Reaching New Heights With Isuzu

In-depth

24 June

SKY THE LIMIT WITH ISUZU AND HEIGHT 4 HIRE

In just over ten years, Brothers Ken and Geoff Baker have turned around a once-distressed business and built Queensland’s largest privately-owned and operated supplier of access hire and scissor lift hire equipment.

Height 4 Hire Managing Director Ken Baker said the business had 57 machines and three staff when it was acquired in 2010. Now the company has 955 machines and 47 employees, including five people answering the phones full-time.

“We've grown about 16 per cent a year on average for 12 years now,” Ken said.

The company specialises in getting people to height safely to do the work they need to do.

Most of their customers operate in the construction and manufacturing sectors, hiring lifting equipment from anywhere between half a day to 11 years.

“Some weeks we do as many as 700 machine movements,” Ken said. “So, it's a lot of mechanical work to get them up to speed to go out on the next hire.”

Height 4 Hire has a dozen technicians working out of two depots in Brisbane doing equipment inspections and servicing.

Every time a lift is returned to the depot, it’s inspected, cleaned and the batteries and diesel are topped up. There’s a more thorough check of each piece of equipment every 90 days and once a year each machine is comprehensively checked, a process that takes more than an hour.

The equipment, which can lift people from 19 feet (5.8 metres) to 135 feet (41 metres), is available for hire through Southeast Queensland, from Brisbane to the Gold Coast in the south and Toowoomba in the west and north to the Sunshine Coast.

Height 4 Hire last year expanded its truck fleet with two FVY 240-300 Auto LWB Tilt Slides and three FYJ 300-350 Auto XLWB Tilt Slides to help deliver and collect its hire equipment.

With each FVY 240-300 having a GVM of 24,000 kilograms and a GCM of 36,000 kilograms and the FYJ 300-350 with a GVM of 30,000 kilograms and a GCM of 45,000 kilograms, each truck is more than capable of delivering several pieces of equipment.

“Once you put on a tilt tray on the back of the FYJ, they can cart about 13 and a half tonnes,” Ken said. “So that's six 19-foot scissors or more.”

“You have to do milk runs in this business to make it all work. So you could have two machines to one site, two to another, two to somewhere else.

“Then when they're out there, you fill them up from other sites and bring them back.”

Ken said the company’s drivers enjoyed the comfort and reliability of the Isuzu product, as well as the ease of the automatic transmission for metro driving.

“The Isuzu is a truck that you can get in, do your inspections in the morning and away you go,” he said.

“They’re very straight forward to drive.”

With the company’s own laser focus on servicing its own products, Ken said all the company’s Isuzu trucks were serviced at Brisbane Isuzu service centres for ultimate peace of mind.

“The thing that's really convenient is we can knock off at the end of the afternoon, drop a truck in there and go and pick it up first thing in the morning,” he said.

And by first thing, Ken means as early as 5am.

The Height 4 Hire team appreciate trucks that work as hard as they do.

Ken spoke of one Isuzu in the company’s fleet which has more than a million kilometres on the clock.

“In the previous company I worked at, in 2007, we purchased an Isuzu,” he said.

“Things got pretty tight with the company and we sold that Isuzu to a towing company in Brisbane who then sold it to a guy out at Roma who was doing some work in the pipeline area.

“So in about 2012 or 2013, a truck became available for sale, so we purchased that truck. It's the same truck!

“It's had obviously a bit of work on the way through, but it's been a brilliant truck, a really, really good truck.”

With such success in the hire lifting business and backed by the reliability and aftersales support of the Isuzu brand, things can only go up for Height 4 Hire!