Backlog is not a growth plan. It is a queue that ends.

Four areas and a plan. Segment and service mix, meaning margin by segment, service line and project size band; recurring service, meaning agreements, renewal, attachment and pricing; capacity, meaning revenue per field employee, licence coverage and what the workforce can genuinely absorb; and the sales system, meaning bid hit rate, award sources and marketing spend reconciled to awarded revenue. The output is a written plan with named owners, an end-market plan and a monthly scorecard.

No. We are not a broker-dealer, an investment bank or a transaction adviser, we do not price businesses, and nothing here is legal, tax, accounting or investment advice. Where growth advisory overlaps with corporate development, our work is the commercial layer underneath it: what the business earns by segment and branch, what it can staff, and which end markets deserve investment. Platform operators routinely run this alongside their own bankers and diligence advisers, who ask us for the same analysis in a different format.

It is built for operators with real management depth: multi-branch contractors, PE-backed platforms, MEP roll-ups and specialty firms in mission-critical markets. That is a big population rather than a niche one, and it is where the analysis pays for itself. FMI reports approximately 70% of U.S. electrical services spending is captured by firms with less than $50 million in revenue, which is precisely the fragmentation a professionally run business can take share from.

An agency is paid to run and scale campaigns. This engagement is paid to find out where growth is actually constrained, and in electrical contracting that is usually segment mix, estimating discipline, service attachment or licensed labour rather than reach. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan can recommend spending less on marketing and more on estimating capacity. Execution afterwards is scoped separately, and the brief is written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of branches, service lines and systems in scope and the state of your job-costing data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue on average across sectors, and contracting sits well below that. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Yes, and with your own margin data rather than a market report. We compare what each end market has actually earned you against where the market is going, then sequence the ones you can win and staff. FMI identifies data centers, health care, advanced manufacturing and logistics as the primary drivers of new construction electrical spend, with new construction growing at a 6.9% compound rate to 2030. Chasing all of them at once is the common error.

Because it is the part of the business that compounds and the part buyers pay for. Repair and retrofit is already the largest segment of U.S. electrical spend at $110.3 billion in 2026, and NFPA 70B has moved electrical system maintenance from advisory guidance to enforceable requirement. Meanwhile firms with ten or more employees draw only 28.4% of revenue from maintenance, service and repair against 35.7% across all firms. Larger operators have more room here, not less.

It has to, or it is fiction. We quantify revenue per field employee, licence coverage by state, attrition by branch, apprentice throughput and prefabrication share, then sequence growth against hiring that has actually happened rather than hiring that was budgeted. Where the ceiling binds, the plan says which work to decline, which to subcontract and which to price differently instead of pretending the labour will appear.

Yes, and it is one of the reasons to run the project. We work from accounting records first, reconcile ERP and estimating data against them, and label clearly which findings are solid and which are directional. Where cost coding is genuinely broken, part of the plan is the minimum change that makes next quarter measurable, and marketing operations consulting is the engagement that rebuilds the reporting layer if you want help doing it.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: segment margin, recurring service, labour capacity and the sales system, which is where electrical growth is actually decided, and it ends in a plan rather than in findings. Contractors who want positioning and messaging work instead should look at marketing strategy consulting.

It changes the questions. With multiple brands the useful findings are the spread between operating companies on margin by segment, bid hit rate, service renewal and revenue per field employee, plus which practices from the strongest brand transfer and which are local. The plan is written per operating company and rolled up, with a platform-level sequence so the changes do not all land in the same quarter.

No. We are a commercial advisory team, not engineers. Code, design and safety questions stay with your licensed engineers and your own compliance leads. What we do is treat the compliance-driven segments as a commercial opportunity: which testing, inspection and maintenance work is growing in your markets, whether your service organisation is structured to sell and deliver it, and what it earns compared with the project work competing for the same technicians.

Twelve months of revenue and gross margin by segment and branch; job costing for completed projects; backlog and pipeline with expected start dates; bid history with hit rates; service agreement count, renewal and revenue; headcount and licence coverage; and marketing and business development spend by line. Where records are thin we work with ranges and label them as ranges rather than presenting them as measured.

Yes. The parent engagement is growth advisory, and the same work runs in other verticals with the mechanics changed, for example HVAC growth consulting, plumbing growth consulting and industrial growth consulting.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many operators book a review at ninety days to re-measure margin by segment, bid hit rate and service renewal, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing marketing leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO or scorecard advisory is the next engagement, quoted separately.