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Foreign. Welcome back to Building Bill Whip. This is number 46, titled Diamonds and Media Restructure. This is a weekly update of what the heck goes on within BuildWit. What the heck BuildWit does, is it just me running around the world? That's part of it, but that's a small, small part of it. Nowadays we have a great team working on training and developing building the dirt world's next generation. And this is a look into how we're doing it on a week by week basis. First up, was I running around this week? Boy, was I. It was one of my best adventures to date. It started with, it was me and Wyatt. We flew out of Nashville and our flight, and I'm happy to say the company, Air Canada, it was delayed by a few hours, which was gonna make our Toronto connection to Yellowknife a little slim. That's okay. I'm like, we're close enough. They're probably gonna hold the plane for us. Cause there's only one of these flights a day. That's what other airlines would do. But no, we get to the gate, the door's closed, the plane is still there. The plane doesn't leave actually for 15 minutes after I get there. But they say, sorry, come back later. There's the desk. So we're like, okay, cool, Cool, man. Right on sick. We go get a hotel. We come back the next day. They route us through Edmonton. So we get on a flight that's delayed, of course, to Edmonton. We hang out in the Edmonton airport for quite a long time. Then we get on another delayed flight, of course, to Yellowknife. We finally make it to Yellowknife. We get in late at night, we go right to the hotel the next day. This is Yellowknife, Canada, in the Northwest Territories. If you look it up, it's very far north, very far north. The most north I've ever been. I think the adventure began that next morning at 6:00am These two guys, they picked us up. Great, great guys. We stopped by McDonald's, of course, because we're silly Americans, and we headed north out of town on a road. Everything really began, though, about an hour north. So it's dark, dark, dark, light starting to get there. We get to this ice road and it is the longest heavy haul ice road in the world. It is officially called the Tibet to. I don't even know how to say this. It's. It's a winter road. Sorry, I probably should have looked this up before I got into this, but it is what it is. It's the world's longest heavy haul ice road. It's only open six weeks a year and it supports every year thousands of loads of fuel, parts and supplies up to three very remote diamond mines. The road itself is an ice Road. It's 85% over lakes. So they, as the ice freezes, they plow the snow off the route. It's very well engineered to let the ice set up even further. So there's over a meter of ice there, 3, 4ft thick for the big trucks to drive over. The trucks have to go. They're limited on speed and they're limited on distance between each other. They travel at four trucks at a time and again 85% over lakes. Where they cross over land, they build the ice up by about 10 to 12 inches so that the trucks are driving entirely on ice, which is over the earth, so that when it melts there's. There's no impact whatsoever. There's just a clearing for trees, but otherwise there's no impact. It's unbelievable. And everything has to go up to these mines within that six week period. Because the mines are situated on islands within giant lakes, so you can't drive to them. There's no road. It's amazing. So we did about 12 hours by ice road all the way up. I don't need to drive the ice road all that often. It was more than enough, 12 hours. But I'm really grateful for the experience. Super unique. We had a great time. And that, believe it or not, wasn't even the reason why we went up there. I said diamonds. The end of our ice road journey was the Diavec diamond mine, owned and operated by Rio Tinto. And we've spent a lot of time with Rio Tinto with copper in Utah, iron ore in Western Australia, and bauxite most recently up in Queensland. So this was the fourth official commodity we've seen with Rio. And we stayed at the on site camp. It's fly in, fly out. So the whole workforce flies in to the on site airstrip. They stay on site, they're fed there, there's a gym there. Everything is housed within the compound. And they toured us through the operations. The crazy thing is that everything is shutting down by the time I'm recording this. It's about done. They're out of ore, they've mined it all and they're going into a multi year reclamation phase. So we got see almost the final or over a 20, 25 year period out of this operation. We saw the surface operations, we saw some of the reclamation operations. We saw the pits. There's two, three huge pits. We saw two of them that are not being mined anymore. We saw the mill, how they extract the diamonds from the ore. And then the highlight for sure was going underground to the underground mining operations to see everything for ourselves. So that was our time on site. We spent two days on site. Then the next day we got onto a plane, a small plane, and flew back to Yellowknife again. We didn't necessarily need to drive the ice road again. We flew into Yellowknife, but mostly for time. And we got Starbucks, of course. Again, you know, why, why not experience the local culture? And we went to then their, their diamond sorting facility, which was I think the most expensive, spectacular part of the process because we got to see the finished rough diamonds. And it was unbelievable to see a table of unfinished diamonds, tens of thousands of diamonds right in front of us. Unbelievably extraordinary experience. I'm still, I'm still shocked. They, they let us in the building and it was, it was really unique because most everybody has seen a finished diamond, a cut diamond. Most everybody will never see a raw diamond in their life. And yet we saw tens of thousands of them all right in front of us, which just amazing. And the coolest thing about this is we'll have a video on the ice road and the diamond mining process coming soon. So I'm very appreciative of the Rio Tinto team for having us. They could not have been better. They, they just cared for us so much. The access we had was incredible and the ability to have these experiences, I'm still, I'm just over the moon about it. When I was in the diamond facility, I was holding a bag of diamonds, like 10,000 carats of diamonds. And I was looking at the guy, our host, explaining all of this, and I was just like, you have such a unique job. All these people are working with diamonds every day, piles of diamonds. Like you have such a unique job. And he looking at me as I'm holding a bag of diamonds, he's like, well, you do too. