Global Specialized Services offers a wealth of services to customers in the Northwest and Midwest areas of the country, including trucking, heavy-haul, and crane services. GSS also offers Rail Logistics and can assist with everything from unloading at the dock, loading to rail, movement to truck, unloading products, and more.

Recently, GSS has added a Consulting Division to its repertoire, to assist customers in various types of scenarios when it comes to heavy-haul wind components.

“Service-wise, what we can provide is pre-construction consulting to help mitigate any potential issues that are going to come up on that project site in the future,” said Dylan Wisroth, the Senior Operations Manager with GSS.

Wisroth said that the consulting services GSS offers are vast and varied. They include in-person consulting, where consultants will meet with the customer and their team to go over whatever situation they may be facing. They will help them to decide that best haul routes, as well as how to build their string roads, how to build their radius’, how to go about getting permits, and more. In many cases, consultants will actually do the pre-project permitting themselves for the site, acquiring the permits and putting them in order for the customer.

Route planning is an especially large part of GSS’ Consulting Division, as that’s one of the most important parts of any project.

“Site surveys and route surveys are a big part of this service,” said Michael Pantuso, the Operations Field Manager with GSS. “Site surveys are huge. Route surveys are massive too, because these components keep getting larger and larger and the infrastructure in the United States is not set up for that. So having to find the right routes to get some of this equipment to sites, especially where they build the wind farms – those are crucial.”

Additionally, consultants can perform ‘load-outs,’ advising customers on the types of equipment and components to use for each project, as well as traffic control plans.

GSS can also provide customers with drone footage of potential land where projects may take place.

“If they just want a flyover to get the lay of the land so that they can supply that to their team, we can do that,” Wisroth stated. “We’ll just do an auto-turn based on a drone footage snapshot, because Google images are not as accurate. So, the best way to do it is with a drone. We’ll also do dry runs. So, if our customers get to a portion of the project and they believe that the roads are built to where they can get components in there and they want to do a dry run, we’ll actually have one of our trucks and blade trailers go out to the site and actually drive all the site roads to make sure that those clearances are good and that there are no issues. Those are all part of the consulting service.”

The Consulting Division of GSS is a labor of love for Pantuso, who has worked in the heavy-haul industry for almost three decades.

“Ever since I took this position, [consulting] was one of the things that I honed in on and focused on because there were so many areas that this could benefit the company in, and it could broaden our customer base,” Pantuso said. “My 5-year-plan is to have a very large division that employs quite a bit of people. I’d like to have 10 permanent people, just like myself, doing this all over North America and possibly going global with it. We can do this. This is something that’s really, really exciting. And it’s a great opportunity.”

Pantuso said his number one goal is to build the division, and his number two goal is for it to actually finance itself.

Both are goals that could very easily be attained.

Right now, Wisroth said there are only about three people heading up the division at the moment, but the more that word gets out that this is a service GSS offers, the more customers will want to utilize it, resulting in more people being hired to perform the consulting.

This is just one of the services that separate GSS from its competitors, but it’s a stark reminder that GSS is committed to providing beginning-to-end services, allowing customers to rest easy knowing that every step of the haul is being handled by true experts in the field.

And make no mistake about it, Pantuso is very much an expert in this field. He has the experience and, maybe even more importantly, he has the passion to see this division flourish.

“Every person that’s a part of this division are all former heavy haul truck drivers that are trained on all forms of equipment,” he stated. “Consistency is key. So, everybody that comes aboard is going to be trained exactly the same way, to do it exactly the same way, to assess the situation exactly the same way. And they’re all going to have real-world experience.”

Wisroth agreed.

“What separates us from our competitors is just the background of each of our guys on-site,” he stated. “Each one of them come with 25-plus years of heavy haul experience. And, for the most part, I think that we work in every area. We’ve done a lot of work in power plants, mining, wind, oil and gas, and more. And, really, the whole purpose of this division is to save these companies money. We can save companies millions of dollars.”

That is the biggest goal off the Consulting Division of GSS and it’s Pantuso’s goal as well – a goal that he believes his team is more than capable of reaching.

“If you take all the people that could make the decisions to run something here, we have well over 200 years of experience, collectively,” he said. “We have that mix between the younger generation in our office that are brilliant, and then we have my generation that are older and have done all of this stuff before. So, it’s a great mix that we put together, and I think we’re unstoppable.”