← Dirt Talk Podcast
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Foreign. Welcome back to Building Bill Wit. This is number 42, titled BHAG speaking in 10,000 lessons. This is my weekly attempt at explaining what the heck Bill Witt does. It's me running around with the camera and a media team, great team, influence team. We're doing podcasts, YouTube content, social media content, talking a bunch of shit. It's a blast. But there's also a purpose to that. It's to grow the Bill Witt brand, to build the dirt world's next generation. That's the next generation of leaders and next generation of builders, which will then build the next generation of America and the world. Because no one can survive without infrastructure. And we're supporting those that do. And we're doing that through bettering people, training and developing people with our Bill Whit and PROVE software, daily training and development, not just skills based, but people based, how to communicate better, lead better take care of yourself, better health, mental health, financial health. And then we've got a leadership development conference, the Ariat Dirt World Summit, you've heard me talk plenty about. That's our annual event to elevate the leadership of the dirt world. So that's a little bit about the business. And this podcast is dedicated to explaining what the heck is going on behind the scenes. So with that, the first point of this week, we are officially two months into our sales year, which means. Which we shifted from December 1 to December 1. So our sales year now starts. I've talked about this in the past, December 1st. So now we're two months in and we have two goals for our 12 month sales year. That is a baseline revenue goal, which means that we're profitable as a business and we hit those numbers. Everybody at the company gets the full bonus cash and stock combination, which is. It's a huge sum for everybody. It's a crazy big sum for everybody, which I'm really excited about. And then we have our bhag, coined by Jeff Collins and recited plenty by our own Randy Blunt, which is the big hairy, audacious goal. So we have the baseline revenue goal, which is again, we're a profitable software company. We're at that point a fair size software company that has a pretty fair valuation. Our team gets full bonus and stock compensation. But then we have the reach goal that is, okay, cool. We can hit that number, but we think we can actually hit this bigger number. And it's safely above that baseline revenue goal. But we think it's entirely possible to hit it. It's entirely possible to hit it. It's a Stretch, it's not gonna be easy, but it's possible. And by hitting it, it's a really big deal for us because it gives us more cash in the bank. Ultimately, it drives the value of the business, so the value of the business will be far greater, which is awesome because that gives us more opportunities for future growth, financing, et cetera, that we just haven't had before. And then it gives us more cash in the bank, which gives us more options than ever before. We, we've spent years now starved for cash. We've been surviving on investment dollars, which is not uncommon for a startup, quote unquote, or a software company, especially, quote unquote. But we're done with that. I don't want to be asking people for money anymore. I want the business to grow on its own. And if we do go raise in the future, I want to be, I want it to be in our terms, not someone else's terms. And that's only the case when you don't need the money, Go figure. And banks especially, then more traditional financing, they don't even loan to you until you. Unless you don't really need the money, which is the irony of it. You have to kind of prove that you don't need the money because they like safety before they give you a bunch of money. I don't know the banks. Yeah, go figure. I say all of this because as of now, two months in, we're tracking beyond the BHAG for revenue, which is extraordinary. And we're coming in, we've come in so far under our projected expenses for the sales year. Again, we're only two months in, so there's still a long ways to go in 2026, but it's a huge momentum boost. We've spent years now on the back foot. We've spent years now with a losing mentality. And when you're losing, when it's all you're doing, in a sense, it's hard to get out of it. It's a hole, no pun intended. And it only gets deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And as it gets deeper and deeper, it's harder to see the sunlight up at the top. It starts to disappear. But once you start to climb out of it and you start getting out of it and the sunlight becomes more and more and more. Now you're excited, now there's the momentum. Now you can have more life within everybody, within the organization. And I think that's where we're going toward right now. And it's, boy, for me again, it's less exciting and more relieving, but it's a good feeling. It's a good feeling. So this is not to say we are resting on our laurels. We have, I mean, two months in is not that much in the grand scheme of things. But to be tracking ahead of that Bhagavad, it's a really big deal, especially with where we were last year financially, where we have been in the past. And it's a game changer for our business, for our team, for our customers, and ultimately the dirt world, because that means we can serve the dirt world and that much better of a way. Speaking season for me is in full swing. This week I traveled to Panama, first thing to speak at the AGC of West Virginia's annual meeting. And then from Panama, I got to go through the Panama Canal too, which was really cool. I took a bus up about halfway up the canal and then we got on a boat. It was me and a hundred other very old people, Europeans and Americans. Go figure. And then we transited the canal. So we were in the locks with a sailboat, catamaran. And then behind us in the same locks as we were going, was a, was a container ship. It was incredible. I don't need to do it again, but to do it once was pretty mind boggling. So that was really something. I spoke at the event, which was awesome. I'm really appreciative for having me there. And then I went from 80 degree Panama to minus 10 degrees in Ohio to speak at Beaver Excavating's annual meeting, which was another awesome opportunity. Speaking is by far the hardest skill I've ever attempted. I think it's a lot of ways very against human nature. It's very scary. It's very against my baseline, my natural state, which is extremely introverted. And then you can only get better by practicing it. And you can only practice it on a stage, in front of other people, in front of strangers, in strange places, which is really damn hard. And I've done it enough now. I haven't actually counted how many times I've done it in like a legitimate setting. I'm curious to see maybe 50 times. And I'm just now getting into like the fun of it. I've talked a little bit about this, but this time I felt like I always grade myself. And I, I was expecting to give a different talk for these, these meetings, but I revised it over break to focus instead of on companies, on individuals. So it was the first time that I'd given this talk, which I practice in the conference room by myself, nonstop before I do it. This was though, again the first time I gave it live twice over. The first time I gave myself a 6 out of 10, which is not a great score. That's pretty low, A pretty, pretty big bummer. I still did fine. But yeah, I gave myself six out of 10. So that that afternoon I went to the drawing board and I overhauled it to make it a lot better. But again, you just, you have to get it to a point where you have to just do it in front of people and then you can iterate from there. It's the only way it happens. So that I reworked it and for Beaver, then I felt like it was much better. I gave myself an 8 out of 10. But the opportunities to speak are awesome. I don't take them for granted one bit. And I am working harder than ever to become a more effective speaker because it makes me more effective in what I do, in leading in building a business and podcasting, and ultimately in helping to build the dirt world's next generation, which is what we're after now that Bill Whit and Prove and our refined implementation approach are well underway. So we rolled out Bill Whit and Prove last year in the fall and we overhauled our implementation approach. If you've been following along since then, we're seeing some really great wins. So again, we're starting to get out into the marketplace, get out into teams more. We have more data and recently we've had multiple customers hit over 10,000 lessons completed within the first month or few months. Depends on the size of the company obviously. But within the first few months of the platform, which means that's hundreds of hours of training that their team is completing in only months without interrupting day to day work. It's not big eight hour training blocks. This is five to ten minutes a day. But when you do it thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, you start to build a huge volume of training that would not be done otherwise. And then the retention is higher because now you're not getting it forced down your throat in, in one day or two days or three days. It's dripped to you every day, little by little, so that you can actually think and, and absorb it and work it into your day to day work. So really cool to see only a few minutes per day helping these companies avoid accidents, avoid, avoid rework and avoid turnover, which is a damn good deal. So it's not to replace seat time, it's not to replace MSHAW training, big formal safety training, trench box Training competent person, whatever it is, but it's to offer teams and companies the ability to train their people every day, which we find very effective and we find is a huge need in the industry. So to see those wins is extremely encouraging. Our development team on the product side of things continues to hammer on overall product performance. Like I said, we've had performance issues. Just the more companies use the platform, the more bugs you find, the more stuff breaks. And the previously built infrastructure is not up to par. So we're piecing it together. We're replacing that infrastructure piece by piece while customers are still using it, which is. It's moving along. We're on track there. And they're doing that while also working on some new features like announcements like the new home screen and like leaderboards. So it's gonna be a really, really fun few months as these serious upgrades roll out, because it'll drive better daily usage, it'll drive more value, and it'll help people be more effective in the field and at the end of the day, be not just better workers, but better humans. That's the goal. And even better, we're continuing to implement new development tools and to build our development team, which will allow us to do all of this faster than ever. It's so exciting to become legitimately a software company. It's taken us years to get to this point with a high functioning development team building not just a great core product, but improving that product over time and then having the opportunity to explore other opportunities. It's really cool stuff. It's really cool stuff. And if you're a user of Build it improve, hopefully you see those improvements as time goes on because they're, they're sick. Randy shows us to them in Slack on the leadership channel all the time. And I'm just, I'm really excited because I've been out in the field. I've been, especially one of those kids, 18 years old, not knowing a single thing. If I had this when I was starting out, I would have been so much more effective. So much more effective. And finally, we are way ahead from a budget standpoint on our 2026 Area Dirt World Summit ticket and sponsor sales. We're still tracking to sell out this quarter, which is a really big deal. As I record this, I think we're almost 90% of tickets, tickets sold. And this is not a blessing, just from a cash flow standpoint because any business owner knows cash is king. So this has brought in a lot of cash for us to take some of the pressure off and to operate the business more effectively. But I think the biggest blessing is actually focus. In the previous years, we've put so much energy into building the Dirt World brand and growing the event to make it successful. And a lot of that energy has come from our leadership team, from me, from Randy, from Jason, from Kara, from Dan, all of us, and then other people within the team. Of course, it's taken a ton of energy and energy. It's a great thing, but it's a limited resource. So when you're pouring it in over, over here, you can't pour it in over there. Dirt World is not the core business. It's part of the business. Bill would improve the software company. That's the core business. That's where our focus needs to be. And now that the event is, we have that momentum that we've built for years now. You know, we got people to the first event based on the years of relationships we had built with the media and everything we've done. And then now we've built this momentum by delivering on those promises made in the early years over the first three years. Now companies are seeing that they're signing up faster than ever, which is awesome. And so now, instead of pushing on, everybody, please come, please come, please come. I promise it'll be great. Now that they get it, we can use that focus and apply it elsewhere to drive the business forward and to solve other problems. And that's a blessing. Man, it's unbelievable to see it actually take place. And it's just been a grind for years and years and years to build Dirt World into the event that, that it is and is becoming. And there's a lot of work to go to make it world class. And every year has to be better. So we're not taking our foot off by any means, but we don't have to sell it, which is a lot of time and energy on a 12 month period. So now that that's almost done, all of that energy can be diverted into other activities, which I could not be happier about. I could not be happier about. I did not like badgering people about Dirt World more than anyone else, but I also believed in it more than anyone else. And I have kept my word to everybody that I've convinced to come there. They've all said, yep, this was worth it. So I don't feel bad about selling something that delivers a lot of value and makes people better and companies better. But now, again, I don't have to have those conversations anymore. I can focus on more productive, more productive things for this year, which is, again, it's real exciting. That was important. But now I've got to be elsewhere. We've got to be elsewhere and we have the means to make that happen. So that's a little bit about what's going on here at Billwood. If you have questions, comments, send me an email anytime. AaronBillwood.com and we'll see you on the next one. Everybody, next week. Until then, stay dirty.