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Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Indonesia Part II, Hiring Tests, and Dubbing (BuildWitt Update #14) – DT 365
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Hey everybody, this is the bill wit update number 14 titled Indonesia Part 2, Hiring Tests and dubbing. So second week to get right into it, Jack White and I in Indonesia with LI be mining this, this week, the second week of the trip, we did eastern Borneo. So we spent the first week, as you know, if you listened to update 13, we spent it in Sumatra. Sumatra is west of Jakarta. Indonesia is enormous. It's the same area, roughly like coast to coast that the United States is. It's similar. I could be making that up, but it's similar. It's a huge expanse of space, but that area is split up by the ocean and it's about a hundred different islands. All different, all different. It was, it was incredible to see the differences between each one as well. So week one, we flew from Jakarta over to South Sumatra, spent the week over there, and then we flew back to Jakarta, spent the weekend in Jakarta, which was great. It is the only downside to our trip back was for about a ten mile drive, it was three and a half hours of traffic, which was brutal. But our time in Jakarta otherwise was quite nice. We stayed at a very nice hotel. They put us up at a very bougie place, enjoyed that, went to the shopping malls, I saw the aquarium stores, local, that were a lot of fun. And then Sunday we got back, went back to the airport to fly, then to Bali Kapan where we spent the night. And then these the next day we visited. We stayed in Bali Kapapan to see Lee Bear's remanufacturing facility. Remanufacturing is a really big deal in the whole recycling world. It's reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycle is last for a reason, because it's not as sustainable as reusing, which isn't as sustainable as reducing. So ideally you don't use as many things to begin with. But if you do have to use things in mining, you gotta use machines. Ideally you can reuse them. And because the components on big machines, like engine blocks, like cylinders, like final drives, are so big they can be remanufactured and used over and over again. Most of those components, if treated right during its lifespan, have quite a few different lives in them. And that's the whole purpose of this facility. So they built a beautiful new facility here in Indonesia just to serve all of the mining machines that they have throughout the country. Most of those machines, I would say the majority are in Borneo. That's where a majority of the coal mining is in Indonesia. However, they do service components from mines across Indonesia. Indonesia, huge mining market, very important for Lieber. So all of these components come to this facility used up sometimes 10,000 hours, 15,000 hours, whatever it is. Some have failed, but most are just at the, at their lifespan. And that's also something that mining is very good at, as opposed to civil construction. Civil construction typically just lets the machine fail and then replaces it. Whereas in mining, again, the machines are so big, production is so important that they can't have machines down unnecessarily. So they do what's called preventative maintenance. So it's at specific interval intervals. They will replace cylinders, they'll replace vinyl drives, they'll even replace whole power packs to ensure that that machine can continue producing as it needs to. And then those used components end up at the remanufacturing facility. The process is quite simple. Yes, these are some of the biggest hydraulic cylinders in the world, biggest heavy equipment components in the world. But it's, it's pretty straightforward. They come in, we bear, cleans everything, they take everything apart, and once everything is all into its individual components, you know, each final drive is made up of a lot of individual components. They take all of those apart, they clean everything, and then they inspect all of the components to see what is still at that manufacturer spec versus what isn't. If it's not, it's thrown out. If it is, it's then put back into the system to then go into a new final drive. And so they replace different things as needed, they use old or used parts as needed, and then they reassemble everything into that final drive engine cylinder that meets the manufacturer specifications new from the factory. So it's using old parts to make a new component that carries the same warranty. So the customers typically work on a, a, a, a program in which I give Lieber one of my say 9200 excavator cylinders. They already give me one, a new one, a remanufactured one so that I can put it on the machine. Right as I take it off, I send that used one to them and then I get another new cylinder for a little bit less, 6 to substantially less than I would if I were to buy a new cylinder. So I'm using my existing components, but putting the new life in them, reducing my costs, while still getting the same reliability. It's hugely important. All the big manufacturers do this. And I would say Lieber's facility was one of the nicest I've seen anywhere in the world. It was so spectacular, so well maintained. Everything was nice and tidy. You could eat off the floors. Everybody was very friendly. It was a great trip and we'll have a video on that entire process here soon, if not already. 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. Now the second part of the week. We then drove a a really grueling 10 hours covering only about 200 miles in those 10 hours because the roads were horrendous. So we started from Bali Kapon, which is like southeastern corner of Borneo. We started to head north along the coast. We drove across the equator. It's the first time I've ever driven across the equator, which is pretty cool technically going from winter to summer. You can't tell because it's the same. Obviously you. We saw the big dashed line in the sky though. That was very cool. The drive was, was, was miserable. One of the worst drives I've done. I get very bad motion sickness. So the, the weaving and the sudden stopping for scooters or potholes or whatever it was was just brutal. But we made it to a small camp, stayed at the camp just outside of the mine and then spent two days in the mine. The customer was Dharma Henwa, a big mining company in Indonesia. They were nice enough to host us. Absolutely fantastic people. Most of the mining was done by 9002 hundreds. So we spent most of our time with Liebherr 9002 hundreds. They had two 9350s and then they had some 9001 hundreds mining the coal. All typically loading 100 ton trucks. They also had some of the bigger, older Komatsu trucks as well. Similar operation to what we saw before. You've got stripping by excavator truck, you've got blasting You've got mining of the coal and then they ship the coal by truck. These were enormous on road trucks. They drive to the coast, put them all, put the coal onto barges and then the barges go either stay in Indonesia to power Indonesia are abroad to places like China and India. Spectacular. I, I think as I mentioned last week, I went into this visit thinking that the mining was going to be decent at best. But the operations were immaculate. Both the ones we went to were completely spotless. Really well done. The trucks knew where they needed to be. The excavator operators were great. The pit was laid out really nicely. Everything about it was fantastic. Which then makes our job easy because we're there to, to make it look