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Hello everybody. Welcome back. Monday Dirt Talk Podcast Bill with update number 19. This one's titled Australian Adventure and Activities. For those that haven't listened much, this is the weekly account of what the heck is going on within Build Wit. I read these based off of the weekly email newsletter I send out as well. Want to keep everybody informed so you can follow along because as we've changed as a business, I've realized we just haven't done a great job of explaining what it is we do as a business. So these podcast episodes, the newsletter is an attempt to give you better insight as to what the heck is going on. One of our values, transparency wins. Trying to just share more as we go about things. So here are this week's happenings. First off, someone told me they read these and they listened to these episodes, which is absolutely huge. Embarrassingly, I've said to everybody that you can email me questions, comments and I will talk about them in these episodes. If you've noticed, there hasn't been that many of them. That's because I haven't got anything until I realized this week, thanks to Dan Briscoe, that I was not included on the email responses. So if somebody responds to the newsletter, I don't see it. And I've realized there's a lot of newsletters newsletter responses that I've missed out on. So. So if you have sent me a response, sorry, going ahead, I will respond. But to get me directly, just email aaronildwith.com would love to hear from you, but very happy people listen to these. Enjoy these. So if that's you, thank you so much. Next up, we touched down in my second favorite country, and that is Australia. Now, antipode means the direct opposite is the definition. So an antipode within a geographical term is the complete opposite point of Planet Earth. So if you poked a stick through the earth from one point, what is the point it comes out at? If you had took the antipode of Nashville, Tennessee, it would be Western Australia, which is where I was sitting as I originally wrote this. It is the complete opposite side of Planet Earth, one of my favorite places on planet Earth. And this is all to say that the clock has officially started on the 2025 Australia dirt world Excursion about an hour after we landed in Perth, we toured the Teess Western Australia Maintenance facility, seeing them rebuild anything from haul truck engines to entire haul trucks themselves. And then next up, we flew from Perth to Port Hedland, which is like the northwestern corner of Australia, for night operations to resurface an iron Mine Runway in the Pilbara. With Fulton Hogan, a leading Australian infrastructure contractor. Why is there an airport that needs resurfacing in the middle of nowhere? It's because this is, it's one of the biggest mining regions in the world. The iron mines of the Pilbara. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary part of the world. If you are into mining, geology, natural resources, globalization is. The scale of the operations are extraordinary, but they're out in the middle of nowhere. So to get a workforce out there consistently, the mines operate as what's called fifo or fly in, fly out, F I, F O, which means the entire workforce flies in and flies out every week. There's different rosters. So some people will be on two weeks on, one week off, some are on one week on one week off, some are on three on one off. It just depends the operation. Um, some do just do days, some change from nights to days. Depends on the operation, depends on your role, depends on your seniority. But most of the workforce lives in Perth in the major city in Western Australia. They go to the airport in Perth every week. They get on a chartered 737 aircraft like what Southwest flies and they fly directly into the mine. So each mine typically operates a different airport and, and this one needed to be resurfaced. Fulton Hogan, being one of the leading paving airport contractors in this part of the country, was on the scene and they let us see it all happen from here. There are two more action packed weeks of events. This is this trip I've spent a lot of time working on the access that allows a trip like this to unfold. This is our third trip to Australia. Work trip. You can build all of the relationships you want online, over email, over the phone, but at a certain point you've got to just go shake hands with people and you've got to figure things out. So I've been to Western Australia once and then the eastern side of the country twice for work. Uh, I've used that experience, the people I've met, the connections I've made, the progress we've made as a business and as a brand in general, to then tee up this trip, which is like my Australia trip thesis, it was a lot of work. Uh, it's at least four, if not six months of planning that goes into a trip like this. And to actually be doing it, doing it is, in my opinion, the easy part. Um, and we will have videos on everything we're seeing once we get through the approval process. So next up in the next podcast, I will Be talking about the gold mine. That's the third visit of the trip. We're going to a remote gold mine in the middle of nowhere, Western Australia. Now back home because I am out and about back home, the show does not stop. There's a good reason why I appointed Randy as CEO of the company so that he can run the business, make leadership decisions alongside our great leadership team and just amazing team back home while I'm out and about halfway around the world and they're just not slowing down. So back home we have now that we've hired all the needed sales positions that I've spoken about over the past few months, we are turning our attention to our development team. So we have plans to hire additional developers to help us iterate on our existing build with improve platform and move faster. We'll use a similar methodology that I've reported on in the past, relying first on job specific assessments to identify the best people to put through our formal hiring process. This is just another evolution of