← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
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Hello everybody. Welcome back. Monday Dirt Talk podcast Billwood update number 24 titled Hiring Developers and Predictability. This is a an attempt weekly to give you a little look behind the scenes as to what the heck. Spill what? What the heck Buildwood is doing. I ran a race this weekend, Sunday, I'm recording this Tuesday, so I'm a little hazy still, mentally, don't expect anything all that dramatic. Everybody thinks it's just me running around with the camera. And while I do do plenty of that do do, there's plenty of brilliant people here at Bill Witt doing all sorts of things to make the dirt world a better place, build the dirt world's next generation. We have the media side of things. That is what I do. Influence, that is training videos, that is marketing collateral. We've got some crazy stuff happening on that front. We've got Bill Whit and Prove, that's the main business product training for the civil construction industry. Daily video based mobile format. And then we have the good old Ariat Dirt World Summit, the best leadership event in the dirt world on its way to being the best event in the dirt world. Dare I say it now, what the heck happened this past week? Well, speaking of training videos, we've spent years building our training video library, which is about 2000 videos. As I've explained, when we started producing these videos, we didn't really know how to do it because we had never done it before and no one has. When you don't have a roadmap to follow, you kind of just figure it out. You start somewhere and you learn and you iterate and you get better and better and better. In theory, if you're smart. I'm not, but our team is and we've gotten way better. So as we've reviewed early training content, we've said, hey, we can, we can do this better. So why don't we start to redo some of our content? And we have a lot of content we're creating into the future. Like right now. I know there is something being prepared for water trucks. Stuff gets moved around because we're working with contractors, we're working with real world sites and things happen, things get pushed around, shoots get postponed or switched, whatever it is. And so to even out our backlog, we decided to take on redoing a few of our early training video tracks. So this past week we got into that. We did Dozer walk arounds, Medium Dozer walk arounds and Medium Excavator walk arounds. We're doing it a little differently as well with Voiceover. I love voiceover. If you've watched any of the vlogs vlogs so far, you'll have noticed we use voiceover a lot. I think it's great. I've gotten a lot better at it now. So we're, we're using voiceover with then footage we're going to go capture at the local cat dealer, Thompson Machinery. They're just excellent to deal with. Put those videos together and hopefully it comes out a lot better than what we have. And what we have right now is great. But again our standards keep increasing and we want to keep doing a much better job. So we we dug into that this week and hopefully those videos come out pretty soon. If you're looking for another industry event that is a snooze fest, this is definitely not for you. But if you're a leader looking to elevate yourself, your team, looking for like minded individuals that are hungry, then look no further than the Ariat Dirt World Summit November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. In our third year we'll have about 1500 hungry industry leaders from about 500 companies looking to learn, grow, teach. It's going to be fantastic. We also have a world class lineup. We've got Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas, James Clear, Atomic Habits, Kim Scott, Radical Candor, Mark Miller, Chick Fil a leadership, Tim Grover who is Michael Jordan's trainer. You will not hear from a lineup like this anywhere else. So check out details now. Dirtworld.com you can use code AARON10 for 10% off any registrations and we'll see you November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. On the software development front, hiring is continuing to build out our internal software development capabilities and now that all customers have access to BillWhit improve the new platform. We are officially sunsetting the bill with training platform in November. So we are taking it out to pasture. Putting it out to pasture. We are full bore on the BillWhit improved product. A lot of our development capacity has gone into that transition but now we can put all of the capacity towards the new product and by adding capacity we'll be able to make the product better faster. And speaking of the product being better and faster, this past week we had a release to make the platform more more effective for it to perform better. We use it every day at BuildWit. I used it yesterday. Today it's performing a lot better. It's really exciting to see it improve. So that's awesome. Our team going forward is working on better administrative functionality and certification tracking over the coming Weeks, which is awesome. And so again, it's all about making the product better. It's all about daily active users. It's been a long time coming to focus as a software company. We've said it a lot, but just because, like Abraham Lincoln says, just because you call a tail a leg does not make it so as far as dogs are concerned. The