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Foreign. Hey there everybody. Welcome back to building. Build with. This is number 55 titled African Mining Adventure. Briefly, people always ask, what is build With? What do you do? Is it just you? No, it's not. We've got 40 plus great team members spread out across the United States working to build the dirt world's next generation. The next generation of builder, the next generation of leader, the next generation of company. Making it happen, making sure society has the infrastructure and resources it needs to live and be successful. It's really, really exciting mission. It's exciting time for our business. We do that in three ways. One, we have Build with improve, a continuous improvement software built specifically for the civil construction industry. Helping companies invest in their number one asset. It's only for the companies that believe their people are number one. It's been awesome so far, only getting better as time goes on. Two, we have the best leadership conference in the dirt world called the area Dirt World Summit that'll be happening in November for the fourth time. Phoenix, Arizona, my hometown. And then we've got Brand, Me, Ben Wyatt and the remainder of the Brand team back home. Running around, capturing the dirt world and sharing it with you all. It is awesome. So speaking of running around, over the past week, I wrote this. I'm not there now, but I wrote this at another airport in Johannesburg. It was middle of the night. I think I had a maybe midnight flight, which are always a blast, but it doesn't really matter when you're flying overseas and changing time zones. It was in the middle of a 40 hour trip back to America from Zambia. Zambia was incredible. We spent the week with first Quantum minerals. They were so good to us. I will say it is not quick to get to and from Zambia. 40 plus hours is just about as long of a travel stint as I've done. I mean that's, that's long. Like Australia. I could get from here to Melbourne in 24 hours and that's halfway around the world. So this was a big one, but it was well worthwhile. I have waited years and years. I've waited my entire life for an African trip. People always ask, have you been to Africa? And I say no. And they're like, what? And I'm like, I know, I know it'll happen. I've been looking for the right opportunity. And thanks to a friend on LinkedIn, another Internet friend, Josh, I got hooked up with FQM's leadership and they invited us out to highlight the copper mining process. From blasting to 99.9% pure copper. It was such a Treat. So we started off. We flew from Nashville, Newark, Newark, Johannesburg. Spent the night in Johannesburg. From Johannesburg, flew to Lusaka, Lusaka to Columbia up northern part of Zambia. And first up on the agenda was FQM Trident. This operation, it's home to two completely separate mines. One is copper, one is nickel. And they, they share a process plant footprint which is actually pretty unique. It's. It's extraordinary how efficient this place was. Visiting the operations, nothing was off limits safely of course, but it was so cool to go everywhere we wanted to. We checked out their truck shop. We checked out shovels loading ultra class trucks, 360 ton Liebherr trucks and then Komatsu 960 trucks. I believe they had some Cat 793, 789s spread out amongst the pit as well. We got wyatt up on one of the Caterpillar 7495 shovels. They had a PC8000. They had some Lee Bear excavators, some smaller Komatsu excavators. They had some letarno 2350 loaders. The biggest loaders in the world. The first time I've actually seen one of them at work out in the field which was an absolute treat. So we got to see the pit and then we saw the trucks which were very unique. They were diesel electric. So they have a big diesel engine powering electric drive motors for the rear axle. Typically the trucks out of a pit. Copper is typically you're, you're mining out of a big pit. It gets deeper as you get deeper or grade sometimes gets better. And so you're hauling out, up and out with a full load of material. And it goes really slowly because while the electric motors can go faster, the diesel engine on board, despite it being humongous, thousands of horsepowers can only produce so much power. But not so fast. FQM has spent many years creating the world's best trolley system. Which means the trucks, they get to the ramp and then they hook onto. They have these, this, this contraption on the front of the truck that goes up and attaches so to speak to these power lines. The power lines feed power directly to the truck's motors. It bypasses the engine. So the engine goes. It would be instead at full bore, it goes down to a low idle fuel burn. In metric, I don't know the conversion offhand. It goes from 660 liters per hour burned to 60 liters per hour burned. A huge cost reduction. That truck gets on the trolley line and the best part is it moves Twice as fast up that hill. So it goes far faster than a conventional truck while burning far less fuel, which means a more efficient operation, which is the name of the game in mining. It's the first time I've seen such a setup and it was absolutely incredible. FQM was very proud and they should be because it is, I think, the absolute world's best. So that was really cool. And then we got to see the processing to copper concentrate, which is like 25% copper. And then we saw one of the world's largest tailings facilities. It is, it's a giant circle. It's about 17 km in circumference, or about 10ish miles all the way around. And it will eventually hold a billion tons of material. Copper mining, you run the material through the plant. The OR grade is quite low. So most everything you're running through the plant ends up just being crushed rock. That crushed rock is pumped in a slurry 50, 50 mix water solids to a tailings impoundment and then the water is recycled through the process. The tailings stay there. Eventually it's capped, grown over and no one is the wiser. It was absolutely amazing. We also went to their neighboring nickel facility. It's a newer operation, ironically, it's right down the road, but a completely different ore body. When they mine the nickel ore, they put it onto trucks, make a short trip to the processing facility where the copper is processed as well. Well, they can share some of the infrastructure. It makes for lower cost nickel, also a very vital resource. The world needs more and more and more from there. We were supposed to catch a flight to Sulwesi, 15 minute flight. But we showed up at the airport at 7. Our flight turns out wasn't until 4pm so I was like, could we just drive? And they're like sure. So we drove the, I think two and a half hours over to the Kansachi operation. Now everybody was very excited because this is the crown jewel of fqm, so to speak, in Africa. It was an incredible facility. Trident was also incredible. I don't know if there was like a best facility, but Kansanchi was enormous. It has 13,000 people that work 24, seven there. And it's really unique because you don't just have the mining operation which is giant, you don't just have the mill operation producing concentrate, multiple mills, but you also have a smelter on site. And that is where the magic happens in copper. That's what takes the copper concentrate to 99% copper. And we got to see the whole picture. There's very few places in the entire world in which you can do that. I might