This article is another installment in my “Crane Truck Startup” series, chronicling my efforts to get a crane truck business off the ground. Follow along for a behind the scenes look at building my business and learning crane trucks, heavy lifting, hauling, and everything in between.
Picking up from the last article, Early Lessons Starting a Crane Truck Business, I left off at the point of purchasing a vehicle, and how the technical specs of the equipment will dictate the scope of crane services you can offer. This brings us to new ideation phase, researching all the ways your specific crane truck equipment can be used in your unique market and to accomplish the goals of your business.
Building on the list that I had initially generated when starting to conceptualize my crane truck business, it’s now time to better define obvious and logical services, while opening up the world of possibilities and uncovering entirely new service options.
What Crane Truck Services are Right for Your Business
To start, have a completely open and creative mindset for this exercise. You’re trying to uncover any and all possibilities, no mater how crazy or impractical they are. Have fun here. All you’re doing is capturing ideas, you’re not making commitments or mapping the business right now.
You’ll find that after writing down a completely outlandish idea, it may spark a tangent thought that leads to a real market need you would have otherwise considered. Capture them all, create a list(s), and start organizing items as you find commonalities.
Looking back at my notes from this creative exercise, I initially labeled each bulleted idea as services, and then reorganized them into a hierarchy of revenue streams with services. My thought process here was that a revenue stream represented a higher categorization level, and a service was a distinct sub action or offering. An example here is Junk Removal as a revenue stream category, and Dumpster Bag Service as a distinct service offering.
Here’s a fun one… One of the entirely tangent revenue streams that I came up with was mobile sauna rentals. Mobile saunas are a growing category in the U.S. and are not established in the Asheville area. While a sauna business is wildly different than crane truck services, I would have the capability to deliver and place small units with care and precision. I’ve kept this revenue stream in my list as a mid to long-term in initiative, but de-prioritized it do to cost and other factors.
By using this categorization approach, I was able to group like services into categories that I ultimately prioritized. I prioritized revenue streams into near, mid, & long-term initiatives that I would pursue. I took into consideration things like:
Crane Truck Equipment Requirements & Costs
- Crane equipment: What additional accessories would be needed and how much would it cost?
- Log grapple
- Crane scale
- Electric hoist
- Crane pallet forks
- Specialty rigging
- Man lift
- Truck equipment: What modifications and accessories are needed, and cost?
- Stake pockets & rub rail (link to YouTube video)
- Winch
- Box truck bed (to qualify for freight dispatch & courier networks)
- Lighting (night operations)
Market Opportunity
- Market need and size (could I quantify the need in my immediate geographic area)
- Competition (if it’s a crowded space, rates might be commoditized with low margin)
- Presence of industry ecosystem and partners (for example, if there weren’t saw mills in my area, recovering logs for processing wouldn’t make sense)
Economics
- Profit Margin (is it worth my time)
- Seasonality (while you don’t want to build an entire business around work that drops off most of the year, consciously assembling seasonal work across the seasons can make for a steady year)
- Launch costs (marketing, advertising, association fees, etc.)
Brand Fit
- Off brand: Does the industry or customer base reflect Up! Up! Lifting’s values or mission
- Conflicting or confusing offering: Was the work so extremely different from the core crane truck lifting and hauling business that it would distract the market. However!!! Keep in mind that if you find a revenue stream that’s worth building a business around, consider whether it warrants a major pivot from what/why/how you initially conceptualized the business.
This brings us to the point of reckoning, the point where you question everything.
Is a Crane Truck Service Business the Right Business for You?
In future article, I’ll dig into the day-to-day operations of a crane truck service business, the professional skills set, and demands of the job. Up next are some hard lessons learned in my first three months of starting an Asheville-based crane truck business.
Depending on where you’re coming from in your career, or perhaps where you hoped you’d go, running a crane truck business will have a different luster for you. For me, I’ve found it exciting, challenging, rewarding, and good fit. I look forward to sharing more next time.
