Enter agrees, maintaining that dealers need to understand that true roundtable value is only gleaned through a multi-year commitment. “It takes about two years to see really measurable results,” he says. “Two years to really turn your machine around and start heading in an even more profitable direction.”

Tindell, for one, understands the necessary commitment—and the eventual payoff—of the roundtable and benchmarking processes. “I don't see how any progressive dealer can afford not to belong to a roundtable,” he says. “It should be the backbone of your business. Otherwise you are just guessing, reinventing the same wheels day-in and day-out.”

With more than 25 years of experience in the area, Tindell ranks the practice as the top strategy to ensure corporate success and growth, and concurs with other successful dealers, roundtable facilitators, and industry financial experts alike on the definitive benchmarking and roundtable maxim: Any dealer missing from the table is ultimately missing out.

Go National NLBMDA partners with MGT Strategies in an effort to provide quarterly, actionable data and financial benchmarking to dealers as a premium service to complement the annual Cost of Doing Business survey.

“Benchmarking is the quest to improve through continuous improvement,” says Steve Davis, owner of Greenville, S.C.–based MGT Strategies, an industry consultancy specializing in benchmarking, roundtables, and process improvement. “The challenge is coping with change, which is made all the more difficult because selling building materials to contractors is perhaps one of the most complex small businesses there is.”

To help pro dealers navigate through the shifts in the business of residential construction supply, Davis has partnered with the National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association (NLBMDA) in launching the Strategic Management Program, a suite of quarterly and annual financial reports and analyses of some 670 financial measurements designed to support NLBMDA's annual Cost of Doing Business (CODB) survey.

To participate, dealers submit information via five separate surveys (assets, salaries, sales and expenses, operational statistics, and a forecast of future sales and expenses) on a quarterly basis. According to Davis, data reporting after an initial setup typically takes less than three hours. Within 10 business days after submission, participants receive a 30-page management performance report that pits current data against the dealer's historical metrics with color-coded (green=good, red=bad) reporting schemes that provide at-a-glance upward, downward, and static trend analysis.

About 45 days after submission, participants receive a 13-page Dealer Report Card benchmarking their performance against all other program participants. The Dealer Report Card also includes a financial impact page that shows the bottom-line dollar result of a dealer raising his performance in any of the given metrics. A year-end report similar to the traditional NLBMDA Cost of Doing Business survey rounds out the program, providing participants with an annual balance sheet and financial roundup.

“The quarterly reporting is really a superset of the CODB survey. Not only is the analysis more in-depth, but the timeliness of it makes it that much more valuable,” Davis says. “By doing a more in-depth analysis rather than just looking at the bottom line, you can see where there are opportunities to save some money, to make some more money, or to see if anything is out of kilter. And if you decide to execute a management initiative, you can see an immediate response in your next quarterly report. If you can see how things are working on a quarterly basis, you can pour on the coals, and by the end of the year see some huge benefits.”

Now in its second year, the Strategic Management Program currently has approximately 85 participating companies, and is available to NLBMDA dealers at a minimal cost of $1,500. “We're all trying to move toward making decisions on a quarterly basis,” says Southern Building Material Association president and program proponent Larry Adams. “You don't want to wait until next year to look at last year's information anymore, so we're all striving to provide information that is current, information that dealers can react to right now.”