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Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Autonomous Dozers, Lumberjacks, and Salt (Building BuildWitt #40) – DT 417
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Foreign. Welcome back to the. What is this? It's the Dirt Talk podcast. It's the Monday update, right? It's obviously Monday. I'm recording this on Monday. Yikes. This is officially building buildwit number 40, titled autonomous dozers, Lumberjacks and Salt. A lot of people ask, what the heck? Bill Wood does this podcast, this weekly update. It's a email newsletter. It's a newsletter via LinkedIn, and of course it's audio format. It's for you all to see what the heck goes on behind the scenes. There's a lot more than just me running around on job sites, sharing on social media. Sure, that's what most people see, but we've got a business building the dirt world's next generation through our training and development product. That is Bill, Wit and Prove and our annual leadership conference, the ARIAT dirtworld Summit, to get right into it. This past week, I was on the road, wasting no time, in 2026 with a banger of a trip out west. That's a technical term. We. To kick it off, I visited a friend of mine in Seattle. And then we went up to Redmond, Washington to see aim, an autonomous equipment company. And we checked out. We went to their office, which is a former SpaceX facility, and then we went up to their proving grounds up in the mountains about 30 minutes away. And we saw multiple autonomous dozers and then an autonomous excavator working at their testing facility. It was pretty incredible. It's the first time they've let people like us just check out what the heck they've got going on. We'll have a whole video on it. Of course, that's why we were there. But. But they were as open as anybody is having us out. They showed us everything about the technology. It worked incredibly well. I was very impressed. And what I was most impressed was with was honestly the dozers. There were two dozers. One was a Komatsu, one was a D6. They were working. And the guy, he's in an office on site, of course, but the office can technically be anywhere. And. And he told the dozers, all right, I want you guys to do this. I want you to cut like this. I want you to basically take this much off as you go. I want you to pile it up here. And you could see it all happening in real time on this, either on an iPad, on a desktop, like a computer, a laptop, or on this touchscreen in the office, huge touchscreen tv. And I could go in there and I could modify what the dozers were doing. Instantaneously. And then the dozers would just get right to it. You could see what was happening because each dozer had lidar, which is constantly scanning the area around each machine. And so it's creating this updated three dimensional surface nonstop. The whole thing was a lot of fun. And I can't wait to work that video out, publish that video, share it with you all to see what they're doing. They are one of the, the, you know, now the many technology companies that are really pioneering this whole new world within the dirt world. And to have the access we do to it is. Is unbelievable. So shout out again to aim for having us with their autonomous equipment. We had a blast next. From there we drove south to Eugene, Oregon. We had planned to see a friend of mine working with a feller buncher doing mechanized logging work. The landowner, unfortunately for us, was a poopy pants, but it actually worked out just fine. My friend, he hooked us up with another great operation called Brinks. And they were working east of Eugene, up in the mountains on an area that had burned over a few years ago. When it burned, it burned a lot of national Forest service land. And on either side of the road you have these enormous trees, old growth that are 2, 3, 400 plus years old, that are burned and pose a significant hazard to people that are recreating. So they've had the area closed until Brinks could come in and remove the hazard. Trees on either side of the roadway. I think 70 miles of roadway in total. The problem or not problem. Challenges though, that they can't do it with equipment. They can't take equipment off the road, but they have to clear significantly beyond the road. Which means it's up to crews of two guys with chainsaws, axes and wedges to take down each one of these trees to then buck the trees. Which means. I said buck everybody. Which means cutting them to length for different sawmills depending on what wood is going where, and then to help get the wood out to the mills that they're eventually going to, they're salvaging the wood. The top question I'm asked is what does Bill Wit do? Our purpose is to build the dirt world's next generation. The dirt world is the companies and people building the critical infrastructure and supporting those who build our critical infrastructure that we need to live the lives that we do. Our business is much bigger than me. I run around the world building our brand. Brand. But the business itself does two things. One, we help develop the next generation through our product called billwhit. Improve it's a daily training and development platform that about 300 civil construction companies are using to not just make their people better workers, but better people. And of course, we have the 2026 ARIAT dirtworld summit, the best opportunity to develop yourself and your teams as. As leaders. So check us out. Billwhit.com, book a meeting with us, and we'll talk to you soon. I We're with these two loggers. They were exactly as you would picture loggers, lumberjacks to be. They were awesome dudes. They followed us online, which made it easy. Whenever that happens, it's awesome because people, when they're excited to have us, we're excited to be there. We can work so much faster. And it was a totally new environment for us because we couldn't be within two tree lengths of the work happening. But thanks to drones and action cams and radio communication, we were able to capture the work that they were doing. And it was one of the most unbelievable things I've ever seen. Watching two guys do. One, there's so much more to cutting a tree down than you would imagine. Two, there's so much more to cutting a tree down that's been burned. And watching that unfold and understanding the reality of one wrong move can kill these guys. It's just unbelievable. So. And you're in this beautiful place, of course. I had a blast. I cannot wait for that video. Stay tuned on that front. Then finally, we drove from Eugene back up to Portland, flew from Portland to Salt Lake City, drove down to Provo, stayed there for the night, Orem. And then we drove about an hour and a half south to visit Redmond, which is a salt mining and producing company. And the funny thing about Redmond is I have cooked with Redmond salt for years. It's been my go to salt. It's pure Utah rock salt. I had no connection with them whatsoever. Jason then somehow got connected with them on dirtworld. They were a sponsor for this year's Dirt World, and they were promoting their electrolyte mix. Now, I was using a different brand before that. Electrolytes are very important for me, especially from an exercise standpoint. I tried their electrolytes, and they're incredible. They're the best I've ever had. And so I'm now using their electrolytes. They're not paying me to say any of this. I buy their stuff, I buy their salt, I buy their electrolytes. They're incredible. And so they were like, well, come on out to the mine and see how it all Happens. And I was like, well, of course I would love to do that. And they gave us the VIP underground salt mine tour and it was just wonderful. I got to set off a blast which is always so much fun. We got to see where the food grade salt is mined. We got to see