← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back. This is the Monday edition Dirt Talk podcast Bill would update number 25 titled 2026 Planning no Churn and wow. The Billwood update is my attempt to give you all some insight as to what Billwood does as a company. There are, I don't know, maybe 45 people at the company. There's a lot more than just me. I am by far the most visible part of Build Whip because I'm building the brand running around on job sites across America worldwide, putting it all on social media. You're listening to me oftentimes if you hear the podcast. But there's a lot more going on here. And so this is abiding by our value of transparency wins to explain the good, bad and just the business stuff happening week to week within our company. So with that the past week, the major news is that our leadership team met in Phoenix to review 2025 and plan for 2026. I left this meeting with overwhelming gratitude. First and foremost, I love those that I work alongside. I love our leadership team and it is a damn good feeling to work with people that you really care about that you know, really care about you and the company and the team and the mission. And I think for the first time too, we're all in the right seats which has taken. It's just taken time to figure out. It's taken us time to figure out who we are as a business, what needs to be done and it's taken time for us to figure out what we're best at and where to apply the skill set that we as individuals have. Me, I am full bore on brand again. That's why you're listening to this. That's why you see all the stuff on social media. Build the bill with brand, which I do. Randy is leading the company as CEO leading product, the software product bill with improve Kara's leading systems on the back end. She's. She's the one of the five that is probably most key, low key from an online standpoint. But none of us could live without her. She's keeping everything together. It's essential. Dan is full bore sales and marketing and then Jason is full bore all things dirt world. Yeah, it was this year unstructured or we structured it ourselves. Last year we had a facilitator who was great, very helpful. This year we're just. If we don't have to spend money, we're not. It's pretty straightforward stuff but so we didn't have a somebody to help facilitate but Randy did help organize it all. Basically the first half was talking about what's worked well, what hasn't worked well, reviewing our goals for the year, lessons learned, etc, and then the back half of the day was all about, all right, what do we need to do to get after it, to get to where we need to be as a business. Early on in the meeting, I brought up the quote from Abraham Lincoln. I don't know if this was actually said or not, but it's wow. Widely attributed to him. And he asked the question to an audience, if you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does it have? And when the audience responded with five, he said, four. Just because you call a tail a leg does not make it so. It was this meeting last year where we asked the question, what if we sold the marketing business? Um, and we all within, you know, an hour or so of asking that question, agreed that we would sell the marketing business. I believe it was September of last year, maybe October. It took three, four months to figure out how we would do that and to do that, which is remarkably fast in the business world, I've learned. But just because we sold the marketing business then this January and called ourselves a software company does not mean we were a software company. It's taken a lot of grinding all year long to actually become a software company, position ourselves as a software company. And I think this meeting was the first time we saw the benefit of that focus because planning for next year was actually pretty, pretty easy. We know what we need to do. We just need to do it. It's simple but hard. Like, knowing what we need to do is quite simple, but doing it's the hard part. And we have two focuses, which I alluded to in the title of this podcast. The first one is Eliminate Churn, and that is the companies that have bought the software product. Bill would improve that. Choose not to continue with the software product after a one or two or three year period. We want everybody to be using the product on an annual basis. We've had challenges with that. I've talked about it on this podcast that's called Churn. And while some of it has been systematic on the industry, most of it's been entirely on us. So, sure, we were a little early to the market with what we're doing, but most of it's well within our area of. Of control. We need to control the controllables. We need to make the product better, we need to roll the product out better, we need to support the product in an ongoing way better. We know we need to do those things. Now, again, it's doing those things. So eliminating churn, that is the single biggest thing we can do as a business. That is probably the biggest challenge we've had as a software business so far. And I think this is the first time we have been able to focus the entire business on that one thing. And we are going to be talking about it ad nauseam. Our people are gonna be sick of it. You're gonna be sick of it. But we are on a churn crusade and I am very excited about that. Then second, the second focus is to wow every customer, go above and beyond. So we historically, we're pretty good about this. From a marketing standpoint, it was a blast rolling out a website or a video or a brand or photos or social media, whatever it was, we were wowing people all the time. We still are across the board, but we need to make that the standard. With every interaction we have with the customer, with every interaction we have with a user from a software standpoint, and with everybody who's coming to the summit as an attendee and with everybody interacting with us online, listening to the podcast, watching the vlog, perhaps even just liking a social post here or there. Are we gonna wow everybody? No. But I think we can strive to wow everybody. I think we can do a much better job at that. And it's for me, really exciting to focus on