Constructionsht is Construction News with Humour
The Flapping Mouth gets a glow-up as Constructionsht. The funny, helpful, challenging, self-deprecating voice of reason for Australian construction suppliers.
For anyone following iseekplant for some time, you'd know that our blog has been the mouth piece of the company since about 2012. It was also, for a time, an online mouthpiece of the construction industry, and it grew to prominence in 2013 when I started writing incendiary opinion pieces about challenging industry issues. At the time, everything else in the construction news space was pay-for-comment editorial guff.
The right people loved it, some people hated it, but you couldn't really avoid it in construction at that time. We would get hundreds of thousands of visitors from my articles, and there was a time when every sales meeting I walked in had a blog fan in it (well, at least if there was blog haters they didn't say it to my face in that setting).
This blog used to be called "The Flapping Mouth" which was my Dad's nickname for me after the first couple of year's of it's success. He would proudly call me "The Flapping Mouth of Plant Hire" at family barbeques. Then there came a time that my role changed into the CEO's job at iseekplant and I didn't have capacity to write anymore.
I slowed down with blogging for several years, until the COVID broke and I started writing 'The Viral Upside' series, based on a belief that the industry was drowning in bad news. This was very symptomatic of my headspace at the time, because we were drowning in bad news and I needed to believe we'd all make it to the other side of that moment in time. Traffic surged again, but it was hard to keep up and manage a business through the pandemic at the same time.
Our blog has had many lives, and many uses, and this new evolution is built around helping our customers.
This new evolution of our blog will focus on super helpful sh*t that you can't get anywhere else, and that involves us sharing our intellectual property with our customers and the industry to help suppliers do better business in construction.
So what are we going to be writing about?
Helpfulsht is articles where we share our unique IP with the industry. This spans topics like hire guides with things to watch out for when hiring, to marketing tactics that do and don't work for construction suppliers (based on our many years of measuring construction-based marketing tactics). There is even reviews of new machines in the mix, specs on popular machines, and guidelines for licensing rules and operating machinery. Its stuff you can't get anywhere else.
At iseekplant, we have a pretty robust sense of humour. In fact, it's got us into trouble many times. We have a long and storied history of poking fun at ourselves, the industry, the government and our shared enemies (ie people chaining themselves to dozers at jobsites). We have a huge back catalogue of April Fools jokes, satirical articles and videos that will have you laughing along with us. Great for 8pm at night when you're half-watching the TV.
In this category you'll find lots of helpful information on technology platforms in construction, new products, new construction techniques, how-to-guides, as well as fun facts and stats about mines and big job sites across the world. If you're a card carrying fan of the construction industry, then doom scroll you're way through hundreds of articles.
This is the place you'll get timely news updates, opinion pieces about industry issues and lots of new and historical updates about major projects. If you want to know who is who in construction, and who is working where, then this is the news feed you need.
Why Sht in the Name?
When Macquarie Bank invested in our business in 2019, one of the first things we did was update our brand. We hired a fancy Sydney design agency to help us, and we sat in many rooms and cr*apped-on about what our brand meant to our customers and to us.
One of the core revelations we came to was that our business helped people ‘make sh*t happen’. Our platform helped Seekers make sh*t happen on their jobsite by sourcing from our Suppliers. 'Make sh*t happen' was also a real motto of the construction industry. The construction industry is made up of millions of action oriented people who cut the cr*p and bring big things to life.
Truth is, at iseekplant, we also all swear a bit. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and neither does anyone in construction. We think it's authentic that our brand language includes the occasional nod to the ‘spirited’ language of the construction industry.
At iseekplant and Constructiv Digital, we make sh*t happen for the people who make sh*t happen.
Alright, enough talking about making Constructionsht happen. Off to actually make sh*t happen and write a few articles.
If you have any ideas about what you'd like to see on our blog, write to me at sally@iseekplant.com.au
Cheers,
Sally