← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back. Monday Dirt Talk podcast Bill would update number 27. We've titled this one Dale Carnegie and Learning Cultures. As always, this is an effort based on our value Transparency wins. To explain what it is Bill Witt does. I am the influence part of the business, growing our brand, but the business is much bigger than me. We are dedicated to building the dirt world's next generation, as I've explained. And there's a whole lot going on. Good, bad, indifferent. So here we are. This is what happened this past week in the world of build with first up, I attended a three day Dale Carnegie course on leadership and communication and it was my all time favorite training. It was unbelievable. The dirt world's problems would go away. They would vanish if everyone attended. We learned simple things like how to remember someone's name, how to build relationships with those that we don't know, how to disagree kindly, how to how to speak more clearly and how to use stories to illustrate the why. It was me and 11 other leaders. I think I was one of the younger ones in the room. Most everybody was 30s, 40s, some into their 50s. They were all leaders at various businesses, mostly around Tennessee, up in Ohio, some Dale Carnegie, to back up a little bit, is an organization I have known since I first read the book how to Win Friends and Influence People. I read it in high school, I've read it many times since because it's brilliant. It's been around for over a hundred years for good reason because it's very applicable still to day to day life. Dale Carnegie, he created not just this book but this whole incredible organization now that's been around for over a hundred years, is in many countries around the world teaching people how to communicate and how to connect with people in a better, more meaningful way. It's just great. So a lot of people ask me, what are your top books? One of them by far is how to Win Friends and Influence People. We then got involved with Dale Carnegie a few years ago as we got into leadership development training. We wanted to find the best in the world on the subject. Dale Carnegie is certainly among the best. So we eventually then got connected with the CEO of the company, Joe Hart, who has a great podcast. I was on their podcast, which was just awesome. He was on our podcast and he spoke at one of the first, I think the first summit that we had. Since then we've developed a great relationship. Joe reached out last year, said hey, I'd love to send you through one of our courses. And I finally got to getting signed up. It was A three day immersion seminar. So everybody there's a leader pretty far in their careers. You would think dedicating half of the first day to names and remembering names and speaking to people simply would be a little elementary. However, you can't build relationships. You can influence people without first knowing someone's name and knowing how to communicate with them in a very simple way. And it's stuff that again, you think you would already know, but you don't. So that was awesome. And then it was a lot of speaking and being very animated and getting to a concise point and using stories to illustrate that point. It was a lot of fun. And I will be using a lot of the tools, not just here on this podcast to communicate more directly, but on our YouTube channel and especially when I'm speaking. So I am very glad I had the opportunity. I will also be signing up for one of their public speaking courses next year to be more effective, specifically as a speaker. But anybody in a leadership position, I could not recommend a Dale Carnegie course more. That's not why they put it, put me through it. There was no give and take. It was like, hey, we just believe in what you're doing. We want you to enjoy this. I did enjoy it and I've been talking about it since we. It's not to say the other leadership training that I've been involved in that we engage with is not remarkably effective, but it was really cool to just be with a group of strangers and to open up so quickly and to be vulnerable with a group of strangers through these awesome hands on exercises. So if you're looking to get uncomfortable and to learn how to communicate more effectively, which is a very important skill not just at work, but in life at home, check out Dale Carnegie. They probably have a course near you. Next up. Since we've worked with hundreds of civil construction companies on their training programs, we have become a subject matter expert because we're. It's not that we're smarter, we're just in the middle. We're just engaged with hundreds of training teams now from all over the industry. And to leverage our experience and better guide the industry, we're trying to formalize what we've learned into guides. Training and development should not be proprietary. A rising tide lifts all ships. We have to elevate the entirety of the industry for us not to just survive, but to thrive and ensure the future is better than it is today, which should be the goal. So we are trying to learn what's worked in various places and then educate the industry on how they can build a training and development culture within the industry, I within their businesses. The standard right now is on the job training which means there's no training. That's how I came up. That's how most everybody came up is on the job training. Again that's code word for non existent training program. That's not sustainable. We've got more people than ever before entering the industry with no prior experience at all, grew up in suburbia like myself that don't understand even the basics. We've gotta get them up to speed and then we have more people transitioning from the field to leadership more than ever without any kind of training on how to effectively lead, how to communicate. We gotta get em up to speed very quickly. We also have an inability as an industry to gather feedback from the field and to push information down the chain. That is what we are addressing as well. With Bill would improve. So we're not just trying to create a great product. We realize we have a lot of work to do on the implementation and support front to guide companies on becoming great at training and development and ongoing training and development as well. So it's a really exciting time for us. We're talking a lot about this internally and we will continue to talk about this because it is the key to success. Next up, I've talked about team changes over the past few months and those team changes have left a fair share of knowledge gaps to