If you want to know where your business stacks up against high-performing firms or versus organizations that are similar based on employee size, business focus or region, NALP’s Financial Benchmark Report is a valuable tool for uncovering areas for improvement.
However, benchmark reports cannot be created without participation from companies like your own. The goal is to collect detailed financial, operational, and workforce data in a standardized format so companies can evaluate their performance relative to peers that operate similarly.
Why Participate in the Financial Benchmark Survey?
Participating in the Financial Benchmark survey provides respondents access to the finalized report, detailed Excel-based data tables of the results and a customized company performance report.
One new feature this year that is exclusive to participants is the Interactive Report Card tool that allows you to ‘grade’ your organization’s performance against the industry as a whole as well as similar organizations in terms of region, sales volume size, and profitability levels. The report card evaluates companies across 20 key financial and operating metrics.
“For each metric, companies can see where they fall relative to other respondents based on quartile rankings,” says Greg Manns, vice president of industry research with Industry Insights, Inc. “For example, if a company’s net profit margin falls within the top 25% of respondents, it would receive a ‘Strong’ rating for that measure.”
No company is too large or too small for their financials to be valuable in the survey.
“Ratios help normalize the data for comparison,” Manns says. “Most of the figures in the report are presented as ratios or percentages rather than raw dollar amounts, which reduces the impact of company size differences. For example, two companies could both report $100,000 in profit, but that number means very different things if one company generated $800,000 in sales and the other generated $2 million.”
Manns notes that owners can learn a lot about their business simply by filling out the survey itself.
If you are daunted by the idea of filling out the survey, Manns says you can also provide financial statements or even a trial balance export from your accounting software, and their team can assist with the classification process.
“At the end of the day, we want to make it as easy as possible for them,” Manns says. “So if it’s a matter of, ‘Hey, I’m going to fill out the top-of-mind type questions on the survey’ and just send in the financial statements for my team and me to have at it, we would love to help in any way we can to make that process as easy as possible.”
Industry Insights has worked exclusively with associations and their members since 1980, and all data is handled with extreme confidentiality.
Manns says they’d love to have at least 300 respondents, but even with 50 respondents from the top 100 businesses, they can gather a good representation of the industry.
“In general, the data tends to stabilize once you have around 30 responses in a category, which is why we typically target that threshold whenever possible,” Manns says. “That said, even comparison groups with five to 10 similar companies can still provide meaningful directional insights for participants.”
Responding to Benchmark Data
Manns stresses that benchmarking studies should be treated as guidelines, not absolutes for businesses. He says a company can be highly successful overall and still have certain areas where they perform below the benchmark.
“The purpose isn’t to force every company into the same mold,” Manns says. “It’s to help organizations identify areas where their performance differs significantly from peers and then better understand why those differences exist.”
He says benchmark studies should prompt owners to look at their numbers with a critical eye and ask what high-profit firms are doing differently and if that is something they can realistically attain.
“Benchmarking is most valuable when it sparks deeper analysis and informed decision-making rather than being viewed as a strict scorecard,” Manns says.
The report also outlines possible causes as to why your company may be scoring higher or lower than normal compared to other businesses in your segment.
He says some of the most valuable data points from the report include sales growth, return on assets, and payroll as a percentage of sales. Sales growth indicates overall business momentum, while return on assets measures profitability relative to the investment required to generate those profits.
“Payroll as a percentage of sales is another critical metric because labor is typically the largest expense category in this industry,” Manns says. “It provides a quick way to evaluate how much of every revenue dollar is going toward payroll and how much remains to cover all other operating expenses and profit.”
Click here to take part in this year’s Financial Benchmark survey by June 30, 2026.