be able to count them on my hand. There's not that many. Really, really cool stuff. So first thing we got there, I got to ride in the world's largest battery electric vehicle. It is a 200 plus ton Hitachi truck, the only big mining truck out on a production site right now being tested. It's possible because FQM has such an advanced trolley line system at also the Kansanti operation. That was great. We then went 1000ft underground for their decline. They have built this decline under the pit for dewatering to pull water out. Zambia has a ton of water. So they pump all of the water out to allow the mine to keep going down down to get more and more copper. That was very cool. We captured the pit operations day and night, which was fantastic. I have not gone through the photos yet. I am really excited to do so though, because I thought, I think we got some, as we say in the business, some bangers. And then we went to the mill. We also saw the mill process, the flotation process. We saw the copper concentrate and then over to the smelter. The smelter, that's where the science really happens. They feed the copper concentrate in with some other materials like limestone and some other ingredients. They turn it to a liquid state that starts to separate the copper. They repeat the process through a few different furnaces as it progresses through the smelter building. And finally at the end, you have the 99% copper to pour the copper anodes. We got to see the anode pouring. I have been to one other smelter before, but this was the first time I saw a pour. They pour hundreds of these anodes at one time. It's like this giant rotating table and you see the liquid copper poured out and it fills the anode model. And then as the table rotates over the following minutes, they then grab it and put it in water to cool it, pile them up and then ship them out. Those are about 99% copper. From there they go around the world to different customers. We or they had some refineries as well on site. They put the anodes into an electrolyte solution. They run an electric current through it. They have steel, stainless steel blanks in between. And then the copper grows on the stainless steel blanks over about a one week period, producing that 99.9% pure copper that you all know and love. That's the real brief explanation. I'm excited to walk you all through the process on YouTube soon with I think what will be the world's best video on the copper mining process. Thanks to the first Quantum team. Everybody was nothing but good to us. They had incredible facilities, the mining was world class. I think it compares to the best mining operations I've seen in Chile, in Western Australia, in Canada. Absolute top tier stuff. It was really cool for them, for them to have us. And I almost forgot we also went from seeing a Hitachi 5600 face shovel loading trucks to giraffes within an hour because they have a conservation area on mine property as well. So stay tuned back home. The BuildWit team our team and a few select customers are officially on app 2, which is our new infrastructure for the BuildWit Improve continuous improvement platform. Thanks to our development team's non stop effort, we have the fewest bugs we've seen yet, giving us the confidence to transition all customers to the new architecture over the coming weeks. So this is the new architecture we've been working on for months. It's nice that our entire company is using Build with Improve because we can use ourselves as the guinea pigs for any new features. Testing things out we have a select few customers that are great as well, that are always open to testing some things out for us. So we have them on there, then we see how it goes, we solve issues and then once we get to. Phone call and then once we get to a point in which we're confident in the architecture, we'll we'll be transitioning everybody to that. Like I said, in the coming weeks, it's really, really exciting stuff to get that project done. Arguably the biggest project from a development standpoint we've ever embarked upon. It's not sexy, but completely necessary. We're just about there. Next up, Frank, who is our Dirt World agent, trained on all of our training content, our media industry standards, best practices, OSHA laws, DoT standards will be live for all customers the month of May. By the time you're listening to this, Frank is live. We plan to keep the beta designation for the time being as we get usage up and as we continue to refine the product. Really exciting. I'm not going to dive too deep into how it works on this episode. On the next episode because it'll officially be live. Then I'll explain some pretty exciting use cases for April. Unfortunately, we missed our sales goal. We which sucks. This is the kind of stuff I would love to omit from reports like this, from podcast episodes, but that's business. You can't win them all. Fortunately, with improved messaging for our sales team, a growing pipeline and hefty executive report, we will be on track again in May. We're still safely ahead for the year from a revenue perspective and, and right in line with expenses. So we're still doing very well. Again, it sucks to lose. I hate it. We've spent a lot of years losing. That is not what we're doing this year. We need to win. Fortunately, again, we have the right team. We've been able to dig in on what the heck is going on and we are making some significant changes to make sure it doesn't happen. May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and then start the next sales year in December. Let's go. But as I always say, transparency wins. So that's what's going on. Not the fun news to report on, but the news nonetheless. Finally selling out the area Dirt World Summit so quickly ironically created a budget issue for us. Our average ticket price. We calculated it. As the year went on, the price went up. That was our pricing strategy. And so we put, you know, we think this many companies are going to buy at this tier, this many companies are going to buy at this tier, this many companies are going to buy at this tier. You average it out, then you get an average ticket price for the sake of the total budget. However, we sold a lot more tickets at the lower tiers than anticipated, which is fine. Present time value of money. We'd rather have the cash today to help operate the business. Cash is king. But down the road it creates a budget issue because there's that gap that we were expecting. However, our quick thinking team was able to rearrange some things from a sponsorship standpoint and cover that gap via the sponsorship side of the event, which is really cool. It gets access to for more sponsors to our event, which we believe makes it far better and then covers that budget issue, making sure that we have the cash necessary for the event to make it world class and better than all three other Ariat Dirt World Summits before us. So awesome shout out to the team. That's the cool business stuff that happens behind the scenes that it's cool to be catching it now because if you, you don't catch it and the events in November. So if we were realizing this in September or October before some big deals or bills are due, it would become a much bigger pickle. So that's everything for this week. If you have questions, comments, feel free to write me aaron buildwood.com anytime. Would love to hear from you and with that, we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty.