NORTH AMERICA Ӏ REGIONAL FOCUS
Jeff Stutt Sales manager Bik Boom Trucks
Toronto, Canada-headquartered Bik Boom Trucks is a family- owned company that has been selling and installing boom trucks since 1990. It is also a distributor for knuckle boom cranes from Italian company PM.
Where are you based? We're headquartered in Toronto, Canada. We also have offices in Milford, Massachusetts, and Florida, California. We’re also opening an office in Texas soon.
How long has the company been operating and what industries do you serve? We’re in our 35th year and we serve a wide range of industries including construction, concrete and tree care. We build complete boom truck packages and import PM knuckle boom cranes from Italy.
How do you see the North American market developing over the next 12 months? With interest rates going up the whole world's going through change and North America is no different. It's a little bit of an unknown factor; things are still strong – sales are still strong and construction is continuing – but people are having to readjust to new interest rates. A lot of the business owners that are under the age of around 32 have never experienced interest rates over one-and-a-half to two percent so it's quite an adjustment suddenly having interest rates of seven and eight percent. There's a little bit of education
involved and we need to have more patience with our customers. It's a longer process but things are still moving forward.
32 CRANES TODAY
buying in this market: making sure they are dealing with somebody who's able to not only sell them what they need and put the product together properly but then to be able to back it up with sales and service. We've got coast-to-coast
service and product availability and we also have parts and cranes on the ground. So if there ever is problem with, say, say a big part we can take a bigger part that we might not stock normally off of an existing crane that's sitting on the ground and ship it out so that the customer has minimal downtime. Some people get involved with companies that don't really have that product availability.
Jeff Stutt, sales manager, Bik Boom Trucks
How accepting is the North American market to Italian-made cranes? Italy produces most of the knuckle booms in the world, plus Austria too. The biggest problem was that a lot of dealers didn’t stock parts. We do things differently. We always have parts, we have lots of booms that are readily available, and our customers can get after sales service all the time. That's the biggest challenge for people
Spotted at ConExpo...
Flying the 'Stars and Stripes' is a Fassi F1750-HXP Techno knuckle boom crane on display on the Fascan International stand (and owned by CraneWorks). Fascan is a family-owned company
based in Baltimore, Maryland. It is also the US distributor for Fassi articulated cranes and Jekko mini cranes. Fascan also showed an AlmaCrawler tracked carrier from Italian company Almac. Fascan now offers the full line of Almac AlmaCrawlers and it has already delivered the fi rst via its new company Multiloader USA.
What do your foresee for the future of Bik Boom Trucks? I'm really optimistic. We are always growing. I think in the 35 years we've been doing this, every year we get a little bit bigger. Even during times that have been challenging we've got great customers who have amazing businesses and they keep pushing forward. So I think as long as we keep focussing on the road ahead and not looking at the ditch we'll end up going the right direction.
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