Jennifer Schuster: On her terms

While Jennifer Schuster’s career aspirations did not initially involve the realm of rigging and heavy haul, she has become a leading player in the industry. As president and COO of Edwards Moving & Rigging, she is involved “in a little bit of everything” at the highly revered company that performs some of the world’s most complicated projects.

Jennifer Schuster, President and COO, Edwards Moving & Rigging

Founded in 1961, Edwards started as a structure moving company, specializing in moving historic buildings. Mark Edwards purchased the company from his father in the late 1980s, when he began evolving it into an equipment moving company, focusing on the transport of transformers, turbines, generators and related heavy vessels and equipment. With its headquarters in Shelbyville, KY, the company also has locations in Florida, South Carolina, Ohio and Illinois.

Hit the ground running

Schuster’s introduction to the company started rather serendipitously in 2014 when she was a practicing attorney in business litigation and employment law.

“I was a partner at the firm and Mark Edwards was one of our clients,” she explained. “I started doing some work for him and learning about the company.”

In the summer of 2015, he asked her for a meeting. She had no idea what he wanted to discuss.

Turns out, he wanted to transition someone into the role of president while working with his son, Jason Edwards, who is now CEO of the company. He said her name kept coming up as a person who could join the company’s leadership team and hit the ground running.

“Even though my background was legal, he said he could teach me what I needed to know about the business,” Schuster said. “He offered me the job of executive vice president. His goal was to retire in the next three to four years.”

Mark Edwards believed that Schuster and the leadership team could take the company to the next level of success.

“It was a leap of faith,” she said. “It took a couple of months to transition my legal practice, and then I jumped into wherever I was needed.”

At the end of 2021 Mark Edwards officially retired and the succession plan played out seamlessly.

“Jason’s experience is more toward the field personnel and maintaining our internal criteria and standards,” she said. “I work on supporting our sales team and taking a project from the initial sale and transitioning it to operations – making sure we are all communicating. This means pulling in our engineering team and coordinating between departments to assure we are following the processes we’ve set up to ensure safety and quality are our priority. I make sure that our internal processes allow us to keep up with our growth. The company has experienced tremendous growth.”

Grace and grit

Today, Schuster is one of a handful of women in a C-suite role in the rigging and specialized transportation industry. It’s a role she handles with grace, grit, wisdom and aplomb.

“Over the last 10 years, we have a lot more women in the field,” she said. “For the most part, they are in back-office roles, in permitting, administrative support and accounting. They are doing fantastic work, and I envision more women will step into leadership roles. More women are out in the field too. This is an industry that has been typically male dominated, but there are roles for women. We need to raise awareness that there are opportunities for female leadership.”

Edwards President and COO Jennifer Schuster started out as an attorney but has transitioned to become a major player in the heavy haul business.

Schuster believes it’s important for women to get involved in the industry, especially in SC&RA. She recently finished a three-year term on the Transportation Governing Committee. In April, she was elected to the SC&RA Board of Directors. She is a huge advocate for making the industry safter and more productive.

I caught up with her in early July to talk about the work of Edwards Moving & Rigging and the challenges of running a heavy haul business. I found her to be engaging, interesting and forthright.

How do you describe Edwards Moving and Rigging’s scope of services?

We specialize in rigging and heavy haul. While we do not own any cranes, we do own gantries and a fleet of Goldhofer trailers and other trailers that will transport, move and lift anything. Our wheelhouse is moving and rigging anything over 150,000 pounds – transformers, generators and turbines. We are heavily concentrated in power, but we also do a lot of work in the steel industry – anything in the industrial realm that has large components and machinery. We have an in-house engineering team and provide our own engineering services. We also do a lot of barge work. We move really heavy, tall or long objects from Point A to Point B as safely and efficiently as possible.

Edwards seems to approach projects with a different mindset. What distinguishes the company in the North American heavy haul market?

We have a lot of employees who have been with us a long time. We are very knowledgeable at what we do, and we believe in the standards we’ve set as a company. And we lead with safety.

Across the company, we talk about taking ownership of your task or your project. We own our projects from cradle to grave. The project manager will drive the project, but there is a team in place making sure all the pieces are in place, the engineering, the permits, the route. Site conditions are very important, and for the larger projects, we are onsite working closely with the customer. We want everything in place so that we are fully ready when it’s time to execute, and our focus is on doing it safely, not running around covering that last detail.

When you are focusing on the execution, everyone owns the next step. We foster the idea that we are all on the same team and all moving in the same direction. It plays out in all that we do. We have a team-focused approach, from the sales guys taking the first call to the superintendent determining the approach to take to the engineering team drawing up the plans to the crew performing the job.

What is it about this industry that keeps you engaged?

The industry has a lot of variety. We move over 200 transformers a year – in addition to all the rotating gear and other heavy components and machinery. Each job is unique. It is an exciting industry and there’s always a new challenge that keeps you engaged. There’s also something satisfying about getting the job done.

I have always found this company, Edwards, to be fascinating. When I was in the legal practice, I was like ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ We are solution providers. We deliver components that keep the lights on for people. We are moving vital components.

What are the particular challenges in the heavy haul and rigging market currently?

Right now, it is the workforce. It’s always a challenge, and other industries are also facing the challenge of finding a reliable workforce, finding skilled people. We have an added challenge – our work happens in all seasons and weather conditions, and it often requires being away from home. Finding good personnel is hard enough, but it’s more difficult in our industry.

How does Edwards address workforce development?

We’ve started an apprentice program to help educate and identify early on crew members who have potential. Our goal is to show them a path forward with not just a job, but a career. This is a field where you can work your way up, from labor, to rigger to project superintendent. These are well-paying jobs that have a defined career path.

We are also looking inward at success at crew members and superintendents who have been successful. What do they have in common? Retention is very important in this process, and we are focusing on practices that start at the beginning.

What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

My husband and I are empty nesters, so we have more time than when our three boys were home. We live in Louisville, Kentucky, and one of the things we really enjoy is going to concerts and catching new bands locally. We are big music fans, and live music is something we do.

We go visit our sons, we like to enjoy the local restaurants and sports. I went to the University of Kentucky and I’m a huge fan. We go to football and basketball games when we can.