42 | CONTRACTING Hawke’s Bay Crane & Platform Hire T T Hugh de Lacy Aaron and team getting into the Grove Hawke’s Bay Crane & Platform Hire is owned and managed by Aaron Bourke. There’s opportunity for expansion in the regional market, but Hastings company Hawke’s Bay Crane and Platform Hire is constrained in what was previously steady growth by the chronic shortage of skilled labour. Owned and managed by Aaron Bourke, with his father Mike Bourke as a director, Hawke’s Bay Crane and Platform Hire has grown with the market from when it was founded 30 years ago by the late Basil Jordon. Basil ran two separate companies, one for cranes and one for platforms, and by the time he sold the crane company to Aaron Bourke in 2015 it boasted three permanent operators and ten machines, the biggest of which was 25t. In 2020 Basil Jordan’s widow offered the platform company to Aaron, and he bought it and combined the two. Today Hawke’s Bay Crane and Platform Hire has seven full-time mobile crane operators and 12 cranes on its books, the biggest a 130t “There’s not a lot of competition in Hawke’s Bay – just us and a couple of others in cranes. Compared to Auckland we’re competitive for cranes down here but cheaper for platforms.” monster, as well as five full-time transport operators for a range of Hiabs and transporters. The company’s platform division has 70odd items of plant, including slab and rough terrain scissor lifts, Z-boom lifts, forklifts and telehandlers. The scissor lifts are mostly of the JLG and Snorkel brands, and the cranes from Grove and Kato. About 70% of the company’s revenue comes from the cranes, and 90% of the clientele are commercial rather than private hirers, including steel structures companies Razos Engineering and Patton Engineering, Tekam Engineering, Apex Engineering, steel supplier Red Steel and a who’s who of project companies. Given the buoyancy of the Hawke’s Bay economy, the company’s growth has occurred organically because, “There’s not a lot of competition in Hawke’s Bay – just us and a couple of others in cranes,” Aaron says. “Compared to Auckland we’re competitive for cranes down here but cheaper for platforms.” Hawke’s Bay Crane and Platform Hire currently has a staff of eighteen, and it’s on an urgent hunt for more. “We’d love to have another crane operator or two, but there’s a huge shortage,” Aaron says. “We’ve got an agency trying to find people for us, and we’ve trained one operator from scratch, but it took 15 months before he was fully qualified.” In the last couple of years Aaron has recruited a diesel mechanic and a spray painter from the Philippines, and he’s hoping something will come from the New Zealand Crane Association’s becoming an accredited employer agent under the Government’s scheme to attract more skilled workers to the country. “We’re required to advertise unsuccessfully in New Zealand before we can recruit an overseas worker under the scheme,” Aaron says. “We hope it yields some fruit.” Hawke’s Bay Crane and Platform Hire is based in an industrial site at Whakatu, south of Hastings, where it owns several sections in an industrial estate, and it’s starting to feel the pinch of a shortage of space at its present depot. Aaron has his eye on one of the company’s other sections which is big enough to accommodate the company through the next stage of a pattern of growth that doesn’t look like slowing. That section is presently occupied by a tenant whose lease doesn’t end for a few years, at which point Hawke’s Bay Crane and Platform Hire will be on the move – hopefully with all the staff it needs.
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