Industry
I read a number this week that stuck with me. Security Sales & Integration wrote up the D-Tools 2026 midyear report. The short version is stark.
More than a third of these integrators grew sales by 51% or more this year. Another third watched sales drop by 21% or more. The middle is thinning out. The market is splitting in two.
Sit with that for a second. Two dealers can work the same towns, sell the same gear, and land in different worlds. One is booking work faster than they can staff it. The other is calling old leads to keep the lights on. Same year. Same tools. Two different outcomes.
I am a small dealer. So my first question is simple. Which side am I on, and why. Not because the report scares me. Because the gap is a signal, and I want to read it right.
Here is what I do not think is happening. I do not think the winners are winning because they sell fancier equipment. Small shops all carry a similar box of parts. We pull from the same catalogs. The gear is not the edge. It never really was.
I think the split is about how a shop runs the work. The boring parts. The quote, the handoff, the connections, the programming, the follow-up. The stuff nobody brags about at trade shows.
When I started, I ran jobs out of my head and a truck. That works at three jobs a month. It falls apart at eight. The estimate takes too long. The proposal has a gap. The crew shows up missing a part. Each slip costs a day. Days turn into a bad quarter. That is how a shop slides toward the losing third without ever making one big mistake.
The winning third, I would bet, cut that friction out. Their quotes go out same day. Their proposals are clear enough that the customer says yes on the phone. Their crews get a clean plan, not a guess. Nothing dramatic. Just fewer dropped balls, week after week.
That is the whole reason I care about this stuff. I have felt both sides. I have had the month where every job flowed. I have had the month where I lost a deal because my quote sat for a week while I was on a ladder. The second kind of month is what pushes a good shop into the bad third.
So what would I actually do with this report if I were reading it cold. Not panic. Not go buy new product lines. I would look at my own numbers first.
Start with speed. How long from a customer call to a real, priced proposal in their hands. If that answer is measured in days, that is your leak. Fast quotes win jobs that slow quotes lose. The customer who gets a clear number first usually signs.
Then look at rework. How often does a crew hit a snag that a better plan would have caught. A wrong connection. A missing piece. A programming step nobody wrote down. Every one of those is a paid hour that earns nothing. String enough together and your margin is gone.
Then look at what only lives in your head. If the business stops when you are on a job site, you have a ceiling. The winning shops built systems so the work does not wait on one person. That is not about being big. It is about not being the bottleneck.
This is the itch that made me build TrimOut in the first place. I was tired of being the slow step in my own company. But the tool is not the point today. The point is the mindset behind it. Treat the plumbing of your business as seriously as you treat the install.
I want to be careful here. The report is one snapshot. It covers a certain group of integrators, not every shop in the country. I am not going to pretend it maps perfectly onto your market or mine. And it does not tell us why each shop landed where it did. That part is my read, not their finding.
But the shape of it rings true to me. In a soft market, sloppy operations get exposed fast. In a good market, they get hidden by demand. Either way, the shop that runs clean pulls ahead. A split like this just makes the gap easier to see.
The comforting lie is that the losing third got unlucky. Bad territory. Bad timing. Some of that is real. But most of the gap, I think, is built one slow quote and one botched handoff at a time. Which means most of it is inside our control.
That is the part I hold onto. If the market is splitting, I do not have to accept which side I land on. I can look at my own speed, my own rework, my own dependence on me. Then I can fix the boring parts, one at a time.
The gear will not decide it. The way I run the work will.
A Control4 dealer who was stuck in the field