Steve Schuster had one more story to get right

Steve Schuster had made his employees a promise. When he eventually stepped away from Rainier Communications, they would still have a company to work for. His departure would not become their scramble for a new job. For a founder whose business was helping other people explain themselves, this was an unusually personal communications brief. The message would have to survive the messenger.

On July 9, 2026, Rainier announced that Sarah LaLiberte would become CEO, with Schuster continuing as founder and advisor. She had worked at the agency from 1998 to 2001, then spent the intervening years building a career in technology marketing. The return joined an old relationship to a practical succession plan. After more than three decades in charge, Schuster was handing responsibility to someone who already understood the place.

There is a pleasing reversal here. Founders spend years persuading customers that their particular judgment makes the company worth hiring. Eventually, they must persuade those same customers that the company can flourish under somebody else. Schuster had reached that second assignment. A convincing farewell required more than a gracious announcement; it required a successor with authority and experience.

His daughter, Eliza Sharrah, remembers the business starting in the basement of the family’s log cabin. In her telling, the office culture later included jeans, T-shirts, a large couch and visiting dogs happy to occupy it. She also remembers her father’s delight in employees’ promotions and growing families. Those details give the succession promise its weight. A business with that much ordinary life inside it needs a future beyond its founder’s calendar.

Before the pitch, the circuitry

Long before Rainier, Schuster worked on the things that communications agencies would later need him to explain. His early engineering career included speech-recognition systems for Ray Kurzweil and professional audio equipment for Lexicon. His education paired electrical engineering with an MBA, both at Northeastern University. He arrived in marketing carrying the habits of somebody who had helped build the product.

At Concurrent, he moved into product management for real-time data acquisition and signal-processing products, then industry marketing. He later ran Data Translation’s digital signal processing division. These were jobs in which the details mattered: what a system measured, how it processed information, which customer needed it and why. Technical language was part of the working equipment.

The frustration that led to Rainier was specific. As an executive, Schuster found that outside advertising and PR agencies struggled to communicate technology credibly to technical audiences. He founded Rainier in 1993 to address that gap. An agency could write a lively sentence and still miss the significance of the engineering. His proposed advantage was understanding enough to know which sentence was worth writing.

That background helps explain the agency’s later concentration on semiconductors, wireless, AI and quantum computing. In those markets, an audience may be highly knowledgeable and still need help grasping why a particular development matters. Schuster built his working life around that awkward middle distance between an invention and its adoption. Having something to say is the beginning of the job.

A family habit, with invoices

Schuster describes himself as a fourth-generation entrepreneur. His father, both grandfathers and all four great-grandfathers started businesses. The family history ranges from a bakery and general store to property ventures; his father, Joseph, also founded a Grand Canyon rafting company. Starting something was familiar family behavior, long before it became a line in Steve’s professional biography.

His own account of entrepreneurship has a useful sense of the ridiculous. He has gently punctured the notion that running a business means answering to nobody, pointing toward the assembled ranks of customers, employees, landlords and bankers. Independence comes with a surprisingly crowded audience. He has also written that financial riches were hardly the defining result across his family’s generations of business owners.

When Rainier reached its 28th anniversary, his advice to his younger self included charging properly for valuable work, stopping unsuccessful efforts sooner and seeking help from experienced people. He admitted to having felt embarrassed about asking for money. It is a revealing confession from somebody paid to make other companies’ value legible: he had to learn to price his own.

Another instruction was personal: “don’t let the business define who you are.” The warning fits a career with several outlets for the same restless appetite to make things. Schuster writes, records songs and takes photographs. An agency can occupy a great deal of a founder’s attention. It need not have permanent possession of his identity.

“You don’t need to go it alone. Throw your ego out.”

Steve Schuster, looking back after 28 years at Rainier

What a burst pipe taught the marketer

One of Schuster’s more useful business anecdotes begins in Barbados. He and his wife were working there during a New England winter when news arrived that a frozen copper pipe had burst back home. Flooding had destroyed the first floor of their two-story apartment. The Caribbean arrangement had acquired a thoroughly uninvited New England subplot.

He described responding by separating the damaged belongings from the process of rebuilding. Furniture, electronics, art and appliances were possessions; reconstruction was a sequence of tasks. His point was practical rather than heroic. A large, upsetting problem becomes more manageable when somebody identifies every necessary step and then takes those steps.

The same essay connects his successes to methodical work powered by a creative idea, and his failures to attempted shortcuts. That combination is a good description of his professional territory. Public relations involves imagination, but an appealing idea still needs competent execution. There are calls to make, arguments to test and details that will resist being wished away.

His model for agency conduct offers another clue: lawyers. He has argued that PR practitioners should act as counselors and advocates, giving considered advice and representing their clients’ ideas with commitment. It is an intentionally demanding comparison. A client hires judgment as well as output. The relationship asks the agency to understand the business deeply enough to offer counsel, including when an easy answer would be more comfortable.

The other kind of recording session

The engineering and the music sit closer together in Schuster’s life than a conventional executive biography might suggest. He once worked on professional audio equipment; he also became a singer-songwriter and recording artist. His catalogue includes Sweet Gems in 2017, Unassembled Man in 2020 and Permanently High in 2024. The last of those contains 11 songs across 46 minutes. These are completed records, with collaborators and release dates.

Unassembled Man took three years to make and contains twelve tracks. The connection to his community work appears in its personnel: Sharon Henderson, the YMCA of Central Massachusetts’ marketing and communications director, contributed backing vocals. Schuster was serving on the organization’s board. A professional association had found another place to make itself heard.

His songs also draw on places and experiences he has carried for years. He first climbed Masada in 1979 and returned repeatedly. For the song Masada, he wrote from the perspective of the last Jewish rebel at the fortress; the accompanying video was filmed on location. He included a shofar in the recording. The instrument is a distinctive choice for a rock song, quite apart from any claims about musical firsts.

Another song, Halcyon Haze, looks back toward his experience as a Jewish summer-camp song leader. He describes its territory as youth, friendship, nature and first love. Dinosaurs & Dragons turns toward childhood imagination. The subjects are far removed from the technical markets his agency serves, yet they make his insistence on a life beyond Rainier feel entirely concrete. There is a catalogue to listen to.

Photography supplies another outlet for the same attention to place. His photographs have appeared in Jewish Post & Opinion, including images from a 2015 Rabin remembrance gathering in Tel Aviv. He has also published The Liberation Haggadah, in 2009. Writing, music and images recur across his life as finished objects intended for other people to encounter.

Giving the next chapter to somebody else

Schuster’s public commitments extend beyond the clients who pay for his advice. He joined Faunalytics’ board in 2020, bringing technology-marketing experience to an organization that supplies research for animal advocates. Its biography describes his vegan-ethics advocacy and work advising startups including VeganNation and Billion Vegans. The communications skill travels: an idea still needs an audience, whether it comes from a laboratory or a cause.

There is also a long relationship with Israel’s technology community. Rainier opened an Israeli office in 1997 to help startups reach North American markets. Schuster’s professional trips developed alongside his writing, photography and music about the country. These activities overlap without becoming interchangeable. A client campaign, a photograph and a song each give him a different way to hold somebody’s attention.

Back at Rainier, LaLiberte’s return brought experience in many of the agency’s existing markets. Her career included Aware, Lantiq, an interim presidency at the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium and more than twelve years running a technology-marketing consultancy. Schuster was placing the next stage of the business in practiced hands. His continuing advisory role supplied a bridge for the team and its clients.

Rainier’s announcement described the handover as a way to preserve its team, client relationships, technical focus and culture. Four Technology Agency of the Year wins form part of the agency’s record under Schuster. Awards can mark what a business has done. Succession asks a more immediate question: who will do the work on Monday?

The answer now belongs to LaLiberte and the people working with her. That is the consequence Schuster had promised to arrange. His earlier advice to entrepreneurs included finding mentors and surrendering some ego; the handover gave those ideas a visible, organizational form. After years helping companies earn a hearing, he had helped his own company continue the conversation. He could leave the CEO’s chair with the next speaker already in place.