Establishing Blue Cranes in 1990 seems like an eternity away

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 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

year and never looked back. We make sure that if we quote on a job it is worth doing. The biggest shock came recently when we found out that Mitall is closing in Saldanha. Blue Cranes had a contract with Mitall for crane maintenance almost from the start that grew into a long relationship almost up to the end. We can move the staff to do jobs at the other service outlets when needed, we can look for other work, but it will have an everlasting impact on the people of the West Coast. Some jobs are interesting and fun, very few can say that they have a crane installed at the SANEA base on Antarctica, St Helena Island, our name is there, Madagascar and all over Namibia. Which small company can say that they send technicians to all corners of the world ensuring that their jobs stay interesting? Blue Cranes must do the day to day things but we also make sure that our technicians have some adventure along the way, flying in helicopters to jobs, drive up mountains in 4 x4’s or even go to a site by bush plane from time to time, is hopefully not the only reason why they stay. Facts is, we all need good staff, and if any crane company tell you that they are better than the other then it is a lie. We all make use of the same pool of technical staff that is available, some like us are training apprentices, although not fast enough, it is he who manage their staff the best that will win this game of snakes and ladders. John le Grange, (old Water Weights) told us once that “if it is more than 2 hands full, it is too much”. If you think you can take contracts and employ more staff you are mistaken. It normally cost you existing customers. As a small business owner you need to realize that you cannot control everything and to put your energy into the things you can. If a competitor decides to take a contract of you no matter what, you cannot control that. You cannot control it if your opposition removes their assistants from the equation, making them cheaper to then send 2 technicians to the job for which the customer pays. What you can control is making sure that your company stay true to its principals and values. If we make a mistake we say so and carry the cost, if our technician slip up then Blue Cranes fix it. Those customers will come back in the end and then stay with you. Throughout you have seen names that has influenced my life, with the best lesson given to me by Richard Hinckley, foreman at Genrec at the time, always said “Maak n Plan”. As an apprentice I stencilled this to the wall, but as one word. Then again I must admit that Kobus is the better at it. Throwing engineering challenges at him will very fast result in a solution. This he picked up during the Angolan bush war, fixing things on the move while lead is flying all around him. If Camel had a crane advert my partner would be the after-action satisfaction man. Being a small privately owned company, versus a multinational have its advantages as well as disadvantages, we can do jobs at cost just to put our name to it, we can quote to include some fun in a project or even do it for free but what is most relevant is that we can pick the projects that make our lives interesting and hopefully be profitable at the same time.

I realize we do not have all the nice and colourful pamphlets that some customers want, but hey, they have Blue Cranes. Somewhere in the middle of all of this into my life came John mac Donald, (Crane Aid and later Kone), the proverbial ice salesman to the Eskimo. A skill neither me or Kobus possess. We sell on technical specifications which unfortunately is not always that successful, but we will rather lose a sale today than to get a call in the early hours of the morning from an upset customer. What is most difficult is to give over to the next generation and hope that the legacy we have built will continue. In the end the lifting equipment game is like playing chess from one side of the board with chess rules against an opponent playing checkers, from the other side with his set of rules. You need to be wide awake and think on your feet all the time. If you read this and were looking for our customer names, all I can say is that this game is an interesting one, so roll the dice.

Joseph van Huyssteen Blue Cranes,

+27 (0) 21 556 0498, +27 (0) 82 490 5453, joseph@bluecranes.co.za, www.bluecranes.co.za