Steve Shaughnessy, new Skyjack president, plans aggressive international growth for the Canadian aerial work platform maker.

Steve Shaughnessy ran his family's aerial equipment rental businesses in New England, was chief operating officer at NES, ran Ashtead's U.K. aerial business and the U.K. subsidiary of French rental giant Loxam. Now president of Skyjack, Shaughnessy sat down with RER in Orlando, Fla., to talk about his plans and ideas for the Guelph, Canada-based aerial work platform manufacturer.

RER: It's been quite an odyssey for you, from Shaughnessy Crane being acquired by NES, working for NES, A-Plant, Loxam and now Skyjack. How did your international opportunities develop?

Shaughnessy: I really liked A-Plant and Ashtead as a company. A-Plant wouldn't be on people's radar screens over here but I had contacted George Burnett the former chief executive and really one of the co-founders of the modern Ashtead in the spring of 2004. My main interest actually was that there had been a lot of disfunction at Sunbelt and they didn't have a settled senior management team at that time so I sent him my c.v. In the cover note I said that I'd lived and worked in the U.K. before and I had the right to work there so if they weren't in a position to do something at Sunbelt, I would be open to working in the U.K.

So he called a couple of days later. As it happened, he was spending a lot of time in North Carolina but we were both going to be in London at the same time a few weeks later. I lived in the U.K. much of the time from 1976 to '87 and we still had a flat in London. So I met him a couple of weeks later and maybe a month after that I got a call to say they may have an opening in their U.K. access business.

So I became director of their access business. It was not in very good shape when I arrived at a time when the market in the U.K. was booming. The fleet was old and it had all sorts of older, almost-impossible-to-get-parts-for equipment. They had some good fleet as well. I had to put a business plan together, and we basically re-fleeted the company. They did have a core group of good managers, we made some changes to the sales strategy and we invested in the business and grew it. Within about 12 to 14 months we really had turned it around and by then it was in the middle range of businesses in the U.K. in terms of its performance.

After about 18 months I was made managing director of all the specialist businesses in the U.K. And that included not just the access business but also power generation. We had a business that provided specialist equipment to rail contractors; we had a site accommodation business, site trailers and a couple of other specialty businesses. I loved it but George Burnett retired at the end of 2006. His successor was Geoff Drabble. In the spring of 2007, we had just finished a strategic review, which is not uncommon when a new CEO comes in and Geoff wanted to re-align the U.K. business with a model that was close to Sunbelt or what he believed Sunbelt's model to be. What that really meant was that over the next two years up until 2009, the specialist businesses would be eliminated as a separate entity, that we might keep one or two and grow them into big businesses, but the rest would be integrated into the general stores. So Geoff said to me that at some point in the next two years, there won't be a job for you in that current role. What he wanted me to do at that time was move to a corporate role for the group and mainly focus on M&A activity. But I preferred to be in an operational role.

That's when you moved on to Loxam?

In the middle of all this, an opportunity came to go to Loxam. I was intrigued. It was a smaller job, a step back in terms of responsibility although on paper at least the goal was that Loxam wanted to expand its activities significantly in the U.K. I'd never worked for a French company; they had a different way of doing things. It's a different culture — in my view, it was much less entrepreneurial than the way most North American companies were run. Even Ashtead is a very entrepreneurial company.

Loxam is a big company, 540 branches, 10 countries, and the core of the business is in France. The culture is very French. The business had been successful in France, in French terms at least. They have a culture that, because they succeeded with their model in France, then the same model should be implemented elsewhere. I'm not going to say whether that's right or wrong, but I guess by nature I tend more towards the entrepreneurial rather than the controlling, managerial thing. But contrary to what they would have liked to have done when I started talking to them in mid-2007, nobody could have foreseen what was going to happen in the next 12 to 15 months and regardless of what they would have liked to do and what I would have liked to do, it was really put on hold and we were in a holding pattern. I did everything I could do to take costs out of the business.

I decided last June or July that I would go. We worked out an agreement that I would stay until the end of November. I got a call from Ken McDougall of Skyjack to say Linamar had asked him to go to Mexico. So that means there would be a vacancy, it would involve a move to Canada. I said I'd like to find out more about it. I went over and had some meetings in November, went back in December, and the rest is history.