From developing next-gen talent to empowering financial teams, find out how NSCA priorities will elevate your company’s performance in 2025.
Integrators continue to have many reasons for optimism. But, while opportunities are great, profitability continues to be tenuous. As a result, NSCA’s 2025 priorities reflect a focus on helping you turn obstacles into opportunities and problems into possibilities—and doing so cautiously, strategically, and profitably.
Our resources and tools, events, consulting, and strategic planning are all designed to help you do business better. Our staff, board members, volunteers, and trusted partners always stand ready to offer solutions to overcome the issues you face.
This year, we’re committed to helping you cultivate the best business climate possible by focusing on six key NSCA priorities.
1. Improving Your Leadership Skills
Running an integration company isn’t easy in any era, but it’s increasingly challenging in a constantly changing environment like the one we’re in today. Effective leadership is crucial to seize the opportunities this market presents.
But how can leaders budget for what they can’t anticipate? How can they deal with chaos related to staff turnover and training in a desperate effort to keep pace with fast-evolving technology? How can they maintain an excellent company culture, a high level of pride, and accountability standards when so many employees are working remotely?
Each day brings new challenges, which can make it difficult to stay focused on what matters—and on what you can control. That’s why NSCA plans to elevate support for leaders. This begins with several leadership-focused sessions at the Business & Leadership Conference (BLC) and extends throughout 2025 in our webinars, research reports, Integrate content, and our XBO Experience event for next-gen leaders. We’re also working with RISE Performance Group to help integrators understand and apply “Scaling Up” principles to improve internal leadership.
2. Helping You Know When to Walk Away
NSCA members face go or no-go decisions daily. Is an upcoming project good for the bottom line or will it be a profit-killer? Is a demanding new customer worth the resources they require? Making the right decisions on matters like these can either propel your company forward or set it back.
We want to help you make better, more informed decisions based on data that separates deal-makers from deal-breakers. NSCA aims to help you better understand margins, backlog, and sales funnels; apply logical decision-making to avoid missteps; and weigh risks and rewards.
We’ll do this by offering many resources:
- Focused breakout sessions at the 2025 Business & Leadership Conference
- “Go/No-Go” decision-making spreadsheets in our Essentials Library
- The Financial Analysis of the Industry report
- The Compensation & Benefits Report
3. Developing Your Next-Gen Talent & Leadership
Year in and year out, integrators recognize the need for new talent—both in the field and in the office—as well as the development of future leaders. This challenge doesn’t make our industry unique, but it also doesn’t make the talent shortage any less important. This industry faces a wide generation gap between those who worked so hard to elevate the industry and the next generation of leaders who are preparing to fill their shoes.
In 2025, NSCA is doubling down on next-generation talent. Our inaugural Excellence in Business Operations (XBO) Experience conference, held in late 2024, was just the first of many events that will cater to this need.
Meanwhile, our Ignite career awareness and internship programs will be highly prioritized to help you break through the industry bubble to hire new and diverse individuals, as well as access resources to get new employees on track.
4. Providing Guidance on Regulations and Compliance
Influenced by a new administration and questions about tariffs and corporate taxes, integrators are on high alert when it comes to regulations in 2025. We’re paying close attention to these trends.
To help you stay on top of what’s happening nationally and globally—and how it impacts your business—we partnered with NSCA Chief Economist Dr. Chris Kuehl to create the Armada Strategic Intelligence System (ASIS) Report, which features content specifically for NSCA members. You can receive his insights every week, right in your inbox (and the best part: ask him questions about what he shares).
NSCA also monitors a steady stream of proposed laws and regulations that could hamper your right to provide limited-power solutions (Power over Ethernet, or PoE) to customers. NSCA won’t let up on leading you through these challenges and working with the Connected Technologies Industry Consortium to advocate on behalf of the industry.
In addition to limited-power regulations, NSCA tracks bills related to cybersecurity, school safety (in conjunction with the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, also known as PASS K-12), sustainability, and more.
You can monitor this legislation, too, by using our online legislative tracker. We also continually update our Guide to State Licensing to understand compliance issues.
5. Empowering Your Financial Leaders
Your finance team plays an important role by taking hard stances and setting standards to make sure projects have a chance to be profitable. In other words, they can de-risk your proposals—if you let them.
As many integrators enter 2025 with strong backlogs, according to our State of the Industry survey conducted in partnership with Commercial Integrator, their financial leaders must be empowered to make sure opportunities are indeed opportunities—not double-edged, profit-killing swords.
NSCA will continually provide guidance on this topic not only through events like the Business & Leadership Conference but also through skills training, webinars and roundtable discussions, blogs and Integrate content, and our Financial Analysis of the Industry. This report, updated every two years, will be released in 2025 and contains industry-specific metrics to help you create business rules and put valuable KPIs in place.
6. Helping the Industry Continually Evolve
Customer needs are changing and escalating. AI relevance is accelerating. Margin erosion is squeezing profits. Compliance issues are growing more complex. Industry consolidation is reshaping the competitive landscape. Interest rates are fluctuating and impacting financial strategies.
And NSCA is here to help you through it all with our ongoing training; in-person conferences and events like BLC and XBO; monthly webinars and roundtable discussions; blogs and quarterly trade journal, Integrate; surveys and research reports; and business tools and resources.
Our AI and Cyber Committee and Emerging Technologies Committee help us keep track of the enabling and disruptive technology our members provide and interface with, while our Marketing and Membership Committee makes sure the resources we provide align with what the industry needs most.
A Special Note of Thanks
We want to thank you: our valued members who regularly leverage NSCA for business resources, advice, data, news, and community. We’re honored to be able to help you do business better, and we’re proud to be your voice when it matters most in our industry.
NSCA is privileged to be the association you rely on for direction and guidance. We are your voice, your business resource, and your trusted advisor. And we look forward to helping you be successful.