overcome. But that is just how the cookie crumbles. Retooling teams always takes longer than anticipated but it's always worthwhile. There's not really a good way to do sucks. I think that's why a lot of people avoid it. That's why a lot of companies don't do it. They retain people, especially those that have been around a long time that have been quote unquote loyal but might be getting in the way of the necessary change that has to happen because it's. They're valuable, they have a lot of knowledge and it's uncomfortable, it's chaotic in the in between to transition to new people, new team structures, new teams. But that is the only way forward, that is the only way to create anything substantial. So we're battling that a little bit internally right now. But the, the team our team is ready for it is more than capable and we're working through it in each one of the the categories. We're battling it right now. It was, it was a lot of change at once. So definitely not ideal. But being resource constrained we had to do what we did and we will get to a better place. It's just the time in between. I am still a little impatient. I want everything to happen yesterday, but that's just not how things work, especially with people and teams. So we are working through that as we speak. Next, our sales and support teams are more proactive in renewal conversations than ever. We have a mountain of renewals in Q4 this quarter, so we're getting ahead of the curve for the first time on this scale. Renewals are key for a software company. That's why a software company is able to build value, it's recurring revenue. If your product is creating value for people, you will then renew that product over each year. Renew, renew, renew. So that when you're selling for this year, you're stacking revenue on top of existing renewal revenue. And if your renewal rate is strong, if they don't renew, that's what's called Churn. That's what we're trying to eliminate. So for each one of these renewal conversations, we, up until this point on a big picture perspective, from a big picture level, have been more reactive than proactive. This is the first quarter we're default aggressive, getting really proactive and will only become more and more proactive as time goes on. So, so as we get into these conversations, we recognizing there's a lot of relationship building that has to happen but the team's up for the task. We have the necessary team to make it happen. And I think this is just the ongoing reality for us as we go well into 2026 to eliminate churn. So the sales team and support team, they're getting aggressive, they're building relationships, they're asking questions, they're understanding each company so that we can continue supporting them through the build it, improve product and ensure they're getting the value they need to then make next year's renewal conversation even easier. We, from a sales standpoint, have lowered our weekly meeting goal from the original 20. We dialed it back a little bit in favor of higher quality meetings with higher quality potential customers. Larger deals with the right companies are far more productive than many small deals, which is quite obvious. It's a quality over quantity type situation. We we've had a lot of great booked meetings. That's been our focus. We needed to prove we could handle the significant increase in booked meetings. We still need some substantial booked meetings. We still need consistent book meetings with potential customers, but we don't want booked meetings with companies that are not a good fit for our product, which there's quite a few of Those either they're outside of our market or they're just not in the right mindset to effectively invest in their workforce. Or they might be outside the country, for example, so we can't support them effectively. And then there's been a lot of companies that just haven't shown up to meetings because we don't have the right relationships with individuals or we're getting into a meeting with somebody, but they're not necessarily the best person to talk to about the subject. So we're dialing it back just a little bit to focus on quality of meeting, to then allow those meetings to be more productive, to then allow us to sell bill would improve more effectively to the right companies. And if we sell into the right companies and support them effectively, they should then be renewing year after year. Bingo, bango. You see how this is going. So that's a little bit about booked meetings and a small change there. And then finally on the summit front, Registration for the 2026 Area Dirt World Summit is all done. And this is really key to having in place because we will be promoting ticket sales as soon as this year's event kicks off. It's really good cash flow for us and we are trying to sell this event out well before the event happens. This year we're dialing the scale of the event back. So all three years before this has been significant growth. Each year we started at about 700 for the first year. This year will be about 1400. We're dialing next year back to about 1250. So it'll be the first year we're shrinking in size. And that we think should create on top of an effective pre sale strategy, ticket sales to sell the event out by, I mean hopefully summer, if not sooner than that. And so next year we won't have to be selling tickets. We'll then instead of sell tickets, be able to focus on making the event great, which is where we want to be. And I think that's, you know, in everybody's best interest. And also just from a business standpoint, it's great cash flow. So we can use that cash to continue growing the business, floating the business in other ways. We don't want to be dependent upon it future state. We have been dependent upon it, we are still dependent upon it. But as the software business matures, it should just be its own business unit that can continue to reinvest in the event and continue to elevate every year. Much better, much better, much better, much better. Which is a really fun place to be. So registration is set up, it'll be a better experience for everybody signing up, and then it'll be a little bit less work for our team since we have some better integrations this next year. So that's everything this past week, or not everything but the highlights, the update, so to speak. Thanks for listening. I appreciate you all following along with what we have going on at Bill Witt listening to the podcast. If you want to speak with me at all, feel free to email me anytime. Aaron aaronillwood.com and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.