How Andrew Curtin built Construction Wave, a B2B outlet covering the UK's construction industry
He charges upwards of $15,000 for each sponsored webinar.
Most companies buy advertising to drive sales of their products, but Andrew Curtin’s first sponsor mostly bought out of pity. It was May 2022 and he had just launched Construction Wave, a B2B outlet that covers the UK’s construction industry. He had absolutely no audience, but a major crane manufacturing company bought a $10,000 sponsorship anyway.
That $10,000 allowed him to hire his first editor, and over the next two years they built Construction Wave up into one of the leading publications in its sector. Its website is mainly monetized through high-priced sponsorships, and this year it hosted its first conference geared toward construction CFOs.
In an interview, Andrew explained how he got interested in the sector, where he found his initial readers, and why he thinks there’s an opportunity to launch a subscription data product for his industry.
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Transcript
Hey, Andrew, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me on. I've been listening for the last few years, so delighted to be a part.
So you currently run a B2B media company that caters to the construction industry, but you didn't grow up working in construction, right? You initially started your career in advertising and marketing.
Yeah, my professional career, I guess, coming out of university, was in advertising. But I spent six summers with the tool belt on. So my dad was a small local contractor in the southeast of Ireland. So I've done a couple of summers there just with the tool belt on.
So you do have a background knowledge of construction because it sounds like you worked with your dad and in his contracting business.
Yeah essentially. Dad just threw me in with the toughest guys and just said, learn your trade. Yeah, it was a small local business. So just helping out here and there. And yeah, I guess there's a big correlation between the Irish and construction. As you know, in America, we like to say we're the hands that built America. That's what the old Irish guys in the pub like to think. And it's the same here in the UK. So it's kind of in our veins a small bit, you know.
Yeah, now that you say that, I have a relative who owned a construction business in Boston, and I was visiting him, and every single guy on his crew was Irish. I completely forgot about that. I didn't draw the correlation.
Yeah, if you go through London, all the contractors are Irish.
Huh, interesting. But so you decided to go, after university, into marketing. Was it at a marketing agency? Were you working in-house somewhere? What were you doing?
So my first job, when I finished my master's in marketing, I did a graduate program with a butter company called Kerrygold. You might have seen their butter in Whole Foods and I think it's in Walmart and Mariano's in Chicago and stuff like that. So I was based in Evanston, just north of Chicago.
And yeah, I spent a year in-house working there, which is a great working holiday. First time in the States, just out of university. I then got a job with an ad agency in in London and worked there, and to be honest maybe six to nine months into that job – I play Irish sports over here, hurling if if any of your listeners ever heard of hurling, so I played sports over here and all the contractors are kind of tied to that sport, and I eventually started just doing freelance marketing consultancy for the contractors on their personal business websites and stuff like that. I was paid like two grand per website and just like maybe some powerpoint presentations. It was basic, but it paid the rent and I could go out for a few drinks on the weekends. So it was good fun. And it kind of set me up for what we're doing now.
So you start doing these side gigs. Did you turn that into a full-time thing where you were doing content marketing consulting for like contractors or construction companies or anything like that?
Yeah, that was exactly it. I was doing long hours. Like an ad agency is a tough business. It's like long hours, low margin. It sounds sexier than what it is. And then the contractors came along and it was probably... making 4,000 pounds, whatever, $5,000 per month. And I was like, okay, I can live on my own terms here. It's freelance. It's not exactly on my own, but I can do it freelance and I can live a life. And that's how it started.
And you quit your ad agency job to do that full time.
Yeah, I couldn't wait to get out of there in the end. It was tough, but I always wanted to do my own thing. And looking back, it was actually great training because... It's just a high paced environment. From a content perspective, you could see what worked, what didn't work. We worked on some cool stuff like the NBA Europe. So it was like looking at content every single Monday and Tuesday, doing the analytics. So it definitely, looking back, was a great learning curve.
And like what kind of content were these companies getting you to do? Were you writing blog posts, articles, videos? Like what were you doing?
I think it started off with tender presentations. I hope your listeners have some coffee for this part. Basically, in contracting, to tender for a project, you have to have a presentation about your company's history and case studies. Times were starting to change in construction where new buyers required a bit more design and just a bit more information,a bit more quality. So I started doing these presentations just like case studies and putting them together so it would help with their tendering and then went into website development. These contractors had no websites, so like they thought I was a genius coming in and doing a five page website. I used to charge like two, two and a half thousand pounds per website.
And so you're doing this freelance for several years. Were these mainly just companies that were in the UK that you were working for?
Yeah, all the UK.
Yeah. And so how many years did you do that as a freelance content marketing consultant?
End of 2018, right up till maybe end of Q1 2022.
So would it be safe to say that you made a lot of contacts with the industry? Obviously, you had this background working with your dad, but it really gave you a holistic view of the business of construction and all the different intricacies of it and stuff like that?
Yeah, I really got to know, I suppose, the back office of construction when doing that. I can tell you one thing, the back office isn't that much easier than working on site, that's for sure. It's a tough, tough industry. But yeah, I got in there and rubbed shoulders with companies and the executives. I learned a lot but I would say I got first-hand experience of how the back office of construction works.
So what motivated you to think like, okay, I'm creating all this content for these companies. I want to start creating content for myself that I own and can scale. How did you get the initial idea for Construction Wave?
Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm a media geek. I love the media business like yourself, Simon. I think it's a fantastic industry. I've read your stuff for the last few years and listened to your podcasts. And London and the UK have such a really strong, robust b2b media business over here. And at the end of the freelancing business, one of the guys at a large developer in the city here just said, listen, Andrew, you're not going to become a millionaire with freelance consulting with us. There is an appetite and a need in this industry to have a new media property. Would you consider doing something like that? And I just looked at the competitive landscape. A lot of the companies have an aging management team and maybe didn't move to print that well. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. That guy supported me a lot as well in terms of getting my first few clients and just getting it off the ground.
And so when did you launch Construction Wave?
I love the word launch, but the website went live, I think it was around the 1st of June 2022. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, Simon, to be honest. But I said, right, let's get it out there. And it started off with a thrown together newsletter, but that was like the summer where I was just more or less figuring out how this works, and I didn't even have an LLC set up at this time.
And then coming into September I cold called Liebherr, who were the world's biggest crane manufacturing company and it was like, uh guys this is what I'm doing, I'm being honest with you, this isn't going to light the world on fire, we have some ad inventory where we’ve partnered with a podcaster. They gave us 10 grand up front. I just think they felt sorry for me, but it got me paid for the first few months, and I remember scrambling to get a limited company and a bank account set up so they could pay us.
So when you first started publishing, it was just you, I think, to start out with. So what kind of content were you producing?
I think the basic stuff in construction is your project wins. So you see your two billion pound, dollar data centers and stuff like that. Just some of the headlines, rewriting them and stuff like that. Very, very basic. Project wins is kind of like the most basic thing you can do in construction.
Like contracts being signed for construction projects and stuff like that?
Yeah, the ones you see, whatever, £2 billion on the Soldier Field Stadium or something like that. So those types of contract wins. I was always interested. I felt the industry needed a bit more of a human touch. So I like to do deep dives and features. But there's only so much you can do when you're one person. But I got a few of those out. But it was mainly, Simon, a roundup of the contract wins of the week and stuff like that.
And then you initially had trouble building an audience, right? Would you say in those early months?
Oh, I think until like June to December, we might have had 100 newsletter subscribers or something like that. I think a lot of people, Simon, who look at this industry, they look at The Hustle, they look at Morning Brew, and they think they're going to skyrocket straight away. But when you're in such a niche industry, it takes time for word to spread because in construction... they don't use Facebook, they don't use Instagram, they don't use Twitter. They look at Linkedin and they look at their email, so you don't have a whole lot of options.
And so you started going to construction conferences and trade shows, right?
I remember going to a trade show. I won't mention the name, but it's one of the main construction trade shows in the UK. And I went in there. I didn't have an iPad at the time, so I rented an iPad for 50 bucks for the day and went around the trade show hall trying to get people to sign up to my newsletter. I eventually got kicked out at the end of the day and got one of these legal emails in the evening and they made me delete all the subscribers, like okay, I'll delete them if you don't bring me to court. But yeah, we actually get on well with that events company now it's amazing how forgiving people can be. But yeah, at the start it's like hand-to-hand combat, just full contact sport, because nobody's going to come to your site and sign up.
I think at some point you hired a reporter. Maybe you raised a little money. What was the evolution to a more formal kind of news organization?
Yeah, we didn't raise. We just bootstrapped the whole team, to be honest. So I’m still open to do a small round of funding, but not massive. But we got a bit of cash flow from the Liebherr sale. It was just a few months because I wasn't taking a salary really. And we hired our editor, Rory, who was a former BBC journalist and worked at... a fairly good UK publication called The Manufacturer, which covers the business of manufacturing. So Rory came in and really took some leadership as well and helped put a framework in place.
Yeah, and so what happened at that point? Once you had him in place, did you find that it was easier to grow the audience and the content and stuff like that?
Rory really scaled the amount of output. And, yeah, it just opened my mind up because I'm not a journalist. I like writing and love copywriting, but I'm not a journalist. So I was just getting out there, just selling what I could. you know, just, just seeing what we could do. And for the first year, we made no money. Like, I don't know how we even survived, but we did just the odd webinar here and there, just something just to keep us going every few months. I think most media companies who are bootstrapping don't make any money for the first couple of years. But coming into this year, it's been quite strong. We launched an event earlier this year, really helped accelerate things.