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, I, yeah, I do, I do. And considering we were in the coldest was minus 43, and a month before that I was transiting the Panama Canal when It was about 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Within a month, I can have that different of an experience. It's just unbelievable. So, again, really thankful, really excited to share all of that very soon. Stay tuned. I touched on this, but with the unexpected departures of three Team members on our media team in January, we spent all of February discussing what the best team structure was going forward. It was a great opportunity to turn over every rock and to ask, well, what do we really need to accomplish here and what's the best place for each individual and is it one team, multiple teams, what's best here? So it was a really great opportunity to ask all of the questions we needed to before, okay, we need to go hire X people, make X decision, etc. It was, it was a great, great exercise and ultimately, through many discussions and a lot of thought, we decided to split the team in two. So split the one media team that we brought together six months ago back into two. And yes, a little bit of a merry ground. But there's good reason for this. One team is now focused entirely on training content, video training content for our Build Whit and Prove training and development platform. And the other big change there is not only are they focused on training content, but they're not rolling up to me anymore. They're rolling up to the product team. So Jake and Caitlin are leading the charge there, rolling up to Darren so that they can focus wholly on what our customers need, what our customers are saying. It's the closest training has been with product and I think it's going to be nothing but good. So really, really an exciting change there then. The other team is focused on influence and brand. So we've always called it influence. We're calling it the brand team now, which is under my domain, which is what I will be leading thanks to also the leadership of Ben and others. This change will make us way better in podcast, in social content and YouTube content, and training content. It's already been maybe two weeks. I'm seeing the benefits already. It's incredible. We have the best damn team. These are such, such talented individuals. And the most exciting thing about this process was that it wasn't just what's best for the business. I think when you're looking at the new org structure, it's what's best for every individual within the structure. I think every individual here won in a big way with this change. They got more focus on what they're best at and they got more opportunities to lead, more opportunities to get better at what they're already the best at. It's a lot of fun and it's been a long road, years and years and years to get here, but now that we're here, it just feels good. It's like, wow, this makes sense. And it damn near makes all of the Terrible decisions I've made, we've made in the past worthwhile because it's a really, really special thing we've got going. So that's a little bit behind the scenes on restructuring our media team. And for any business owners or leaders listening, you know, it's easy to panic, especially when people leave, especially when there's unplanned departures. But this was, I think, the result of a lot of lessons learned over the years. Instead of panicking, instead of just acting, we took a moment and we stopped and we reassessed before we started to make decisions, which I think again, was the right call on the product side of things. Again, I keep talking about it. It's a really big deal. The code base replacement project. It is the foundation of Bill Whit and prove going forward it can be the best designed product. It can be. We could have the best, you know, intent with the product. If it doesn't work every time a user goes to use it every day, it's not worth anything. And that's why we're replacing the code base. It's far from ideal. We don't want to be doing it, but we have to do it to build a robust product. And we're really happy to report that the project is still on track and is trending towards a mid to Q2 completion with. With really, really good results so far. Is again, something that's, that's not sexy. But you can't build upon a flawed foundation. And we did have to bite the bullet here a little bit. Again, we didn't want to do it. We just paid a lot of money to build out this code base last year and the year before that and the year before that. So to be sitting here replacing what's essentially a new code base, again, it sucks, but it's absolutely the right call for the future of the company. So it's a. It's a great example of one of those decisions. Not fun in the short term, but 100% right for the long term. And fortunately, we have the right team making it happen. It's on track. I'm really excited for that to come together and I teased it last week, but now that our Q1 is, our Q1 sales starts in December is complete. I am very happy to report that we are trending well ahead of our 2026 revenue goal. This is possible not only thanks to our team, but our tremendous customers and the dirt world as a whole. The support we have is unbelievable. We do not take it for granted and we're really Appreciative of them, allowing us to play the role we are in building the dirt world's next generation. It's, it's really cool. I've, I've used the word relieving often to explain where we're at on revenue right now. It's relieving. We're building a safe bus, a safe business for people to be a part of, which allows us to think beyond survival mode, which is where we've been for years. We spent almost all year last year there. Just what we need to survive, just survive. What's next week look like? We couldn't think about next month, we couldn't think about next quarter. We certainly couldn't in a lot of ways think about next year. But because it was last year, I say in previous years our suffering was mostly due to our ignorance and to some just, just mistakes, failures. Last year was suffering, was, was a more deliberate suffering. It was self inflicted, but in a deliberate sense to then get us to a better place to tee the business up to where it needed to be. And after suffering last year, seeing the results this year, it makes last year so much more worth it. I don't want to do it again ever. But it makes it all worth it to know where we are, where we're headed. It's a really good feeling because it means we can take care of our customers better, take care of our team members better, make better decisions, invest further and ultimately make a bigger difference in the world and build the dirt world's next generation, which will then build the world and build our entire world's next generation. The future of America, future of the world is, is upon the shoulders of these individuals that we're trying to help train, develop and equipped to be the best. Not just workers, but people that they can be. So really exciting to report that after Q1, we're not resting on our laurels. We have Q2. Everything starts over again. The score's back down to zero. We've got to do it again. That's any great team, any great company. It's not just about performance over a small amount of time. It's about prolonged performance. It's about performance over years and years and years and years. And that is certain. Certainly our intention or target. That's everything for this week. I appreciate you all listening as always. If you have questions, feel free to send them directly to me. Aaron buildwit.com Aaron and with that, we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody. Ra.