As a family-owned aerial lift and material handling equipment rental and sales leader headquartered in Burlington, Ontario, CanLift Equipment Ltd. is a progressive early adopter driven by technology, innovation, and a recently expanded fleet.
At CanLift, cultivating people beats chasing trends. Following phenomenal growth in recent years, doubling its revenue in the two years leading up to 2025, the company is now settling into a deep dive into its evolution as an industry thought leader. More impressively, perhaps, the company has built its culture alongside its revenue, landing it a Great Place to Work® Canada award in June of this year. Its healthy company morale continues to speak for itself.
With September of this year being CanLift’s best rental quarter and month in its history, overall growth may have slowed slightly but forecasts remain positive. “We’re expanding again in the second quarter of next year,” shares Johnny Dragicevic, Managing Partner and Co-founder. “We look forward to growing some more.”
Beyond its sterling service, the company’s business model simply makes sense. By renting equipment in uncertain times, client companies can protect their working capital for when they really need it.
Over the past year, CanLift has come to learn the value of artificial intelligence (AI) in strengthening its systems. The result is a new era in operational efficiency and a promise of things to come. “The more immersed we become in AI, the more we find it is beneficial to our company,” says Joe Gould, Director of Business Development.
To achieve the goal of continuing to expand the company while deepening its culture, a new AI club welcomes staff to lunch-and-learns, where people enjoy becoming a part of this new paradigm. Cultivating morale is not all about business performance, either; the team believes that the personal attention and sincere care that exists between leadership and staff is the secret sauce that sets the company’s culture apart.
“The principles of good business haven’t changed. You want to take good care of your people and deliver great service,” says Ryan Fitzgibbon, Director of Technology & Marketing and Co-founder.
When it comes to delivering excellence, the team’s mandate is straightforward: stay ahead of customers’ needs. To achieve this, the company continuously invests in new equipment, deepening its expertise and its capabilities in ways very few of its competitors can match. Serving many customers in glazing, for instance, CanLift is actively expanding its offerings with specialized glass-manipulation equipment, ensuring customers can work more quickly, safely, and efficiently while meeting the evolving needs of high-rise, healthcare, and other specialized construction projects. “[Staying on top] of our customers’ needs is what is driving the expansion,” Fitzgibbon continues.
Gould points out that, for this reason, CanLift’s most recent investment focus has been on high-reach equipment to 185 feet. “This opens a whole new market for us,” he says of the game-changing commitment that has taken the company from offering 120-foot booms to now being able to operate on behalf of significantly larger, cross-border customers.
These new capabilities also allow CanLift to enter the manufacturing industry due to its consistency in demand. Working mainly with OEMs, the team can leverage its independence to its own and its customers’ benefit and adapt to changing demands fast. And, by having its hands-on owners on board working alongside the greater team, customers enjoy the immediacy of CanLift’s ability to respond to their organizational needs with speed and integrity.
Ever-aware of the importance of supply chain strategy and the need for evolution, Dragicevic describes the company’s ability to pivot as its “superpower. With supply chain volatility, we have to be intentional with our procurement,” he says. The result is more effective equipment and satisfied staff. To ensure that this status quo persists, CanLift now employs AI to harvest data that enables in-depth fleet analysis to guide maintenance, lifecycle planning, and the equipment retirement process, amongst many other tasks.
As an employee-led initiative, AI has also improved service delivery and, therefore, business relationships, as staff members have more time to spend on in-person engagements with customers. With a group of its leaders completing an intensive AI for Business mini-MBA from Section AI, they are now clear on the importance of leveraging the technology. The result is an expedited implementation process and a very happy team. Perhaps one of CanLift’s more fun roll-outs of AI is its fantastic 24/7 chatbot, Clive, who assists customers quickly and efficiently from the company website.
“A big takeaway for our staff is that they know that it’s not replacing anyone; it helps them. It makes them more efficient personally and professionally. They are just using it as a tool,” Dragicevic says, underlining how engaging staff and allowing them to lead the way with AI has erased all possible anxiety that may have existed initially about being replaced by computers.
“At the end of the day, we are a people’s business, so AI is not going to take that away from us,” Fitzgibbon adds.
To simplify the process, the team also has its own AI coach, Edwin Jansen of Coachfully.AI, who helps guide everything from ideation to implementation processes as well as the analysis process to ensure that the company gets as much as possible from its investment and its commitment to remaining an AI-forward operation. In the process, Jansen also assisted the company in developing a few custom generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to assist in simplifying tasks outsourced to technology. These functions are quickly becoming extensive, including some aspects of enterprise resource planning (ERP), fleet and financial analysis, daily accounting tasks, and prospecting for clients. It also improves response times, making the benefits almost innumerable.
For any company looking to invest in AI but uncertain of where to start, the advice of these leaders is simple: start small. By taking one or two business problems and finding a way AI can assist in solving them, the ball gets rolling. Evolution starts from there. By using it as a tool to free staff from mundane tasks to take care of the soft skills that the technology cannot offer, everyone becomes more fulfilled at work. “Don’t be afraid to ask for help,” Fitzgibbon says, highlighting the importance of letting teams find their own way using the tools to allow for organic development.
Having attended AI conference HumanX in Las Vegas earlier this year, Gould is impressed by its capabilities. “Even the people who are developing AI have no idea where it’s going in the next five years,” he shares. “It’s better to get in on the ground floor with it and then use it within your business.” Naturally, these investments are intended to further drive and help sustain growth, and CanLift is also always scouting for new talent to join its team. “AI hasn’t stopped us from hiring. We’re growing as a company. That’s the main focus,” Gould continues.
To achieve that growth, however, means continuously strengthening the company’s financial and structural foundations alongside its capabilities. And so, that is what its leadership is focused on while its engaged, positive team gets to work implementing fresh new systems. Confident in the success of its projected growth trajectory, CanLift Equipment Ltd. knows that, thanks to its team’s creativity and commitment to personalized service, customer satisfaction and field capabilities can only go up from here.
