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Aaron
Foreign welcome back everybody. Dirt Talk Podcast Monday Episode this is the third BuildWIT update, which is a weekly account of what the heck is happening behind the scenes here. I've titled this one Extreme Ownership AI and Babies. And as a reminder, if you have questions you can email me aaron buildwit.com Aaron, would love to hear from you and I can address any questions, offer clarifications on subsequent episodes. But this is the new weekly installment Build with Update. First up, we launched another on the job training series which our very own Jake Pico and Randy Blunt visited some really great Arizona based contractors like Sunland and Rummel to show some real world examples of earth moving, paving, crack sealing, et cetera. The fun thing about creating training content that doesn't otherwise exist is that we can do it our way. So not everything has to be nice and tidy, which is a lot of fun. So we have experimented with different formats. A lot of our stuff is educational, a lot of it is scripted because it's very heavy information. So we have to work through what we're going to say, ensure all the information is there, ensure the information is correct before we go to shoot everything. Which is great, it's essential for a lot of our stuff. But um, there's other formats that we can play with and one of them is this on the Job series. So it's us going out to projects. I've done a few of them now Jake and Randy are also doing a few of them. We go out to projects and just explain what the heck's going on. You know, explain how they did with Sunland crack sealing works or explain how drilling and blasting works. Big picture. And not just explain it. But hey, here's how drilling and blasting and works. And I'm on a job site with drilling and blasting and here's how they're doing it. And in this specific application so you get immediate context that you don't get with strictly educational content. So it's not the end all be all, but it's a lot of fun to be putting these together. And that means right now we have about 2,000 videos that are now available to our Build with Improve customers. So we haven't just created this training and development platform, but we have what now I think is the largest educational library, video based library in the dirt world, which is very exciting. And it seems like every week there's new videos getting added. So that is what was added this past week. Very, very exciting stuff. Second, we rolled out our first official leadership training program. We're calling this Book wit Leaders. We've needed leadership training for years and we have debated every way to go about it. Most methods we debated involved hiring outside firms, spending a lot of money, but we don't have a lot of money to spend on that kind of stuff. So we went back to the drawing board. One of our core values is keep it simple, stupid. So we went back to our drawing board, we kept it simple, and we said, all right, what is the simplest leadership development program we could put together for our people? And that is what we came up with here. Everybody with direct reports must participate in this program. But the program is also open to anybody at the company, even if they don't have direct reports. Every quarter we're focusing on a different foundational book, a book that's been very important to build wit to the leadership team. And the first is Extreme Ownership. I think we reference Extreme Ownership more than just about any other book. So that was the obvious first choice. And then we assign a few chapters of reading each month and then we meet in small groups to discuss. So we have maybe five small groups, each with about five people. Each small group is being led by somebody from the executive team to start. And then the second quarter it'll be led by other people within the group, which is very fun. We're just doing a few chapters each month. I'm encouraging everybody to read the whole book. Extreme Ownership is a great book. It's in your best interest to read it. But for the sake of discussion, it's just a lot to discuss a whole book. So we focused on specific chapters. The first two we, we, we discussed was, were Extreme Ownership, the introduction to Extreme Ownership, chapter one in the book, and then check the ego was the next one. And now we're going to get into the laws of combat, which I'm very excited about. So it worked great. I had a great time. Really simple discussion. Hey, when has extreme ownership come up in your life outside of work, in work? When has it, when has it worked well? When have you not taken extreme ownership? When has your ego gotten in play or gotten in the way? And these are concepts I've learned, others on the executive team have learned over the past few years. But people new to leadership might not have considered yet. And even if they have considered them, it's, it's super helpful to just talk about them with others. So this was great. We've only done one meeting so far. It's just an hour long. This month we have two more chapters, another hour long meeting, we'll have a third with extreme ownership. And then we'll be going into our second book and I'm not going to spoil that quite yet, but that's our new leadership training program which I'm very excited about. It's simple, we'll build upon it as time goes on. But something is much better than nothing and I'm like I said, just very happy it's going. Now 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 Dirtworld Summit November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. In our third year, we'll have about 1500 hungry industry leaders from, 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. We're having discussions about leveraging AI better right now. That's a hot topic. And whether we like it or not, I'm not particularly fond with it. It's certainly here and as a software company, there are many great ways we can be using it to build a