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Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Bulldozer Art, New Hires, and Seating Charts (BuildWitt Update #26) — DT 389
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Foreign everybody Monday. You know what that means. Another build would update. This is number 26, titled Bulldozer Art. New hires and seating charts like kindergarten. This, if you haven't listened before, is the weekly update. One of our values is transparency wins. It always wins. So it's not just transparency. It's that, hey, you're always better off being transparent, even when it's not fun, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's inconvenient. We haven't always been there as an organization, but I feel like we've done better than most. And it's certainly a value that I have held quite dearly. So when it came to figuring out what to do with the Monday episodes this year, I thought, why not just give people a weekly account of what the heck is happening within our business? Most everybody thinks it's just me running around with the camera. We have about 50 people at the company doing anything from video, of course, to software development to event planning. There's all, all kinds of stuff happening here. And this is an effort to give you all a peek behind the curtain and show you how the buildwit sausage is made. So with that, this past week, I was on the road. The usual. First, we started in Florida, Naples, Florida, with Quality Enterprises. This is a company we've worked with for many years now. Initially on the marketing front, we were out there to shoot a, an artwork project. It doesn't really make sense over audio. You're just gonna have to watch the video, which is hopefully out at this point. So if you haven't watched it, check it out on YouTube. Just search my name. But. Earthwork Project, they took a picture of a D6 dozer. They put it into paint by numbers. They made six colors. They took the line work and made a 3D or a model out of it, a GPS model on Trimble. They then picked a 200 by 200 foot area within their quarry. They found six different kinds, six different colors of earth, and they got to work. So over three days, they created a giant picture of a bulldozer, which was spectacular to see. So really excited to show off that. And a lot of people are like, what's the point? And Howard out there had, I think a great, a great argument if it, if it, if that question came as criticism. And it was that we could either go spend X amount of dollars on traditional marketing or we could spend it on this, which is a lot more eye catching to a lot more people. One, which I agree with. And two, demonstrates just how detailed oriented they are. If they're capable of pulling off something like that as if it's business as usual. How is their overall quality, craftsmanship with work? It's probably pretty good. I think it's brilliant. If you don't follow them online, check them out, they've got all kinds of great stuff. But it was cool to be to be involved with their latest Earthwork artwork project. Then next we were supposed to go to Georgia with our friends at C.W. matthews. Unfortunately, weather scheduling got the best of us. But we don't give up. So we made some calls around. We called out to Ajax who had some paving projects, but nothing interstate night wise. But then we got a hold of the folks at Anderson Columbia. They had interstate night paving, which is exactly what we were supposed to shoot with C.W. matthews as well. So we went out to see the Anderson Columbia crews working outside of Ocala, Central Florida on I75. They were milling the existing shoulder. It was a three lane. It's a three lane interstate. They're milling the existing shoulder, they're removing 14 inches which is a lot of material. And then they're replacing that 14 inches with a 14 inch cross section of asphalt for a fourth travel lane for about 20 plus miles either side. And then once they're done with that fourth travel lane, which is now still a shoulder, they will do the earthwork and paving for a new shoulder. And maybe next year, I don't know when the project is done, the that stretch of I75 will then have four lanes. So it's north of the villages headed towards Ocala is where they were working. The crew was great. We had a lot of fun. We did some just dumb stuff. Nothing unsafe of course, would never do that, but some dumb stuff. You'll see it on YouTube if you watch our videos. We're having a good time nowadays. Beyond that because we got switched around, a drive from Brunswick to Charlotte was was not that far, maybe five hours. Unfortunately though, we worked night paving until about one in the morning. And then I had lunch scheduled with Hoopa at noon in Charlotte. I was 8 hours away so had to start driving again at 4am not ideal. Made it up. Saw our friends at Hoopa, had a great lunch with some of their up and coming leaders. Recorded a podcast for their Give Us the Dirt podcast. A great show hosted by Brandon Lindsey there. And then after Charlotte I drove a few hours to Asheville where I spoke Saturday morning to Nuka of the Carolinas. Great group. It was my first time giving my my new talk for this speaking season. Quote unquote I like to do it every year. There's a lot changing. I'm pretty excited about it. Felt really good. I'm always quite critical with what I can improve upon, but I left that event really happy and that's the talk I'll give at the Dirt World Summit. And then on my way home, I stopped by Ames at i40unannounced. I didn't know if anybody would be there, but they were there. They gave me a brief tour of the project, how they're bringing i40 back to life after Hurricane Helene last year and there is a mountain of work for them still to do. So it was really cool seeing that job. That's everything on the travel front now on the business business front. We signed two large billboard improve software deals, which is very exciting over the past week. One with a new customer and one with an existing customer. Both were three year deals, which is a massive win for our growing software business. It means that they believe in what we're doing, our business, our product, what we can do for their people so much that they're willing to say, hey, we're