I once hired an amazing flooring contractor after told me he was allergic to bullsh!t.

He did a great job.

Ive spent my career building technology solutions, which often are driven by the Marketing department. Ive watched huge piles of money be spent on nothing but names and slogans, while tech has to scrounge to build any product at all, so my natural tendency is to be pretty wary of tag-lines and vision statement meetings.

So with my anti-spin street cred on the table, let me now tell you - Ive got a problem and I see the light.

For years Andrew and I have been driving concrete5 forward any way we can. We make money with the marketplace, hosting, and support contracts - but services work has always been a huge part of our revenue. Not only do we need projects to keep our kids fed, we need this work to keep centered on solving real problems with concrete5. Im happy to not be in the business of selling creative design and strategy, but if were not actually building sites with concrete5, how do we know if were making great tools or not?

Many of the features you know and love in concrete5 have emerged from client projects. Clear.com needed some important changes to how we did overrides and abstracted the core. The Nation of Kuwait needed to view thousands of pages at once, and the flat view of sitemap was born. Planned Parenthood and TopCon needed changes to permissions and workflow that emerged in version 6. The U.S. Army project were working on now has required the addition of folders to Stacks and the File Manager, along with the exciting centralized data types that are becoming Express in version 8. Sometimes were funding new development internally, and sometimes weve got a few clients who all need similar solutions and the costs are being spread across projects. Sometimes were just building a one-off iOS app that connects to a concrete5 install for a single clients needs. Regardless, without client work, there would be no concrete5. Every project helps to pay bills so we can grow, and every project informs the needs we see and roadmap for the core. Were building this thing together with you guys.

Which amazingly, seems to be a shocker to every prospective client who comes our way. We routinely get on calls where the folks have been grinding their gears, often for years, on something theyve built internally, and now theyre pleasantly amazed that theyve got the executive team of their CMS on the phone. Last week we had two similar calls in one day:

OMG! I cant believe I didnt think of asking for help 2 years ago

You have availability to work on this now??!?

Youve already built half of what we need in the next version?

Its super hard for us to find great programmers, you too, right? No? Youve got a whole team of great freelancers who have contributed to the core who are waiting to help at any moment? WOW!!!

Its extremely flattering to get the rock star treatment. Thank you! We are very proud of what weve done with concrete5. But - yes wed LOVE to build a great solution for your needs too!

I dont know where the idea that our team was just too awesome to actually work ever got started. I suppose you dont expect Matt Mullenweg to ask you for $10k to build some key feature everyone would benefit from into WordPress. I suppose you might not think Bill Gates wants to help you setup your desktop computer. I dont know why, but it does seem that prospective clients consistently werent thinking about contacting us as part of their solution needs at all until they just did so on a whim.

This is frustrating for me. Plenty if not most software companies with a product are known for services. You might think of Word & Excel with Microsoft, but they actually do offer quite a lot of services too. When you think of Oracle or SAP, you certainly dont think those folks would be too busy to work on your projects. You know theyre eager to, and if they arent the perfect fit, they have a partner network that surely has one.

So all of a sudden I see why people would spend piles of cash around a few words. Weve got an amazing product and community but have somehow managed to screw up the positioning around concrete5. In some misguided concern to make sure that people knew concrete5 was stable and dependable as a product and project, Ive let people believe that the team behind it would never be interested in helping them with their own needs (which couldnt be further from the truth.)

The reality is weve got a very tight core team that will keep the project, support and operations moving along fine, but for things to really grow the way we want we need to keep half a dozen contractors who are waiting in the wings busy. Theyre sitting there in Slack, eager to collaborate on big problems and small alike. These are bright developers who have worked on the core, made add-ons, volunteered many important contributions to the concrete5 experience, and are waiting to agument your team and provide development services to you. Solutions architected by the CEO and CTO of concrete5, reviewed by the same team that reviews the core, well thought out hardened top tier code at flexible and reasonable pricing

...but were just not keeping them busy.

Sure, were not the right shop for all jobs. We dont do anything creative or marketing related. Were not going to be able to help a small business build their first website or do SEO. We dont write copy or spend time explaining processes and choices to clients. We are simply not a full service web firm and we dont want to compete in that space. Wed rather partner with others for that.

We work for webshops and IT groups that need hosting, support, application and buildout needs. If you know what you want, we can build it. If you have comps, we can chop them. If you have requirements, we can write a SOW and build you a well tested solution on a fixed bid. If you need training, staffing, or bug fixes on somone elses code, we can do all of that too.

If you need something else, Im sure we have a partner. If you offer something I should know about, you should be a partner.

In an effort to better communicate this eagerness to work together, and also the larger value of open source development and community here, I am announcing our new tag-line slogan vision statement

concrete5: We Can Build It Together

We can mean both us (PortlandLabs the core team that manages the core) and the community of partners, marketplace developers, and github contributors who volunteer so much time and effort to make concrete5 work.

It can mean both the core CMS (which is quite robust but always improving) but also your unique project work.

Together can mean youre hiring us for some heavy lifting, it could also mean were hiring you, or handing off a design project. Weve got a team of contractors waiting to tackle hard concrete5 problems, and that team always needs to grow. If youre accomplished at concrete5 and we like your code, wed be happy to add you to our pack of talent.

This phrase can also gets across that balance between a programmers needs and a content contributors expectations - a togetherness Ive often tried to express to folks looking for a quick positioning statement from me in the past.

It says a lot of important stuff that we want people in peoples heads when they think concrete5, so youre going to hear everyone on our team talking about how we can build it together ad nauseam from now moving forward. Its going to start showing up more on concrete5.org and in videos. Until Andrew and I start hearing we knew we could count on getting help from you because its concrete5 on these calls, were havent drilled it in enough.

So if youre wondering if you can afford to hire that new programmer to keep up with the work coming in, stop! Contact us to augment your team - we can build it together.

If you need to figure out how to migrate your version 6 site to a version 7 site, contact us - we can build it together.

If your organization could use an Intranet to better share data and communicate, contact us - we can build it together.

If youre offering concrete5 as a builder solution and need to provision mini-sites or customize our UX, contact us - we can build it together.

If youre interested in freelance work and youre a great concrete5 developer, contact us - we can build this together.

Im not one to get touchy feely over some buzzwords. I believe weve already got the hard parts done (great product, amazing community, smooth support & operations processes) - were just failing to communicate a basic idea. If we can keep this growing team of freelancers busy, we could funnel more energy and money into the promotion that Jess is leading and really see the kind of growth that concrete5 deserves. Im not bullsh!tting you here, we really can build this all together.