“When I got to college, I felt like I’d found my people. The friendships I made then, endure today.”
Mrs Sally McPherson is the CEO and founder of iSeekplant.com.au, Australia's largest online construction hire marketplace.
After graduating from The University of Queensland, Mrs McPherson started her career in event management. She moved to China where she worked on a number of events in the lead up to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.
In 2008, Mrs McPherson moved to Sydney, where her career evolved into retail, events and experiential marketing - working for two of the largest technology brands in the world - Samsung and Microsoft. During this time, she was awarded a Global Ideas Engineering Award for a successful experiential marketing campaign to launch the Samsung LED TV.
In 2013, Mrs McPherson left Sydney to launch iSeekplant with her brother Drew and two business partners. Since then, iSeekplant has grown to be the most visited online construction marketplace in the world, responsible for aggregating hundreds of thousands of suppliers and construction equipment assets in one central digital destination. iSeekplant is backed by investors including Seven Group Holdings (Ryan and Kerry Stokes), QIC, Position Partners and Macquarie Group Ltd and has evolved to provide marketplace lead generation, online advertising, consulting, digital marketing and financial services to its industrial services customer-base.
Mrs McPherson became the first female earth moving and construction industry blogger when she launched the iSeekplant blog, ‘The Flapping Mouth’, which is now the most widely read publication in the civil and commercial construction industry in Australia. iSeekplant has the largest social following in industrial services in the world.
Committed to the ongoing development of marketing professionals, Mrs McPherson established an internship program with her business where graduates from local universities can undertake a 16-week intensive program in search marketing tactics. iSeekplant has produced twenty-four graduates of this program, with six graduates now working for the business full-time, with another four intakes starting every quarter.
iSeekplant employs 48 people in Brisbane, and is predicted to grow its revenue by 110% in this financial year, and its headcount to 71 before June next year.
