07.03.2018

Kevin Fox retires

Kevin Fox of Skyjack is retiring at the end of this month after more than 40 years in the access industry.

Fox started his working life as a heating design engineer, having left college with a Higher National Diploma in Heating & Ventilation. Having qualified as a heating design engineer he worked for a heating and ventilation installation company before joining a consulting engineering firm as a heating design engineer. His next step took him into sales, and then in 1975 he decided to emigrate to Canada.

In Canada he joined a cladding and window company, but soon moved on and got his first taste of the access business, when in 1977 he joined Upright Scaffolds as a sales manager working out of its office in Toronto.

The company was the Canadian distributor for UpRight alloy scaffold towers and scissor lifts. The company also operated a rental division. He recalls his first contact with the company when Canadian country manager John Bieler demonstrated an Upright VX scaffold base and an airlift and showed him how the sales team demonstrated and sold access equipment to end users.

He was hooked and soon became a leading sales man, joining the Upright Million Dollar Club, and gaining several other company awards and status levels. Among his breakthrough achievements during this time was getting scissor lifts into the sprawling GM car plant in Ontario resulting in dozens of multiple unit repeat orders.
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Kevin Fox

12 years later he joined Houle High-Reach in Toronto as national sales manager, responsible for a national sales force across Canada. The company was the distributor for Markllift booms and scissor lifts and MEC push around platforms and scissor lifts.

In the mid 1990s he decided to move back to the UK and joined the Upright company store and rental business Instant Zip-Up, based at its the Chester-le-Street branch. A couple of years later he joined Genie UK, spending several years with the company, before moving to Haulotte UK where he helped rebuild the company’s reputation which had been hit by its earlier soft finance mega deal with UK Platforms. His final move came in 2007, when he joined Skyjack where he found his place, and has remained until the present day, helping build the company into the scissor lift market leader.

Fox is also a talented musician with a good voice who plays in a band in his spare time. He is a true character in the industry with great integrity and a sense of fair play - he has always put his customers first and considers many of them as true friends.

Charlie Patterson, vice president of international operations who recruited Fox to Skyjack said: "Kevin is a great guy, a hard hard working, valued member of the team. I know that his customers will miss him as much as we will. We wish him the very best in his retirement."

Kevin Fox has more than earned his retirement, but the industry is losing a great deal of knowledge and experience, not to mention another of its characters and personalities and a guiding light for professionalism, dedication and integrity.
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