← Dirt Talk Podcast
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Foreign. Welcome back to the Dirt Talk podcast. This is building Build with number 60, titled Build with Kids, Leaderboards and Budget. This is the weekly attempt at explaining what the heck buildwit does. Transparency wins is a value. I want you all along with us. You may not be, you know, driving the motorcycle, but you're in the sidecar alongside us, along for the ride. That's the goal. I don't want people to think that we have it all figured out. We certainly don't. We are working on a big problem. That is productivity, that is workforce in the US Construction industry, civil construction industry, the dirt world. And we're not here to be the savior, the smart ones in the room. It's a collaborative effort. That's why we have the Dirt World Summit. That's why we have the YouTube series. That's why we have this podcast with people coming in here and talking every Thursday, new episode, every Thursday about their story, what they're seeing in the industry, etc. And this is another extension of that, bringing you with us, sharing what we're learning, what we're doing, what we're doing. That's good, what we're doing. That, that wasn't so good, and what we're doing just in general. So with that, first up, we have the Build with kids channel on YouTube. It is now live. If I had a dollar for every time someone said, you should have a Kids program on YouTube, I would. I'd have a lot of money. I would not have to live above somebody's garage. But that's not the case. It's taken us a while to get here. And my argument, the reason why we haven't done this sooner is that we've had a lot going on. We haven't really had the bandwidth to just do everything. And we've tried to do everything in the past. It doesn't work very well. We're just now, I think, from a brand and content perspective, starting to get focused. And we have the right team now. We brought on a consultant earlier this year, David Rock. He helped build Gary Vee's brand and he helped us get our teams right. We hired some new people for the brand team. We hired somebody new for the podcast, we hired somebody new for social. We've reorganized the team a little bit. We now have a social specific editor as well. Really, really exciting stuff going on behind the scenes. But even with that additional help, we've just had one limited bandwidth until now to dedicate to this. So bandwidth is 1, 2. I've argued that our YouTube videos in their existing state are for kids as well. They're sure they're, they're engineering speak. Sure they're adult speak. I'm an adult. I'm not talking like, hey, everybody, look at this tractor. But that's what kids are into. I, I think they want to learn at that higher level. I think at least that's what I was watching when I was a kid. And I think there's a lot of kids that watch our videos. And I know there are because I get pictures from parents with our kids staring at the TV watching our normal YouTube videos. So I've always said our existing content is already for kids. We're not swearing, we're not doing all kinds of crazy stuff. We're just explaining the dirt world as is. And so it's already for kids. It is kids safe. However, we wanted to make a separate kid specific channel that was just machines working, nobody talking, no nonsense, Just compactors at a landfill or a drag line digging dirt or a dredge deepening a harbor. And that's exactly what this channel delivers upon. It's really exciting to be in a position as a business to continue to give, give, give, give. That's what we've always done with content. That's what we've done with this podcast. That's we've done with the YouTube channel. That's what we've done with social media on any platform. Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, of course. And this is just another thing that we're giving, giving, giving back. Because the more you give, the more you ultimately receive. That's not why we're doing it, but the more we can give, the better. And again, this is just another channel for us to do that. So it is live on, Build With. If you look up Build with kids, check it out. It's a channel, a separate channel specifically made for kids. There's no comments, there's no nonsense. It's just heavy machines doing what they're doing. Most videos like 20 minutes, 25 minutes. You can put it on for your kids and let them just zone out to an excavator making it happen. Or, or you as an adult can just watch it and zone out to an excavator making it happen. Why not? It's fun for all ages. The dirt world is for all ages. I believe that for sure. So we've started small, just a few videos now, but we'll be getting these videos out more and more from our archives. We have more mining and construction footage than just about anybody in the Entire world at this point. We've had a lot of shooters shooting since 2019 beyond just me. So we have a mountain of stuff to dig through and we'll be releasing that as time goes on. Next up, from a product standpoint, with Build with Improve, leaderboards are live. What are leaderboards? Well, it allows those within each company, within each team to see where they rank in, in training versus everybody else. So when you complete your training, you get points. When you're consistent about it, you rack up more points. When you watch more, you rack up more points. And then you're ranked within your team on a monthly basis, weekly basis, you choose your basis. And we now have that live. We first at, at this point have it live for, for Build, Whip and for a first group of customers. But we've seen some great results so far. The goal of this feature is to drive consistent training and development to help everybody become a little bit better every day. That's how you stack up the big wins. And with our team, just by this feature, not even saying anything about it, we've seen a 100%, a doubling. Is that 100% growth? I think so. I'm not very good with numbers, unfortunately. I did fake my way through engineering school, but I've been done with numbers since. We've seen a. We've seen double completions of, of training lessons within our team within the first week thanks to leaderboards. And over the coming weeks and months, leaderboards will be