In our fleet

Two years ago I had a goal to start a small service based business as an owner operator. Coming from an office based role within the construction industry, I knew this was always going to be a challenge; however I relished any opportunity to start a small business on my own. I was a little unsure exactly what industry that this was going to be in, but always knew it would be based around machinery. After looking into transport and similar industries, I settled on a crane hire based company. I started researching and there seemed to be opportunities with limited access crane hire; as Adelaide moved towards 'infilling' and higher density developments. So I started researching crane supply using smaller 'city cranes'.

After some further research, I found a small 10t city crane available to purchase interstate; after the inspections I purchased the unit. I recall the crane arriving at my workshop, staring at it, and thinking 'What have I done?' I started learning to drive the machine and completed crane licences in order to operate the unit. At the time my brother was living interstate; so I called him up and asked him to come and help me get up and running; he promptly agreed and completed his Dogman/Rigger qualifications in order to assist me in the business.

After we had 'all the ticks' in the right boxes, we started searching for work. Although both my brother and I were not from the industry, we both have experience mechanically, Thomas as a Mechanic and myself from the construction industry. However, it was a long hard road searching for clients and commence building a customer base.

We always knew, that if we focussed hard on safe, quality, customer focused service delivery, we couldn't go wrong.

In the first twelve months of operation in the business we built a handy solid customer base and found the 10t crane to be consistently busy day in day out. So after the first twelve months, Load 28 purchased its second crane, a 16t city class crane. We worked hard again with the two units and further expanded our client base and service delivery. During this second year, we completed a number of glass panel installation projects in various major projects around Adelaide, it was this move that led us to purchase a brand new Maeda Mini Crawler crane, fitted with a remote glass handler to complete a major glass installation project in Adelaide, which we are currently 50% thorough the project. The Mini Crane with remote glass handler, gave us an edge on our competition and this machine is a fantastic piece of equipment for installing glass panels in limited access areas. The Load 28 Mini Crawler featured in the Crane display for the 2012 CICA Crane Conference.

Load 28 is just entering its third year in 2012/13, and we are looking at the purchase of a fourth piece of equipment to round out our fleet off limited access equipment. I have formed a great passion for the industry and we are poised well to become leaders in our industry for the supply of limited access crane hire here in Adelaide.

Marcus Rigney, operations manager Load 28 Crane Hire