Builders Mutual Thought Leadership Series
Context
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Near the end of my internship at Clean, I was tasked with writing a series of thought leadership
articles focused on the labor shortage in the construction industry for Builders Mutual Insurance
Company, a commercial construction insurance agency. This entailed interviewing experts at
Builders Mutual and then crafting a series of articles to be posted on their blog. There ended up
being four articles in the series. The first one addressed the situation of the labor shortage in the
construction industry. The second focused on industry best practices for hiring and recruiting.
The third dealt with industry best practices for hiring and on-boarding new employees. And the
fourth discussed the cost of a poor hire.
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Rhetorical Decisions
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The research I compiled for this project mainly came from three interviews I held with experts at Builders Mutual. I also did a lot of internet research about the most recent Great Recession and the impact it has had on the construction industry, particularly the labor shortage. Through this act of assembling information I got to truly engage in inquiry. The most difficult part of this project was taking all the information and making it interesting and understandable for those who will be reading the articles. I first began by sifting through the research and breaking it up based on common themes such as training, on-boarding, costs of a poor hire, etc. These became the topics for each article. With this information I created an outline for each article.
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While writing I realized that communication between client and agency is extremely important. After completing the first article, they came back with feedback saying that most of the information I had included was not needed. This was because, based off our initial meeting with the client, I was under the impression that they wanted to focus on the labor shortage and why/how it effected the construction agency. However, upon receiving their feedback, they realized they needed to reword their expectations to say that they wanted to focus on the labor shortage in context to how Builders Mutual can help contractors beat it. It was because of this new piece of information that I realized I needed to hold more interviews (at first I had only held one interview). I also asked other Clean staff members if they knew of any resources that would aid me, which is when I was sent presentations and Builders Mutual program information. Then I really had what I needed to get started.
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In the future I find it imperative to develop better communication with clients in order for projects to be completed more satisfactory and more efficiently.
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Evaluation
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This project gave me a chance to do something completely out of my comfort zone. I had never been too fond of giving interviews, but as it was required, I had to get over my fear. Not only did I successfully get the information I needed from the three interviews that were held, but I was also able to go through all the information and organize it based on the topic of each article. This series gave me a lot of confidence in what I can do professionally. I now know that I am capable of holding a professional interview and I can take my research and turn it into something worth publishing. I have also developed my writing techniques so that I am able to write for companies with different voices, something that comes in handy when trying to tailor copy to a certain audience.
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