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Hey everybody, welcome back. This is The BuildWit update number five. We are five in as a intro. This is the weekly account of how our sausage is made behind the scenes. What the heck is happening within the business? If you have questions, comments as you listen to this you can send them directly to me. Aaron A a r o nildwit.com I would love to hear from you. I really appreciate you listening and feel free to send this to anybody you think would find it interesting as well. This is my attempt to again just show people what the heck's going on here. We've been great at telling stories of other people of the industry, of the dirt world. We've done a very poor job of telling our story. However, we have a lot of things in the works to reverse that trend. This podcast, my newsletter weekly is certainly one of them, one of many things. So to get into it first up and I printed this very small for some reason, so bear with me. I spoke at Plateau Excavations leadership meeting which marked my last of speaking gigs for the season. So now I go back to the drawing board. I spoke I don't know, maybe 10 times ish this spring, so quite a few compared to previous years. I'm to the point where I can get up in front of an audience and not embarrass myself for 45 minutes. I can start in a decent way, I can tell a story, I can put somewhat of a narrative together. So I've establish like the basic building blocks. But after this past speaking season that just finished up last week with Plateau, I now have more data, more information. I think I'm closer than ever to crafting a really compelling message. But I want to take what I've learned, tear up what I have, go back to the drawing board, start over and begin building my next talk, which I'll then refine through the summer. I'll then present to quite a few different groups in the fall and then hopefully we'll present to many more dirt world companies and associations in the spring. Booking that kind of stuff now and at that point it should be pretty good. I'm excited. First, when you start talking, speaking, it's just getting through it. It's terrifying. Or at least it has been for me. It still gives me jitters. Before I do it. I really don't like the hour or two leading up to before I go. But once you do it as you do it, it's actually quite a bit of fun and I think it's an essential leadership skill speaking public speaking especially. And there is no better way to practice your public speaking than by public speaking. Go figure. So it's been a really, really good experience for me over the past few years. Speaking. I didn't do any of this to, to, to speak, to be a speaker. It's been one of those weird things. I've just started to do it because I was asked originally and then asked more as people started to see what I had and as I started to build this data set that is seeing these different civil construction mining companies all over, not just the United States, but the world. I started to, oh well, realize I have something to talk about that no one else necessarily has. So yeah, I'm 30, I'm young, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm never there to tell people how to build better. But I do get to see this industry from a very unique perspective and it's cool to share that perspective with people. 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, Ken 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. Now from a hiring standpoint we, we have begun recruiting two more developers to increase our internal development capacity. Over the past few years we have leveraged a small internal team alongside outside contractors which has gotten us here. But it's just, it's tough going forward because when you're using outside contractors you don't control your destiny and we're at the point where we need to control our destiny or else we're going to have some serious problems. So we are transitioning to developing everything in house for the build it improve product. We have a great internal team. It's very exciting to add more development capacity to allow us to move faster to iterate on the existing product to improve what we have and then to build additional features, functionality, etc. As well as we go forward. So that's a very exciting development. And on this note, our hiring process is way better than it used to be, which is very exciting. We the previous round of development applications, we had to work through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications to find anything worth us looking into. It's kind of like finding a needle in the haystack. Most applications nowadays are junk, and I don't say that because these are all just good people applying. Most of the time it's applications filled out by AI, which is happening much more nowadays. Applicants who don't meet basic requirements, like those not in the United States, for example, would be, would be one of those or those who submit the same basic application for many roles as possible. We're trying to get rid of all of those as quickly as possible, which narrows it down substantially. And then you can start to get into, all right, who has the qualifications we're looking for, who seems legitimate and who seems like they want to work here, who seems like they care. And then you can put them into that next round of, of qualifying, of, of recruiting, of interviews, etc. To start seeing what they're capable of. You can test them out, etc. Before you eventually hire them. Our hiring process is pretty slow, but this new process has, has allowed us to move a lot faster on the front end to then spend more time on the back end where it really matters. So before our leaders had to comb through a lot of these resumes. Now we can knock a lot of them out or these applications knock a lot of them out. With, with the process, which I think is a great thing. Our marketing team is developing some really cool resources to help our dirt world customers build a learning culture. With build with, improve, we