For 20 years Tyler Truss® Systems, LLC has designed and manufactured aluminum theatrical truss and structures for the staging of live entertainment, concert touring, and corporate events around the world. Known for exceptional craftsmanship, value, safety, and delivering on-time, Tyler vaulted itself into the upper echelon of truss fabricators. Over the years it has remained an industry leader thanks to its many innovations—Tyler GT Plus® Pre-Rig, Tyler Video/LED Truss, Centerline® Truss, and Stackmaster™. Tyler’s clients range from global rental companies to regional and local production companies supporting all market segments. The American-owned and operated company is based in Indiana but serves the world. As PLSN congratulates Tyler Truss on their 20th anniversary we wanted to highlight the company and mark this industry milestone.
Early Days of Tyler Truss
Tyler Truss was established in 2004 by Mark Dodd, owner of Dodd Technologies, Inc., a leading national event production company located in Pendleton, IN. Originally, Dodd was building truss for his production needs, since he was buying so much of it. He then expanded to sell the products to other production companies and rental houses. In its first couple of years, Tyler built standard truss products and accessories that began to get traction thanks to its attention to craftsmanship and on-time delivery, a problem that previously had been an industry headache for years. During that same period, Tyler was fortunate to secure several custom builds for major national concert tours as well as the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium; a concert stage/roof system for an outdoor shopping facility in Boca Raton, FL, and more. Tyler Truss also had built a reputation for innovation and out of the box thinking. Then in 2008, things changed for the company.
“Around 2008, during a sales call on Upstaging, a requirement for an improved pre-rig came up,” explains Bill Edwards, VP Sales & Marketing Tyler Truss Systems. Edwards was on the original team that launched Tyler Truss in 2004. “After months of design work and client feedback, our team came up with what is now Tyler GT® pre-rig truss which Mark patented. One of the first gigs for the new pre-rig product was an AC/DC tour. If I remember right, it saved about three and half semi-trucks that normally would’ve housed hundreds of fixture cases! Just do the math on the savings. It was huge! In 2004, when we started selling truss, in our research we found a weakness in the industry…on time delivery. That was it…we had a unique selling point to promise the marketplace… So we figured if we built the highest quality truss, branded what before was looked upon as a commodity…and we were on-time, every time, we’d probably raise some heads, and that’s what happened. We absolutely did not cut any corners from manufacturing to shipping, to being on time, and we still don’t. We promised that it would be quality, and we answered that promise. Our big thing was ‘challenge us. If you need something, we’ll make it happen.’”
That is what they did with GT Truss and in addition to AC/DC, within a year, GT Truss was featured on several concert tours of acts including Neil Diamond, Brad Paisley, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Today, Tyler’s GT Truss is the industry standard lighting pre-rig truss for live events, concert tours, and venues worldwide.
Tyler GT pre-rig truss was designed primarily for automated fixtures, which can be pre-loaded in the shop, with cabling laid in place. This saves time unpacking, hanging, unhanging, and repacking the lights and cable on show site. It also, as noted from the first AC/DC tour, saves a lot of truck space by not having all the extra road cases for the lights and cables. Tyler Truss has always been an ardent supporter of the center backbone concept. They build truss with the center backbone, like the GT, Centerline Truss, and LED truss so the fixtures hang on a center chord rather than on the upstage or downstage chords. This provides for a more balanced load and a safer hang.
A Change in Ownership
After a 15-year run, Dodd sold Tyler Truss to businessman Glenn Cleland in 2019 who came with a long background in automotive manufacturing. “After researching what the long-term possibilities were with Tyler Truss, we were thrilled to become the new stewards of such a successful brand,” said Tyler CEO Cleland. “We wanted to take a very good company and make it a leading manufacturing company. When Mark Dodd started Tyler Truss, it was originally for the benefit of his own truss demands. It catapulted into much bigger things. After now five years growing the business, it’s even more exciting.” Working with Cleland, Marc Johnson, COO and Chris Russell, EVP Marketing/Sales head the day-to-day operations at Tyler Truss. Both previously worked with Cleland for years and have extensive backgrounds in manufacturing and successfully growing companies. To that end, Tyler Truss is today aggressively growing its capabilities and personnel.
“We have invested heavily, but smartly, to acquire top talent, as well as the finest machinery and tools the industry offers,” says Johnson. “The company now produces triple the amount of product than when we came aboard. And that’s just the start.” In addition, Tyler has also expanded its buying capabilities for materials, increased its marketing efforts, and expanded internal training along the way. “We’re on a trajectory of tremendous growth, but we are extremely aware that turnaround times must be as short as they can be,” points out Russell. “Our clients don’t always have the luxury of waiting very long, a need we’re not only aware of, but one we monitor every day.”
“We’ve continued to expand our capacities to support our increased sales—especially overseas,” notes Johnson. “We had spent two years running with four to six month lead times; we’ve finally built and invested heavily into our capacity where we’re able to support the market with lead times of a few weeks instead of months. That’s been our goal for the last two years and now we can answer an order with ‘yes, we can ship in two or three weeks’.”
