At the beginning of this year we started an internal project to gather information about our customers. We knew that, in general, we had quite a few customers in manufacturing and distribution, but we had not ever attempted to define things more rigorously. We also thought that there were probably enough “bigger” customers that they would be publicly traded, and that it might be interesting for us (and you) so see the performance of a WilloWare Stock Portfolio built from our publicly traded customers.
Being the developers we are, we added some features to Dynamics GP to help us collect SIC Codes, and Stock Symbols. We recently finished the first pass of tracking down this information, and have now begun a second pass to do some spot checking to ensure accuracy, as well as to cover the new customers added this year.
Our GP enhancement connects directly to an online stock portfolio tracker that allows us to pull updated quotes directly into GP. We are also starting to build some nice analysis tools using Microsoft’s new Power BI tools. We will share some of this information with you over the coming months.
The chart above shows the 1-Year performance of the WilloWare Stock Portfolio. The WWSP is up 10.33% for the year compared to 6.24% for the Dow Jones and 3.11% for the NASDAQ.
Dynamics GP is referred to as a “mid-market” ERP package, which is defined as having something like 25-750 users. The user count does not necessarily correlate to the size of the business. We know that we have some very large consumer brands using our software (and therefore Dynamics GP), but who do not have a large number of users. At any rate, we can generally assume that a company using Dynamics GP falls under the common definition of Small Business.
As I mentioned above, in the coming months we will share more updates about the performance of our WWSP, and provide more details about the industries our customers are in. At this point, our first rough analysis found that a bit over 60% of our customers are in SIC codes related to manufacturing.
Looking at the performance of our WWSP, and considering most of our customers are in manufacturing, we are optimistic about the future of Small Business Manufacturing. In contrast to much of the news lately, our numbers indicate that our customers are performing significantly better than the broader market! If you are one of our customers…Go You!