Shay Downing didn’t wait for the market to come back. When the industrial logistics company she built near Port Houston took hits from multiple directions in 2025, she went to work on the business itself.

JS&J Solutions specializes in moving, storing, and coordinating oversized industrial equipment for clients in construction, infrastructure, and other sectors. The company’s location near Port Houston is strategic — much of what JS&J handles moves through that corridor before it reaches a job site. By 2024, the business had a growing client base and a contract portfolio that reflected real momentum.

Then 2025 arrived.

Federal shifts disrupted the industrial sectors JS&J served. Tariff changes effectively froze international trade activity. Contracts that had seemed secure were canceled or pushed to indefinite hold. Downing and her husband drew on personal savings to keep the business running. They cut where they could.

But they didn’t stop.

Downing’s relationship with Communities Unlimited (CU) started on the lending side in 2025. When the market turned and JS&J needed more than capital, that relationship expanded. CU connected Downing with CU Senior Management Consultant James Custer from the Entrepreneurship Team, who came alongside her to work through the harder, longer-term questions: What does this business look like on the other side of this? Where does it go next?

Custer and Downing built a strategic plan and detailed financial projections together. The plan charted a path toward a more diversified client base, reducing JS&J’s exposure to any single sector or market. The projections gave CU’s Lending Team a clear picture of where the business was headed.

“As entrepreneurs, especially for me coming out of corporate America, I’m accustomed to having mentors, advisors, and senior leaders you can go to and learn from,” Downing said. “When you move into entrepreneurship, you are the decision maker. And sometimes you get so bogged down operationally that you’re unable to pull yourself out as that leader and look at your business objectively.”

Custer became that perspective for JS&J Solutions.

“Having a set of eyes that’s able to really guide and give you perspective, let you know, hey, maybe you should consider this,” Downing said. “James has absolutely been that.”

On the operational side, Downing moved fast and methodically. She restructured how JS&J staffed projects, shifting some employees to contractor arrangements to create more flexibility. She renegotiated storage access through outside partnerships, cutting fixed costs. She tightened the company’s quoting process — building in full cost accounting, a risk-adjusted margin, and firm re-quote timelines when scope or timing shifts. She also instituted deposits on capital-intensive contracts, reducing the upfront financial exposure that had previously fallen entirely on JS&J.

These weren’t emergency patches. They were lasting structural changes, the kind that come from stepping back and deciding a business needs to operate differently going forward.

By early 2026, the work was showing results. In February, JS&J secured a second loan from CU Lending, funded through the Sachs Family Foundation, providing the working capital to maintain cash flow while executing on active contracts. The company’s portfolio now reflects the range and ambition of its new direction, including a domestic contract that grew directly out of a client relationship Downing kept close during the difficult months of 2025.

“The first thing it does for us is give us forecastable revenue,” she said. “We’re in a project business, and historically our projects have been more spot work. It’s really difficult to forecast quarter over quarter. This gives us the bandwidth with the cash flow to reinvest in our business, reinvest in our staff, specifically our sales team, so that we can go after incremental projects.”

What Downing is building toward isn’t rapid expansion. It’s something more durable.

“Stability and predictability,” she said. “I’m not interested in premature growth. I want stable growth. I want sustainable growth, forecastable growth.”

CU’s Lending and Entrepreneurship Teams remain active partners as JS&J moves into its next phase.