available to all Build with Improve customers. Super cool. There's. From a sales standpoint, I know we've been talking a lot about sales, getting that back on track. We are getting it back on track, which is very exciting. And as we do, our leadership mostly, Randy, honestly, can then focus on still some sales stuff, but transition a little bit more to renewals to existing customers, supporting existing customers back better. So we have a customer success team led by Darren. That team is working further ahead than ever before. But there's still a lot of opportunity to renew companies, especially renew them for their full team rather than sometimes the small team that they were initially sold. We are doing this one, not just because it's additional revenue, but, but two, most importantly, if a company is not committed to daily continuous improvement, learning and development, getting better as a team, it will fail. And why would you get just some of your team a tool to make themselves better? Wouldn't you want everybody to be better? Especially from a leadership standpoint, communication standpoint, mental health standpoint. So if the entire company's not on board or A division is not on board. It's. It is likely to fail. We've seen it fail quite a few times now. We don't want that anymore. And so with these renewal conversations, we're trying to tee them up and get either full companies or divisions on board, big groups of individuals, because that is what makes this most successful. It's not a program, it is part of the culture. And to be part of the culture, you gotta have everybody on board. So starting with those that are at the top, back to sales. We've gone from no key target list. So bigger companies that we really want to get on build with improve. We want to make customers. We've gone from none to about 70 that we think we have a pretty solid shot at closing in 2026 thanks to the sales push. So it's really good progress that we've made over the past few months. Like I said, if we had one wish or regret, it's that we didn't get on this soon enough. But we got on it. We started to get these bigger companies within our pipeline. And the good news is out of 70, we only need to close like two or three a month to make sure we're smashing our goals. And it looks like we're tracking in that direction, which is really exciting stuff. And then from that, we've been working a lot on bdrs like I've spoken about and our BDR team, we've got five business development reps, they are refining their outreach and they're focusing on 18 meetings per week that are with the right people and right companies within the our target range. Our best size company customer is between a hundred and a thousand people. We do want to talk to some people bigger than a thousand and we are within that target list. We don't want to talk to as many people below a hundred. Our product just doesn't really, really fit their business. It's not that it couldn't work, it's just not a great fit. Once you get beyond a hundred, that's when you start to need more systems, more process. That's when the founder or leadership team can't get to everybody as much. And that's when improve really comes into play to help develop their teams more effectively as they get more spread out. So we've got great sales conversations and we've got better conversations with our BDRs. Reaching out to the right people to get the right meetings to then sell our product to the right companies. Sounds obvious, but it's taken us a few months to get this Sorted. It's taken us honestly a year to get our sales process to where it is now. We had to make a big change about this time last year, beginning of July, and here we are rolling into summer. We're still learning, we're still growing, and I don't think will ever be done. That's the fun of business. There's always something to work on. There's always something and to improve. And it can either drive you nuts if you have the wrong mindset about it, or it could be the excitement about the game of business that, that I think is, is what makes it really special. Finally, finally, finally, finally we. Our sales. Our budget year starts December 1st. So at this point, we are six months into the year. We've been talking a lot about sales money in revenue. That is the oxygen for a business. And if you are a business leader, you know how important revenue is. And it's demonized a lot because that's what a lot of these big businesses talk about. Or there's all this demonization of money, revenue, this and that. And I think for good reason sometimes because business has gone completely off the rails within the United States of America in a lot of different ways. That's a rabbit hole. We won't go down that now. We want to stay focused. But for any business, especially small business, money in is everything, but money out is also very key. And that is not something we've been very disciplined about in previous years. We have been in the past the most recent years quite good. We've been budgeting now for three, maybe four years, but in a really deliberate sense, for three years. And this year, fortunately, we're not just getting money in like needed for our budget, but we are staying right on budget. From an expense standpoint, our team has been scrappier than ever, has been very cost conscious, very cost effective, has been doing more with less, especially using some of these new digital tools. And it is a huge help and is ultimately there to benefit the entire team as well, because that is one of two metrics. Our bonus for this year is based upon it's money in. So we have a revenue metric and then there's an expense metric to create that profitability. If we hit those two metrics, everybody gets the full bonus. That is a combination of cash and stock, everybody at the company, which is really exciting and will be a very good day when we get there in December. So that is everything for this week on the Building Build with episode here. Thank you as always for tuning in. I appreciate you being curious about what we're going on, we've got going on as a business. If you have questions, reach out to me. Anytime, Aaron, at Buildwood. Com with that. We'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty.