Steve Thacker, Managing Director (left) and Ashley Thacker, General Manager (right) at Ranger’s new head office in Prestons, NSW.


Whilst we never wanted to lose our family-run ethos and culture—and still don’t—we needed to start to look and act more like a medium to large business.” He continues, “A conversation I still look back on


and reminisce about is one I had with my father shortly after returning; we’d just lost out on a contract to one of the ‘bigger players’ and we realized that we needed to stop following our competition and start becoming an industry leader. It wasn’t a U-turn, just a realignment with our existing ‘service through knowledge’ tagline.”


Global Vision Ashley is right to remember the moment; it prompted a full-scale rebrand of the business. He talks a lot about the power of perception, but a new logo, catalogs, brochures, and vehicle wraps were just the start. “Actually,” he says, “It was about changing the way


we thought and acted as a business from the ground up. We even sent multiple staff around the world to various training courses and spent hours up-skilling every position in the business. Work to this end still hasn’t stopped today—and it never will.” Steve says, “Ash taking on the role of GM [general manager] was a game changing moment in our industry


26 MAY–JUNE 2018 WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE


here in Australia.” He emphasizes the word ‘industry’ so as not to be mistaken for ‘company’. “Most of the competition was being run by people my age; we had an edge,” he continues. “We cannot change the way people use our lifting equipment so we needed to adapt the way we sold and presented it. Te fulcrum was the training we exposed our staff to and a commitment to a customer- centric, service through knowledge approach to business.” Tere are various milestones to note. Ranger became


Australia’s first full member of the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association (LEEA) in 2011, before Ashley was named LEEA’s youngest ever board member—a role he still holds today. Ashley and Steve share a belief that it’s extremely important that the industry has a third party to deliver the same training content all over the world, tailored to each geography’s standards. Tey advise industry not to use anyone to inspect their equipment that has not been trained to the highest standards by LEEA. Te association makes sure personnel and their employers are properly qualified to carry out their lifting equipment-related work, Ashley adds. More recently, he joined Australian Standards (AS) Committee ME-025 Lifting Tackle. Standards Australia is the nation’s peak non-government, not-for-profit


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