When sales potential for any market area spikes, a key factor is usually major employment growth with its electrical contractors and industrials, because these two customer groups typically account for 70% or more of a market’s electrical business. When these businesses are hiring, it adds millions in sales potential. According to EM’s data, every 100 additional electrical contracting employees represents $7.3 million more in market potential, while in the industrial market an additional 100 employees can equal $200,600 in new market potential.
Some of the faster-growing counties in EM’s Top 50 chart at the bottom of this page added employees on a much grander scale. Electrical contractors in Harris County, TX, added more employees than any other county in the nation from 1Q 2021 to 1Q 2022, according to county employee data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The additional 1,608 employees they added to payrolls represent an additional $117.8 million in market potential when you figure that each new employee is worth $73,268 in market potential according to Electrical Wholesaling’s 2022 sales-per-employee multipliers.
San Patricio County in the Corpus Christi, TX, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is the only other county that added 1,000 electrical contracting employees according to the BLS data, with an increase of 1,143 employees. EM’s editors couldn’t find any immediate reasons for the large increase in contractor employment for the county, although the MSA has logged 1,340 single-family building permits through Aug. 2022 and down the road the market will have a large industrial project breaking ground in Green Hydrogen International’s plans to create the world’s largest green hydrogen production and storage hub in South Texas.
According to a company press release, Hydrogen City, Texas will be an integrated green hydrogen production, storage, and transport hub growing to 60GW in size and producing over 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen per year.
In the industrial market, Chicago’s Cook County has $347.2 million in industrial sales potential, substantially more the $240 million logged by Dallas County, TX.
