Aron Jones bet his daughter an expensive bottle of wine that he wouldn’t be able to get 500 followers on his remodeling-themed Instagram account within a year. She said he’d be at 1,000 in no time. It was a bet that Jones found himself losing fairly quickly.

Jones owns Big Dog Construction, operating in New Brunswick, Canada, which he estimates he started about 12 years ago (by his own admission, he’s a little fuzzy with dates). He’s had an interest in construction dating all the way back to when he was 8 years old, and after some time in the Canadian Armed Forces, he decided to take up construction tech. He started his business not long after.

Jones was a bit skeptical of Instagram at first, chalking it up as just “another Facebook” when an apprentice put in on his radar in its early days. After creating an account and making a few sporadic posts, his daughter urged him to take it more seriously and use it to educate the masses with his construction knowledge, which he eventually did.

“Somewhere along the way, somebody said, ‘hey, all these little things that you're showing me every day, you should post about it’,” Jones recalls. “And I was like, ‘no, there's no value in that. Everybody knows this stuff’, and she assured me that not everybody did.”

Mike Guertin of Fine Homebuilding, whose written work Jones was very familiar with at that point, eventually caught wind of Jones’ online platform and reached out to persuade Jones to submit some of his work to their site. It was through this exchange that Jones started to realize the legitimate value of his content and “brought a little bit of validity to the whole endeavor,” as Jones puts it. Today, @bigdogconstruction.gm, Jones’ account, has 90 thousand followers and counting.

Creating Content and Holidays

As far as the content itself, it usually comes down to Jones filming a task on the job and explaining what he’s doing while completing it. While he stresses that the job always comes first and that sometimes a time crunch may prevent them from getting any content filmed that day, they are usually able to justify filming the process since the time he is spending explaining it to the camera would normally be spent explaining it to an apprentice onsite.

With the content production taking a backseat to and being dependent on the needs of the job, Jones’ average weekly time commitment to creating content greatly varies, noting that it ranges from around 5 to 20 hours per week.

For Jones, the purpose of the content lies entirely in educating his audience and promoting proper building techniques. As an extension of this idea, Jones created his own holiday dubbed International Flashing Awareness Day, which falls on August 26^th.

The inspiration for this came from the vast amount of poor flashing techniques he had seen during his many years of construction work, not as a result of poor workmanship, but rather just a lack of education and the industry’s poor standards.

Every August 26^th, Jones encourages his followers to post their favorite flashing techniques or “an epic flashing fail” in an effort to continue the education and bring more awareness to the topic.

“My big thing is, let’s keep water out of buildings,” says Jones. “Quite often it's $5 of time and $0.50 of material and that window opening, that door opening, or any penetration is protected for the next 100, 150 years.”

Jones is the Name, Education is the Game

With such a focus on education, business promotion isn’t even a consideration for Jones.

“The little bit of business promotion that has happened because of [Instagram] is purely accidental,” says Jones.

Regarding revenue, Jones says that the Instagram account has opened up opportunities for them and that it does bring in a little bit of money each year, but admits that it’s not a substantial amount and that most of it goes into BS and Beer Canada, a not-for-profit monthly webinar that Jones is a host on, which discusses best building practices.

When asked about his biggest success and his biggest gaffe related to his social media account, Jones had the same answer: starting the darn thing.

While he admits that the amount of time and effort that goes into some of the posts “can be an incredible time suck,” especially if you don’t get much joy out of the creative process, the amount of people he’s been able to reach and educate, as well as the various friendships he’s made through his account makes the whole investment worth it.

“I know there's a lot of young people out there. They're working in a place where their employer isn’t necessarily taking the time, or maybe their employer has the knowledge, but they don't have the ability to teach,” says Jones. “ I have some knowledge, and if you're willing to learn and apply it, I'm going to take the time to share it.”