becoming a better higher performing software company. Software is predicated on development and we need more development horsepower. We're at the point in the business and point in our product where we've got a we've got to move faster, we've got to iterate and we've got to not just make our existing product perform better but then add to it as time goes on simultaneously. So it's a really exciting moment for us to be growing development, hiring additional developers. I think what we have to offer from an employment standpoint is quite different from a lot of other technology companies and I'm really excited to see the the quality of folk we can bring in put to work and I'm excited then to see what kind of product they can put together on the bill it improve side to serve ultimately the dirt world better and better and better. If you're looking for another industry event that is a snooze fest, this is definitely not for you. But if you're a leader looking to elevate yourself, your team looking for like minded individuals that are hungry, then look no further than the Ariat Dirt World Summit November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. In our third year we'll have about 1500 hungry industry leaders from about 500 companies looking to learn, grow, teach. It's going to be fast. Fantastic. We also have a world class lineup. We've got Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas, James Clear, Atomic Habits, Kim Scott, Radical Candor, Mark Miller, Chick Fil a leadership, Tim Grover who is Michael Jordan's trainer. You Will not hear from a lineup like this anywhere else. So check out details now. Dirtworld.com you can use code AARON10 for 10% off any registrations and we'll see you November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. Next up, sales, sales, sales, sales. We exceeded our weekly target of 25 booked meetings and we set a record for monthly sales team activities with still a week to go in the month. Activities are anything each sales team member does to connect with a potential customer. So such as phone calls, emails and LinkedIn messages. It's a core metric that we're tracking as the more activities we generate equates to more eventual sales. Now there's a quality component to activities as well. We don't just wanna be spamming people or reaching out to contractors that might not benefit from our product or reaching out to our core market called our icp. Uh, and now that we have this new BDR team, now that we have the sales folks organized into regions, we can be a whole lot more effective. Dan's leading the charge here. He's been doing a great job and it's really exciting to see the momentum come together. So the team's reaching out to people. I'm reaching out to people as well. I got a message the other day, sent a message to someone on LinkedIn and they said, well, this is probably, you know, you know, I know this is probably your team sending me this message, but so on and so forth. And I was like, hey, if you get a message from me on social media, I promise you it's coming from me. I work all the time. I have no family, no children, just a few plants and some clownfish here in the office. But I work all the time. So I try to get back to everybody. I'm pretty good at LinkedIn, I'm very good at email, I'm very good at Instagram messages, I never look at Facebook messages, try to respond to YouTube comments. I really try to engage with everybody coming our way. So if you get something from me, it's coming from me. I promise. I promise. And finally we are talking the future of our software offering and it is really damn exciting. Our goal is to serve the field first. Giving those who build our world the ability to develop their work and leaders leadership skills, keep themselves and those around them safe and communicate up the chain. We're leaning heavily on our industry background and understanding with the help of our great customers. So it is getting spicy. The core offering is daily training and development for the field for the workforce within the civil construction industry that's our bread and butter. The product is build it improve. However, there are other opportunities that we can tackle to help those building the work, which is 80% of the industry's costs. Those that do the work themselves help them perform better, communicate better, push information up the chain. There is a breakdown between the office and field. Largely it's because of the nature of the industry. The nature of the industry is highly fragmented. You have some companies have tens of projects, some have hundreds, some have thousands of projects. And to collect data from that many projects scattered sometimes coast to coast is really damn hard. So not only do we help or aim to help develop the people building the work, not just into better workers, but better people and better leaders. We help deliver or aim to deliver other value like helping them communicate more effectively, helping leadership keep them informed and et cetera. So it's, it's really exciting where we're going. World domination is 100% our intent. It will happen, it's just a matter of when or I will at least die trying. But fortunately it's not on my shoulders. It's spread across our team. I'll put our team up against anybody else and we are, we're certainly on the right track. So it's also thanks to the customers that have trusted us so far and it's, it's going really well. So it's, it's exciting or finally becoming a software company. And it's been a grind, a many year grind to get to this point. It will continue being a grind because that is the game we play. But it's really exciting to talk, talk about the future. So that's a little insight as to where we're going from a software company standpoint. And that is what the heck was going on this week. Stay tuned. Next week, More Australia. I appreciate you all listening. Like I said beginning of the episode, if you have comments, questions, feel free to reach out anytime. Aaronbillwood.com I would love to hear from you. See you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody.