Marc Olson got his first engcon in 2018. This year he’s getting his fifth.

Olson was recently working a job in Nyack, NY, an established riverfront village on the Hudson, that included demolishing an old garage and digging a trench for a sewer line to the house. “It was so tight that my machine stayed in its track and I could barely spin-around,” Olson said. He could move forward and back about 5 feet in a narrow driveway between the dumpster and the garage he was dismantling.

“I would grab pieces of the roof, bring it in as tight as I could, and…spin the tilt rotator around” to drop the piece of garage into the dumpster.” It was one of the tightest locations he’s ever worked in, Olson said.

Olson thinks that without his engcon tiltrotator it would have taken a week just to demolish the garage and clean-up. “We did it in two-and-a-half days,” he said. “This tiltrotator is a game changer.”

As other engcon owners have noted, the versatility of the machinery helps them work more efficiently, and that means keeping labor costs down.

“If my guy (his employee Daniel has worked with him for 17 years) goes to get lunch or coffee, it doesn’t stop me. I can do anything,” Olson said.

When it was time to dig and then backfill the trench, the only place to put the machine was on a small rise of dirt perpendicular to the trench. Using an engcon cable bucket, Olson could perch his Yanmar mini excavator in that one spot and easily dig and then backfill the trench.

Although Olson does mostly site work, he has some work of a more serious, or grave, nature. He’s been working for a cemetery for about a year and a half, and he is there often enough that he leaves two machines and engcon equipment there all the time. “Usually they dig with a backhoe (at a cemetery) but the bucket I have is the perfect size for a vault, and it leaves a super smooth bottom,” he said.

After digging the grave, Olson comes back later to fill it in. “That’s where the screening bucket is indispensable,” he noted, because after they screen out the rocks. “All there is nice dirt, it gives more dignity to the burial.”

Olson has a degree in civil engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and his first job was working behind a desk for General Dynamics in a large engineering office. “But I was always looking out the window wishing I was out there, even when it was zero degrees,” he said of his realization that desk work wasn’t for him.

“So I left and got a backhoe job and I’ve been loving it ever since….you gotta follow your dreams,” he advised.

A few years later he went into business for himself, and established M.P. Olson Excavation in Suffern, New York in 1986. But it wasn’t until 2011 that he first thought about growing that business with engcon, when he was introduced to their tiltrotator at CONEXPO in Las Vegas. He tried it out in the parking at the show, “And…then I was hooked,” he said.

When he went back to CONEXPO in 2017 he ordered his first engcon, a 204. After delivery and set-up, Olson played with it a little in the yard over the weekend, and that Monday he took it straight to a job, a project digging about 120 sewers in the village of Sloatsburg, New York.

A week later he ordered a second engcon, and he’s been investing in them ever since.

You could say M.P. Olson knows a good thing when he sees it.