better product and serve customers. And I think it's also coming for the dirt world in a lot of ways. But we can't help the dirt world with AI until we understand it ourselves and are leveraging it for our business in positive ways. And it's everywhere already. Whether again, whether we like it or not, we're already either using AI or AI is using us, depending on the platform and where we are on the Internet. But I think it's, it's a really great tool. Again, especially on the the software side of things. There's just incredible AI tools out there to allow us to just move faster, to build better products and iterate test different things. It's really fun. But with that also comes legitimate concerns. So part of this is discussing which AI platforms we want to use as a business, which we want to stay away from, what kind of guidelines we want to provide for people. There's a lot of free AI tools out there, but then they take everything you feed into them, which is potentially problematic. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? I don't think anybody does. But those are the questions. Not just how to leverage it, but what to look out for as well. And we're still in the early innings. And as a software company, maybe we're behind the ball, but it's a fun discussion. I'm glad we're having it. And we're now leaning into it, which is, I think, a great thing. So that's AI. Next up, our John Deere workshop registration has closed. By the time this airs, we'll have already held the workshop with about 100 people attending. We're really excited because we want to make it our best event to date, but we're equally as excited because it will be our last workshop this year. Our goal is focus. We have not been focused as a business, and I don't think we really understood the cost of that until recently. As we got focused, we've started to really appreciate it. And so we asked ourselves. This year we've hosted a few workshops. We've, I don't know, maybe hosted six. This might be number six. We did two last year. This is the second one this year. The first one was at WyoTech, but we asked early this year, hey, are these workshops in our best interest? Should we be focusing on these right now or should we go all in on our bunch bigger event, the Ariat Dirt World Summit. And we quickly agreed that it was much better off for us to go all in on the Area Dirt World Summit. So this will be our final workshop. We're going to do everything to make it absolutely extraordinary. But after this, we can go 100% in on the Area Dirt World Summit November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. And we don't just intend to make this the best industry event, but one of the best events in the United States over the coming years. It'll be our third year. We've learned a lot. There's a lot more to learn past this, but we're on the right track. We're having fun with it, and with 100% focus on it, we're gonna be able to make it much better, much faster. So that's where we are on the events side of things currently. Next up, our sales team is back to 100%. We offer a few weeks off for new dads and three months off at least for new moms. All paid. Big companies can do better. I've heard other great policies out there, but it's not bad for a small Fry company like us. I think it's a pretty generous policy. We don't need to have it legally, but it's just the right thing to do. And while awesome, it's tricky to balance when it happens because we're small, we're lean. When people are out, it is hard. It's hard on the business, it's hard on the rest of the team. It's hard on the individuals off sometimes because we've really had to help them. Be off. If you're gonna be off, be off. Please go enjoy your newborn. And last month we had two of four salespeople, two of four on the sales team, out with newborns in the same month, same few weeks. And that reduced our sales capacity substantially, which was not, obviously didn't yield the result we needed last month. But now they're back, which is great news. I'm very happy to have them back. The babies are healthy and our capacity is at 100%. So could not be happier. I've never once regretted our. Our maternity paternity leave policy. I hope it gets better and better as time goes on. I think it's a great thing. It's a very special time. But it's also just the reality of managing a business, planning accordingly and running lean. It makes things a little bit more tricky. And finally we realized our billing model for a small group of customers no longer makes sense. So we're converting this group to a standard pricing structure to remedy the issue, saving both parties money. We're proactively now trying to evaluate our model. What works, what doesn't work, what works for us, what works for our customers. Again, I think this is one of the benefits of Focus this year as a software company selling the creative business, dialing things in, really going all in on software has allowed us to be less reactive, more proactive. Look ahead, hey, what's been working and what's not working. And rather than find out when things. That things aren't working, when they're really not working, spot them ahead of time and solve those issues before they become major issues. I think this was a small example of that. Cara looking ahead and saying, hey, this isn't best for us or the customer, so let's just proactively make that adjustment, which is awesome. We haven't done as much of that in the past, so I'm very happy to see that going forward. And that's everything that happened at Build with last week or the highlights. Definitely not everything, but those are the highlights. So I appreciate you all tuning in. Like, I said. If you have comments, questions, if you want some clarity on any of this, I'm happy to share. Transparency wins is a value for a reason. Write me aaron aaron@buildwit.com Would love to hear from you. And with that, we will see you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody.