Benjamin Schaefer, PE

Ben Schaefer, PE, is a licensed engineer, NBIS bridge inspection team leader and co-founder of Preferred, where he leads field inspections and oversees quality control. He has 14 years of experience in structural inspection, is SPRAT Level III certified, has inspected roughly 4,000 structures across 18 states, and specializes in nonredundant steel tension member (NSTM) and timber structures. Ben started as an inspector and worked his way up through team leader, project manager and QC manager, managing statewide inspection programs in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana and serving as a rope access administrator. He is known among his crews for being efficient and thorough, and his timber work shows it: he assesses piles below the ground line with a resistance drill and developed a spreadsheet that converts angled borings into true cross sections and assigns condition states against each state's decay criteria. He has trained about a dozen inspectors and rope access climbers, and he believes the people who inspect a structure should be the ones who write and review its report.

Outside of work, Ben is a self-certified DIY expert (YouTube University, with honors), mostly because he would rather build something himself than pay someone else to. That habit has turned into welding projects, woodworking, home renovations and several trucks built for off-road camping, starting with a small pickup he outfitted to reach campsites a Subaru couldn't. Ben grew up in Wisconsin as one of ten kids and now spends his free time with his wife and their young son, who loves riding bikes probably more than Ben himself and is usually close by in the garage when there's a truck project going. Montana has been a favorite since his first trip there with his wife over 10 years ago, and moving there has been on his rolling five-year plan ever since.

"I got into this because of two people rappelling the Washington Monument, and I've never looked back."