So you've got an actual journalist. He's actually probably doing original reporting, maybe even breaking some news. Who was the core readership? I'm guessing it's not like the on-the-ground construction workers. It's probably the higher-level executives, the people... you know, who work in the offices. I'm guessing that's kind of the readership of the publication.
Yeah. Our readership is project manager and above. So if you were the project manager director on site, right up to the CEO. The main readership is the CEO, project directors, and you need people who have an influence on the site because those are the people that buy the technology. So it's mainly your project manager, director team, commercial team, all those type of job titles.
Yeah. So you said that you started selling, and I think what you were selling were like sponsored webinars. What were the companies that wanted to sponsor these webinars? Like they're ones who basically sell stuff to construction companies?
Yeah, in the B2B space, the early emerging tech companies try to get some lead gen, some thought leadership. Early on, you cannot offer a huge audience. So we always try to have a good panel of speakers so the sponsor can network with some of the other speakers. So I think early on, that's where the value was because we weren't getting that many registrants, maybe 25 to 40. But that being said, they were good quality registrants.
And so the sponsors, they're the ones who have sales teams with long lead times. So I'm guessing that those 45 people who signed up, those were leads that you would hand over to the sponsor so that their sales team can nurture those relationships and eventually land a big contract with the construction company six to 12 months down the road or something like that.
Yeah, we looked at it in the short term because a lot of companies who are buying a webinar with people like us are just testing you at the start to see whether they’re going to get anything out of us. So I always said that the registrants were more long-term, and we'd try and make sure that they're nurturing these properly, or else they'll just come back and say they sucked. Some of these companies need a bit of hand-holding. And then in the short term, I would call up some of the guest panelists individually and say, Hey, we have a sponsor for this. We're trying to get off the ground. Would you mind having a conversation with our sponsor after the webinar is completed? And most people are absolutely fine with that.
Yeah. And because these were leads for very high price products in a lot of cases, you were able to charge a relatively high price for these webinar sponsorships, like even very early on when it was only like 45 people or something.
Yeah, you could charge anything between $7,000 to $15,000. $15,000 was a bit top shelf, but for what we were doing, it was great money. And to be honest, it's still around that price point. I don't think at the moment there's a huge appetite to be paying massive amounts of ad budgets on webinars, but we can still price it accordingly.
And so what other revenue lines did you start? Did you start selling advertising in the newsletter on the website or anything like that? Or was it mainly focused on the webinars?
Yeah, new webinars mainly at the start and then newsletter really coming into this year, Again, there's a lot of lead gen stuff. And the big pillar for us this year, Simon, was we launched our construction CFO summit.
So what was that? So CFO, so that's Chief Financial Officer. So it's an event specifically for CFOs at construction companies?
Correct. So there's a global construction issue at the moment from the war and COVID backlog. There's been a lot of companies going into administration. And we looked at last year, we kind of chatted to our journalists qualitatively and then looked at some of our website analytics and were like, OK, everyone's reading the finance part of our news. You know, everyone's interested in the insolvencies. And there was no gathering for financial leaders across the industry and we figured it's too big of a market not to discuss money, so I literally bet the business on this event.
Cash flow was really tight around this time last year, last summer. I think I had two grand left in the business account and our venue was 50 grand with everything included. And I said to the venue, I was like, listen, just give me a chance to pay it. And my hat goes off to them, they created an installment plan and we got it paid and made a 7% profit for year one.
Nice. And so where was the summit held?
It was held in a venue called Northumberland Avenue off Trafalgar Square in central London. So it's not far away from Westminster and all those famous landmarks. And we could have gone a bit cheaper and maybe rented out a cinema, but we just said construction CFOs and financial directors don't get out of the office at all, so let's make an impression on these guys, because this was probably the only day in the year where they're going to get outside their office and network. So we picked the kick ass venue and it really helped us elevate the event and people loved it.
And was it like a one day event?
Yeah, one day event. And it was definitely the most stressful time of my life. I can tell you, getting a new event off the ground, having every single pound to my name invested in this whole thing was, yeah, it was so stressful. But we had great sponsors, we had great speakers, and had a good network of people.
And you also charged for admission as well.
Yeah, it was on average £250 per ticket.
And how many CFOs came?
Just around 180 was what we got. Maybe around 40% were FDs and CFOs, and then the rest were operational.
Yeah. So is the plan to turn that into an annual event or are you going to start doing other niche events like CEOs in construction, CMOs in construction? What's the kind of event strategy that you want to implement?
We're not looking at any more job title events. We are going ahead on the 27th of February next year with the second CFO conference, and we've huge momentum going into that. We have all our last year sponsorship rebooked and we have some massive public companies reaching out to us, like companies you see every day and you're like, these guys don't work in construction, but in the background, they're actually helping. So we'll surpass 150,000 for that event, 150,000 pounds for that event next year. And we should have around... just under 300 delegates. I don't want to turn into an events business. This is going to be like our q1 calendar event. It helps us get our brand out there. It’s a good income stream, but it just helps accelerate the business as well.
