How many businesses are you actually competing with?

Every tradie in Hamilton has heard the same discouraging line: the market is saturated, there are thousands of you, good luck standing out.

The register says there are 5,913 trades and services businesses in Hamilton. So the line is true, as far as it goes.

It just is not the number that matters. Of those 5,913, only 1,187 have a website on record and 1,288 have a phone number. When somebody goes looking for a tradie, the ones with nothing on the record are not in the running. They are not competition. They are just registered.

You are not competing with 5,913 businesses. You are competing with roughly 1,200.

You are free to cite these figures. Method sits at the bottom.

Your trade, nationally

Category	On the register	Website and phone both on record	Share
Trades and services	155,148	21,994	14.2%
Professional services	87,327	13,339	15.3%
Health and beauty	27,702	6,089	22.0%
Cafes and eating	22,982	2,905	12.6%
Automotive	15,283	3,120	20.4%
Accommodation	9,117	1,336	14.7%

Health and beauty is the most contested trade in the country at 22%, and even there almost four in five businesses are effectively invisible. Cafes are the least contested at 12.6%, which is remarkable for an industry that lives or dies on being found by someone hungry and nearby.

The main centres, trades and services

Town	Trades businesses	With a website	With a phone
Auckland City	30,048	5,279	6,589
Hamilton	5,913	1,187	1,288
Christchurch	3,986	774	834
Tauranga	2,776	574	566
Wellington City	1,780	399	377

The pattern holds everywhere: roughly one in five trades businesses has a website on record, and roughly one in five has a phone number. The gap between the headline number and the real one is consistent across the country.

Why this is good news and not just trivia

Two things follow from it, and they point the same way.

The bar is far lower than it looks. If four out of five businesses in your trade have no website and no phone number on the record, then simply having both puts you in the top fifth before you have done anything clever. Not first. But in the conversation, which is where everyone else in that 80% is not.

It gets more true, not less, as search changes. Google could always fall back on matching words to a thin page. An AI assistant cannot. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews for a sparkie in Hamilton, the engine has to name specific businesses and stand behind the recommendation, which means it can only choose from businesses whose details it can actually read and corroborate. The pool it picks from is that 20%, not the 5,913.

So the saturated-market story has it backwards. The market is not crowded with competitors. It is crowded with businesses that cannot be found, and every one of those is a place in the queue that nobody is standing in.

What actually puts you in the findable fifth

None of this is difficult, and almost none of it costs money.

A phone number and a website on the public record. Not on your Facebook page. On the record a search engine reads.
The same details everywhere. One phone number, one address, one trading name. Contradictions are the most common reason an engine goes quiet about a business it otherwise knows exists.
A verified Google Business Profile with hours on it. Check yours free, it takes ten seconds and tells you the single biggest gap.
A page a machine can read. Your services in plain text, your town named, your hours listed. Not a photo of a sign, not a PDF menu.

Every registered NZ business already has a page on List-It built from the official register, including yours. It carries your legal name and your NZBN and, if you are like four in five, very little else. Find yours and finish it. It is free forever and takes about five minutes.

Method

Counts were taken on 3 September 2026 against List-It's copy of the full New Zealand Business Number register, reloaded monthly under our data agreement with the Companies Office.

"On the register" counts every business carrying that category, including entities that are dormant, holding companies, or otherwise not trading publicly. That inflates the totals relative to the number of businesses actually competing for work, and we have not filtered it, because any filter would be a guess. Read these as figures for the register, not for the trading economy. The practical effect is that the real competitive pool is probably smaller than the numbers above, not larger.

"Website" and "phone" mean a value recorded against the business, from the NZBN record or supplied by a verified owner. A business may well have a phone number that has never been published anywhere a machine can read, which is exactly the point.

Categories are our own classification, derived from the register's industry codes, so a business may sit in a different category than its owner would choose.