How Hays Electrical Scaled from 100 to 900 Employees with a Lean Back Office

Company Overview

Hays Electrical Services has grown from a small hospitality-focused contractor into one of the fastest-growing commercial electrical contractors in the country with more than 900 employees. Based in Houston, Texas, the company now operates in more than 20 states, delivering large-scale projects including hospitals, schools, warehouses, and airports.

Over the past few years, Hays has achieved consistent 30% year-over-year revenue and workforce growth.  “Our mission is to make ourselves indispensable to our customers,” says Hassan Tabatabayee, Vice President of Financial Planning & Analysis. “That focus on delivering success is what drives our growth.”

We sat down with Hassan to learn how the business is evolving to support their rapid growth. “My role exists because we’re growing so fast,” he explains. “We need to get our finances and systems in order to support that growth.”

The Challenge: Scaling back office functions to support a growing team

“Our top line is growing much faster than our support can handle it,” explains Hassan. “With growth comes not only opportunity but a lot of issues as well. We needed tools to help us keep everything in track and in order.”

As revenue and headcount climbed rapidly, Hays had to build a back office that could support not just today’s operations, but future growth as well.

The Solution: Build a Scalable Back Office to Handle Current Size and Continued Growth

Hays implemented Miter to build scalable processes that support both their current workforce and continued growth. The platform integrates with Sage Intacct, their ERP, to streamline job costing and accounting workflows, and with Procore to eliminate double entry across jobs, cost codes, cost types, and production tracking. By connecting HCM, field operations, and expense management in one cohesive system, Miter gives Hays a centralized way to manage their workforce at scale.

An Integrated System

Hays consolidated payroll, HR, time tracking, and expenses into Miter. Having employee data in the same system that tracks time and processes payroll streamlines workflows and improves accuracy for the Hays team.

This enables several key benefits. For the payroll team: “It makes it easier for payroll as well that all the information — time and reimbursements — are coming in the same platform so they can see it together and make sure they process it together,” Hassan explains.

For employees, managing everything in one app makes their lives easier: “It makes it easier for team members to have one platform where they input their time and their expense reports,” Hassan notes.

With Miter, the Hays team manages expenses, approvals, and payroll in a single system, reducing admin work and keeping everything connected. “For spend and reimbursements, having the approval routing in Miter is really helpful because it already has our master list of team members,” says Hassan. “When someone submits an expense report, it automatically goes to the right manager based on the job they’re on. All the routing is built in.”

They also use Miter for tracking applicants, onboarding new employees, and training their team: “It just makes sense to have it all under one platform,” says Hassan.

Automation That Scales

“Processing payroll for 900 people – all with unique situations – is a massive undertaking,” acknowledges Hassan. Miter enables the Hays team to pay their team with a fraction of the people it would require if they were running payroll manually. “Having a system like Miter that automates as much of the process as possible saves an incredible amount of time.” 

On top of paying their employees, prevailing wage calculations and certified payroll reporting are critical for Hays, given the volume of government work they take on. Miter streamlines both, saving the team significant time and effort. Without that automation, Hassan says, they’d need to substantially grow the payroll team just to keep up.

Beyond payroll, Miter’s time tracking enables Hays to scale operations nationwide. “We’re working in multiple states at any given time. We can’t have our eyes on every employee,” Hassan explains. Miter’s geolocation validation ensures accountability: “We use the geofencing feature so employees can only clock in based on their location, and the photo feature verifies they’re actually on site. It’s an effective validation tool for us.”

With national operations and employees frequently traveling to job sites, tracking and issuing per diems had been time-consuming and manual. Now, the process runs automatically in Miter. “Once we set up a per diem for a project, it’s automatically assigned to employees working on that project,” explains Hassan. Miter even calculates travel distance based on each employee’s home address. “If someone from Houston has to work in East Texas, we want to pay them a per diem. Now Miter automatically calculates that for us rather than us having to go and edit each person’s per diem.” 

Powerful, Reliable Data

Accurate time and cost data is foundational to Hassan’s role in financial planning – and to the company’s ability to scale responsibly. Miter enforces structure at the point of entry by requiring employees to log time against a preselected list of cost codes assigned to that project.

“You’re required to enter your time based on the cost codes available to you for your project,” Hassan explains. “So when time gets processed, it’s automatically applied to the right cost code with the correct labor and burden amounts. That makes job costing much easier.”

This structure also extends to salaried and overhead employees. Because departments are clearly defined in Miter, SG&A reporting is consistent and clean.

With clean inputs from the field, Hassan can trust the numbers that drive forecasts and executive decisions.

Conclusion: Ready to Scale for the Future

The impact of Miter’s integrated platform is clear in Hassan’s assessment: 

The efficiency gains are quantifiable: “We’d probably need to double the team. It’s one and a half people right now doing payroll, but we would need four people to do manual payroll.”

Most importantly, Miter positions Hays for continued ambitious growth: “With a little bit more automation, from us and from Miter, we can definitely add hundreds of more employees without having to scale our back office team.”

As Hassan reflects on the construction industry’s future: “We have to apply technology to help our people and companies grow. The work will never stop, but we have to empower everyone to do more work with fewer resources.” Hays Electrical, powered by Miter’s integrated platform, is perfectly positioned to meet that challenge and continue their impressive growth trajectory.