CUTLER BAY, Fla. — For small business owners like Xavier Miranda of Top Florida Roofing out of Cutler Bay, Florida, rising energy costs have a multi-pronged impact.
“We just kind of get hit from all angles right now,” said Miranda.
As a roofer, one increase is felt on the actual materials themselves. Take, for example, asphalt shingles.
“Most people may not know, but a lot of the roofing products that we use, they’re petroleum based,” said Miranda. “So as these prices go up, our material cost goes up. A lot of the underlayments that go down, they’re all petroleum based, so everything on your roof, 90% of the stuff on your roof is petroleum based.”
Now consider roofing suppliers, who have been adding fuel surcharges, as all businesses along the global supply chain seek to offset rising energy costs.
“We are constantly getting updates from our suppliers that prices are going to increase because of their fuel expense. So they pass it on to us,” said Miranda.
These include, he says, their metal and shingle suppliers, and he estimates the costs have probably increased by 30% in just the past three months.
“I think every time we get an email, it’s like a 10% [fuel] surcharge that we’re getting,” said Miranda. “And we’ll get multiple of those, sometimes a month, sometimes we’ll get them every other month. So that’s not the normal for us. Prior to all of these issues, I mean, maybe once a year we were seeing something like that. Every other quarter, now it’s like every month you’re seeing them and you’re seeing them multiple times a month.”
Then, like the majority of companies across the U.S., his commercial vehicle fleet runs on diesel, making his cost to get to and from job sites more expensive.
“Diesel expenses has pretty much almost doubled. We all see it. You go to the gas station, you see it, you go to the supermarket, you see it,” said Miranda.
Costs, much like what you might already be experiencing from retail to grocery store chains, get passed down.
“We try our best not to, but it’s not feasible at certain points. Sometimes we get proposals 30 days in advance, they see it later on, they see some increases in the prices, and we try to explain to them we’re being hit with additional expenses, so we try not to pass it on, but at some point, as a small business, we just can’t continue to front the burden,” said Miranda.
That is because, in the case of a small business, raising prices is an especially difficult decision to make as they work to retain their local clients. Yet they are up against a tough reality: rising diesel costs are harder for small businesses to absorb given their already slim margins.
“Every time our cost goes up we have to pass it on eventually to the customer and some customers, they are also watching their budgets, so we are not having as many sales which impacts the business, which affects the people who make up the business, the individuals, and there are families tied to that, so it is a big trickle,” said Miranda.
What he says federal lawmakers should know is that “we are the ones building in the community, spending in the community, living in the community. Their decisions impact us which in return impacts the entire community.”
A Miami-Dade County report found that “according to Jorge M. Pérez FIU’s Metropolitan Center, 96% of businesses in our region have 49 employees or less.”
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