Sims Crane

29 May 2015


Florida-based Sims Crane & Equipment hires and sells mobile cranes and rigging to customers across the state, completing more than 3,000 jobs a month, says vice president of marketing Dean Sims II.

Sims Crane was founded in 1959 by Tommy Sims, who was an ironworker and the head of the ironworkers' union.

He realised that the company was making more money from renting out its crane than through its erection work, so in 1962 bought five cranes.

There's been a lot of history since -- by the end of the 1960s the company had around 12 cranes, and in the 1970s it worked on building Disneyworld here in Florida.

In the 1980s Dean Sims renamed the company as Sims Crane & Equipment, selling off some of the equipment and rebuilding the business. Today we have around 350 employees, 300 cranes, 150 forklifts and boomlifts, and 70-80 tractors and trailers.

We operate only in Florida, specialising in mobile taxi cranes and providing point-to-point movement of equipment and rigging. We have Tadano and Grove cranes in our fleet, Kobelco crawler cranes, and have just added a huge Tadano all terrain to our portfolio, the first in North America.

We cover lots of different types of work, including the power, chemical, infrastructure, and public utilities sectors -- we touch a little bit of everything. Some parts of the US focus on a certain sector, such as wind or oil, but in Florida it's more mixed.
We do complete a lot of projects in theme parks and zoos. We work on the rides, we've moved animals from zoos to clinics, and we completed a four-crane lift of a boat used on a river cruise.

Florida has lots of cool projects -- we used a SL6000 Kobelco crane at SpaceX to help move 600t rockets, and we've worked at the NASA visitor centre.

There is a trend towards larger cranes -- our clients are asking to handle larger and larger loads, for projects such as bigger buildings. For example, with tilt walls, the size of the panels has increased. Ten years ago in Miami buildings were 300-350ft high -- now they're all 500ft.

We perform around 100-150 jobs a day with our mobile cranes, and we're always looking to expand and update our fleet -- we've bought $75m of equipment in the last three years, and the average age of our cranes is around six years, so we can offer reliability and safety.

Sims Crane assisted with the construction of the Orlando Citrus Bowl stadium.
One of the company’s fleet working on the Palm Bay Water Tower.
Sims Crane completes a wide variety of projects across the state of Florida.