NECA 2026 Wrap-Up: What 75 Electrical Contractors Told Us in Las Vegas

Key takeaways

• We had real conversations with 75 contractor companies at Booth #1725, from 30-person shops to outfits running thousands in the field.
• The same problem came up again and again: labor planning that lives in spreadsheets, whiteboards, and one person’s head is breaking as contractors grow.
• Contractors who built their own tools, or who are stuck on tools that stopped improving, are looking for something built for labor.
• Interest is moving past scheduling into job planning, productivity, and foreman time capture.
• Our customers did a lot of the talking for us, and a few NECA chapters asked to bring the Labor Operations Master Class to their members in 2027.

We’re back from NECA 2026 at Mandalay Bay, and we’re still sorting through our notes. NECA’s 125th anniversary show felt like a reunion. We caught up with customers we usually only see on screen, met a lot of contractors for the first time, and had more good conversations than we could log between booth shifts. Here’s what stood out.

Spreadsheets are breaking, and contractors know it

If one line summed up the week, it was some version of “we’re running labor on a bunch of spreadsheets that keep breaking.” We heard it from owners, operations managers, general superintendents, and PMs across every size of company.

The pain wasn’t abstract. One contractor told us they’d let two apprentices go because they couldn’t see where the work was, while they had people sitting at home waiting for jobs. Another described the week someone forgot to send the Friday schedule, and nobody in the field had assignments on Monday. Others said their manpower process held together fine at 50 people and started to fall apart at 150.

The common thread: when the labor plan lives in a file only one person understands, every hire, every new job, and every change order makes it more fragile.

“We built our own” and “our tool stopped getting better”

Two other stories came up more than we expected.

The first was the homegrown tool. Several contractors told us they’d built something internal that sort of does what RIVET does, then watched it stall once the person who built it moved on or the business outgrew it. One said their CTO was sure they could build it in-house, and it hasn’t worked out. Contractors are great at building. They’re just not set up to also run a software company.

The second was frustration with tools that haven’t kept up. We talked with contractors on resource planners that stopped getting meaningful updates, and with others whose ERP or project management tool was supposed to handle labor but never got adopted in the field. They weren’t asking for another system. They wanted one built around how labor actually moves.

The conversation is moving past scheduling

A few years ago, most booth conversations started with “how do I get my people to the right job?” This year, more of them started with “how do I know if the job is going to make money?”

At the booth we gave an early look at what we’re building for job planning and productivity and foreman time capture: getting the near-term plan, the hours, and the actuals into the same place as the long-term forecast. Customers came by specifically to see it, and several prospects who stopped in for scheduling stayed for the planning conversation. We also heard a lot about data center and other large, multi-crew projects, where contractors want to break a job into sections and schedule each crew to its own piece.

That was also the focus of our CEO Ryan Meitl’s Contractor Solutions Workshop, Look-Aheads and Project Planning: Closing the Loop. Ryan walked through how to merge field-owned, detailed look-aheads with your long-term project forecasts. That gives you a granular near-term plan without losing the long view, and it adds up to a company-level picture of what you’ve committed to and what you can take on next. Preconstruction needs that picture to pursue the right work at the right time.

Our customers did a lot of the talking

The best moments at the booth weren’t demos. They were customers telling prospects what it’s actually like.

One customer brought their whole superintendent team over to see what’s new. Others signed up for customer hours at the booth and ended up giving references to contractors standing next to them. And a lot of first-time visitors told us they’d heard about RIVET from a peer group, a neighboring contractor, or someone in their NECA chapter. That’s the kind of word of mouth you can’t buy.

Customers also brought us honest feedback, from feature requests on the map to notes on recent changes, and it’s already in front of our product team. Thank you for both the praise and the pushback.

Labor Ops Master Classes, live from the floor

We ran a short Labor Operations Master Class in the booth each day of the show, a quick, standing-room version of the sessions we run with NECA chapters around the country. It turned out to be one of the easiest ways to start a real conversation about overmanning, turnover, and forecasting.

It also started conversations with chapter leaders. A few asked about bringing a full Master Class to their members in 2027. If your chapter wants one, let us know. Our next one is the Labor Operations Master Class — Atlantic Coast.

Thank you, NECA, chapters, and partners

Thank you to NECA and ELECTRI International for putting on a great 125th anniversary show, and to the chapters who hosted evening events, including the Midwest chapters’ regional night at Swingers. Thanks to our partners at Remarcable (great neighbors across the aisle), Trimble, and COINS for the hallway conversations and the shared customers. And thank you to every contractor who joined us for dinner, sat in on a Master Class, or gave us twenty minutes of their time on the floor.

See you on the road

NECA is the one week a year a lot of contractors set aside to think about how they run the business, and we don’t take that time for granted. Next up, you’ll find us at Trimble Dimensions, the SMACNA Annual Convention, and the MEP Innovation Conference in January.

RIVET customers: save the date for RIVET Move 2027, our first user conference, April 27–29 in Detroit.

If we talked at the booth, expect to hear from us this week. If we missed you, schedule a demo and we’ll pick up where the show left off.