How W.W. Gay turned process into a competitive advantage

The Challenge

As Director of Technology for W. W. Gay Mechanical Contractor, Mike Rizzo knew what it took to produce the kind of steady, reliable data that drives smarter business decisions. 

He also knew that his company wasn’t doing it. 

As W.W. Gay expanded its business across the Sunshine State, Mike watched the company’s processes for everyday tasks splinter into countless individual approaches. “We had silos, disconnected spreadsheets and people doing their own process and their own standardization,” Mike says. The result was “a lot of disconnected, non-centralized data."

Those inconsistencies created friction. Field teams wasted time sorting through paper drawings. Project information was difficult to roll up across the organization. And when problems occurred, it wasn’t always clear where they started or how to prevent them from reoccurring. 

The risks extended beyond inefficiency. As a specialty contractor, W.W. Gay was often forced to enter project information into a general contractor’s Procore instance while simultaneously maintaining its own records. That not only created extra work, it handed over control of their critical data, leaving them defenseless in case of a change order dispute, claim or legal challenge. 

Meanwhile, project data was growing exponentially, but without standardized processes, much of it was useless for generating insights. And as compliance requirements for federal projects became increasingly stringent, not having secure, centralized and auditable data put W.W. Gay at risk of being locked out of lucrative opportunities. 

With one eye on the future of the industry, Mike knew what would soon happen to companies that couldn’t produce the kind of data that told a clear story. 

"They're going to be left behind," he says. "Without that data, you're going to lose out on actionable insights into how your business can grow or change."

To keep W.W. Gay competitive, Mike knew the company needed more than another software platform. It needed a standardized way of working — one that could bring its people, processes and project data together into a single, verifiable source of truth.

The Solution

W.W. Gay decided that owning its own Procore instance was the fastest way to establish that source of truth. "Procore allows us to centralize and standardize a lot of our data across the entire organization,” Mike says. “It is just night and day different from what we used to do."

Almost immediately, W.W. gay launched an ambitious effort to map and standardize its operations from end to end. Mike assembled teams of subject matter experts and executive sponsors to define how work should flow across the organization. 

Over the next 18 months, those teams “baseline mapped every single business process that we've got," Mike says, “from pre-construction to project closeout." Detailed process maps and swim lanes clarified responsibilities, standardized workflows and revealed opportunities for improvement. 

Procore also helped eliminate much of the administrative friction that had long frustrated field teams. Instead of managing paper drawings in dusty job trailers or jumping between multiple systems, foremen could access the information they needed from a single mobile platform.

"When you reduce a technology stack with the wide range of tools provided within Procore, you get faster adoption, more buy-in from the field and easier visibility into what you're doing," Mike says. "No paperwork — it's just leaps and bounds from what we used to do."

Most importantly, owning its own Procore instance gave W.W. Gay control over its project record. Rather than relying on documentation housed in a general contractor’s system, the company could maintain a complete, transparent history of its own work — protecting itself during change order disputes and legal claims while creating the secure, centralized data foundation needed to pursue federal opportunities.

The Results

• Eliminated Administrative Friction: Foremen swapped paper drawings for iPads with zoom and swipe, allowing them to focus entirely on high-value installation tasks.
• Rapid Technology Adoption: Consolidating the tech stack into a single mobile platform triggered faster field buy-in, ensuring real-time data capture from job sites.
• Proactive Federal Compliance: Partnered with a FedRAMP-compliant platform to gain a distinct bidding advantage and long-term stability on public sector projects.
• Watertight Historical Archiving: Built an unalterable record of all project data to seamlessly resolve change order disputes and protect against legal claims during closeout.

The true value of W.W. Gay’s transformation became apparent the first time something went wrong. 

When an issue surfaced in the company’s cash collection and billing process, Mike’s team didn’t have to rely on guesswork to find the cause. “We were able to pull our map back out and find the broken process,” he says. “We addressed that gap in our baseline process so it doesn’t happen again.”

That ability to continually diagnose and improve operations has turned Procore into a source of clean, reliable data that leadership can use to find efficiencies and make strategic decisions. "We use it in our processes to feed back into our system and see how we did,” Mike says. “We can start pulling metrics out of that to look at how we can complete a job quicker and where we have gaps."

The same foundation also supports W.W. Gay’s expanding federal business. With Procore’s FedRAMP authorization and support for frameworks such as CMMC 2.0, the company can easily maintain a data environment that meets increasingly demanding government requirements. 

For Mike, that’s the real ROI. With a single source of truth supporting standardized processes throughout the organization, W.W. Gay can make smarter decisions based on strong data and stay competitive well into the future.