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Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
BuildWitt Dashboard and 80% Tickets Sold (Building BuildWitt #39) – DT 415
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Foreign. Welcome back to Building Build Wit. This is number 39 titled Build with Dashboard and 80% of tickets sold. I love these podcast episodes. They are an opportunity for me to explain what it is that Bill Wit does. That is the number one question we get. We are first and foremost here to build the dirt world's next generation. We're doing that through a few different means. One Training and development with our software products that is Build with Improve daily training and improvement not just to make people better workers, but better people which is most important and is the way forward for the dirt world. Then we have our annual leadership development, Workforce development Industry development Conference Summit, the Ariat Dirt World Summit coming up this year and November 9th through 11th in Phoenix, Arizona for the fourth time we'll have about 1250 infrastructure leaders, civil construction primarily some mining leaders into Learn talk everything about leadership and then of course what I do is the influence side of the business with our great team to preach the gospel about the dirt world, tell stories of the dirt world to explain how it is these fine folks, hard working people keep our world moving and hopefully inspire the next generation along the way. I you know I'm always running around but there's always stuff going on whether I'm here or not in Nashville and we're back 2026 and it is busier than ever so we'll get right into it. First up, we have officially published the first version of our company dashboard for our team and investors and thanks to all of the systems that we implemented last year. In the accompanying APIs, our team can view real time data including our revenue goal compared to actual revenue, Dirt World tickets sold and the number of lessons Bill Whit and Prove users are completing Transparency it only wins when everyone has the score. And now that our team is aware, it's our responsibility from a leadership standpoint to discuss and educate everyone on the meaning of each number so that they can most importantly tie their day to day and into the overall company's performance. Again, I have said this on every one of these episodes. Transparency wins has been a Bill Whip core value since the beginning. I've always been a big believer in sharing information. We used to share just about everything from a financial standpoint. The problem became that the company we were outpacing some of our systems. We became a little bit more complex financially and we we had insight into what was going on, but it wasn't all that great. It wasn't all that in real time, it wasn't all that helpful. And then as we've transitioned to A software company. It's taken us quite a while to even understand what core metrics matter the most to our business and where we need to go and then how we can again in real time, track those metrics. But after a very big effort last year to implement a new accounting system, to implement new systems across the board to clarify what our core metrics are that we need to be looking for, to focus our business as a whole, we've been able to aggregate everything into one place for the first time. Now another big lesson of transparency wins. You can't just, I've already alluded to this. You can't just give people all this information and expect them to one, understand it and two, know what to do with it. Business finances are very different than personal finances. And the reality is most people don't even understand their personal finances. They're never taught. It's not that they're dumb, it's just that they've never been taught. Their parents probably don't know. Odds are they didn't get it in school, They've definitely not gotten it from former employers. So we don't only have to teach people from a personal finance standpoint, which I'm trying to do better of this year, we have to teach people from a business finance standpoint. I've been able to learn this over seven, eight years. So I can look at some of these numbers and be like, yeah, that's, you know, where it needs to be, or that needs to be a little bit higher. That's, that's, you know, whatever it is. And then the same with our core software metrics. I've had to learn all these software terms like ARR, annual recurring revenue or daily active users or boy, acv average account value. So annualized account value, now I don't even know, sorry, my stupidity is in full view. The point is I've had to learn all this and if I were to expect and assume that everybody just knows what these numbers mean and what to do with them, that would be a very dumb thing, a very, very foolish assumption. So this is really, it's been a 15 month project to get here, to just get this down dashboard available. But now the work really begins on getting the numbers out to our business, educating everyone on the numbers and then focusing ultimately on driving the numbers to where they need to be. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Because that's what the world is, just a bunch of numbers. So that's company dashboard business. The top question I'm asked is what does Bill Witt 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. 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 dirt world Summit, the best opportunity to develop yourself and your teams as leaders. So check us out. Billwhit.com, book a meeting with us and we'll talk to you soon. Next up, I hosted Rod Bohl, who's the CEO of Komatsu North America, in Nashville for the Dirt Talk podcast. It is really, really cool for me to have such high caliber leaders willing to come down to Nashville, sit down for a few hours and talk shop. This opportunity helps further our relationship with Komatsu. Komatsu has, has started to become just great for us. They've always been good, but we're starting to get more in depth with them from a relationship standpoint, so that's very exciting. I think on the horizon, there's potential projects with them on the training front, on the AR Dirt World Summit, they were their sponsor this past year. They'll be back again. And then of course on the influence front because they have big cool machines, not just across America, but worldwide. So very exciting stuff. I started the podcast in 2020 from my apartment. It's come a long ways. A lot of you have been here since the beginning, which I really appreciate. And this year I'm trying to bring the best people that I know in the