I'm guessing you're not trying to do a general construction conference because there's already an existing one right?
Yeah, and they don't have a great net promoter score. They're not really liked by the industry. The event companies do well out of it, but the attendees don't seem to love it. I think what would be interesting, Simon, is we definitely want to focus more editorially on the financial aspect of the industry. So this CFO franchise that we have, I'd be keen to expand it a bit more. Maybe like in a virtual awards or something like that or some sort of virtual conference around it. Because the finance people in this industry have a hell of a job to do because this is a 2-3% margin business and very high turnover. I'm interested in exploring franchising it out a bit more on the finance side.
Yeah. And if you're going to target any title, the finance side, they're the ones who have the purse strings. So those are the ones that are probably the most lucrative job title to go after, other than maybe the CEO.
Yeah, they're definitely a good job title to target. And as well, London is a financial services city. It's one of the leading hubs like New York. So there's a lot of interest around construction and real estate here. So I went with my gut and a bit of data, but yeah, it's worked out quite well and they're a good target audience for a lot of brands.
What's your content mix look like now? I saw in addition to your editor Rory, it looks like you have at least one other reporter working for you.
So we just hired Miles, a young reporter who has done an apprenticeship with the Financial Times, so he's doing very well so far. We'll be having another reporter on q1 next year. So the output is we do between five and eight stories a day, and covering a lot of a lot of contract wins. Miles has taken that a bit more. Rory is starting to go more into the strategic side of the industry, doing deep dives, company breakdowns, looking at the M&A side a bit more.
So we would say our bread and butter, Simon, is executive moves, contract wins, those big contract wins. Now we're starting to create our own USP on just deep dives of companies, because a lot of these companies are quietly making billions of pounds per year, but we don't know much about them.
So looking at more of the human aspect of it. We also like to champion the industry. It's quite a secretive industry, but there's some amazing founders in this industry that started with absolutely nothing and have built incredible-sized companies.
So do you now feel like you have a real brand for the publication? Are you getting scoops and people coming to you first and stuff like that to actually publish original news that hasn't been published anywhere else?
Yeah, we're definitely becoming more of a go-to place. We're not getting all the scoops. We do have some good competitors in the market, and my hats go off to them. They do get some good scoops, but definitely it's becoming a lot easier to pick up the phone. The PR teams have heard of us. A lot of the industry has heard of us. So we’re getting more scoops. We're just getting a lot more engagement. I always ask the journalists, how busy is your inbox? And I'm always interested to see how busy their inbox is. And it's hectic in there at the moment, which is a good sign.
But a lot of people are reaching out to me as well, just personally, just trying to get featured and stuff like that. And the CFO side is really starting to kick through. CFOs, when they're doing their annual accounts, they tend to come to us first.
Are you mainly only producing written content are you doing anything like podcasts or video or anything like that?
At the moment we don't. It's all written for now. I don't see us changing much to be honest. We’ve done a podcast at the start, but I think podcasts are tough. They're a tough business. I think sometimes for a niche industry, especially construction, it's such a busy industry. You're not going to really listen to podcasts when you get back in the evening. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just think it's a tough industry for podcasts. I'm open to looking at it again. It might be just a journalism-focused podcast for awareness, but we tried it and it worked okay. I'll think about doing it again, however.
And have you waded into paid subscriptions or any other kind of digital paid products or anything like that, like information products? I feel like you could create a database that's just tracking a deals database or something like that and charge for access to that since your reporters are already collecting that information anyway.
Yeah, we could. One thing I think about is, five years down the line, there's no reason why we couldn't be like CB Insights, but for construction only, because we're going to get to data first. We have a competitive advantage, a massive network. And I think this industry is going through a technological transformation. There's new companies emerging. AI is really affecting this industry. There's a labor problem. Young kids where I come from don't want to work on the ground in construction anymore, so like technology is starting to take a lot of those positions.
So how do you want to expand over the next five years? Do you want to just continue to grow Construction Wave, hire more reporters? Do you want to launch other sites that are in adjacent niches? Or do you want to expand regionally, like, you know, beyond the UK?
Next year we'll open up a new publication around the refurbishment part of the sector. There's a lot of work going on around refurbing buildings here, turning them into hotels. Within the next maybe five to seven years we'd hope to have five publications all covering different sub-sectors of the industry. We've done a calculation that we have about 500,000 back office workers in UK construction. Probably around 200,000 of those are real, real value. So we find that there's different sub-sectors that are like civil engineering, refurbishments, we'd like to start going into those sexy industries. And beyond just the publications online, it's the database or community I'm quite interested in. We really want to drill down into the construction industry.