When I was doing industry research for academia (ten years ago), we would often utilize a quick rule-of-thumb for estimating the annual revenues for a company (which, unless they were traded on public exchanges, were rarely available) based upon the number of employees they had.  The rule of thumb was that for every employee, the company was expected to make about $150,000 in revenue if they had about average profitability.  While this was of course a gross estimation, it was always useful for providing a quick order-of-magnitude guess … and was pretty close to the actual revenue more often than you would expect.

Estimates like this are a very simple form of “productivity” or “profitability” measurement, and are often more valuable for understanding growth and health in an industry than outright employment levels (revenues may actually increase while employment drops, if the industry is investing in capital or other labor-saving strategies).

I thought I’d update that rule-of-thumb for inflation, and see if it could be made more accurate for Florida and for specific industries.  With the help of the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation and the US Census department, I found that number is still pretty accurate overall but varies considerably depending on the specific industry:

Average revenue (receipts) per employee, all nonfarm industries: $155,855
Average revenue (receipts) per employee, by NAICS Industry category:

Results were based upon the 2002 US Economic census for the state of Florida, and adjusted for inflation to 2007 USD.  Special thanks to Becky Rust and Pamela Schenker at the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation, they do more work than they’re appreciated for.

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