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- [00:14]
Aaron
Hi everybody. This is the fourth BuildWit update that I titled Certifications, Migration and Sales Lessons. Before we get into it, this is, if you haven't listened before, a weekly summary of what the heck is going on at Build Wit at the company so you can follow along, see inside of our business, what we're doing. Well, not so well, just stuff in general that's happening in the past. I haven't done a very good job sharing about the business as a whole and this is an effort to correct that ongoing. As you listen to these, you can email me aaronildwit.com if you have questions, if you have thoughts, if you want clarification on anything, and I will work that into future episodes. So that's just a a r o nildwit.com I would love to hear from you. And with that, we will get into this week's happenings. Number one, we are closing in on having an official training video production plan for for the remainder of 2025 by leveraging internal and external feedback, which is very exciting. At this point, we have about 2,000 training videos and we've covered a ton of ground in those training videos, from conflict resolution to basic equipment operation. But now that we have most of the basics covered, we are identifying where our gaps are and what our customers want more of. And then we're working that into the plan for the rest of the year so that we can be better, we can be more prepared, we can schedule out shoots further in advance, working with the right partners, get approval squared away, be more cost effective. Up until this point, we've done our best, we've done what we've had to do, but it's been very reactionary, very scrappy, which is one of our values. Stay scrappy. It's been very scrappy, but that's not always a good thing. It creates a lot of chaos. Again, it's gotten us here, but it's not necessarily the best way forward. So for the rest of the year, we'll have that plan to work off of. So we'll roughly know what videos we're going to be producing for our training library and why, based again, on internal feedback and external feedback. So it's a lot of fun. It's been a total adventure. It's building out what's now the largest training library in the industry. We still have a lot to learn. We're learning every day, every shoot, every video. Everyone's an opportunity to get better and better and we are hungrier than ever. So with that planning, it'll allow us to execute a lot better. And it's really exciting because this is the kind of stuff we haven't been able to do until now. Haven't had the team for until now. Which is, like I said, just quite, quite, quite fun. Next up, we have completed testing our next feature for Build with Improve, which will allow civil contractors to create and track specific certifications for their workforce. We're building the industry's best training and development tool and now we are helping contractors build a training record for each of their people, which is very exciting. I am a huge believer in the product and the content. I think everybody in the industry could benefit from the training content we have on Build with Improve. Some people, they disagree, but they haven't seen it, or I think they're out to lunch when it comes to what their people actually know. For example, okay, you could discard all of the equipment operation stuff. You have the world's best operators, but are they all mentally healthy? Because we have some of the best mental health content out there, best physical health content out there, best leadership content, et cetera. So there's a lot beyond just on the job skills, but that's still not enough. You've got to make the product stickier. And that's why we are working on the compliance functionality as well. So this isn't just a tool to help these contractors elevate their workforce, build that next generation of leaders, but it also helps them from a compliance standpoint, building that training record for each individual on their sites. And it adds value to that individual as well, because it allows that individual to prove that they at least have this knowledge base, that they have these certifications, that those certifications are active. So it's a win, win across the board. And a lot of these big general contractors, big government agencies, are starting to require this more. So it's really exciting to have this feature coming out. Like I said, it's in testing or wrapped up testing. It now goes to a few different customers for beta and then we'll go out to more customers this summer. So super exciting stuff there. And that was a feature that was identified not by us by, but by our customers, which is quite fun. 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 Dirt World Summit, November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. In our third year, we'll have about 1500 hungry industry leaders 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 youm can use code AARON10 for 10% off any registrations and we'll see you November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. As of now, we've onboarded new customers to Bill with Improve. So over the past six months I'd say we were selling oftentimes the new product which hadn't launched yet. So customers were waiting for that new product to come out before onboarding. And that's what we've been doing now is we launched that new product last month in April, and we have been onboarding those new customers that have been waiting to get on in the first place. But now is the start of onboarding