good. If it already looks good, we don't have to work that hard. So really good time, really good visit. We got a little rain on the second day but we got a whole first day. We got everything we wanted to and more. So we were very, very happy leaving that, that, that mindsight and you know following this trip coming back to the States it's just a. Still another good reminder of how small the American mind can be. We think we're best at everything and that is so far from reality. It's just completely wrong and it's a good reminder of that. So it's always sobering to come back to the States now that I'm starting to understand how the world works a little bit better. We have a lot of great things going for us but we're not nearly as good as we think we are and we have to improve if there is to be a great future here. And I think infrastructure, natural resources, those two things are a, an essential part of that improvement in future and I'm excited to play a small role in, in helping to make that a reality. So that was week two Indonesia adventure with Liebherr mining. It's really cool. I do not take these opportunities for granted and what's even cooler is that we get to share it with you all. I just reviewed photos this weekend took probably let's see at least 10,000 photos between the three site visits. We did so went through photos and then we'll have three videos out at some point explaining the whole process showing our travel. It should be a lot of fun. So stay tuned. That's all on YouTube. All or long form stuff. Typically every video now is 20 to 30 minutes. At least some 30 plus minutes. So we're getting longer per your requests. So go on to our YouTube to see that and more. Next up back home we sent an offer out for one business development rep or bdr and a few more are far along in the hiring process. So we should be, we should have all the positions, all four positions hired for here pretty, pretty soon. And thanks to our online reach and overall brand, we got a ton of quality applicants, tons of them. So it's a great problem. I know a lot of businesses don't have that opportunity. However, it's still a problem when you get a huge flow of applicants in. You need an effective way to sort through them. And this is where we love to use job specific tests which look different because they're based on the job. So for Dan, he was the one, he was the hiring manager for this role, quote unquote. He looked through everybody that applied and anybody that was remotely qualified. He then sent an email to saying, hey, you're applying for this role. Here's the role. Business development rep. Your job is to reach out to construction companies, civil construction companies across the United States who could benefit from day to day training of their people and a platform that helps them do that more effectively. And your goal is to ask them some basic questions and get them signed up for a demo so that we can walk them through the platform and hopefully get them onto the platform. And so because that's the job, he said, act like I am a civil construction company and you want to get me onto a demo. And at that point it doesn't really matter how they go about it as long as it's mildly intelligent, which is you would think everybody would then do a great job. However, that's just not the case. That's just not the case. And so with something as simple as this, you can see who puts in effort, extra effort, who does their homework, who wants the job, who can communicate effectively like the prerequisites for the position. And then from there you can cut through the noise, find solid applicants that you can then bring to the next part of the process. And that's the formal interview part of the process. So this was a really simple task that we had everybody do. It was really effective. We've done this, you know, for, for a lot of positions in the past, you know, for, for developers, maybe having them do a very simple coding project for videographers, having them edit some of our footage into something cohesive. It's, it's a great tool. And so if you have the ability to do this in, in your, the roles you're hiring for, I highly recommend it because it's, boy does it help you cut through the Nonsense. So that was some, some on our hiring test there. Next, from a product standpoint, we lost subtitles and dubbing on our training content because we switched media players as we've transitioned from training to the new build would improve platform. However, this week our team found a solid solution to get this back by next month for our over 4,000 minutes of training content. And the language that is the obvious priority is Spanish. So we had all of our content with Spanish subtitles on the old platform. We also had a lot of it dubbed, which is crazy how effective it can be now, especially with the AI tools that are out there. We lost that capability again as we transitioned, but we'll be having it back in the coming month. Thanks. Thanks to some of the tools and this approach that they found, which is really great news. Obviously most everybody's consuming training in English. It's the United States of America. That's our language. However, there's a ton of people, Hispanics in the construction industry in the United States. I grew up with a lot of these guys. Most of the guys I grew up with were Mexican. I was in Phoenix, Arizona. But there's all kinds of folks that will learn more effectively in Spanish. So we will offer that pretty soon, which is really, really great news. And then finally our systems team is working on a better on better real time software company specific metrics to help us monitor progress. Last year our revenue came from three sources. Put in three buckets. We had creative work, we had events, primarily the area Dirt World Summit. And then we had software which was build with training, now build with improve. We sold the creative business to focus the business and focus our our revenue and everything across the board which removed one of those buckets. Fantastic. It made revenue and metrics this year a lot simpler. However, we still have a significant percentage of our revenue coming from events which throws off overall metrics. And software metrics are, are very specific like construction company metrics or any kind of different company has different metrics to manage the health of the business. Ideally it's if I'm on an island and all I see are these metrics, I can determine the health of our business, what we're doing well at, what we're not doing well at. We historically have not been that great at at measuring these because again we've been doing a lot of things. However, we can't afford to do that anymore. We have to be a serious software organization. We have to be a serious business and this is a step in that right direction. So the systems team is working through how we segment software versus events to then partition events. Get it over here so that we can build out clean, tidy software metrics going forward that we can use to build the business. That's the future of the business. The events are essential to our overall success, but the real economic engine is the software company and we have to get that dialed in. That's what we're working on right now, starting with metrics measurements to ensure we're on the right track. So that's everything over the past week. I appreciate you all tuning in as always. If you have questions or comments, you can send me an email anytime. Aaron, buildwith.com would love to hear from you. And with that, we'll see you next Monday. Stay dirty everybody.