What does this article cover?
- What can you actually get for free?
- What financial data is free?
- What operational data is free?
- Are the self-assessment tools worth anything?
- What does the afternoon actually look like?
- What is worth paying for?
- Who should this article send away?
- Where does this break down?
- People also ask
- What I sell, and what I don’t
- About the Stagnation Assassin
Most of what a mid-market operator needs to diagnose their own stagnation is published, free, and almost never used, because nobody tells you it exists and the government does not market. This article sorts the free sources into three kinds, names what each can and cannot establish, and is honest about the one category where free data does not exist at all. It also includes my own assessment, positioned against the alternatives rather than above them, because the alternatives are better for most of what you need.
What can you actually get for free?
Financial comparison, in detail. Operational comparison, almost not at all. That asymmetry shapes everything below: you can establish whether your margins are normal for your industry in an afternoon, and you cannot establish whether your plant runs well without visiting somebody else’s.
Hold that distinction, because it explains why the diagnostic tools market looks the way it does. Where hard comparison is available, nobody sells you an opinion. Where it is unavailable, the market fills the gap with assessments, maturity models and scorecards, all of which collect beliefs and present them as findings.
That is not a reason to avoid them. It is a reason to know which kind of thing you are holding, and to spend your free-data effort on the half where real comparison exists.
What financial data is free?
More than most operators know. The Census Bureau has published quarterly income statements, balance sheets and operating ratios by industry since 1947, covering manufacturers with assets from five million dollars, which is low enough to include most mid-market companies reading this.
The Quarterly Financial Report. The Census Bureau’s QFR is the most useful free source in this article and the least known. It publishes aggregate income statements, retained earnings, balance sheets and operating ratios by NAICS subsector and four-digit industry group. The manufacturing threshold is assets of five million dollars and above; other covered sectors start at fifty million. The sample frame is drawn annually from federal tax records, which is why the coverage is real rather than self-selected.
What that gets you in an afternoon: your gross margin, operating margin, inventory position and leverage against corporations in your industry group and broadly your size. For a company that has never had a credible external comparison, that is the single highest-value free exercise available.
BizStats. Free industry financial reports across roughly 250 industries, broken out by corporation, S-corporation and sole proprietorship. The entity-type breakdown is genuinely useful for an owner-operated business, because comparing a closely held S-corporation to aggregate corporate data mixes two different compensation structures.
SEC EDGAR. Free, and underused by private companies. Your public competitors, your public customers and your public suppliers all file. A customer’s filings will tell you their margin pressure before their buyer tells you, and a supplier’s will tell you whether their price increase is real.
One caveat that applies to all three and comes from elsewhere on this site: these are averages. Comparing yourself to an average establishes whether you are typical, which is a different question from whether you are any good.
Where hard comparison is available, nobody sells you an opinion. Where it is unavailable, the market fills the gap with assessments and maturity models, all of which collect beliefs and present them as findings.
What operational data is free?
Very little, and the reason matters. Nobody collects comparable operational figures across companies, because changeover time and scrap rate are measured differently in every plant and no regulator requires them. The gap is structural rather than an oversight anybody could fix.
Consider what would have to be true for free operational benchmarking to exist. Somebody would need a common definition of overall equipment effectiveness that plants actually follow, a collection mechanism, and a reason for companies to submit honestly. Financial data has all three because tax authorities compel it. Operational data has none.
What does exist and is worth having:
Bureau of Labor Statistics industry productivity. Output per hour by industry, free, useful for establishing whether your sector’s productivity is rising or falling. It will not tell you about your plant and it will tell you whether the ground is moving under all of you.
Your own trend data. The most underrated operational benchmark is your own plant eighteen months ago, which is free, perfectly comparable, and the only dataset where the definitions genuinely match. I have argued elsewhere that internal trend frequently beats external comparison, and the absence of free operational data is a large part of why.
Other people’s floors. Not a dataset, and the closest available substitute. A manufacturing extension partnership, an industry association or a peer group will get you inside other plants, and two visits will recalibrate your sense of normal more than any number would.
Are the self-assessment tools worth anything?
They are opinion collected systematically, which is worth more than opinion collected casually and less than data. They exist because the operational gap above exists, and the honest way to use one is as a structured argument-starter rather than a measurement.
Three that are free and worth the hour.
The EOS Organizational Checkup. Free from the vendor, scores a leadership team across six components, and is useful precisely because it is quick and forces the team to answer separately before comparing. Its value is in the disagreements it surfaces rather than the score it produces.
Open diagnostic frameworks. The Beckhard-Harris change equation tests whether dissatisfaction, vision and first steps together exceed resistance, which is a one-page assessment of whether change will start at all. Maurer’s three levels sorts resistance into not understanding, not liking it, and not trusting you. Both are free, both take minutes, and both are in the public domain of management thinking rather than anybody’s product.
The Altman Z-score. Free to calculate from your own accounts, with the critical caveat that a private company must use the variant built for private firms rather than the original public formula. I have written about this at length elsewhere, including where its accuracy claims range.
And my own readiness assessment, which is free, covers leadership alignment, financial runway, data availability and organisational capacity, and is self-report like every other tool in this section. It produces a score and a recommendation including, where warranted, that you are not ready and should fix two things first. Use it for what self-report is good for, which is finding out where your own leadership team disagrees with itself.
What does the afternoon actually look like?
Four steps, in order, using nothing you have to pay for. Find your industry code, pull the published ratios for it, put your own figures in the same format, and write down the three largest gaps before anybody in the room starts explaining them away.
The sequence matters because the explaining is what kills the exercise, and it starts the moment somebody sees a number they do not like.
Find your NAICS code. Six digits, free to look up, and get it right rather than approximately right. A manufacturer who files under a code they picked at incorporation fifteen years ago will be comparing themselves to a different industry, which produces confident nonsense.
