How a $500M electrical contractor streamlined executive approvals with Tallyfy

Executive approvals at scale require structured processes that become part of company vocabulary. Here’s how we approach approval management.

Joe Meadors

VP of IT

Gaylor Electric

Explosive growth at Gaylor Electric

The growth has been dramatic. Just a year ago in October, our revenue was roughly $400 million and our backlog was $300 million. In the construction industry, backlog means jobs you have under contract that you haven’t started yet - work your teams will move to next.

One thing that keeps coming up: what do companies at this growth stage do? They either build structured approval processes or drown in ad-hoc email chains. What struck me about Gaylor was the timeline. We first started working together in April 2018 on employee onboarding - the initial pilot focused on Project Engineers and Project Managers. By July of that year, they’d rolled out across all locations. The fact that they’re still using the platform years later, now for executive approvals, speaks to how these tools become embedded in company culture.

Today, a year later, we’re a $500 million operation with $900 million in backlog.

We’re adding about 100 people a month. It’s been crazy, but a lot of fun for me. I’d rather be panicked about growth than panicked about failing.

• Joe Meadors, VP of IT, Gaylor Electric

My IT team has tripled from 6 to 18 people. We now have team members in Indianapolis, Noblesville, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

What types of projects does Gaylor Electric work on?

It’s a pretty solid mix. We do distribution facilities, hotels, office buildings, data centers, production facilities, warehouses, and residential government housing. We stay away from most government work, but we handle airports and many other commercial projects.

Most of our customers are repeat clients. They’re either the owner or a general contractor who’s worked with us before.

Making “put it in Tallyfy” part of company vocabulary

Tallyfy has become a regular thing that people say around here. When something needs approval, the default response is “put that in Tallyfy.” Everyone knows it by name.

It’s become the executive approval tool. When we have policy changes or new job titles and job descriptions, they go through Tallyfy.

• Joe Meadors, VP of IT, Gaylor Electric

We have a bi-weekly Tallyfy call with most of the executive team. Someone places a document in there for us to look at - safety documents, policy documents, payroll documents, job descriptions, new job titles. Everybody gets a chance to read and comment in a shared Word doc with a link in Tallyfy.

When that executive group approves it, it goes to another tier where the owner and president give final approval.

What other processes have you run through Tallyfy?

We recently used it for our Dayforce migration. We were moving from nine different software products that all handled HR and payroll separately to one unified platform - Ceridian Dayforce.

Each software vendor had workbooks - questions about how to configure our environment. Do you do this? Do you do that? How do you calculate this? Nine different groups tackled those workbooks.

We tracked our Dayforce workbooks in Tallyfy as a separate process. Everybody says yes, I’ve looked at the workbook, yes it’s correct, yes let’s send that on.

• Joe Meadors, VP of IT, Gaylor Electric

That kept us on pace during a major system migration.

What’s next for Tallyfy at Gaylor Electric?

When we launch Dayforce in January, we’ll use Tallyfy for change management. If somebody wants to change a field or modify how something reads in the system, that’ll go through a change management group in Tallyfy before it reaches the executive team.

Any configuration changes - adding a third choice to a yes/no field, adjusting how something displays - other people might be impacted by those changes. Standard change management, but we’ll run it through Tallyfy.

Would you recommend Tallyfy to other companies?

Absolutely. When you’re growing as fast as we are, you need systems that keep everyone aligned without bottlenecks. Tallyfy gives us that structured approach to approvals while still being flexible enough to handle different types of documents and workflows. The fact that it’s become part of our vocabulary - that people just say “put it in Tallyfy” - tells you how well it’s been adopted across the organization. After watching hundreds of teams try this, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat across industries - from pharmaceutical companies with 13-step vendor onboarding processes to law firms that handle estate probate workflows. The common thread is that when a process becomes part of how people talk about work, adoption stops being a challenge. One estate planning firm doubled the number of cases each attorney could handle after moving from Excel spreadsheets to structured workflows. That kind of result doesn’t come from the tool alone - it comes from people who use it every day. And that only happens when the tool fits how teams already think about their work.