The Electronic Security Association (ESA) recently launched its Executive Management Professionals (EMP) Group with the mission to help business leaders strengthen and grow their companies.
To that end, one of the group’s initial undertakings was to conduct a survey of executives in order to drill down to their particular pain points as well as identify key opportunities in the marketplace.
The research centered on advancing the EMP Group’s core mission in providing key information to top managers on such topics as company valuation, financing, business model development, mergers and acquisitions, human capital development, executive leadership, and change management.
Conducted in October, the online survey was promoted to the Electronic Security Expo (ESX) industry database, which includes both members and nonmembers of ESA. The survey accepted only those individuals charged with the strategic and financial leadership of security integration and monitoring companies. Responses by individuals from supplier companies were filtered out. The study’s final results were compiled from 141 approved participants.
“One of the things we saw, anecdotally, there are such massive changes going on in the security industry in terms of what the product offer is with the interactive services coming in,” says John Galante, president of AE Ventures, which produces the ESA Leadership Summit as well as ESX. “There is a real change in the skills and knowledge required of the staff — staff in the field, in the central station, and in customer service. There is an enormous need to train and retrain existing staff that is evident.”
Ultimately, ESA aims to take the information gleaned from the research and use it to create new training and educational curriculum. The following survey results were provided exclusively to SSI to coincide with the ESA Leadership Summit, which will be held Feb. 18-21 at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Fla.