Leveraging the Orange County Manufacturing Market

The USA business database compiled by the Census Bureau contains approximately 7,600,000 business establishments of which 82,000 are in Orange County. There are 300,000 manufacturers in the US of which 4,700 firms employing 170,000 workers are in Orange County..

For those firms marketing to Orange County manufacturers and planning to identify and purchase sales leads, here are some of the ways to search the manufacturing market using Inside Prospects locally researched database.

Standard Industrial Codes- SIC

SIC classifications were designed by the Federal Government to categorize the more than 800 types of business that exist. You can conduct an SIC search of the 400 four-digit manufacturing SIC codes and pinpoint by type of manufacturer the ones you are focused on. However, most marketers are not as concerned about conducting a 400 SIC lookup as they are about targeting within the 19 major SIC manufacturing groups.  In other words your focus may be on electrical manufacturers and not just on manufacturers of resistors.  A common mistake in drilling down to the four-digit level of SIC codes is the reality that you will not choose adjacent groups of SIC categories that would be valuable.  However, you are much better served in targeting these companies by the first two or three digits of their SIC code.

For example, if your focus is on high tech manufacturers which accounts for 40% of the county’s manufacturers, you would want to include most of the SIC categories between 3511 to 3853. By selecting all firms beginning with 35, 36, 37, and 38 you will have selected the majority of high tech firms that are in Orange County.

Employment Size

A simple search by number of employees can make a big difference in your marketing efforts. For example, selecting firms above 10 employees will cut the total count in half, to about 2,500 firms. The reason for doing this is that for many firms the revenue from any sale quite often is related to the size of the firm.  Therefore, the bigger the firm, the potential volume of sales revenue will increase. The most interesting fact is that 75% of all Orange County employees in manufacturing work for firms that employ over 50 people.  Alternative ways some Orange firms market to manufacturers is to vary the employment size by type of business.  For high tech and biotech firms you would select firms with 5 or more employees, but for “low tech” firms (for example, printing firms) target those groups of manufacturers that employ 10 or more employees.  For best results, contact your Inside Prospects consultant.

City and/or Zip

In assigning sales territories in Orange County it would be wise to acquire a count by either zip code or city since the quantity of firms can vary dramatically by these geographic areas.  For example, 46% of all manufacturers are in just four of the 40 incorporated cities in Orange County: Anaheim, Irvine, Santa Ana, and Huntington Beach.  Zip code 92618 (Irvine Spectrum) has over 250 manufacturers, the most of any one zip.

Branch vs. Locally owned

Another question to ask when targeting manufacturers in Orange County is to look at their ability to make a buying decision at the local level. Over 10% of the manufacturers in Orange County are either a branch or a division (subsidiary) of a firm that is headquartered outside of the market area. There is no need to buy sales leads where the probability of selling to that firm diminishes because the firm is too small, is a branch office, or is in the wrong SIC code category.