Excavation & Site Preparation
The industry — Site preparation contractors
Base industry report for 238910 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 8,127
- Under 10 employeesA
- 74%
- Establishments · USA
- 39,686
- Employment · USA
- 435,837
- Payroll · USA
- $31.5B
Of 8,127 Canadian establishments with employees, 74% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 10
The binding constraint — capital intensity
Iron is the business: an excavator, a truck and a float before the first invoice, financed at rates that assume utilisation nobody can promise a new entrant. Work arrives through general contractors who already have a preferred sub, and volume tracks housing starts — the cycle that is currently softening in the same markets where rents are falling.
Moving iron costs money, so the market is whatever a float can reach economically — usually under two hours. Work volume tracks local housing starts, not national construction spend. Sized by the float radius.
Handle — Badger's revenue per HydroVac per month. Badger publishes revenue, fleet count and revenue per truck per month together, so the unit this record sizes — one machine — has a reported earnings figure attached to it. It is a hydrovac rather than an excavator, and it comes with a national accounts programme, multi-branch dispatch and a fuel recovery fee behind it, so read it as the ceiling for one machine rather than the average.
$41,672 a month x 12, from Badger's reported 2025 revenue per truck per month. Derived from one reported figure. Badger runs that machine off a national accounts programme with multi-branch dispatch; an owner-operator waiting on a general contractor's call should expect less utilisation and therefore less revenue from the same iron.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 2 of 5 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 5 named · 2 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Badger Infrastructure SolutionsTSX: BDGIA | $832M | — | FY2025 revenue, +12%, as stated in the company's results release |
| North American Construction GroupTSX/NYSE: NOAA | $1.3B | — | FY2025 revenue of C$1,284.3M, as tagged in its 40-F |
| The independent owner-operator majorityA | not disclosed | — | 4,287 of 8,127 Canadian establishments have one to four employees; only two have 500 or more (Statistics Canada, December 2023). This is the competitive structure, not a footnote to it. |
| Aecon / Bird Construction / Graham / Ledcor / PCLC | not disclosed | — | The general contractors who award site-preparation subcontracts. They are the customer and the gatekeeper at once. Not researched for this record. |
| Finning International / Toromont Industries / United RentalsC | not disclosed | — | Dealers and rental houses. They set what a machine costs to own and will rent an identical one to anybody, which is why the iron confers no advantage. Not researched for this record. |
Evidence
Evidence. Badger Infrastructure Solutions' 2025 figures — revenue $831.7M (+12%), adjusted EBITDA $198.2M (+13%), 1,723 HydroVacs, revenue per truck per month of $41,672 against $39,529, and the 2026 build plan — were read in the company's own results release of 5 March 2026 and its fourth-quarter results call transcript, not from a summary [A]. North American Construction Group's FY2025 revenue of C$1,284.3M is the figure tagged in its 40-F as filed with the SEC [A]. Business counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US County Business Patterns (2022) [A]. What this does not establish: Badger's presentation currency was not confirmed from its financial statements, so its figures are quoted as the release states them; a hydrovac is not an excavator, and the per-truck revenue is a listed operator's number, not an owner-operator's. The cost of a machine, the financing rate, and the claim that general contractors already have a preferred sub are UNVERIFIED — no equipment quote, lending term or contractor interview was obtained. The absence of a Canadian consolidator is the result of not finding one, which is weaker than a source saying none exists. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
'18,000 member firms drawn from 57 local and provincial integrated partner associations', per About page
'over 800 companies' (contractors, suppliers, engineers) via ten local associations, per homepage; annual conference
'300+ member companies' in road building, underground/utility and paving, per homepage
US association for utility construction and excavation contractors, organised in chapters; no member count stated
Canada's biennial heavy equipment show at the International Centre, Toronto; next April 27-28, 2028
Weekly BuildWitt podcast by Aaron Witt interviewing dirt-work and mining contractors; episodes through September 2026
Canadian construction-equipment magazine and news site (Baum Publications)
Blocked automated access (Cloudflare); search results show threads from August and September 2026 on excavators and equipment repair
Manitoba Heavy Construction Association (mhca.mb.ca) and Alberta Roadbuilders & Heavy Construction Association (arhca.ab.ca) are live provincial equivalents. On-Site Magazine (on-sitemag.com) refused connections during checking and r/Excavators could not be confirmed, so both are omitted.