Ebbe Christensen the chief executive of North American truck mount and spider lift sales and service company Ruthmann Reachmaster has left the company along with most of the staff.
The move which was announced internally in mid-September, follows changes to the company’s strategy and organisation by parent Time Manufacturing. Resulting in Christensen and seven other employees leaving the business, including the entire five person sales team and two back office staff – half the company’s employees.
Ebbe Christensen
Time has decided that group distribution subsidiaries will focus purely on truck mounted lifts (plus Bluelift tracked lifts) built by the company’s manufacturing affiliates – Versalift, Ruthmann, France Elévateur and Movex. Its non Time products include, Almac / Almacrawler tracked platforms and tracked carriers, Winlet glass handling robots and previously Galizia pick & carry cranes.
The company has relocated to a new facility in nearby New Caney, Texas in December as the current facility in Porter, on the north side of Houston, is owned by Christiansen.
Ebbe Christensen, began his career in 1982 as a freight forwarder with Samson Transport in Denmark, moving into sales as a turbine salesman with Bonus Vindmøller /Siemens wind. He arrived in the USA in 1989 as a trade commissioner with the Danish government, initially in Miami, Florida and then Houston, Texas. In 1996 he began importing Danish food products, such as smoked salmon and butter cookies. In 2000 he was approached to set up a US sales office for Danish spider lift pioneer Falck Schmidt. He named business Reach master and based it in Houston, the following year accepted the role as chief executive of the new subsidiary.
Falck Schmidt merged with Denka Lift in 2005, becoming World Lift and then Skako Lift. Christensen acquired the company in a Management Buy Out in 2012 and began offering a Ruthmann truck mount the following year. In early 2020 he sold the business to Ruthmann, closing the deal at Conexpo that year – just as the Covid pandemic took hold. At that point it was renamed Ruthmann ReachMaster North America.
Speaking publicly of the changes for the first time Christensen said: “When I sold ReachMaster to Ruthmann in 2020 the market and strategies were different as our product portfolio was a mixture of both truck mounted and self-propelled specialty lift equipment. When the Ruthmann group later became a part of Time Mfg. These parameters changed, as most of the combined product portfolio (except the Bluelift line) is truck mounted equipment.”
“It has been a fantastic journey to introduce new and safer solutions for working temporarily at height to the North American markets, including Canada and Mexico. I have been very privileged over the past 24 years to work with both exceptionally talented and innovative European manufacturers and a fantastic team of loyal employees without whom it would have been impossible. While we we're selling equipment, it was always the people that made the difference with our customers and without any doubt the biggest asset of the company. It has been a pleasure working with the Time Manufacturing Company team as well, where my team and I almost tripled the company’s revenue over the past three years. I wish them all the best going forward.”
Sending a clear message that he is not yet ready to retire, he added: “This is such a great industry with wonderful people on a mission to provide safer and better solutions for working at height, so there is plenty of pioneering still to be done.”
In addition to his role at Reachmaster Christensen has been active in industry associations and is a past chairman of the IPAF North American Regional Council, and still sits on the council.
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