existing customers from what was called Build with Training to the Build it Improve product. And we've waited on this because it requires us to migrate existing users and existing data so it's a little bit easier to get new customers in than existing customers. But now that we've gotten most of the new customers in, it's time for the existing customers we can migrate that data, migrate those users and get them onto the new platform, which is going to be spectacular. So we have figured out what that timeline looks like and over the coming weeks we'll be communicating that timeline to our existing customers and then over the coming months we will be getting them onto the new platform. So by the end of the summer everybody will be on the new Build with Improve platform and we can sunset the former products. That was Build with Training. It has been an undertaking to get here. It's just been a lot of work across the board by our team. Not just development, but sales, production, customer support, all kinds of stuff going on to make this a reality. So it'll be really fun to see what those existing customers think because we have spent a lot of time making this product way better than what we've had so far. And that's the fun thing about software. You get to build it and change it and get feedback and test it and keep iterating as you go. It's just an absolute blast most of the time. Sometimes it's maddening. Regarding a lesson learned, we made Too many structural changes to sales and marketing in March and April which resulted in lower numbers because inputs equal outputs. If you don't have the inputs, you don't get the outputs. It's pretty basic math. In hindsight, we could have planned better accordingly. It was one of those mistakes that afterwards you're like, ah, we should have seen that, we should have known, we should have planned a little bit better. I don't think any of us are regretting making the changes. Like for example, we replaced our website with a much simpler, much better website. Fitting of us being a software company now after the sale of the creative business. But with that, you eliminate so much data, so many pages, all these processes for customers to find you and book demos with you, et cetera. So we broke all that with the new website and we had to fix all of that over the past four, six weeks. Fortunately though, over the past week especially, we've seen much better data, we've seen much better results. So we're going in a better direction. Was it, in hindsight the best thing to do to change everything at once? No. But we did it. We're glad we did it. We're going in the right direction. We're seeing more improvements over the past week. Hopefully the improvements will continue to stack up over the coming months and we'll be in a fantastic place as a result. But yeah, definitely lesson learned. Way too many changes at once and we probably would have phased the changes a little bit more so we could digest each over instead of a few week period, maybe a month or two, not super long, but just phased it a little bit better I think is what we would have done in hindsight. So that's on the sales and marketing front. And then finally, our Dirt World community, called Dirt World Connect, is growing faster than ever because it's now free for anybody to sign up, post and join the Weekly Calls. And these Weekly Calls are leaders inside and outside the industry, teaching on anything from estimating to recruiting. So you can find that on the dirtworld website. Dirtworld.com last week we had Jimmy Starbuck and every week is a different industry leader talking about what they've learned, what they're doing. It's awesome insight and then it also has some great discussion functionality. So if you're looking for like a new estimating software, you can share on there, you could ask the question. If you are wondering what the heck's going on in other markets, ask the question. You could message people directly. It's a lot of fun. It's built specifically for the dirt world and we're really enjoying it. So you can check that out@dirtworld.com it's fun seeing it grow now that it's free. We Another lesson learned. We tried to make it paid in the early days. Expensive exclusive. That wasn't the right call. We lowered the price point, but we were still like, hey, we're better off involving more people in this than less. So why don't we cut the pricing? Let's let anybody into this. Let's add maximum value. Let's make this still a very valuable product for people being a part of it, because get them into our ecosystem and then hopefully get them to something like the Dirt World Summit in the fall, November 5th through the 7th, onto build it improve or just get them within our ecosystem for future opportunities. So that was the play, that was the decision making. It was an iterative process. Had we done it better, if we were doing it again, we would have tested the pricing a little bit more before we had rolled it out. Officially, it wasn't the best way of doing it because we changed it a few different times pretty quick. We could have avoided some of that heartache, but again, here we are. We're happy we're here, we're iterating and we're happy with that dirtworld Connect product. So that's everything. Appreciate you all listening. Like I said, if you have questions, comments, whatever, you can send them to me directly. Aaron. Aaron@billwood.com, i check my email every day, no matter where I am in the world. I appreciate you all listening and we will see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.