Derbyshire-based Street Crane (www.streetcrane.co.uk) has announced that Andrew Pimblett (pictured) is stepping down as managing director after 49 years with the business — 38 of them as a board member.

His successor is Gus Zona, who has worked for Street Crane in the roles of sales director and operations director.

Mr Pimblett, who has been managing director for 28 years, has spent his whole career at the company, joining as
a technical apprentice in 1969 and quickly working his way up the ranks.

He was made sales director in 1980, before being appointed deputy managing director — and then managing director in 1990.

He said: “When I joined Street, it was a very small company that manufactured custom-made cranes — mainly for the Sheffield steel industry.

“It was always my ambition that one day we’d be able to compete with the big names in the pre-engineered volume crane and component sector, but most people told me that would never happen; to have proved them wrong is very satisfying.

Street has grown and evolved rapidly, achieving phenomenal success driven primarily by our commitment to investing in product development and innovation.

“We now have a vast engineering team, including many experienced designers and a large number of younger graduates, all of whom are focused on designing new products.

“This has helped us to create one of the biggest ranges of cranes and components in the world, which we sell to more than 100 distributors globally and to end users in a vast number of sectors in the UK.”

Mr Zona is also a long-serving member of the Street team, having joined the company in 1988.

He worked initially in production control and purchasing, before serving two terms on the board — firstly as sales director and latterly as operations director.

In between those two roles at Street, he was managing director of Lloyds British Testing.