industry into this room to have the best conversations I've ever had to give you the most value possible. I'm really excited about it and this was a fantastic way to start 2026. Next up from the title, we have sold 80% of all over now, 80% of all 2026 Ariat Dirt World Summit tickets. Our huge push and three successful years of the event are finally paying off. We are eight months ahead of where we were at this time just last year. And this is already about what we've sold for the entire 2024 eventually. This year, we've been growing it for three years. We're dialing it back just a little bit to 1250 industry leaders, industry tickets, people, seats. And so if Anybody's on the fence. This is about the last chance to get squared away before we sell out in Q1. I am by no means above saying I told you so. I. You have maybe noticed in my rhetoric, that rhetoric, excuse me, yikes. That I'm starting. I'm done explaining myself. I really just want to work and focus on those that get it and those that I've been fighting uphill with, I'm just getting rid of, which is a great feeling. I've chased on Summit in particular. Hundreds of people. Hundreds of people. Great leaders. I really respect most of them and I've tried to get them on board and they're just not on board. So at this point, whatever bro, I don't care. I'm just going to focus on those that get it. I'm going to make them as good as possible, as successful as possible and they will create the change necessary within the industry. We are going to build the early adopters. The next generation of dirt world company that looks at their people completely differently, that looks at their people holistically, that takes responsibility from a leadership standpoint. Those are the only people I want to be around now. And all the others gone. If they want to come on, come on down. I'm happy to work with them. But I'm not here to convince. I'm not here to sell. Get on board. If you're on board, it's going to be a great time. If not, whatever bro. Whatever bro. So really exciting. It's unbelievable to have this much momentum behind the event and I deeply appreciate everybody that's been along for the ride that's been a supporter of, of of the event and a great role model and, and a great leader with within the dirt world on the support front. Our team technically doubled in size this week as we onboarded two new customer success team members. We recruited them before break but we had the two weeks off so we didn't start them until 2026. World class implementation is support and support is key to ensuring success of bill would improve. So investing further in this area is a no brainer. We've been at best good when it comes to support and it's not, it's not anyone's fault. But from a leadership standpoint, ours as leaders, um, and we've just been early on in figuring out training and development, building a learning culture, build improved software products. There's, there's a lot there. We're, we're solving for a very hard problem. But last year it became very clear that we needed to invest more in support, especially just the number of customers that we have. If you divide up the, the amount of customers between the team and it's like 100 plus customers per person, which is not sustainable and doesn't allow for them to really support each customer in the way that they have to. So by doubling our capacity right away this year, we should see better implementation, we should see better ongoing utilization, we should see more impact to each customer's workforce and then ultimately we'll see better renewal numbers, growing renewal numbers to grow our business business to allow us to do more and more and more. So really exciting on that front. Our Bill would improve development team. They're on track for the launch of the new home screen and product layout for Q1. Testing begins this coming week. And it is damn exciting to see our velocity increase. Our velocity is our ability and the speed at which we're able to to improve and grow the product. No pun intended. We have, we've made a lot of changes from a development standpoint, especially from a team member standpoint over the past six months. It's taken a while for some of those things to shake out. But headed into this new year the team is looking really good. And this will be since the launch of billwhit improve by far the biggest update. It'll be a totally new look. So when people go to the Bill would improve app on their phone or iPad or on the computer, a completely new look that should be a lot more intuitive, that should show any announcements from leadership, should show them what they need to do today and then should show them what the heck is on the platform in general so that they can dig in and focus on what they need most. Finally, I'll give you a little bit of behind the scenes. I was just looking at this, I was like, should I keep talking about this right now? I don't know. We're sitting on a mountain of content. We have more modern training and development content, educational content, inspirational content, fun content than anybody else in the industry in the world at this point. I would say we have all these podcasts, thousands of hours, we have all of the YouTube videos, hundreds and hundreds of videos. We have thousands of social media posts, we have thousands of training videos. We've got a lot going on, got a lot of content. And with tools now coming online that can digest content better and faster than ever before, we believe we can gather up our content and better leverage it to serve our customers, to create real world value, to better equip to those that are building our world. So it's in the early stages right now. But we've always said that the real value to our business is our brand, our brand awareness, the brand equity that we have and then the, the sheer volume, the trust with that and then the sheer volume of content that we have as well. We have more than anyone else. It's, it's, it's awesome. That's why I'm on the road all the time, because I know that that has inherent value in our business and our future position within the industry. So it's exciting to see the team playing around with how we can make better use of that, all the stuff we've created along the way. So that's what I'll say there. That is the end of the first update of 2026. There's a lot coming if you want to hear about anything specific. If you have any questions, if you want to chat, you can drop me a line. I've gotten some emails recently. Thanks for those reaching out. Aaroniltwood.com would love to hear from you. Thanks as always for listening. We'll see you on the next one. Everybody stay dirty. Ra.