Kindly give us a brief description of yourself.
Shane: “I’m Shane Adams. I am one of the owners of Crane Safety. I have been here for 21 years.”
Kim: “I’m Kim Adams and I am the other owner and I have been a part of Crane Safety since the inception, but I have been here full-time for seven years.”
Can you tell me about the inception of the company?
Kim: “It started out in my parent’s living room. I stuffed a lot of envelopes. Crane Safety was my dad’s dream, and he kind of ran with that dream. My mom helped him along the way. Any small company, as they start out, they start out usually in somebody’s formal dining room or wherever, and then everybody’s all hands on deck and then, Shane actually started and took over as my dad stepped back, and here we are.”
Shane, what was it like for you when you first came on board?
Shane: “This was not my trade when I first started in the field. I actually was Vice President of the electrical company. Bill decided the move the company to Atlanta. He asked me if I was going to come up here and help him run it. So, really, my day-to-day operations were assisting him running the company. He stepped out probably back around 2007, I guess, and I just ran the company, so when it was time for him to retire, it was nonsense just to go ahead and buy the company.”
Kim: “But, he learned the trade first. He started from the bottom and worked his way up.”
In summary, what does Crane Safety offer?
Shane: “The best part about Crane Safety is you don’t have to go to several different companies to get something taken care of. You got overhead crane problems, you need overhead cranes installed, overhead cranes inspected? We can do it. You need overhead crane operators trained? We can do it. You’re in the mobile crane side? We can train your operators. We can assist in getting their national certifications. If you operate mobile cranes, there’s a company where somebody has to do your inspections. We can inspect your cranes and provide you with any detail that you need.”
Why is Crane Safety important?
Shane: “When you’re dealing with safety, you have to preach it every day. Simple mistakes cause accidents. The more you stay up-to-date with safety procedures and operational procedures, the safer you’re going to be.”
What type of culture have you tried to build here?
Kim: “Crane safety, as a whole, is family. We want our employees to feel valued. They make us. They represent us. When you don’t see me, you’re seeing whoever walks through the door. When I speak with our customers, I want them to know that I value them on a personal level. They can pick anybody they want, but at the end of the day, we care about it as a whole. When you call me for something: a service, an inspection, anything, our goal is to represent you like we would want to be represented. That’s what I feel like we offer. So when we hire somebody, we tell them, ‘We’re a family. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s kind of like the Mafia. You’re in. You don’t get out. We want you to stay.’”
Shane: “A lot of crane companies, guys spend a lot of time out of state, out of town, away from home, and we really try to avoid that the best we can. We try to minimize that kind of stuff. The guys that we’ve got in place, I don’t feel like I have any problems with them making decisions. They know how we are. They know our ideologies. We don’t do half-ass work.”
You mentioned trying to minimize the time your team works away from home. Please tell me more about that.
Shane: The type of work we do – we have to travel a bit. We do our training throughout the 50 states. For our service department, we tend to hang on the East Coast to do any kind of overhead crane work repairs. We really took it to heart that we don’t like our guys being gone a long time. We got some young people, they got kids, they got ball practices, they got soccer games, and we want to try to get everybody just met at equal time with our family.
Is there anything about the business that you would like to highlight?
Shane: “The crane business, whether in the overhead crane side or the mobile crane side, isn’t just boom. There’s not enough people. Like us in most companies, we need all of the qualified people that we can find. We need service technicians, electrical experience. We need guys who have the strength, who have the knowledge and the time to teach people how to operate cranes.”
What would you say to anyone coming to work at Crane Safety?
Kim: “Crane Safety has a family value, and we’re looking for people to join our family.”
Shane: “We’ve got guys who have been here for over 20 years. There’s a reason.”
For more information visit us at https://cranesafetyassociates.com/