My family migrated from the former Yugoslavia in 1969 when I was 4 years old, certainly no manufacturing skills or business background here just a family who knew there has to better than what they grew up with

Been in business for 17 years

I built hoists in my garage for 8 years. A staff of one full time and one part time and growing

Customers are people like Kennards Hire, A E Smith, A G Coombs, OP Industries, PJM Engineering, Complex Air-conditioning, Ductmakers, Corporate Airconditioning, A C Goulding, and many other Mechanical services, hire, mining, building companies

The Business started in 1996, at that time I was doing mostly gas pipeline welding, contract welding and general fabrication. To generate work I would run an advertisement in the Age newspaper in the Tenders section titled “welding contractor available”, I would pick up work from this on top of the pipeline welding.

One day I received a call from a Commercial Air conditioning company, they saw my advertisement in the newspaper and wanted me to fabricate a large roof frame to hold an air conditioning unit, I did the job for them and when I had finished they said to me that they wanted to see me at their factory, I thought I was in trouble!

But as it turned out I was not in trouble, they took me into the factory and showed me a hoist and said “can you build some of these as we can’t buy them anymore” My first question was “what is it” That was my first introduction to the duct hoist – material hoist. The company that built these hoists had closed their business in the mid 80’s. So I asked if I could take one of these hoists with me and copy it, so from that hoist I built 9 hoists for them.

After that I went back to the pipeline work thinking that it was just another job that I had completed, a few weeks later I started getting phone calls from other Air Conditioning companies asking me to build some hoists for them, I wasn’t really keen to build more as I liked the pipeline work but I had to as the pipeline work a bit inconsistent,

I ended up building another 12 hoists and was continuing to get more calls asking for hoists that lift even higher.

I had to teach myself to use a Lathe, milling machine and CAD software

So over the next 12 months I decided to design a hoist that would lift higher and could lift more weight, this was a bit of a challenge as I didn’t even have a computer to draw it with so out came the pencil and paper, the hoists that I currently sell are 90% of that original design, the design was refined based on customer feedback by just asking my customers “what do you like about my hoists and what can I improve”.

During the 12 month period designing my hoists I did a lot of repairs on existing hoists and found consistent problems in their design, they kept coming back in for repairs for the same problems, some of this was caused by operator error but mostly due to poor design, I took these issues and designed a better hoist.

While I was building the first hoists I was buying the winches from a supplier, one day they asked me what I was using them for I replied “duct hoists” They asked if I knew how to repair them to which I answered yes!

They explained to me that a customer of theirs (BE Hire) was looking for someone to repair their duct hoists, they arranged a meeting with them for me and from that point I was repairing all of BE Hire’s hoists.

As it turned out BE Hire was bought out by Kennards Hire not long after that and I found myself repairing for them. I approached Kennards about buying my newly designed hoists, they were a bit hesitant so I gave them a hoist to trial and to give me some feedback on it, 2 weeks later they returned the hoist with a list of things they would like to see changed (this was in 1999, that original hoist is still in service at Kennards in 2013)

WHY I BEGAN BUILDING HOISTS IN AUSTRALIA

MY FIRST MATERIAL AND IT IS STILL GOING STRONG

“I just want to show you guys the first machine that I ever built in 1998, still going strong. The reason that came about was that I got asked to build a material hoist with better reliability than what was out there and what was available at that time. I was always repairing machines, so, I found there (were) consistent weaknesses in the American product. And so I went about fixing that and rectifying it.

So, one of the common things that happens on the American machines is the cable keeps coming off the pulley. On my machines it’s impossible to come off. It cannot be removed. I use a thicker cable on mine. I use aluminium pulleys and not plastic pulleys, which lead to twist and that can actually damage the cable overtime.

As you can see, this machine, being 14 years old is still going strong. Sure, it’s had some repairs but it is still inactive service today.

Here we have a machine over here that’s a year old. It’s an American machine but because of the inherent issues that it has, it’s actually going to be decommissioned because it’s too expensive to repair. Based on these are the things that I spoke about on my machine that the weaknesses that are on here caused it to fail after a year and it’s just too expensive to repair”