Industry reports

What an industry report is

An industry report is a publication of data you gathered yourself, written up and released under your own name. The data comes from your own records, from your own customers, or from a survey you ran and can describe honestly. It carries a method note, it is usually repeated once a year, and its purpose is to become the document people quote when they need a figure about your trade.

It is not a round-up of numbers other people published, which is desk research and anyone can do it. It is not a white paper, which argues a position from evidence it cites rather than evidence it created. And it is not the shorter write-up of your own numbers that sits on your blog, though that piece is usually made from this one. The report is the full asset: findings, tables, method, caveats, the thing a sceptical reader can check.

Who this is for

A business that already holds data nobody else holds and has never published it. Service firms with years of job records, wholesalers with order histories, associations with member lists, anyone who can count something about their trade that people argue about without figures. It also suits a firm that wants to be named in other people's writing without paying for the privilege, because a report with a stated method gets cited, and each citation carries your name somewhere you could not have placed it.

You do not need one if you have nothing to count. A badly run survey is worse than no survey at all: too few replies, a sample made entirely of your happiest customers, questions written to produce the answer you wanted, and a headline finding that falls apart the moment somebody with a statistics background reads it. That embarrassment outlasts the attention. If that is where you are, a properly sourced argument does the same job honestly, and I will say so on the first call rather than help you publish something you will have to defend.

What goes in it

A report is judged on its method before its findings, so the method sits near the front rather than in an appendix.

• The method. Where the data came from, how many records or replies, over what period, who was excluded and why. Stated in plain language a reader in the trade can follow.
• The findings. Three to six of them, each a single clear statement supported by one table or one chart. The findings that surprised you are the ones worth leading with.
• The caveats. What this data cannot tell anyone. Naming the limits is what makes the rest believable, and it is the section most firms want to cut.
• What it means. A short reading of the findings for somebody in the trade: what to do differently, said without turning the page into a pitch.
• The tables. The underlying figures in full at the back, so anybody who wants to check the working can.

What you get

The report. Twelve to twenty pages in an editable document, laid out as a PDF to your template or plainly if you have none, with the charts built from your figures and labelled properly.

The method note and the data file. One document describing exactly how the data was assembled and cleaned, and the spreadsheet it was counted from. This is what lets you run the same report next year and compare like with like, which is where a report becomes valuable.

The citation kit. The findings written as quotable sentences, the chart set as separate images, and a suggested citation line. Journalists and other writers use what is easy to lift, and this is how a report earns mentions.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Winnipeg company that services commercial kitchen equipment has six years of job records covering about 900 restaurants and roughly 14,000 callouts. Nobody has ever published anything about how long this equipment actually lasts in a working kitchen, and every supplier quotes the manufacturer's expected life, which the company knows is optimistic.

The report runs to sixteen pages. It says which appliance type fails first and which outlasts the rest, describing each in words with the counts in a table, and it says that faults cluster in the weeks after a kitchen changes head chef. The method note is plain: these are service records rather than a survey, only customers on a maintenance contract are included, and the sample is heavier on independent restaurants than on chains. A trade magazine quotes the fryer finding, two suppliers link to the report, and the sales team starts using it in quotes. The following year the report is run again, and the comparison between the two years is the more interesting document.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you can count, where it lives and who would care. No charge, and if the data is not there I say so.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope, length and whether a survey is involved, agreed before anything starts.
3. The data review. Five working days. I look at a raw export before agreeing what the report is allowed to claim, because that is when most reports quietly go wrong.
4. Counting, or fielding the survey. Ten to fifteen working days. If a survey is needed, the questions are written to avoid leading the answer, and the sample is described honestly whatever it turns out to be.
5. Draft and review. Ten working days. Somebody in your business checks every figure against the source before I write the interpretation.
6. Delivery. The report, the method note, the data file and the citation kit, with a short walkthrough for whoever will send it out.

Six to eight weeks from first call to published report is typical, and most of that is counting and checking rather than writing.

What it costs

Reports are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so each is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. What moves the price is how clean the data is when I first see it, whether a survey has to be run, and how many charts the document needs. The number is fixed in writing before any work begins.

What happens next

A report is worth more in pieces than it is as a single download. The usual next steps are a shorter article version of the findings published on your own site, a two-page briefing for the people who will never open a sixteen-page PDF, and a short newsletter sending it to the list you already have. None of that is assumed. The report is a finished piece of work on its own, and you can stop there.