have created a learning culture assessment, a learning culture quick start guide and a discussion guide for frontline leaders. These are really, these are vital tools that we've developed through working with some of the best companies in the industry to really learn how they're building learning cultures, to learn alongside them, to then take that formula of a learning culture and apply it to as many companies as possible. And this will be key to helping dirt world companies develop that next generation. Bring new people into the industry that don't know anything and elevate them as they go and then especially elevate their next level leadership. We have a lot of leaders right now aging out those crew leaders, which I think are the most influential positions in this industry. The next people backfilling those that are retiring don't necessarily have those skills, the ability to host a discussion, lead a crew, et cetera. So we're trying to arm them with some of that critical information and it's really exciting to see all this stuff come together. So yes, we have this software product, build it, improve, but there's a lot more we need to do from an implementation and support standpoint to help these companies, these teams, these frontline leaders, implement a learning culture within the organization and that's what these tools will do. So really, really nice job to our marketing team there. Next up, we had the final Dirt World workshop at John Deere's HQ and it was one of our best. I think it was our best actually. Everybody played golf at TPC Deer Run. They ran John Deere equipment and learned from world class experts like Mike Abrashoff, who was a former Navy captain, and then Marcus Sheridan who is world class in every category. I was supposed to be there, but the airlines got the best of me. It was really unfortunate. Moline is a hard place to get to and I don't know what was going on last weekend, but no flights were available, no rental cars anywhere were available. Everything was sold out across the board. I tried like 20 different ways to get there, not working out. But the feedback was fantastic, which would suggest like, why don't we keep doing this? But we've chosen to make this our last one for right now because we need to focus, we need to focus on the software business. We need to focus on making the area Dirt World Summit in November a world class, not just dirt world event, but eventually. And we've learned this lesson by touching the hot stove a lot of times over. We've tried to do too many things. You can't focus on a lot of things, you can't prioritize multiple things. You've got to choose a priority. And so from an event standpoint, the clear priority is the Ariat Dirt World Summit. We're going to pour all of our energy into that event. We're going to make it a great experience. We're going to eliminate friction, we're going to, gonna make it really enjoyable before, during, after and elevate that, that, that group of leaders that, that will be there, which is gonna be quite, quite special in our third year after that. And as the business grows, as we have more options, sure, there's plenty more opportunities to potentially have workshops. They've been great. We've had one at Knife Rivers Training facility, one at First Form Headquarters, one at WyoTech this one at John Deere's headquarters. Some cor crazy cool places we've taken the industry to. We would love to do it again into the future, but for the foreseeable future, the only opportunity we have is the AR Dirt World Summit, which is certainly no slouch. So very happy. It was our best event ever and we are also happy to focus on what we must for the time being. At the end of 2024, we implemented a new accounting system which is really thrilling stuff. Everybody knows anybody that's implemented an accounting system knows what that entails. We have an incredible team behind the scenes that, that made it happen. But it's a heavy lift. It's a really heavy lift and it was necessary for, for quite a few reasons. But one of the big ones was getting our leaders more financial transparency. And after months of work, we finally have some real time budget and expense information into the hands of our first division leader, Jess, which we're very excited about. And over the coming months, all of our leadership should have this information which will allow them to manage lead the business accordingly. The struggle is when you don't have financial information as a leader, you don't quite know where the score is or you can't make decisions fast enough. If you're getting expense information a month or two after the fact, it's just not very helpful at that point. So with this new system we can be more real time. We can arm our leaders with that financial information and then they can make decisions within their areas of expertise accordingly rather than having to ask for hey, can we do this, can we do that? They'll have a budget stick within the budget, life's good and this will help them do that. So I'm so excited about this. As I've talked about on these previous updates, one of our values is transparency wins. That extends certainly from to a financial standpoint. Internally, we haven't been able to do it as much as as we've wanted to over the past few years because we've been limited on the accounting system front. But now that we have this new system Sage, we can start to provide a lot more visibility for, for not just our frontline leaders, but also myself and our executive team too, which we're, we're all very excited about. So that is everything for this week. I appreciate you all tuning in. I'm really happy to have these going out. It's exciting to share what the heck we're doing as a business. I'm hoping that you're enjoying them. If you have again questions comments, you can send them to me anytime. @aaron buildwit.com I answer all my emails. I'm really good at messages in general, so feel free to reach out anytime. Would love to chat and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody.