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Foreign. Hey there everybody. Welcome back to building buildwit number 54. And this one is short and sweet. It's called Dirt World. Sold out. I teased it last week but we're there. Ladies and gentlemen, this if you haven't been around before, this is my weekly attempt at explaining what the heck Billwood is up to, how we are building the dirt world's next generation. I am part of the brand team that is to grow awareness for the dirt world and the Buildwit brand. Build trust to then grow our business from there. Our business is in two parts. One, we have our annual leadership event elevating the leadership of the dirt world called the area Dirt World Summit. And then we have our bread and butter, our continuous improvement platform, Build with improve to help civil contractors train, develop, communicate with their workforce better than ever before. Help their people solve problems in the in the moment. There are all kinds of incredible features with the BillWhit Improve platform, but it is the only continuous improvement product for specifically for the civil construction industry. It is a really exciting time. I in fairness, I wrote this before boarding another 15 hour flight across the pond. So bear with me. I didn't go all that creative on this one, but we'll do our best here after the fact on audio. So first up, of course, the 2026 Area Dirt World Summit is, is sold out completely at 1,250 tickets. Plus we have about a hundred sponsors. So It'll be over 1500 people attending, which is incredible. This is six months ahead of the event. It is November 5th through the 7th in Phoenix, Arizona. An absolute overnight success, textbook overnight success. Thanks to the hard work of our team for, for three years now, making this event possible and the support of thousands of industry leaders, some of you likely listening to this, who have attended. It has been a group effort. One of our values is where the stage hands, not the stars. I don't see the Dirt World Summit as ours. It's not Buildwitz, it's the dirt worlds. That's why we used Dirt World in the event. It's us building the stage. But we're not the stars. It's the industry that is. The stars are the stars. At the end of the day, those in the room, that's the value. It's not necessarily the people up on stage that creates some value, but the value is those there present interacting with one another in a completely different way than ever before. Like anything this event, putting it together, making it successful has been a grind. It has been. I have had many days where selling dirt World has been the absolute last thing I've wanted to do. But it is proof that when you do the right thing and give the market something that it wants and needs, good things happen, which is, for us, a huge, big boost of confidence. Very, very, very, very exciting. I. I am not a great salesperson. I don't enjoy sales, but it makes the world go round. It drives business. It's essential. And I'm not good at sales, but what I am good at is being consistent. I've talked about it a lot on this podcast. And so for three years, we started selling Dirt World, let's see, 25 in April of 2023. So from 2023 to April of 2026, I sold Dirt World every single day. I only had a break immediately after Dirt World or during Dirt World, which was really nice, or like the week up to the event, but otherwise I was selling it. And then we had a whole team selling it, and then we had a whole team making it happen and making the event happen. And if it, you know, if we had sold the first year and the event sucked, we wouldn't have had the second year be successful. But then the second year had to be better than the first, and the team delivered on that. They delivered on the third year. And so with all of that effort, that work, that consistency, to me, selling this year out wasn't a surprise because I know the effort that's been put in, when you put in the effort, you get the result. And it's, it's, it's, it's a really, really just nice case study for us. Within business, if you do the right thing, if you put in the work, you get the results. It's as simple as that. There's no easy button, there's no shortcut. This has been a long time coming. And before we had our first year in 2023, we had years and years and years of building relationships and a brand to begin with, to get the 600 something people to the first event that trusted us enough to come to an event that didn't technically exist. So it's hugely gratifying to see it come together and if you've been a part of it, or if you're going to be a part of it this year. Thank you. Because without you, obviously it wouldn't exist. I, I talked about it last week, too, but now that it is sold out, we are officially transitioned to a waiting list. At this point, we have 35 people already signed up, so the waiting list, it'll first come, first serve on Any tickets that come up because of cancellations for this year, which it's construction. There are usually. There's not many, but there usually are some because schedules change, weather, etc. Um, but that waiting list will also get access to tickets for 2027 before the general public, which will be really important because this event's going to sell out faster. And faster and faster is the plan because of how good it's going to become over the next few years. It only gets better from here. So if you're not on that waiting list, if you're interested in dirt world, get on it because there are benefits to being on it beyond just being there this year. I also talked last week about we solved the phone problem and then we had a messaging problem, conversation problem that we started to dig in on. So this week, work on clarifying our sales process and messaging is going quite well. With build, with improve, we are planning to leverage our position as the authority in continuous improvement for civil construction. And we're planning to