As most in the industry know, though Tyler is located in central Indiana, it is absolutely a global minded business today. “I think we’ve gained a lot of respect from people in the industry,” comments Russell. “At first it was ‘these are automotive guys that came in and really took over this business with a lean manufacturing process.’ We just had the desire to excel at our manufacturing process. It’s been the industry getting to know who’s behind Tyler Truss as much as what Tyler Truss is today. One of the bigger things is that they may not have realized how large our capabilities are and being able to produce components as quickly as we can now. Even some of the bigger clients we had thought we were just a small mom-and-pop business and only able to produce a few pieces of truss a day. Now they’re learning how large a scope we operate at and of our capabilities; what we’re able to manufacture daily. I’ll never forget getting an order for 200 pieces of GT Truss from one of our customers, and we had a long lead time. We were just busy. They assumed that that was because we only had the capability of building three or four pieces a day when in fact, we could build 40 or 50+ a day. People came in that previously thought we were in a pole barn somewhere building a few pieces of truss at a time. They are pleasantly surprised to see our expanded capabilities.”
A Full Range of Products
When the new management took over, Tyler was very well known for the GT Truss, but the team felt that Tyler wasn’t at the top of mind in terms of standard truss, as well as its custom capabilities by its clients. “When we acquired the business, it was very well known for the pre-rig GT Truss, that was what everybody bought from Tyler Truss,” explains Russell. “It was almost like a lot of the industry didn’t even know we made standard box truss. I was amazed at the number of customers who would order GT Truss from us, but box truss from another supplier. We’ve spent the last two years trying to make sure we’re a full circle supplier. We want to make the truss that the industry needs. We want to innovate new products and pay attention to what’s not out there and make life better for our customers. All our growth has actually come from everything across the board. We are trying to become a full-service provider that can do anything the industry needs when it comes to load-bearing support.”
Cleland agrees with this approach and adds that Tyler is always working to reduce the need for labor on site, as it’s the core of the company’s mission. “What can we do to make it as show-ready when it leaves the shop, as possible? That seems to be a recipe for success,” he says. “We don’t ram a particular product down somebody’s throat; we listen to what our customers are telling us and we’re constantly asking what would make their job easier?” This thinking is the same thought processes that launched Tyler back in 2004. To look at designs and think about how they can be made to work better. Things like looking at how structures go together, how things are transported, how fixtures are mounted within the structure. All these details are important to look at for improvements to be made. That innovative streak has fueled an 18-month sales growth beyond their flagship product—Tyler GT® Plus. They have brought about growth with some key proprietary products, product upgrades, a vast array of accessories, and impressive custom projects.
As Indianapolis gets a lot of tours through, the Tyler team uses them as learning opportunities. When there are shows loading in, you can bet that someone from Tyler is there observing and seeing if there are improvements or innovations that they could make to their products which would make the lives of the road crews that much easier. “We like to go see our customers onsite at load-ins,” states Russell. “I love to see them roll GT Truss off the trucks pre-rigged, ready to go. I was at one load-in, and I saw some lighting ladders being hung manually on site. We came back to the drawing board and said, ‘how can we make torm ladders where it comes in on a cart already pre-rigged and ready to go?’ ‘What can we do to make it easier to tour, easier and faster to load-in and -out?’ Now, we have the Tyler Lighting Tower and Lighting Rack products. The GT Plus was very prominent in the Pitbull tour last year and LPS shared with us that before they went to pre-rig truss, they needed 125 people to load-in the show, and after they went with a pre-rig set up that number was greatly reduced.”
Custom Fabrication
When your company is known for innovative thinking, custom work is a natural progression, and it is an area that Tyler Truss has grown in recent years. They work closely with their customers to fabricate trussing that designers and productions have dreamt up for their clients. Tyler recently fabricated the large circular lighting pods for Bandit Lites to put out on the 2024 leg of the Billy Strings tour, which was a fast turnaround to make the tour’s tight timeline requirements. “We have a custom department that does nothing but build custom product every day to somebody’s specifications,” explains Cleland. “We’re proud of our custom work, and we’re also expanding our engineering department because of the opportunities out there for that work. We found that there’s a big market for custom work, but people weren’t calling Tyler Truss for that kind of work. Now they are.”
From Edwards’ long view of the company over its 20 years, he feels that Tyler is a solid contender in the custom fabrication market. “We’ve got a full custom department, and we can do a lot of custom work; we can do even more than we’re doing now. It all goes with our commitment to our customers. We will never vacate the position of ‘if we tell you it’s going to be there on a date, it will be there’, and the quality will be there. We have really invested in customer service, so if there is an issue, we will do whatever it takes to make it right. If you get it and it’s wrong, there’s no wasting time. We get it back on the board, get it fixed, and ship it out to you. We don’t ask any questions.”
