How the research works
Every trade we cover is licensed by the State of Texas, and the state publishes the licence records. That is the whole basis of what we know before we ever speak to anyone — no insider knowledge, no purchased list, nothing you could not obtain yourself with enough time.
One licence is not one company
This is the mistake that makes most market counts wrong. A firm holding four trade licences appears four times, so a raw registry badly overstates how many businesses exist. We consolidate registrations by the operating entity behind them before counting anything, then remove the national platforms, franchise locations, school districts and government bodies that also hold licences.
Cross-referencing is where the useful part comes from
A licence list on its own tells you very little. Matched against county appraisal records it shows who owns their premises rather than renting. Matched against franchise tax filings it shows how long the entity has actually existed, which is rarely the same as how long it has held a licence. Matched against a second licence programme it shows which operators run two halves of the same business. That is where a list becomes a picture.
Acquired firms keep their names
A company that has already sold usually keeps its sign, its phone number and its website for years. We check for it two separate ways, because neither catches every case: some firms reveal themselves when an old domain quietly redirects to the acquirer, and others only show up in parent-company records. Both matter — the firm down the road that looks like a local competitor may already be a branch of a national buyer.
What the public record cannot show
Revenue, margins, and the size of anyone’s recurring base. None of that is public, and we do not pretend to have it. Some regulators publish nothing usable at all — alarm monitoring licences and municipal permit records in Texas are locked behind interfaces that cannot be read reliably, so we leave them out rather than quote something we cannot stand behind. Anything we tell you about your own finances came from you.
Coverage is not the same as a practice
Ten trades are listed on the home page. Three of them have a practice page, and those are the ones we are actively working: the licence data has been consolidated by operating entity, screened against consolidator ownership, and in the case of fire protection cross-referenced against property and tax records and checked for a verifiable web presence.
The other seven are counted, not enriched. We hold the state’s licence file, we have consolidated duplicate certificates and removed out-of-state registrants, and that is what the figure represents. It is enough to tell an owner how many competitors hold their licence and where — and we would rather say exactly that than imply more.
Where the numbers come from
Each practice page states the exact files behind its figures and the date they were pulled. We re-run them quarterly rather than measuring once and repeating the number for years.