Just Released: 2023 Benchmarking Guide for Family Business Directors
Growing up playing football, the team would gather after every game to run back the tape and review film. Rewatching games where you made a big play and the team won was always a good feeling. A loss? As my college coach from East Tennessee used to say, “Katy, bar the door.”
If 2021 was a comeback win for a lot of companies after the COVID-19 downturn, 2022 was like running into a stonewall defense. Rising interest rates, breakneck inflation, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict stifled offenses like the ’85 Bears. But despite some bumps and bruises, the tape was more favorable than one might have expected. While shareholder returns were down with a broad decline in equity markets, EBITDA margins held up, albeit unevenly across industries, and total distributions (distributions and share repurchases) rose considerably over 2021. Or for a coaching cliché: “The game was really a lot closer than the scoreboard would indicate.”
We are happy to share the release of our 2023 Benchmarking Guide for Family Business Directors. Benchmarking helps provide valuable context to directors when making their most critical decisions: what should our dividend policy be, what investments should we make, and how should we finance our business? For our benchmarking report, we use the Russell 3000 Index Companies, excluding financial institutions, real estate companies, and utilities. We also exclude companies with less than $10 million in revenue in 2022. We sort the data into f ive quintiles based on company sizes and the following industries.
This article summarizes some of our financing, operating, investing, and distribution findings. For a comprehensive and detailed report on all the above questions, download the full guide.
How Much Money Do Companies Like Ours Make?
Inflation may have originally been billed as transitory and only here for a short visit, but 2022 showed us CPI is not taking the hint. The 12-month percentage change in Consumer Price Index, or CPI, has run north of 2% every month since March of 2021, with 2022 exceeding 6% the entire year. Redhot inflation does appear to have been finally shown the door, with growth peaking in June 2022, but CPI is still well above recent historical norms and Federal Reserve targets.
