Versalift Brand Guidelines: Time Manufacturing’s Waco Bucket-Truck Lifts Since 1965

A small Texas firm and a 24-foot lift.

Versalift is the main brand of Time Manufacturing Company, a maker of truck-mounted aerial lifts in Waco, Texas. The company’s own timeline says it was established in 1965 in Clifton, a small town in central Texas, building a 24-foot articulated aerial device mounted on a truck for the telecommunications market. In 1967 it moved to Waco, which has been its home ever since. The Versalift website describes the brand as having designed and built vehicle-mounted aerial lifts “since 1965.” The private equity firm that bought the business in 2017 says it acquired it from “a family who had owned the business for over forty years.”

The product at the centre of the brand is the bucket truck: a boom, often insulated, mounted on a work vehicle so that a line worker can reach overhead cables and equipment. Time Manufacturing’s timeline marks the steps. In 1972 it introduced the Tel 24/28, which it calls the first small telescopic aerial device and the standard for telephone work. In 1976 it entered the electric utility industry with taller, insulated lifts, and in 1977 it began selling Versalift lifts internationally, to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The VO-50 of 1985 took it into forestry and tree trimming and was its first 50-foot lift; the VN-50 followed in 1987.

The company says the VST-40 of 1989 was the world’s first telescopic articulated truck-mounted aerial device, and that it still builds VST models from 36 feet to more than 100 feet. In 1996 it added the SST-37, a small articulated telescopic unit built for telecommunications crews; in 2013 a line of heavy-duty elevators that add height to existing lifts; and in 2015, the year it marked its 50th anniversary, cable-placing lifts and high-reach machines.

Growth also came through purchases. In 1990 the company bought Calavar Corporation of Santa Fe Springs, California, a maker of high-reach aerial devices and self-propelled booms, which moved to Waco the next year and was renamed Time Condor in 1997. In 1995 it bought the Texoma digger-derrick line from Reedrill of Sherman, Texas, adding the truck-mounted machines used to set utility poles.

Company-owned dealers, then private equity.

Europe arrived early. The timeline records an international sales facility at Farsø, Denmark, in 1992; Versalift UK, the exclusive dealer for Britain and Ireland and the first company-owned distributor, in 1994; Time France in 2001; and Time Denmark, Time Benelux and Time Deutschland in 2003. In the United States the company built a network of its own regional distributors: Versalift Southwest in Texas in 2000, Versalift East in 2006 and Versalift Northwest in Salem, Oregon, in 2012. It added a rental and leasing business in Canton, Ohio, in 2009 and a used-equipment business, Utility Truck Trader, in 2011.

Ownership changed in 2017, when the Houston private equity firm The Sterling Group bought Time Manufacturing; Vertikal.net reported in December 2021 that the seller had been O’Flaherty Holdings. Under Sterling, the company’s timeline lists a run of acquisitions: Aspen Aerials of Duluth, Minnesota, a maker of bridge inspection units, in 2018; the truck-body maker BrandFX in 2019; and the European aerial-platform maker Ruthmann in 2021. Sterling said Time completed nine acquisitions over that period. In 2018 the company also announced an agreement with Xuji Electric, part of China’s State Grid, to set up an aerial-lift manufacturing facility in China.

On 3 December 2021 an affiliate of H.I.G. Capital, the Miami-based investment firm, completed its purchase of Time Manufacturing Holdings from Sterling, both firms announced that day. H.I.G. described a company with nine manufacturing facilities and 30 distribution and service facilities around the world, selling under Versalift and six other names, among them Ruthmann, Aspen Aerials and Bluelift. In 2022 Time added France Elévateur, a French maker of vehicle-mounted platforms, along with its Movex brand.

Design and documentation.

Aerial work platform makers present themselves through the machines first. Scissor lifts, articulated booms, telescopic booms, truck-mounted platforms and tracked spider lifts are usually painted in a single strong colour, such as an orange, a blue, a red or a yellow, with the maker’s name and the model code set large on the chassis or the boom. Seen across a site, the colour does much of the work a logo would do elsewhere.

Much of the industry sells to rental companies rather than to the people who use the machines, and its pictures often show that. Brochures and websites favour long rows of identical scissors and folded booms in a rental yard, machines lined up on a delivery truck, and close views of control boxes, battery packs and parts that a fleet workshop would care about. Product names tend to be strings of letters and numbers that encode working height, width or drive type.

The other stock image is the machine at work: a platform raised against a steel frame, a warehouse ceiling or a building facade, with operators in hard hats and harnesses at height. Electric and hybrid drive, lithium batteries and low-noise indoor use have become common themes in recent launches, described in the makers’ own words.

Trade fairs and awards fill the rest of the calendar. New models are often unveiled at The ARA Show in the United States, at bauma in Munich and at APEX, the access-equipment show in the Netherlands, while the industry press runs its own prizes, such as the International Awards for Powered Access. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Built mostly in Waco, sold through a dealer network.

Today Versalift describes itself as “A Time Manufacturing Company based in Waco, Texas,” making bucket trucks, digger derricks, cable placers and specialised equipment for utilities, telecommunications, lighting and signage, forestry and wind energy. On where the lifts are built, the company says that “most Versalift units are manufactured in Waco, Texas,” and that it is an ISO 9001:2015-certified manufacturer. It names a system for insulated lifts called TruGuard, which its timeline dates to 2017. Its equipment pages sort the range into articulated, telescopic, overcenter and non-overcenter lifts, with digger derricks and cable placers listed alongside.

Versalift says its customers include cooperatives, municipalities, government agencies and corporations, served through a network of distributors in the United States, Latin America and Europe. The company now gives a headcount of more than 2,600; when the sale to H.I.G. closed in 2021, both firms put it at more than 2,000.

For a design guide, Versalift shows how one product type — the truck-mounted lift — can carry a brand through six decades and several owners. Compare Bluelift, another name in the Time Manufacturing group, and Genie, another American aerial-platform maker. For this guide we use a deep steel blue and a signal amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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