Pull the published figures. The Census data is organised by subsector and four-digit group, so you may have to work one level up from your six-digit code. Take gross margin, operating margin, inventory as a share of assets, and the leverage ratio. Four numbers is enough for a first pass.
Restate your own accounts to match. This is the step that takes the time and the step everybody skips. Published ratios use specific definitions, and comparing your management-accounts gross margin to a differently-defined published one produces a gap that is an artefact rather than a finding. Get your accountant to line up the definitions before you interpret anything.
Write the three largest gaps down, then stop. Do not explain them in the same session. Circulate them, let people think, and reconvene. The first explanation offered for an unfavourable gap is almost always the most comfortable one available, and it arrives within seconds if you let it.
That is a half day for somebody who has never done it, an hour a quarter afterwards, and it is the cheapest external perspective a private company can obtain.
What is worth paying for?
Quartiles. Every free source gives you an average, and an average tells you how to be typical. The paid studies report upper and lower quartiles, which is the difference between knowing you are normal and knowing whether normal is any good.
Three paid sources do something the free ones cannot, and one of them is free by another route.
RMA Annual Statement Studies compiles financial and operating ratios from statements submitted to banks across more than 750 lines of business, and reports upper quartile, median and lower quartile. That distribution is the thing. A manufacturer sitting at the median on gross margin and the lower quartile on inventory turns has learned something no average could tell them.
Dun & Bradstreet’s Industry Norms and Key Business Ratios covers around 800 lines of business with fourteen ratios across solvency, efficiency and profitability, searchable by industry code and asset range.
The Almanac of Business and Industrial Financial Ratios is compiled from IRS tax return data across roughly 190 lines of business and fifty performance indicators, broken out by asset range, with profitable companies shown separately. That last split is unusually useful, because comparing yourself to an industry average that includes loss-making firms flatters you.
The route that makes this free: all three sit in most public and university business library collections, and a library card costs nothing. For a mid-market operator running this exercise once a year, an afternoon in a business library is a genuine substitute for a subscription.
Who should this article send away?
Anyone without clean numbers of their own. A benchmark is a comparison and it needs two sides, so a company that cannot produce its own gross margin by product or its own cost to serve has nothing to put against the free data.
That disqualifies more mid-market manufacturers than it should. If your overhead is allocated by revenue, your product margins are a restatement of your product revenue and comparing them to anything is theatre. Fix the allocation first; it is a fortnight with an accountant and it makes every source in this article usable.
A second group, from elsewhere on this site: anyone who intends to turn a benchmark into a target. Industry data tells you where you sit, and adopting somebody else’s number as a goal imports a cost structure you do not have.
Where to go instead, and most of it beats my own tool. For quantitative comparison, the Census data is better than any assessment I could build, because it is real financial results from real companies rather than what a leadership team believes. For the distribution rather than the average, the paid studies are worth the library trip. And if your question is operational rather than financial, a manufacturing extension partnership will get you into other plants, which no dataset and no questionnaire replaces.
Where does this break down?
My own assessment is self-report, which is the weakest evidence on this page. It collects what a leadership team believes about itself, and free government data beats it comprehensively for anything a company can actually count. The gap it fills is real and narrow.
Being precise about that gap. Self-report is the only instrument available for things nobody measures: whether the leadership team agrees on the strategy, whether people believe the last initiative worked, whether the person who should raise an objection will. Those matter and no dataset holds them. Everything else on my assessment would be better answered by the Census figures, and a reader with limited time should do those first.
Three further limits. The free financial sources are aggregated to industry groups, so a specialised manufacturer may find their nearest category is a poor match, and there is no free fix for that. The operational gap I have described is a description of the United States; other jurisdictions collect differently and I have not checked them. And government statistical programmes change coverage and publication schedules, so verify a source is current before building anything on it.
One thing I would defend regardless. The asymmetry between free financial data and absent operational data is not a temporary state of the market. It follows from the fact that tax authorities compel one and nobody compels the other, and it explains why the diagnostic tools industry looks the way it does.
Self-report is the only instrument available for things nobody measures: whether the leadership team agrees on the strategy, whether the person who should raise an objection actually will. Everything else is better answered by the Census figures.
People also ask
What free data can I use to benchmark my company? The Census Bureau’s Quarterly Financial Report publishes income statements, balance sheets and operating ratios by industry, covering manufacturers with assets from five million dollars. BizStats and SEC EDGAR are also free.
Is there free operational benchmarking data? Almost none. No common definitions exist across plants, nobody collects it, and no regulator compels submission. The usable substitutes are sector productivity data, your own historical trend, and visiting other people’s facilities.
Are free self-assessment tools worth using? They collect opinion systematically, which beats opinion collected casually and falls well short of data. Their value is in the disagreements they surface inside a leadership team rather than in the score.
What should I pay for? Quartiles. Free sources give averages, which tell you whether you are typical. RMA, Dun & Bradstreet and the Almanac report distributions, and all three sit in most business library collections.
What has to be true before any of this helps? You need clean numbers of your own. If overhead is allocated by revenue, your product margins restate your product revenue, and there is nothing meaningful to compare.
What I sell, and what I don’t
I don’t sell consulting. My employment contract doesn’t allow it, so there is no engagement waiting at the end of this article and no proposal coming. Two things here are commercial: I speak for a fee, and I sell books. Everything else, including the audit, is free, and it stays free because it has to be. If you pull your industry’s figures and want a second read on what they say, send them to my contact page.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books, The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
The talk version of this asks how many people in the room have ever pulled their own industry’s published financial ratios. It is usually nobody, and the data has been free since 1947. Formats and fee are on my speaking page.