R&F STEEL BUILDINGS
A customer story for R&F Steel Buildings, made to do a real job: prove a prototype build worked, so it could be rolled out across the country.
R&F Steel Buildings is one of Queensland's most established steel building specialists, with more than 10,000 structures completed across the state. The model is central to who they are: a network of independent local owner-builders, each running their own business and backing their own work. Every building is engineered for its site, made from Australian steel, and put up by a licensed local who stays accountable long after handover. The shed is designed for the job. The person installing it lives down the road.
The build sat on the Anchorage, part of Cubbie Station, one of the largest irrigated agricultural operations in the country. At over 12,000 hectares, the scale is enormous, and so was the problem. At planting, the operation moved huge volumes of fertiliser, and a bottleneck in how it was received and stored meant constant trips off-site during the most time-critical window of the year. R&F engineered a structure to fix the receiving process and make storage safer. But this build was a prototype. If it worked, the design would roll out across multiple sites. That raised the stakes on the engineering and it raised the stakes on our video. The film wasn't there to celebrate a finished shed. It was there to prove the system worked, so other operators would have the confidence to adopt it.
R&F relies heavily on building trust as part of their sales process. Big claims need to be supported by proof. That's true for a shed builder on a 12,000-hectare farm, and it's just as true for a software company, a law firm, or anyone asking a customer to believe them. We developed undeniable proof in collaboration with The Anchorage and R&F Steel Buildings.
"I honestly believe this is some of the best money we have spent for the company."
OWNER - R&F STEEL BUILDINGS ST GEORGE
What separates a useful customer story from a forgettable one is whether the people making it understand the business they're filming. We learned R&F's engineering approach and the specifics of The Anchorage's fertiliser operation before the camera rolled, so we weren't fishing in the interview. An interviewer who already understands the problem asks the second and third question to get past the rehearsed line to the real answer.
That preparation is why the piece explains the solution properly instead of dissolving into jargon about sheds and farming. For a prototype that needed to win over sceptical operators, that clarity mattered commercially. The client sounds like the expert he is, because we knew enough to let him be one. ShareStory was built on this. We always try to come in as informed as possible, which is how the proof lands where it needs to.
The hardest part of a customer story isn't the lighting or the lenses. It's helping a real person, who never asked to be on camera, feel comfortable enough to speak like themselves while a crew watches. Sometimes the most down to earth people find this the hardest. When we work with farmers, we're often asking someone who's spent a lifetime letting their work do the talking to suddenly put it into words. We've guided hundreds of everyday people through exactly that, which is why this story sounds authentic and not like a brochure.
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