Local investors take on next heavy lift with crane company acquisition
Adding to a collection of businesses that already includes RV parks, cold storage and office buildings, a local investor group is on to something a bit more heavy-duty.
Longtime business partners Yogi Singh, Stewart Garland and Pushkal Basavaraj, through their 1850 Investments, recently acquired Hampton Roads Crane and Rigging.
As part of the deal, which closed in late May, the group now owns the 43-year-old Newport News-based company and its fleet of 10 cranes.
The vehicles range from an 8-ton carry deck crane to a 165-ton rough terrain crane. Singh said the fleet is rented out to industrial users of all sorts.
“Our customers one day could be a homebuilder that needs help putting up roof trusses and the next day you could be repairing a shaft on a warship,” he said.
1850 Investments, headquartered in the Stony Point area of South Richmond, bought Hampton Roads Crane from Jim Speegle, whose father Bill Speegle founded the company 1981.
The younger Speegle has been with his family’s company since 1994 and is staying on as a consultant to help with the ownership transition.
Managing the new acquisition for 1850 is senior associate Drew Brockwell.
Due to 1850’s eclectic portfolio of businesses, each new deal comes with a bit of a learning curve, Brockwell said. In this case, no one at the firm has run a crane company, nor have they driven a crane.
“We’re basically going down there and learning the ins and outs of the day-to-day business,” Brockwell said. “With it being a service-based business, there’s different jobs every day, so it’s learning that dynamic, getting to know the guys, and having a good connection with the guys too.”
Among the more interesting facets of moving cranes around town are the road restrictions related to the massive machines. For example, in the company’s home city of Newport News, cranes can’t be on the road until 8 a.m. and must be off the road by 4 p.m., Brockwell said.
That’s where 1850’s strategy of deploying new technology comes in. As it has done at its campgrounds and cold storage warehouses, the firm brings industry specific software to help streamline operations.
For cranes, that includes fleet management software for scheduling and maintenance and drilling down to nitty-gritty data points such as which vehicle in the fleet is the most profitable.
Michael White, director of operations for 1850, said family-run companies like the crane business often use outdated systems, in this case a paper calendar for job scheduling, not offering direct deposit to employees and not much of an online presence for marketing.
He said the crane company was similar to many of 1850’s other acquisitions in that regard.
“They have similar ownership profiles: aging-out operators, no succession plan but wanting to retire, and a stable, profitable business that hadn’t had that shot in the arm that a more motivated operator might be willing to do,” White said.
Terms of the crane deal were not disclosed and Singh declined to share revenue figures of the newly acquired company or 1850 as a whole. He said the firm financed this latest deal with internal capital and a loan from First National Bank.
The crane company’s 19 employees add to the more than 100 workers across 1850’s portfolio, which also includes eight campgrounds and RV parks in Virginia and other states that operate under its National Land Lease Capital division, along with its AgCold cold storage warehousing business in Suffolk, and office buildings in Scott’s Addition and Shockoe Slip.
Singh said one of the aspects he and his partners liked about the crane deal is its AI-resistance – meaning the service it offers can’t be easily replaced by artificial intelligence.
“This was an opportunity to acquire a business that services a large swath of the industrial sector with a customer list that is so expansive, that I think it would be hard for us to find ourselves in a situation where the service we provide becomes obsolete,” he said. “We think deeply about these industries that have a long way to go before becoming obsolete to artificial intelligence.”
Singh said the firm would continue to look for additional acquisitions in the crane and rigging field. It’s also keeping an eye on new opportunities in cold storage, with a particular interest in the Northeast, the Carolinas and Texas.
“We have no restrictions in our minds as to how big these companies can get,” he said. “We would put no governor on growth.”
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