← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Coal, 2026 Dirt World Sales, and 100 New Videos (BuildWitt Update #31) — DT 399
00:10:58
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Foreign. Welcome back to the Billwood update. This is number 31 titled Coal 2026 Dirt World Sales and a hundred new videos. As always, this is the attempt at peeling back the curtain, showing you how the sausage is made. What the heck is buildwit? What do we do, how we're doing it? Hopefully this gives you some context as far as the business. A lot of people see me online running around the industry, which is great, but buildwit is much bigger than me. Got a team of about 50 incredible people doing incredible things to build Dirt World's next generation. And this is how we're doing it. First up, the biggest news by far for the week was the 2026 Area Dirt World Summit sales effort. It was absolutely huge. So in one week we sold 718 of the 1250 available tickets. So well over half of the available tickets sold in one week, which is huge. We closed 50 sponsors, which is huge. And then we have a John Deere workshop before the event and sold half of the tickets to that as well in the first week. And it's relieving. It's exciting, but it's more so relieving for me. I'm always looking at money, I'm always looking at business. Things have got to work. When we make plans, it's like, man, I hope this works. We made these pretty ambitious posts. Summit sales plans. We first had to make it a world class event. If it was world class, we would then be able to hit these goals. But you're still nervous until it happens. But fortunately it did happen for us. I am so appreciative of everybody that wasn't just at this year but now is committed for next year. And it only gets better from here. So from this point we plan to target the remaining companies that attended in 2025 but have not yet purchased for 2026 through the end of the year. For five plus tickets, there's still $700 off each, with $400 off each one through four tickets. So it's a huge, huge discount still available through the end of the year. And after three years we no longer have to convince people. I feel like we've earned our position now and so I can. And we can pour into those that get it, pour into those that are hungry and pour into those that want to be a part and are part of the movement to build the Dirt world's next generation. And with that momentum, I think we'll be selling out here early in 2026 for the first time. We'll be selling the business out, which is awesome for two reasons. One, gives us cash to run the business for next year, and two, most importantly for the event, it gives us the ability to, instead of sell the event all year, we can focus on making it a great event for the first time because we've been selling all year, every year to build the momentum that we're now achieving. So really exciting. I just went through my business development doc for the 2026 dirt world. Frankly, I deleted a lot of names and companies that have had no response to the previous three years. And it felt great because it's like, man, I don't have to spend my time there anymore. I can just focus on those that have been engaged with us, pour into them, and this is going to be a great thing. The top question I'm asked is, what does Bill Witt do? Our purpose is to build the dirt world's next generation. The dirt world is the companies and people building the critical infrastructure and supporting those who build our critical infrastructure that we need to live the lives that we do. Our business is much bigger than me. I run around the world building our brand. But the business itself does two things. One, we help develop the next generation through our product called billwhit Improve. It's a daily training and development platform that about 300 civil construction companies are using to not just make their people better workers, but better people. And of course, we have the 2026 ARIAT dirtworld summit, the best opportunity to develop yourself and your teams as long as leaders. So check us out. Billwhit.com book a meeting with us and we'll talk to you soon. And someone asked me too, yesterday, we were doing onboarding with some of the new folks on our team and someone asked, you know, do we have to grow the event to really make the impact that we need to to change the industry? And I said, no, we don't. Because you only need a small group of very convicted leaders that are very impactful and influential in the industry to create huge change. And I think by making these companies better and better and better, by allowing them to exploit to further their number one resource, which is people. Most companies say that it's not true at most though, but for those that are coming to Summit, that's why they're there. They're there to invest in themselves and their people. By helping those companies become better and better, we will give them the greatest advantage that they've seen competitively and we will force the rest of the industry to catch up, which will create change across the industry. And so we don't need to go create this monster event with 20,000 people. We just need to focus on the 1250 that want to get better and that are hungriest. And so it's cool for that to finally shift. Now we can focus on those that are hungriest, pour into them and ultimately change the industry as a result. Really exciting stuff. And so again I'm excited, I'm happy, but most importantly I'm relieved that it's actually working. That means it was a great event. It didn't just feel like a great event, it was everybody there got value. So much so that most companies actually bought five plus tickets for next year. Almost all companies bought five plus tickets. They don't just want one or two people to benefit, they want a team to benefit. Oh. Next up we added over a hundred new training videos to build with improve. New topics include fire extinguishers, water and wastewater form work, concrete foundations, competent person truck safety truck pre trips, gas distribution and erosion control basics. So with that we, we now have officially over 2000 videos on the platform with more to come. The media team has been hard at work putting together these new courses. It is by far the best training content in the industry. All of these videos are roughly two to three minutes long. They're built for everybody in the field to learn a little bit every day instead of eight hours of mind numbing training that they're not going to use, not going to utilize. Uh, really exciting. So the platform's getting better and we're also adding more content to the platform. Anybody signing up for it has access to those 2,000 plus training videos. Now the biggest training library in the civil construction industry. Really exciting stuff on my calendar. I was lucky enough to be the keynote speaker at the Lignite Energy Council annual meeting in Bismarck, North Dakota. And then after that after speaking I had the opportunity to go see some lignite myself. I can't help myself. Thanks to our friends at North American Coal. They have been so good to us. So good to us. And every time I'm up there I reach out, hey, can I stop by and see some mining? And they're like absolutely. So we stopped by, spent a few days, I only spent one day but Wyatt and Drew spent the other day we with draglines and dragline crews to show everybody what the heck it takes to operate the world's largest earth movers. And it's gonna be a fantastic video. And finally our team is fired up after Dirt World because it was the first time altogether as a team in Years. For years now, we haven't had money in the budget for a team meeting, which sucks. We had team meetings throughout the early years of Build Wit. It peaked maybe in 22 with probably 80 people, maybe 85 people. And that's when we started our march to building a legitimate business, which meant a lot of cost cutting. And unfortunately, team meetings have been on the chopping block for years now. However, this was the first year in which we were able to bring our entire team to the Dirt World Summit. So while it wasn't necessarily three days together, just together, it was three days of our team together and with the industry for the first time in a very long time. And because we're remote, it was the first time that a lot of people had met one another in person. It was the first time I had met a lot of people in person. So really exciting during the event and coming out of it, it's just. It gives you a whole. A whole new level of energy within the business, within the culture. It's a breath of fresh air. We're seeing the benefit of it. I think the team really enjoyed being together and hopefully our goal is to facilitate more and more facetime within the company as time goes on, as the business matures, and as we can work it into the budget. So really cool. It's awesome that we have that opportunity to give our team the. The ability to. To be together, to be with the industry and then hopefully learn from some of the speakers we have there. It's long days. They all put in a lot of effort to make it such a great event, but it's cool. It's cool to bring everybody together. So that's this week. I, as always, appreciate you all listening, following along as far as what the heck is going on within the world of Buildwood. If you have questions, comments, send them my way anytime, Aaron at billwood. Com and with that, we'll see you next week. Stay dirty, everybody.