as well. I love the thought of that that's gonna get us to the next level. It's what we've been wanting to do for a long time, but haven't because we haven't been focused. But now, again, we're focused. We can go all in on a single subject and that is what we're doing. So I left our meeting to summarize, really excited as a team, I think we left more excited than ever because one, we have the right team, we have the right leaders. We all have different skills to offer the the mission we're trying to achieve, which is building the dirt world's next generation. And we finally as a business have the focus necessary to execute. So really exciting stuff there. Stay tuned. Beyond that, while we were meeting, just a few happenings. One I was since I was in Phoenix. Our meeting was in Phoenix. Randy lives there. I like going there to see my mother. I was able to see BCS. They rolled out their 5130 demolition excavator, which I believe believe is the heaviest demolition machine in America, in maybe North America. She only comes out every few years. I've seen the machine twice in the past. Six or seven years, maybe eight years. This was my third. It was wrecking a hospital. It was very cool, a lot of fun. There won't be a video on that since it was just me, but took plenty of photos, so stay tuned for those. Shout out to bcs. They've been so good at always letting me know what the heck they're up to. So thanks Cody. They're great folks. BCS Arizona Back home at the business fortunately we far exceeded September or September sales goal with our overall Q3 sales goal. So we went way over in September, but we were trailing for Q3 as a whole. However, going way over in September helped us catch up for Q3. So we ended with within about 2% of our target, which was great. We need to be hitting goals on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, on an annual basis. We have to be predictable as a business. I think I talked about that last week. So to be within 2% of our revenue goal is awesome. And then we've been very good at keeping spending reined in. Being under budget has also been a big priority for us this year. We've done really well with that. We have missed some from a revenue standpoint, but we're back on track for the quarter. We're into the last quarter of the year and we're going to be pushing like all get out with our full sales team now to stay on track and to exceed our targets. Speaking of sales, we hired two more BDRs, which is really key because that gives us one BDR for for all five regions for the first time. Very exciting. We split the United States into five regions about three months ago. Two months ago when Dan came into lead sales. We have one sales rep per region. The sales rep is largely giving demos, dealing with new potential customers and then the BDR is booking meetings to keep their calendar as full as possible. We've had a few BDRs up until now, but now we've got one to one so we've got a full sales team for the first time for Bill would improve. It's really exciting and I can't wait to see how we go as the industry slows down into the winter. As I record this, we're officially one month from the 2025 ARIAT dirt world Summit, which is very exciting. I cannot wait for it to be here. It is the coolest few days of the year by a mile. The coolest event I've ever been to by a mile. I'm very biased, but bias to the best of my abilities aside, it is by far the coolest industry event I've been to. The energy is unmatched. The quality of individual in that room is unmatched. I've spent a lot of time reflecting upon who I want to be around. I want to be around those that give me energy, that add, that create value. And this room has more of those people in the construction industry than any other in the construction industry. I can say that with, with certainty after being in a lot of those rooms and knowing this group of people, it's just a blast. So I'm tired of selling it. I'm tired of getting people there. But once it all happens, it is the coolest feeling in the world. And then finally this week, we rolled out quarterly team surveys. We did this years ago through whatever HR platform we have. It was fine. It wasn't super helpful, but we did read everything. As I met with somebody a week or two ago, they said, hey, it'd be, it'd be really nice to just offer feedback to the company. This is also important too, because we are remote business. We're really spread out. So to have a mechanism that allows for people to reflect and to offer feedback for the company overall, for leadership, I think is a great thing that we've been lacking. So we rolled that out. We're doing it on the same feedback format that we have as a business for each individual quarterly now, which is start, stop, continue. So what should build with start doing, what should bill, what stop doing and what should build it continue doing? Now, the most important change we've made here before, the feedback was not. Was anonymous, was unnamed. This time it's not anonymous anonymous feedback. Okay, maybe you get more authentic feedback, sure. But it's really unhelpful because then you can't follow any of it up with a conversation like, hey, you feel this way or hey, you said we should do this better. Could you elaborate more on that? Could we talk about it so that we could do something about it? So while anonymous feedback was sometimes helpful, oftentimes it wasn't. And it just, it doesn't align with our value of transparency wins. I'm trying to get back as close to our values as possible as a business. We've strayed at times away from them. And so anonymous feedback, it just, it doesn't align, it's not helpful. So we decided to have it not anonymous on a quarterly basis going forward. And I'll report back on what we learn. I don't know yet. I haven't seen any of the responses quite yet. But we've also made it mandatory for everybody to do it on a quarterly basis. So stay tuned, let you know how it goes. And with that, that is everything for the past week. I appreciate you listening as always. Feel free to reach out anytime. Aaron. Aaron. Buildwit Bullet I L d w I T T would love to hear from you. And we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.