#42 What Really Moves a Show | ShowShuttle and Extreme Lighting & Sound (ELS)

Every touring crew knows the same routine: cases stacked too high, restacked every night, and a crew’s back a little more worn out by the third city. Inside Extreme Lighting & Sound’s shop in Nashville, that daily grind is exactly what a team of welders, machinists, and lighting techs has spent years trying to fix.

Nikki Sanz spent a day on the floor there, welded her first bead, and sat down with the people building the gear that’s meant to make load-in less brutal and load-out faster.

A Shop Built Around a Problem

The ShowShuttle is ELS’s answer to a problem every road crew has lived with: cases built for one fixture, one tour, then stacked, unstacked, and stacked again. Founder and CEO Austin Grunberg designed the ShowShuttle as a modular, truck-pack-sized cart, taller than a standard case so it doesn’t need to be stacked at all, and sized to fit through a standard commercial man door for the venues that don’t have a loading dock.

“So it’s fully modular, which allows us to adjust where these are… everything is super durable and road ready and strong. Kind of the Swiss Army knife of a set cart.”

It took six years of prototyping to get there. ELS has already run Gen 1 ShowShuttles at multiple companies, collected feedback from the road, and rebuilt the design more than once before bringing it to market.

“I didn’t want to release a product that’s not vetted 100%… the product that we have today is not patched together.”

Never Too Young to Start

Austin’s path to founding ELS started with a set of Chauvet lights he asked for at Christmas around age 12. That gift became a one-person operation called AgLite, then a lighting gig at his middle school talent show, then a job at 15 coiling cable and running backline at a club in Illinois. By his junior year of high school, after his family relocated to the Nashville area, Austin and his father Glenn Grundberg had turned that experience into a company.

Austin went straight from high school into touring, spending several years on the road with Maddy & Tae in multiple roles: lighting, guitar teching, monitor engineering, and stage managing. He eventually stepped off the road full time because ELS had grown too fast for him to run it from a tour bus.

Learning to Weld, Machine, and Wire

Back at the shop, ELS’s fabrication and integration teams build most of what the company sells in-house. Lead welder Caleb Stewart, who learned the trade at a factory job before ELS, walked Nikki through her first weld on a scrap piece of aluminum.

“This is basically how I learned. They handed me the welder and said, get to it.”

Machinist Ross Davenport, twenty years into the trade, showed how a solid aluminum bar becomes a precision part for the ShowShuttle frame, cut on a CNC mill programmed from a laptop. “Constant measurement, test fitting. We get a print, we measure per print.”

AVL integration lead Josh Gunnel handled the permanent-install side, building the cables that connect ELS’s lighting rigs, and walked Nikki through wiring one from scratch.

Kaden Newby’s Path Into Lighting Design

Kaden Newby started at ELS in a stage manager role that grew into audio and then lighting design, teaching himself on a small rig during nights and weekends until it became a career.

“To be able to set the mood and kind of make people feel or like a certain way about something, or to drive their focus somewhere… that just for me felt really powerful.”

Kaden’s advice for anyone chasing a similar path was less about encouragement and more about honesty: the work behind a show is a lot bigger than what audiences see from their seats.

The Father-Son Build

Glenn Grundberg, Austin’s father and ELS’s VP and co-owner, is a Navy veteran who spent years bouncing between carpentry, the oil patch, and a touring band before landing on electrical work. ELS started almost by accident: while working as an electrical contractor in Nashville, Glenn realized his company was subcontracting out theatrical lighting and sound work that Austin, then still in high school, already knew how to do.

“Would you have any objection to me forming a little side company and subcontracting it to myself?… Extreme Lighting and Sound was born.”

Austin led the crew on ELS’s first job, a school auditorium install, while still a junior in high school.

Hiring for Character, Not Just Resume

Lisa Moore joined ELS as director of HR from a healthcare background with no live events experience at all. She was referred by her son, ELS welder Caleb Stewart, and now leads a hiring approach built around fit over credentials.

“For us, it’s all about the personality, the character, the ethics, the morals… we can teach a technical aspect of anything.”

What Kept the Doors Open During COVID

That approach, Moore said, is also what keeps ELS’s client relationships intact: most of the company’s business comes from repeat clients and word of mouth built over more than a decade.

When production work disappeared industry-wide, ELS’s electrical contracting license, classified as an essential service, kept revenue coming in. The team pivoted its production and fabrication staff into electrical work, running conduit and pulling wire on jobs that kept everyone employed. That division ended up outperforming the previous three years combined and funded the expansion of ELS’s production department once touring came back.

What’s Next for ELS

The ShowShuttle and its sibling, the TrussShuttle, are the first products ELS has brought to market, but Austin says the company is already developing a longer list based on requests from other crews and companies in the industry. The bigger goal, he says, goes beyond any one product.

“We want to innovate in the industry… but also for the ease of use and the protection of the crews too.”

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