take a firmer rather than a passive role in, in sales and onboarding. We have a phenomenal team that has been in the civil construction industry for many decades. People like Randy, Max, Darren, Christian, Jason, Jake. We have a lot of really, really great PA People that have been around the block. We have had the ability to see a lot of companies and meet a lot of leaders in civil construction now probably more than just about anybody in America. And then we also have hundreds of customers that we've worked with on training, development, continuous improvement within their workforces. And we have results, we have data, we have legitimate success stories that we can leverage to help other contractors do the same. It's not competitive to train and develop your people. Keep them safe, elevate them as humans, not just workers. Everybody wins in the industry when we do it. Rising tide lifts all boats, and that is how we build the dirt world's next generation. So we are leveraging that. That sense of authority, the brand that I think we've, We've earned. It's not an entitled position. I think we've earned our position here and we're using it to lead the dirt world now again, that's not to say we're the important ones here. We're not. We're the stagehands, not the stars. We're just the ones able to see the entire playing field and hopefully help civil contractors along and get them to a more productive place. When it comes to people and those that are getting to that place, I'm telling you, they're Having a lot more fun, they have a lot less turnover, a lot less stress and they're making more money. Go figure. It's a better model. And we are going to work every day, every night, until the civil construction industry is there as a whole. And we are doing that through Build With Improve. So really exciting stuff. I'm really happy about the messaging, I'm happy with the product and it only gets better from here. So it's a really exciting time. And I've said that probably a hundred times over the past few weeks from a product standpoint. Our product team met this week to refine the next few months of Build with Improve development. On top of finishing the giant platform RE architecture project that I've spoken about over the past few months, users will soon have access to leaderboards which will give them information on their company's top performers so you can see who in your company is doing best, which is very cool. They will have playlists done which allows for specific training based on role. And then there will be integrations with external training allowing users to do things like OSHA 10 for 30 and other official trainings, certifications within the Billboard and Proof platform. So really exciting stuff. Really, really exciting stuff. I just cannot wait to see more and more people use the platform. And from there there's a lot of stuff I'm not even saying that's even cooler, but we're transitioning a little bit. Instead of talking about the vision, the future we are talking about, here is what was just delivered this month. So going forward I'll be talking a lot more about. Here is what's delivered the past few months. It has been vision based because we've been doing that RE architecture, but that's winding down and so now we can blow and go on brand new stuff to make the product better and better and better and better for those end users, those people in the field, ultimately building the world around us. Annual salary reviews are underway for our team right now. We review annually with raises in May. We do our best to balance the budget that we have set while also being proactive in rewarding people for performance. Fortunately, this year we also have a really strong bonus program which is extremely cool and that should be a huge boost for everyone at the end of the year. So we do it on an annual basis, annual cadence, we review in April, it goes into effect in middle of May. And then we have that bonus structure I've talked about for December. It is based on revenue and based on profitability. So do we hit our money in and Then do we hit our money out metrics? If we do, everybody gets a full bonus and that is split between 50% cash, 50% company stock, and that is based on their compensation overall. Really exciting. I, you know, companies get a lot of grief for not paying people well. And I think a lot of people are very jaded with how selfish companies corporations are, which they are. I think corporations have in a lot of ways hollowed out America. But in small business and any business that's healthy and doing the right thing, I love paying people more. There's the constant challenge of economics and of budget and running a profitable business. But I couldn't be happier to give people more money, those that earn it, that are deserving of it. It is the coolest thing in the world. And, and I want to pay people more and more and more and more money as time goes on, which means we need to make our business run better and better and better and train and develop our people. And around and around it goes. So it's a really exciting time to reward people making it happen within our business. We try to be proactive about it. Do we get it right all the time? Absolutely not. But I think we've gotten much better year over year and with each year we refine it a little bit more. So I think this was the best way we've done it yet. And like I said, hopefully it gets better and better from here as the years go on. But layer on top of that, the bonus program. For the first time ever, we are in a incredible place. Finally. Our recent video with the United States Army Corps of Engineers made the Lake Okeechobee news. So you don't have to tell me that we're big time. I already know big time stuff happening over here in Bill Witt's brand world. So that's everything for this week. I really appreciate you all listening. Thanks for tuning in as always and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.