where the rock salt is mined. We went through the processing facility. And then of course, naturally, since it was a mine visit, salt mine visit. We had some of their salt on homemade french fries and hamburgers while shooting dynamite on the nearby shooting range. Because why not? Why not? So just an unbelievable experience with Redmond. They were the nicest folks in the world. I could not recommend their products more. I could not recommend their products more. I'm a huge fan. They're available in all kinds of stores. I get my salt from Publix, but check them out online. Check them out the grocery store. American made salt, completely natural, untouched with additional trace elements. What's not to like? Of course, like any other week, we had a whole team back home making it happen. Our development team, they have been working on not just rolling out the new home screen UX UI that we're working on with the bill would improve product, but they're also re architecting the product itself and they're doing this one component at a time in the background to allow us to address performance issues that we've been facing with the new product as users continue to grow without impacting customers and users. So without having to take the product down, replace the product entirely, they're able to do it in pieces, deliberately, surgically, so that we're not impacting day to day while solving for some, some major challenges to then tee us up for a much better product as it grows into the future. They've also just implemented a new AI first development tool to help move even faster. I've talked about our velocity, which is our ability to develop and our ability to improve the product. It's speeding up over time with better processes with the right team and then with the right tools. Of course we're looking at various tools. There's so many great tools coming available and we're trying to make the most of each. We're not trying to overdo it, but there are some really great options out there that we're implementing now with with some good success. On the customer success side of things, the team pivoted on one of our largest rollouts to date. They opted for a phased approach instead of a quick all at one melee. This is, I think, great news. Being more methodical in our Implementation is a key lesson we've learned over the past few months, over the past year. And if we begin well with the customer, odds are they're going to continue to use it, odds are they're going to see more progress, and odds are they're going to stay on the product over time. So it's not just having a great product, but we are building learning cultures, different learning cultures, a new culture within each company we're working with. And that takes time. It takes a methodical approach. So rather than rushing into something, we've took a step back and we said, let's be a little bit more deliberate about this. And I couldn't be happier to see something like that. It's. It's a really, really big deal. On that note, I just read a book by James Dyson. It was really good. I recommend it. It was the first book, new book I've read this year, and he was talking about, or he quoted somebody saying, you don't want to challenge existing models. You want to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete and that summarizes what we're doing in a very, very good, concise manner. I don't want to overstate the importance of what we're doing, but that's what we're doing. We're not saying that's dumb. This is better. We're saying, hey, this is something that hasn't been done before but is proven in most other industries. It's the standard across the board. We don't have it all figured out yet, but I think we can all agree that eight hours of training, that's very dry, that's very outdated, versus five, 10 minutes of training every day, every week, every month, every year is far more effective. And that is the new model we're building that is starting to take hold. But we're also kidding ourselves. I talked about this with my lessons learned that we're kidding ourselves if it's gonna happen quick. It's starting to accelerate as we're getting further out into the marketplace, but it's gonna continue to take time. And again, it's part product and part support. And that's why this customer success team is so key for us. And finally, on the sales front, our team spent time digging into what we can do better to find better leads and provide more value, rather than just pushing wares. People don't like to be pushed. Now I've been pushing on Dirtworld. I'm not all that sorry about it anymore, though. We've had three great years. We've proven the product, we're selling the damn thing out. So I'll push on that all day long. And people need to get pushed on that. People need to buy their damn tickets. We're almost sold out. But on the bill whit and prove software side of things, we can provide more value to people before we start talking to them. So a few changes we identified or improvements we can make are this past week we can have a full product demo available on our website. Right now we have some product features, but you can't really explore the actual product itself without booking a demo, which is sometimes cumbersome. You have to set a meeting with one of our people. You have to be at the meeting. You gotta make sure the right people are in the meeting. Correct schedules, you might miss it, something might come up. Whereas now, within the coming weeks, you can go to our website and you can explore the product right there. Anybody at any time, which is really key. Next, we have improved viewing of our content. We've got over 2,000 training videos now. The problem though is that's a lot and all the time, like somebody on the sales team last week was like, man, you know, paving companies, they keep saying we don't have relevant content for them. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? We have so much paving content. We've got milling content, we've got paving content, we've got how to be safe around trucks on paving operations content. We've got all kinds of stuff, we've got raking all kinds of stuff. But if they don't see it, if it's not viewable, then what's the point? So we're trying to make our content a lot easier to explore on the website for anybody. And then a third challenge that we had was when people would come to our website. We have a tool that picks up on the URL that they're coming from, like whatever their company URL is. But most construction companies within our target market, their URL, their website isn't categorized as construction. Sometimes it's not categorized at all. Sometimes it's categorized as development or real estate or whatever it is. And so our tool would not recognize those companies as warm potential leads. We are better sifting through those coming to our website now, which will then allow us more inbound leads. That means people that have already expressed interest in what we're doing by coming to our website, checking out the product, viewing the demo, viewing the content that we can then engage with, which is much more efficient and effective than cold calling, etcetera and we don't need to do that. If we're being effective with our brand, with drawing people into our ecosystem, we should be able to do most everything from an inbound standpoint. So that's a little bit of what's happening on the sales front. That's what's happening within buildwit. We're at it another week. There's all sorts of good things going on here. I, as always, really appreciate you following along. I love having everybody along, seeing what the heck we're doing. If you have any questions, comments, reach out to me anytime. If I can help you in any way. Seriously, Aaron, buildwit.com would love to hear from you. And we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.