COVER STORY Establishing Blue Cranes in 1990 seems like an eternity away, but at the same time, as if it was yesterday. How time flies when you are having fun. “My business partner, Kobus Steyn, , (nicknamed by Demag as the 2 musketeers) has known each other from HTS Elspark outside Germiston, joint forces and opened the first Blue cranes branch in Cape Town followed by Saldanha then Swakopmund and later Vredendal. Kobus came through the military, been permanent force for close to 20 years, although new to the lifting equipment industry at the time he brought discipline and sense to our everyday life, but most importantly he knew that money was round and how to let it roll into good investments, whereas I would have driven the biggest badass Range Rover I can lay my hands on. For me, I am the lifelong crane man. As a young boy I would go with my father to “Hume Pipe” and he would let we climb onto the cranes and let the driver show me how to turn those old drum controllers. After 2-year military service I did my electrical apprenticeship at Genrec Engineering in Wadeville, mostly servicing and repairs to cranes, then moved over to Morris Cranes as electrical manager in 87 with Bruce Norridge at the helm. Bruce almost fired me in week 2, then ignored me for 2 years flat. Looking back, the best thing that ever happened to me. During that 2 years I made sure to do more than I got paid for, which must have been noticed. One morning I was called to his office, he gave me keys to a company car and double the salary. Bruce is this bigger than life figure 4
Lifting Africa - Sep/Oct 2020
and we were all shit scared of him. He expected us to make discissions based on the facts before you in an instant, no matter what, and if it does go South, “what are we going to do to fix it”? Between Lourens Langlois and I (drawing office at the time and later production manager) we thought we were running the show, when in fact it was Bruce moving us from one department to the next, giving us life’s lessons, we needed for the future to run our own businesses. Bruce went on to become the big boss of Morris Cranes worldwide. After a stint with Crane Aid, me and Kobus started Blue Cranes with a series 2 short wheel base Land Rover and an old Toyota with very little money, on a very small scale and built Blue Cranes up to the business it is today with close to the best 50 staff members one can get, but they will tell you that Blue Cranes is not easy to work for. But a crane service business, is a crane service business no matter how you look at it. Be you Kone, Morris, Condra or any one of the other 100 companies doing the same thing, we all have budgets and commitments, we all have to answer to somebody, be it a share-holder far away or a business partner sitting next to you. We all have to make it work to pay salaries and endless bills, to only realize that in the end it is about banks and taxes but mostly overheads just for some profit, so whilst we at Blue Cranes played this “Game of
Thrones” with our competitors, we made sure that we had some fun along the way doing some weird and wonderful jobs, one of them a complete row of cranes with the runways at a 30 degree angle to a straight line of beams and hoists. Paging through old job books bring back floods of memories, I can still remember many of those jobs years down the line, for instance, Job 1 was for installing lights in a shoe shop, followed not long after that with the installation of a bridge over a canal that is still in use today and to now have broken through the 100 000 jobs completed. PEP stores distribution has been one of our longest running contracts, all on the shake of a hand and that is still the way we prefer to do business, not that life is so simple anymore especially with BEE, ECSA, LEEASA and the DOL in the mix. Although Blue Cranes have built new overhead cranes for almost every big-name customer out there, we still stick to the thing that we do best. One been legal inspections as per the OHS act. Blue Cranes have won numerous contracts because of our documentation system, and it reflects in the number of ladies we employ to make sure that it run smooth. Some of the jobs gave us bragging rights, or so we though. When Blue Cranes lost the Koeberg Power Station contract after 7 years, we then thought it was the end of the world for us, when in fact Blue Cranes doubled in size in that same
