—Why this step matters
Step 8 · Market position on the roadmap
Every business has a picture in its head of who it competes with and where demand is going. That picture is usually built from the last few jobs lost and whatever a customer mentioned in passing.
It is cheap to check. How many firms do what you do, whether that number is rising or falling, and what has happened to the price of what you sell are all published free, monthly, by agencies with no stake in the answer. The cost of skipping this step is cutting your price against a competitor who was never taking that work from you — or holding a price flat through a decade in which your own inputs nearly doubled.
What follows is one worked example. The company figures are invented; the method and the published series are not.
Market & Competitive Analysis
The trade stopped growing. The cost of the box did not.
Prepared for Halstead Heat & Air
00Summary of findings
The number of people employed in this trade nationally grew 31.1% over ten years and 15.3% over five — but only 1.4% in the last year. The flood of new competition is over. What you are competing against now is a stable set of firms, not a growing one.
Over the same decade the producer price of the equipment you install rose 77.8%. That is 47 points faster than the trade added people. The competitive pressure went down; the cost of the box went up.
Equipment is up only 3.2% in the last year against 44.5% over five. The steep part of the increase has already happened and is sitting in your cost base. A price set before it will not have caught up on its own.
Stop competing on the install price. In a market where the box costs 78% more than it did and nobody new is arriving, the install is the worst place to be cheap. Section 06.
01The question
Halstead's owner believes the market is getting more crowded and that price pressure is coming from new entrants undercutting on replacements. That belief is doing real work — it is why quotes have not moved in two years.
Is the trade actually getting more crowded, and is the install price where the competition really is? Both halves are checkable against published data before anybody spends money on a positioning exercise.
02Sources, and what is real
Real, and checkable. One employment series and one producer price index, both published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, pulled 5 August 2026. Every percentage in section 03 is computed from these two.
| Series | Title | Jun 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| CES2023822001 | CES: All employees, plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors (thousands, seasonally adjusted) | 1,335.2 |
| PCU333415333415 | PPI Industry: Air-conditioning, warm air heating and commercial refrigeration equipment manufacturing | 321.8 |
Invented. Halstead Heat & Air, its revenue, its quotes and its owner's beliefs.
A real limitation, stated plainly. Both series are national. They tell you what the trade is doing across the country, not what the four firms within thirty miles of you are doing. National data is the right place to start because it is free and it is not anecdote — but a local count, which takes an afternoon on a map, is what would confirm it. Section 05 says how.
03What the published data says
Read the top three bars against the bottom three. Competition grew hard for a decade and has now flattened to almost nothing. Equipment cost did the opposite: it kept climbing and has only recently slowed, which means the increase is already in your cost base rather than still coming.
That combination is unusual and it is favorable. A market with stable competitor numbers and a structurally higher input cost is one where prices should have moved. If Halstead's have not, the money is not being lost to competitors. It is being left on the table.
04Where the competition actually is
If the install price is not where the pressure is, it is worth being precise about where it is. Three places, in the order they are usually underestimated:
- The first phone call. A customer with no heat calls three numbers and books the first one that answers. That is a scheduling and responsiveness contest, not a price contest, and it is steps 1 through 3 of the roadmap rather than this one.
- The replace-or-repair conversation. The margin difference between a repair and a replacement is the largest single number in this business, and it is decided in a five-minute conversation in somebody's hallway.
- What happens after. A maintenance agreement is priced on your time, not on a box whose cost rose 78% in a decade. It is the one part of the revenue that equipment inflation cannot reach.
05How to challenge this
- Count the competitors inside your actual service radius on a map, and check how many are new in the last two years. If your local market is growing while the national number has flattened, this analysis does not describe you.
- Pull your last twenty quotes and mark which were lost on price and which were lost on availability. Most contractors are surprised by the split.
- Check your own equipment cost against the index. If your distributor has held you below the national move, your position is stronger than this suggests.
06Recommendation
- Raise the install price and find out. The data says the market can carry it. Move it on the next twenty quotes, not on all of them, and count what happens — that is a test costing nothing but twenty quotes.
- Price the maintenance agreement deliberately. It is the part of the business insulated from equipment inflation, and in most contractors of this size it has never been priced on purpose at all.
- Re-run these two series every six months. Both are free. The thing worth watching is the top bar: if trade employment starts climbing again, the market has changed and so has this recommendation.
The honest summary: the belief that started this — that new competition is forcing prices down — is not supported by the published numbers. That does not make it wrong about your street. It makes it worth checking before another two years of quotes go out at a price set in a different market.