesses in the UK is 43220, which covers plumbing, heat and air conditioning installation. The comparison is sector specific, which means the numbers you’re being measured against are the numbers your actual competitors are putting up, not some generic small business average.
What if my numbers come out badly?
Then we’ve found something genuinely valuable. The whole point of the report is to surface the gaps so we can talk about closing them. There’s no judgement in any of this. Most business owners have at least one or two areas where the report flags real concern, and that’s exactly where the biggest profit improvements tend to sit.
Do I have to switch accountants to get the report?
No. We offer the report as a free lead magnet, as a bonus included in our Full and Advanced Accounting packages, and as a paid standalone service for businesses that want the report but don’t want to switch their accountancy. You’re in control of which option suits you.
What if I want to act on the findings?
That’s where the conversation gets interesting. Together We Count specialises in plumbing and heating businesses, so once we’ve identified the gaps, we can help you close them. Pricing, profitability, working capital, team productivity, growth, all of it. The report is the starting point. The improvements come from what we do together afterwards.
If you’ve read this far, you already know the truth. Running a plumbing and heating business on guesswork is a slow way to leave profit on the table year after year. A benchmark report is the fastest, cleanest way to see exactly where you stand and exactly where the opportunities are.
The next step is a conversation. Tell us about your business, send us your latest accounts, and we’ll produce a properly tailored Benchmark Report at no cost to you. We’ll walk you through the findings on an online meeting, answer your questions, and let you decide what you want to do next.
You can call us on 0114 4000 119, email info@togetherwecount.co.uk, or use the contact form on our website. We’ll take it from there.
Together We Count. Specialist accountants for plumbing and heating businesses. Real numbers. Real comparisons. Real opportunities.
