One-Stop Shop
Supreme Crane & Rigging LLC founder Keith Hyatt’s journey to success
Chuckling, the founder and principal owner of Supreme Crane & Rigging LLC shares, “It does sound kind of crazy … a crane rental company without a crane.”
Yes, you read that correctly—just over a year ago, Keith Hyatt founded a crane company … without owning a single crane.
In June 2016, Keith quit his job as a crane operator and opened a business account with a beginning balance of just $2,000. With his extensive knowledge of cranes and rigging, combined with his wife’s academic background in business, Keith was confident in his vision for Supreme Crane & Rigging and refused to allow naysayers’ doubts deter him from success.
A Market Niche
Essentially, Keith started Supreme Crane & Rigging not to sell cranes, but to sell his crane operating services. Describing his role as a sort of “crane broker,” Keith serves as an intermediary that connects customers with cranes from third-party companies at a discounted rate and then operates the cranes himself to complete customers’ projects.
While cranes cost millions of dollars to purchase, and renting a crane for a job can be confusing and time-consuming, Supreme Crane & Rigging has become what Keith describes as a “one-stop shop.”
He elaborates, “Because of my knowledge of cranes and rigging, I know how to connect people with cranes and crane operators. My specialty is catering to my clients’ unique needs and I think I’ve found a market niche.”
Keith indeed appears to have found a niche in the crane and rigging industry. When he and Maria launched Supreme Crane & Rigging, they worked from his home and truck, owned zero cranes, and had just three employees. Today, just a little over a year later, Supreme Crane & Rigging has two offices, two cranes, four trailers, a forklift, three RAM heavy-duty trucks, 17 employees, and even an entire department dedicated to rigging. The company earned about $1.5 million dollars in its first year of business and is projected to earn about $2.5 million in its second.
While Keith’s vision clearly has culminated in success, he emphasizes, “Building this company was a team effort and there truly isn’t a weak link in the chain holding Supreme Crane & Rigging together.” Just a few months after Supreme Crane & Rigging opened for business, Tommy Byrd became part-owner of the company, and Keith believes it is Tommy’s knowledge and management skills, combined with an incredible team of employees, that have proven integral to the company’s growth.
From the River to the Crane
Though Keith has worked in the crane and rigging business for 11 years, his path to the industry was by no means expected or direct.
Keith’s work experience actually began at the age of eight on a river in his hometown of Starks, La. Alongside his father and brothers, he worked for his family’s business catching, skinning and selling fish. After dropping out of school midway through the ninth grade, Keith went to work as a boilermaker and participated in projects throughout the United States. Years later—though without a day of previous experience in the field—he was one of just 12 selected from a pool of 4,000 applicants to work as a process operator at LyondellBasell’s Houston Refinery.
Next, Keith decided to pursue his longtime interest in rigging and obtained his NCCER Rigger & Signal Person certification. He performed so well as a rigger that his superiors encouraged him to begin familiarizing himself with cranes. Shortly thereafter, Keith began training with seasoned crane experts and then went on to complete and pass the CCO Mobile Crane Operator certification program exam, sponsored by the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators. This certified him to operate both small and large hydraulic cranes and proved a key step along the path toward his eventual decision to found Supreme Crane & Rigging.
In his early 20s, Keith also completed the General Educational Development (GED) certification as well as the 132-hour OSHAcademy Safety and Health online training program. He even served on an emergency response team for chemical manufacturing and toll processing provider, KMCO, in Crosby, Texas, while obtaining fire and emergency services training at Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX).
This is it
Though he has worked in a variety of industries, Keith has every intention of remaining in the crane and rigging business. For a long time, Keith’s goal as a professional was advancement. He notes, “I never liked being at the bottom, so with each new job I’d wait in anticipation for the next opportunity to move on or up in the workplace.”
However, things changed for Keith when he sat in the seat of a crane. In that moment he remembers thinking, “This is it. This is what I’m excited about.” Now, over a year later since he formed his own company, he proudly attests, “I’m still just as excited about my work.”
The Real Success
It is apparent that Keith has excelled in virtually every step of his journey. Really, what’s most impressive about Keith’s story isn’t the fact that he consistently advanced in spite of his short academic career and his lack of formal mechanical training, or even the fact that his new business was nearly an overnight success. Instead, the real triumph is Keith’s continual dedication to his values and the people behind his business.
As one of eight children, Keith didn’t have much growing up and had to forego activities like playing sports or relaxing with his friends after school so that he could work for his family’s business. However, Keith never felt cheated and instead embraced any opportunity to help his family.
While his work as a child was an act performed selflessly for the good of his family, Keith feels the lessons he learned on the river were invaluable. It was during this time that he developed mechanical skills, cultivated a strong work ethic and, ultimately, gained the confidence that would later enable him to start his own business. “Watching my father every day as we floated up and down the river was incredible. No matter what adversities he faced, he never stopped. He was and still is my inspiration,” says Keith.
While excited about his company’s day-to-day work, Keith is motivated most by the opportunity to pay forward his personal success by investing in his employees.
“I want my employees to look at me as a leader. I want to be the kind of boss they are genuinely happy to see walk around the corner while they are working,” he says.
In addition to his creation of a positive work environment in which questions are invited and professional and personal assistance from company leadership is the norm, Keith moves mountains for his employees. Be it inviting them over to his family home for barbeque, or paying for them to receive new training and further education, his employees’ best interests are always top of mind.
One employee, Jonathan Hinojosa, describes the time the air conditioner in his family truck stopped working. “I told Keith about my truck and he offered to take it to a friend of his to diagnose the problem. At the end of that same day, Keith called me and told me my truck was fixed. He had personally paid for all necessary repairs,” recalls Jonathan.
For those close to Keith, stories like this are common. Keith’s father, also named Keith, elaborates: “He never expects anything. He just does things to help out his fellow man and I’m so proud of him.”
Going Forward
Keith never dreamed that what started out as a small, minority and woman-owned business would have accomplished so much in such a short amount of time. Though Supreme Crane & Rigging has made great strides in its first year of operation and has already had the opportunity to assist with large-scale projects such as the University of Houston football stadium, Keith has even bigger plans for the future. Ultimately, he envisions growing his business to include a few additional locations, acquiring larger shops and more cranes, and—most importantly—hiring and investing in more employees.