quote to back up, if you called a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Someone would say 5. He says no, 4. Because just because you call a tail leg doesn't make it so. That's true. Just because we've called ourselves a software company has not meant we're a software company. It's taken a while to really make that transition. But we're there, we're moving right along. We have metrics that are very much software company metrics and we have a great product that's getting better. So it's a really exciting time. On the sales front, we are at 89 booked meetings for the month. This is the closest we've been to our hundred meeting month per month goal since we restructured the team this summer. A few more days to go for the month. The month is not over and that is not the full BDR team. So we're thinking we can exceed safely beyond 100 booked meetings per month. Especially as everything slows down in construction, which means it gets busier for us into the winter. Really, really good sign. Really promising. The sales team is doing just an amazing job. Dan's leading the charge there. If you don't follow him on LinkedIn, Dan Briscoe, he's a great follow. He's talking all about what he's doing every day so you can hear more from him. We've also closed significant deals with some large and small civil construction companies over the past week. Some signing for three years. The three year deals include custom training content as well. So we signed a few of these deals recently. Really exciting. The companies, they're saying, hey, we want to go all in on this for the next three years. We're going to pay for it now as well. And then included in that is, you know, five custom videos, 10 custom videos, 20, 30, depending on the size of the company and what they're looking for. So going into next year, we're going to take on more custom content. Now that custom content is what the company needs. Some of those videos may be company specific. Some of those videos though are going to be industry videos, training videos in general, just featuring that company, positioning that company as a subject matter. Expert in whatever the subject is. I think it's a huge advantage for any company to be featured in our training video library. So these custom videos, sometimes they're just for the companies, but I think it's a win, win, win all the way around when they're also videos for the overall industry. For any company on the platform. We've done this with some great companies. One recently is Garney for example. They wanted some videos on underground and on plant construction. What they do, so it's going to benefit their few thousand employee owners. But then anybody on Billboard Improve can also learn from Garney on how to put pipe in the ground more effectively, which is, I mean you can't learn from anybody better than that on that subject. Going to the summit. We are into the final stretch of area dirt world ticket sales. It's really exciting. A few more sponsors jumping on board and we are chasing the last minute planners trying to get those tickets across the line. It is a pain tracking down some of these folks. It's a very busy time of year. I don't blame them at all for not picking up. I'd be doing the same thing if I were them, moving dirt, laying pipe, especially getting the asphalt down before everything gets a little too cold. But the team, me, we're doing our best to get everybody on the phone, get their tickets squared away and set up what I think will be the best event in the year 2025 for the industry. Really exciting stuff there. By the time you're listening to this, we'll be just about at the event. The event makes all of the effort worthwhile and I just cannot wait to get there. And then finally looking ahead into the coming week, our leadership team is meeting in Phoenix to review our 2026 plan and budget. The theme for 2026 will be predictability. We've become a lot more focused this year. I would say focus has been the word for us in 2025. But now into 2026, we have to tune the organization to be predictable, steady and to deliver results consistently. Maybe consistency is even a more important word. So we have to set our budget, we have to stick to that budget and we have to hit every number, the spend and the money coming in. Those numbers have to be spot on every month. If they're not gonna be spot on, we need to know 90 days out. We need to plan accordingly, we need to change things accordingly. But next year is, I think, a great opportunity for us to just deliver on a great software product. The civil construction industry to train and develop the next generation of leaders, the next generation of builders to make the area Dirt World Summit into an incredible event, not just for the industry, but period, in the United States, and then to really elevate our storytelling. What I do as well. So it's really exciting, nothing dramatic, but I've learned as I've gotten further in business that that's the stuff that matters the most. It's not the sexy stuff that makes a difference. It is the everyday nuts and bolts. And that's what we'll be meeting on this coming week. That's everything. Really appreciate you listening. Appreciate you following along with what the heck's happening at Billwit. You can write me anytime. Aaronillwood.com a a r o n buildwit b u I L D W I T T would love to hear from you. And we'll see you next week. Everybody. Stay dirty.