Mack Time

Born of hard-working Romanian migrants, Load Ranger owner Danny Josef’s formative years were spent in and around all manner of earthmoving equipment. The story goes that he was more than capable of driving a bobcat at the tender age of five, part of an upbringing that most certainly laid the path to Danny’s later professional life.

“My grandfather started a house demolition and excavation business and in time that resulted in my father and eventually myself working with him. Like many migrants of that era my grandfather was a dedicated hard-working man, at one stage operating a truck in which he did furniture removals during the day and at night would use the truck to deliver ‘KitKats’,” recalled Danny.

For some time, Danny worked alongside his father in the demolition operation, but something didn’t sit quite right with him in this type of business.

“I liked the demolition business but I didn’t like the way, as a consequence of the working environment, the equipment got knocked around. I have a real passion for equipment and like it looking good. Some say I have OCD, but if I see something broken, I like to get it fixed,” said Danny.

In 1998, Danny saw an opportunity to break away from the demolition area a bit and start a civil construction business. The Civil Management Group was formed and run by Danny and his father until 2005. In that seven years the business flourished working on housing estates and roads in the Sydney region, then expanding into the Hunter Valley area to include a couple of quarries and concrete plants.

“The company’s expansion into the Hunter Valley allowed us to be completely vertically integrated, supplying our quarried raw materials to our own concrete plants as well as supplying concrete to third party operations for use on road and housing sub-pisions,” said Danny.

The subsequent inpidual sale of both the Civil Management Group and Construction Materials Group to independent buyers resulted in Danny being unemployed for a while. His next challenge was to relocate to Indonesia where he ran his own civil consulting business for about six years, prior to selling that business and heading back to Australia.

On his return to Australia, Danny was employed to start and manage a bulk haulage company on behalf of its owner. This business was very successful however Danny eventually decided he would get more satisfaction out of running this type of business for himself. That was 2018 and saw the inception of the Load Ranger enterprise.

Read the full story published in Powertorque here.