Acme Lift: Behind the Scene

Focusing on ultra-large aerial work platforms and telehandlers, while renting only to rental companies, Acme Lift serves a unique niche.

Michael Roth

Nov. 19, 2014

2 min read

What do hundreds of rental companies from the top 10 to Caterpillar dealers to small independents have in common? When they need to rent a 150- or 180-foot boomlift, or a large telehandler, they call Acme Lift.

From Alaska to Arizona, Minnesota to Miami and all points in between, the Acme Lift aerials are at work, decaled as though they belong to the company that rented them from Acme. Every one of them is tracked 24/7/365 by an efficient and omnipresent telematics system. And so the rental company with no yard, and fewer than a handful of mechanics and salesmen, has almost 80 percent of a fleet of nearly 600 boomlifts out on rent.

How it does it is the vision of one of the rental industry’s most charismatic owners, Woody Weld, and the hard-working staff of an operations center called “the war room.”

Acme Lift’s operations are strictly wholesale. It only rents to rental companies, not to the end user. It rents the largest boomlifts and telehandlers, the ones most rental companies generally don’t carry in their inventory but prefer to re-rent on a job-by-job basis. Acme Lift refuses to compromise on its business model – it will not rent to the end user and compete with its rental company customers for jobs.

Take a look at this behind the scenes photo gallery, and see how Acme Lifts, tracks, transports and runs its business.

To read the complete story on Acme Lift, click here.

About the Author

Michael Roth

Editor

Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.