NOTHING LIKE AUSTRALIA
THERE’S BY: BOB GLENN, EDITOR I
n a suburb of Australia’s most populous city, you’ll find a family-owned lifting and rigging equipment supplier named after an English soccer team.
Meet the Tackers: Steve, Verity, and Ashley. Te latter is general manager of Ranger, a lifting and rigging equipment company headquartered in Sydney, Australia; it recently opened a second site in Melbourne, further down the country’s east coast. It’s been 20 years since his father Steve, managing
director, and his former business partners, Brian and Shane, started an industrial supply company named after their favorite English soccer team, the lesser-known Queen’s Park Rangers, which finished the current season in lower-mid table in the country’s second tier, somewhat ironically called the Championship. It’s referred to as soccer there too; ‘football’ is reserved for the native sport, played under Australian Rules. Verity, quality assurance manager, joined at the turn of the decade, at the same time that Ashley began a second spell at the company. He had recently completed studies—he has since achieved an Executive Masters in Business Administration through the University of Wollongong—and returned from traveling. As the official Australian tourism website boasts, however, “Tere’s nothing like Australia”. Ashley doesn’t sell vacations, he provides lifting gear,
but he reiterates the point. “Imagine,” he says, “a country of 24 million people on a land mass not dissimilar to the USA, which has a population close to 330 million. Where my mother and father were from, the UK [it’s still home to much of the family], 65 million people are crammed into a fraction of the space. Te size of the population and sprawling landscape have to be at the forefront of a
24 MAY–JUNE 2018 WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE
company’s approach to business, especially one that relies on delivery of product and efficiency of supply chain.” More on that later. First, let’s go back to the beginning.
Behind the Drive Steve remembers his roots well; further, they shape him. “My upbringing was a little different to Ash’s. I was born in northwest London; my dad was a lorry driver and he worked very hard but found it hard to make a living. I also had a disabled sister, which meant my mum couldn’t work and frequent hospital visits—my sister had multiple, major operations by the time she was three years
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