Room for Efficient Manufacturing
Tyler Truss has two facilities in the Indianapolis area, and they like to bring clients—and potential customers—to the manufacturing operations to show off what their newer capabilities are, and all that Tyler Truss can offer. “We’ve put in a lot of efficiencies—that we had practiced for many years in automotive manufacturing—into truss manufacturing,” says Russell. “Everything from precision automated laser cutting to our own, in-house continuous loop automated powder coating. These give us more opportunities than we had in the past. We’re revolutionizing the manufacturing process of truss, and once people see what we’re doing, it turns on the lightbulbs, and they say, ‘these guys could make anything for us if we asked.’ That is it, people just need to know to ask, because we are ready.” Along with more efficiencies, the accuracy has increased as well, again underpinning the high level of quality Tyler’s reputation is built on.
Today, Tyler Truss has 90 employees. “It’s a homegrown business. One hundred percent of the workers are all within 20 miles of our buildings,” says Edwards. “Also, most of our people are long termers; we’ve got a lot of people who have been here since 2012, or earlier. We are an American-made product; it’s not shipped from China and assembled in America. It’s American made, owned, and operated. Also, it’s not a bunch of corporations. Tyler is a family-owned company.” The fact that Tyler is today building three times as much product with roughly the same size staff is a testament to the improvements being made to its capabilities.
Customers as Partners
Tyler Truss’ clients have been very loyal over the years, Tyler—and their products—are highly valued. “The biggest thing is we’re not making a bargain, knock-off type truss,” says Russell. We take truss manufacturing to the extreme. No one is going to be a perfect manufacturer, but whenever we stub our toe, we take it to the nth degree to make sure satisfaction is achieved. We just simply build—what we believe to be—one of the best quality-built truss products on the market. We 360 weld everything; we spend a lot of money on validation, engineering, destructive testing. In our minds, failure is never an option in what we build. When it comes to customer service, it doesn’t matter if you buy one truss from us, or 1,000—every customer is treated the same. And we’ve grown our customer base; we had over 350 different, unique customers that we did business with last year. I think a lot of that goes back to Tyler Truss’ reputation of doing it right the first time. We look at our customers as extended partners, so we feel an obligation to meet their deadlines and do whatever we need to do to help them accomplish what they need to accomplish.”
Johnson believes it is very simple why clients value Tyler. “It’s a quality of innovation,” he states. “Our clients tell us when we speak with them at industry events, or trade shows, that when they have a concern, they can come to us, and we’ll address it. One client said, ‘what I love about Tyler Truss, is that you guys are always trying to solve a problem. You’re always taking an out of the box look at things and trying to make our jobs easier and smoother.’ We are doing that and we’re going to continue doing that. The innovative side of the business is really key for us to continue moving forward and growing. Always bringing new items to the market or listening to our clients and be able to react quickly to them and help them. That’s what really separates us from the competition. We’re here to support the live events industry and to help our clients be more successful. It is why we’re excited for the next 20 years.”
Expanded Services
In 2023, Tyler acquired the Indianapolis-based McGuire Scenic, a nationally recognized scenic construction company. Now branded as Tyler Scenic, they offer custom scenic fabrication, automation, carpentry, CNC routing, electronics, foam carving, sculpture, welding, and custom finishing. “As we’ve had with Tyler Truss in the past five years, we will be heavily investing into top talent, the finest machinery and tools, and products such as staging and drapery for rental,” describes Cleland. “Following Tyler Truss’ journey, Tyler Scenic will go ‘next level’ as well.” Together with Tyler Truss, the two companies can now offer more complete solutions for those who desire more of a turnkey experience with the Tyler quality.
Their Place in the Industry
The team at Tyler continues to keep on the lookout for places where their products and services can fill a need or provide a solution. Today, Tyler’s products can be found on Broadway, one-off concerts and events, concert tours, Houses of Worship, amusement parks, in sports venues, at Olympic and professional athletic events, corporate events, conventions, casinos, and manufacturing facilities. The team at Tyler is rightfully proud, while also keenly aware of their place in the industry. “We’re proud parents every time we see our truss flying at a show,” says Cleland. “But when you’re at a concert and you look at the total money sitting on that stage, we recognize that the truss spend is finite. It’s nuts and bolts. I mean, there’s tens of thousands of dollars worth of lights hanging from our 10’ GT Truss. We understand our place, but we also know that we play a big role in how that show is set up, how efficiently it can be loaded-in, and the labor that’s used to get it in. It is interesting because when you look at a stage and you’re looking at millions of dollars of products on that stage. We might only have $30,000 of product on that stage, but we look at it as being just as important as the most expensive thing up there.”
As the future of live events continues its dynamic growth, Tyler certainly plans to continue its mission to provide world-class products that make a difference. And to provide on-time solutions that help its clients succeed. For 20 years, the Tyler Truss team has remained committed to creating theatrical truss and systems to help its clients increase sales and profits. By bringing a new perspective to the manufacturing of truss and truss systems, the team at Tyler will undoubtedly thrive and grow over the next 20 years—and beyond. Innovation, industry leading products, craftsmanship, and value were the key to Tyler Truss Systems success when launched in 2004 and remain the key ingredients to their success moving forward.
For more information about Tyler Truss Systems, their products and services, go to: www.tylertruss.com