in it for the long haul, which is great for us. So we don't necessarily collect upon that revenue over the next few years. But with where we are, small business cash crunch. That cash is very helpful today and it's just awesome to see these deals coming through. So we're really happy with that. It's a great start to the sales for October and we'll keep at it from here. There's really exciting news as well on the hiring front. So we've hired over the past week a new VP of engineering who somehow brings experience in civil construction and software development and online learning. The guy is a unicorn when it comes to what we needed and he has everything. So we're really excited to bring this position into place. This is a key position for us. Now we can focus on hiring a few more developers as I've talked about, and have the development team necessary to hit those 2026 goals. It's so cool, so cool to see this start falling into place. I love hiring new people, getting new experiences, new perspectives, new skills. It's really exciting. It always takes a little bit for people to get spooled up in a new position, but boy is it fun to bring new people into the business. This is a key position for us too, so really, really happy about that one. Thanks to our greater sense of focus. As I reported last week, we made the call to focus our 1 Rockstar marketer on build would improve the software product following the Ariat Dirt World Summit that's coming up which then now this leaves the door open for a new junior marketing hire hire a new junior marketing hire to focus exclusively on Dirt World alongside Jason and Nikki. Focus is everything. We've got to wow customers, we've got to reduce Churn. We've had one marketer for a little bit now, Brandon underneath Dan. Dan's been pretty busy with sales so Brandon's been on his own own for the most part. He's been a huge trooper. He's been split between Dirt World and Improve. But if your focus is split between two things that are pulling you equally in both directions, you just, you can only be so effective. So it's to the point where it's like, hey, if we're going to be serious, if we're going to deliver a world class event but also grow as a software business, we've got to focus from a marketing and brand perspective. So Brandon's going to be focused on full bore on build and improve following Dirt World and then we'll get that new hire in potentially late this year, early next year to work with Jason on growing the brand that is the Ariat Dirt World Summit. So really exciting there. On the support front, we're also hiring two additional support roles. One paired with each of our existing rock stars who all who report to Darren. Everybody will report to Darren. Darren. He's had a foot in both product and support camps since we're bringing on this new VP of engineering though it'll give him the ability to focus more on support reducing Churn. There's two components to it. One is product. We can improve the product to have people use it better, which is absolutely necessary. We need to do that. We need to get utilization higher. We can drive that through product improvements, how people interact with the product, what they use it for on a day to day basis. However, when it comes to support, we have implementation where we show the administrators of each company how to use Billboard Improve. We get their people on to build improve. We help them in the early stages, but the ongoing support is just as important, if not more important. That is where we have not been strong. Especially this past year. We've been bogged down by migrating customers from the old platform build it training to the new platform Build it Improve. But that's done. We have Austin and Max, both rockstars, supporting customers the best they can. But we're nearing 300 customers. They can only get so far. So we're going to add two more Positions there will likely add more positions as time goes on. We're going to invest in support as much as we will product because that is key to achieving what we have to, which is lowering churn. Creating a great product that supports the field delivers more value for the people doing the work. So really exciting there. And then finally this past week our team met to finalize a few ways we'll facilitate attendees of the Area Dirt World Summit meeting one another. When you've got a thousand plus people in the same room, it can be intimidating. It can be like the cafeteria in grade school or high school. Everybody's got their table and there's some bigger groups there and everybody knows one another. But the value of the Area Dirt World Summit I would say is more so in the audience, in the room than on the stage. The stage is essential. We put some remarkable people up on that stage. It's really fun. And me, of course it's really fun. But the value is the audience. It is a remarkable group of individuals that are in that room. However, it's again overwhelming. It's hard to meet people sometimes, especially at the event itself itself. So we've asked ourselves what can we do to help facilitate people meeting one another that they wouldn't otherwise meet. And one of those things we're doing is assigned seating. The second day we'll see how this goes. First time we've done it. But our amazing events team has organized the attendees by roughly position. So if somebody's president, they might be sitting with other presidents at the table. And we'll have an activity I think led by Wally to help those inner introductions as well form new relationships that wouldn't be there otherwise. So really exciting stuff. This is the. Now that we're three years in the fun stuff, we can start thinking through, working through building not just a great event, but a world class experience that's totally different than any other event anybody there's been to and totally different than any other year of the Area Dirt Ruled summit. We want every year to be a lot better than the last. And this is a small example. So that's it for the past week. As always, I really appreciate you all listening. Feel free to write me anytime if you have questions about any of this. Happy to explain further. Aaron. A A R O N at buildwith B U I L D W I T T and we will see you on the next one. Everybody stay dirty.