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Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Australian Adventure Week One and Mental Health (BuildWitt Update #20) – DT 377
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Hello everybody. This is the Bill whit update number 20 titled Australian Adventure Week 1 and Mental Health. This, for those that have not listened to, is a weekly account of what the heck is going on at Build Wit. I have realized that I have not always done the best job of explaining what it is we do as a business and one of our most cherished company values is transparency wins. I have often shared this information with investors and with our team every week in email and video format. But earlier this year I just thought, why don't I share this with the industry, with those listening to the podcast, give them the ability to follow along and then also publish it weekly as an email newsletter. So that is why we're here. This is what the heck is going on behind the scenes so you can better follow along and maybe enjoy hearing about what we're doing, maybe learn something, maybe have some ideas for us. We are open to any kind of feedback of means of reception for this information. So first up, this week I held a gold bar worth about $2 million, which is very cool, I will say. Gold bars are way heavier than the movies and cartoons make them out to seem. It is such a joke when I see a cartoon character run off with a bunch of gold bars. That's just not how it works. It is so heavy. If you look at the periodic table elements, it's one of the heaviest substances in the world. A gold bar worth 2 million is not all that big. It's really not. It's pretty comfortably like a brick, size of a brick, but you go to pick it up thinking it's going to be the weight of a brick and you are sorely mistaken. So really cool to have that opportunity. It's my second time holding a gold bar and maybe one day, maybe that gold bar will be mine. But this day was was certainly not it. I had to return it. Unfortunately, why I was doing that, why I held the gold bar is because it is our first or was our first full official week in Australia. 2025 Australia adventure we hit high gear. So as I recounted last week, we started off in Perth. We went to Teese and their maintenance facility in Perth. We then flew to Port Hedland and went into the Pilbara to see the Runway resurfacing with Fulton Hogan. And then from there we drove about six hours south from Port Hedland down deep into the Pilbara through Newman to the Carlonda gold mine to visit with maca, which is a large Australian contract mining company that is owned by Tees as well. Really Cool. Drive through the Pilbara. It's funny because while there's a ton of people that work out there, most everybody that works out there has never actually seen the Pilbara because. Because they fly in, fly out. So like I said last week, again, they fly from Perth about two hours or maybe hour and a half into these airports at each mine. And then they get picked up by a bus and they go right to camp, they go right to work. So they see the camp, they see the mine, they see the immediate area around the mine, but you don't really see the Pilbara. So, you know, as I realized as I was driving through, I was like, man, after a six hour drive through the Pilbara, I have seen more of this region than most of the people that work out here. And it's. I think it's extraordinary. There's a lot of people that say it's boring. I thought it was absolutely beautiful. It's just this bright red earth. It's this desert. There was a little bit of a mountain range that we drove through. And then there's really flat areas. It's, it's. I think it's just extraordinary. So we went out to Makkah because it's out in the Pilbara, stayed in a camp. Their camp was extraordinary. One of the nicest camps I've stayed in. Everybody when I say we stayed in a mining camp, they're like, what are you okay? And it's like, no, no, no. It's spectacular. They have a gym, they have laundry facilities, they've got sports courts, they've got food. The food is amazing. Or this one was extraordinary. Really something. So it was really cool. And then we got to see the whole gold mining operation. They Maca were so good to us. The Capricorn, the company that owned the mine, was, was really good to us as well. We saw blasting, loading, hauling. We got to go across the whole operation. And then of course they showed us the gold pour which happens about twice a week. I think it is so mesmerizing to see liquid gold basically cascade across multiple of these containers, ceramic containers to handle the heat. And then in the few, first few, the gold settles out while then the slag is poured out from there. I have pictures of it. They let us record the process. It'll be all in the video about the gold mining process. It was a really, really cool. And then from Western Australia we caught four flights. So we drove from the mine, about hour and a half mine or about an hour to the Newman Airport. We flew from Newman to Perth. We then flew from Perth to Brisbane. We stayed the night in Brisbane because that was the whole day done. We got up early, I ran around the Brisbane airport. Always fun. From Brisbane we flew up to Cairns and then from Cairns we flew up to Weipa. We were then picked up by Rio Tinto. We drove to the ferry terminal, got on the ferry, went across the river, got onto a bus, drove to the mining camp and ended up at the next mine of the adventure. And that was a bauxite operation with Rio Tinto. Their am run mine. Really extraordinary. We stayed at their mine camp. Again, I love mine camps. They great food. They had steak on demand. So I would like a steak. You write it down on a piece of paper, they cook you a steak. Not so bad. And Rio Tinto gave us a VIP tour. They let us go wherever we needed to go. Tell the story of the bauxite mining operation. Their folks were extraordinary, so kind to us. And just to have that level of access in the industry with such a respected company globally like a Rio Tinto, it doesn't get much cooler than that. The only downside, the only bummer of the visit was that I did not see a crocodile. I so badly wanted to see a crocodile in the wild, but I couldn't find one and I was looking everywhere. So next time I go up to Northern Queensland, I'm going on a croc tour. I'm gonna see some damn crocs. If that's all I do, that's what I'm gonna do. So that was week one, the full week one in Australia. Over the weekend we're in Cairns which is still northern Queensland, going out to the Great Barrier Reef and then we head south from here. We start to work our way down the east coast ult ending up in Melbourne. So the distance between WEPA and Northern Queensland and Melbourne where we end up, it's like starting up in Maine and ending up in Miami. It's crazy how big this country is. And again it's my second favorite country in the world behind America. I am delighted to have an opportunity like this. So stay tuned. Next up, back home thanks to our amazing team chipping away at the business. Our product team is planning an in person workshop before the November area Dirt World Summit with key civil construction customers to review their feedback on billwhit improve and additional features in the works. This is one of the many benefits of our influence plus product and business approach. The resulting feedback will then help us plan our product roadmap into the next year. 2026. So because we're gathering so many great contractors together in one place for the area Dirt World Summit, a lot of those contractors are now Billwood improved customers. And we can take an hour while they're there to sit down and say, hey, what's working well? What's not working well? Here's where we're going. What do you think? What are we missing? Get all that feedback together, marry it with what we've already learned, with where we think we need to go and create a much better product into next year. Better and better and better. And with our increased development capacity now going into the fall, going into next year, in theory we should make the product better, faster, which is also really exciting. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what kind of feedback we get from customers at this event. Usually a software company like ours would have to have a whole separate event to get customers in one place and you'd have to pay for it and it's expensive and you got to ask people, so on and so forth. Whereas everybody's already coming to the summit to learn leadership. They are great. They want to help us out. They want to make build it improve better. They want to improve, improve. And being able to just pull them aside while we're at the greater event is, is, is quite special. 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 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, I explained sales activities last week and as I wrote this at the end of the month, we can now report that activities were up 229% for the month. This is thanks to our new activities dashboards which Dan is publishing to the team and our new BDR team hitting their stride. We have not seen the sales benefit yet, but it's a fantastic indicator of what's coming. It's a leading indicator. You've got to create activities, you've got to book meetings before then you have demos before you close sales before you implement, and then get the customer into the product. So this is a great, great trend that we're seeing, you know, activities. It's not just a volume game. We don't want to be bothering companies that are not a great fit for the product. So we're only going after civil construction companies typically that can really benefit from the training and development that we have to offer. It's really exciting too, because Dan, team company. I don't know who else worked on it. I think it was a whole collaborative effort with systems and Kara and Tracy and others. But we have really cool dashboards that show activities by type. So you can see based on every person on the sales team, how much of their activities are LinkedIn messages versus phone calls versus emails versus text messages. And you can see, you know, what is coming down the pipeline. So what each rep has in potential deals that they're working, what they've closed for the month, what they've lost for the month. This data is amazing. It's in real time. And these dashboards, because of our value of transparency, wins are being shared with the team so that they know where they stand. You need a scoreboard to perform. Creating these scoreboards, one of the better things we've done from a sales standpoint, it's really exciting to see the data. And it's so that again, everybody knows how they're performing and how they can perform better. And it is, boy, is it creating a lot of activity shown in the huge increase we saw over the past month. Finally, every Tuesday, we have a build what team member lead a toolbox, talk on a productive topic of their choosing. This is the benefit is twofold. One, it gives the company every week, I guess threefold, gives the company every week an opportunity to come together that we wouldn't otherwise have because we're mostly remote. Two, it allows the company to learn and discuss something so that we're getting better, we're growing. One of our other values is build leaders. That is one of the ways we build leaders. And then three, this is another way we build leaders. It allows each person within our company. Everybody has to do it. And then once everybody does it, you start over. It allows everybody in our company to give a presentation. Me, I do this all the time. A lot of people like on our sales team Executive team, customer success. They do this all the time. But there's also a lot of people that don't do this all the time, that don't publicly present. And yes, it's remote, but you still have to choose a topic and put a message together and speak clearly and deliver that message effectively. Facilitated discussion. So it's great all the way around. However, this week was a little bit different. We didn't have a team member on. We instead had Rich Jones from Buildwell Health. He took over to highlight the Buildwell program that we offer to all our people and their families. This is one of the best things we've done as a business. I promise you. Anyone on our team can call their hotline and arrange a session to discuss stress, anxiety, alcoholism, substance abuse and anything else under the mental health sun. It's a wildly valuable resource. I've used it, my family's used it. And it is way more helpful than the garbage and the garbage programs insurance carriers provide. Most companies, they provide mental health, substance abuse resources through their insurance carrier go. If you are a leader, try to use these resources. I can almost guarantee maybe there's some out there. I haven't seen them, but maybe there's some that are actually pretty effective. But I can promise you most of them are horrendous. Horrendous, which creates no usage. If there's no usage, that doesn't mean there's no problems. The problems are out there. It's oftentimes just a matter of ease of use. So what Buildwell U turn, what they've done is they've created a really simple way to get people the help they need. They have a phone number that you publish with your team. Your team members can use it, their family can use it. So their spouses, their children, their parents, anybody within their family, siblings, they can use it as well. And then we as a company, we pay on a monthly basis. We don't know who is using it. It's confidential and it is just another thing that we can offer to care for our people. We can't do a ton because we're still in startup mode. We still are cash strapped. But it is one thing that one expense that we have not considered cutting because I think it's just so valuable and we believe in it so much. So highly, highly, highly recommend checking them out. You can check them out atu turn health.com buildwit we I'm a big promoter. We pay for their services. We just, we use them as a company. Rich has been on the podcast highly recommend you check out his episode if you haven't. He's also spoken at the Dirt World Summit. He's attended U Turn. Hamilton has also been on the podcast. He's another great one. Great episode. They're not there to lecture anybody. They both say, listen, we've been in this position before. Um, we have abused things in the past ourselves. We understand and we're creating resources, we're creating a network to, to help others through the. The same process we've gone through so highly. Recommend U Turn and Build well Health. That is a company that we've worked with that I just, I. I could not believe more in. So that is everything for this week. If you have questions, comments, you want to discuss something further, as always, send me an email, please. Aaronbillwood.com a a r o n build b u I l d wit w I-t t.com would love to hear from you. I'm the one checking my emails. I'm the one responding. I promise, no matter where I am in the world, Australia, America, anywhere, would love to talk to you. So thank you for listening and we will see you next week. Stay dirty, everybody.