NSCA’s updated Financial Leadership 101 for Systems Integrators guide can help you drive smart decisions and real growth.
Most integration firm leaders already know their basic numbers: pipeline, margins, backlog. But those figures only scratch the surface of true performance insight.
If you’re looking for the metrics that drive smart decisions and real growth, then you want to dig deeper. And NSCA’s updated Financial Leadership 101 for Systems Integrators guide can help you do it.
Our Financial Leadership Council recently revisited this resource to add three critical metrics to the list:
- Revenue per install hour
- Gross profit per employee
- Return on overhead investment
In this updated version, you’ll recognize the metrics that were always there, such as proposal volume, revenue per employee, and project backlog. But what’s new, and what’s worth your attention, are three new benchmarks we added to help you drill down on operational strengths and spot trouble early.
1. Revenue Per Install Hour
Far more telling than tracking payroll or labor costs, knowing this number helps you answer a blunt question: Are you making enough on every hour a tech spends onsite? Lots of integrators don’t track this metric … and that’s how they end up with revenue but thin margins. Calculating this critical ratio lets you fine-tune pricing, spot efficiency gaps, and set the right goals for teams.
2. Gross Profit Per Employee
Staffing up feels like progress, but are those new hires delivering profit? The new metric we added to our guide can help you determine whether your organization is leveraging its people for real returns.
If that number slips, then you’re probably overstaffed or experiencing margin erosion. But if it climbs, then you’ve got a lean, effective team that is pulling in the right jobs at the right price.
3. Return on Overhead Investment (ROOI)
Integrators are focusing more on services contracts and recurring revenue streams, but those also come with extra support needs, systems, and overhead that can quietly eat away at your margins.
Tracking ROOI cuts through the noise and tells you whether your investments are paying you back … or just padding the top line without boosting the bottom. For example, if you don’t separate ROOI to compare recurring vs. non-recurring work, you may never know where your overhead is working (and where it isn’t).
Track Smarter to Grow Stronger
Calculating these metrics consistently and side by side helps you avoid common traps like:
- Growing too fast without controls
- Ramping up staff beyond what’s profitable
- Piling on tech hours without enough revenue per slot
- Ramping up managed services while overhead quietly swells
By focusing on these three additional metrics (in addition to the ones already included in our checklist), you can benchmark your firm’s performance against the operational efficiency and profit drivers that separate leaders from the rest.
NSCA members can download their copies in the Essentials Library.
