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Hey everyone, welcome back. The Monday episode Dirk Talk Podcast Bill Whit Update. This is number 23 and I've titled this one Letting People Go. To preface this Monday episode, I've been doing this for a while now. A lot of people ask what does Bill wit do? They think it's me running around with cameras, a few folks making some YouTube videos. That is part of it. But there's a much bigger business to ultimately make the dirt world a better place. Build the dirt world's next generation. We have an event called the Area Dirt World Summit. And then we have a software product training and development for the civil construction industry in the United States called BuildWit Improve. We've got a lot of brilliant people behind both of those efforts. Ultimately, we intend to change the industry for the better. Part of that is also storytelling what I do like on podcast, YouTube, social media, etc. So hopefully these shorter Monday editions give you some insight as to what the heck is going on in the business and what it is that we do. Now I've started these episodes too, saying these old are the weekly happenings. You know, good, bad and different. And before I started writing this one, because of course it's a newsletter first and foremost email newsletter. You can sign up on my website via my LinkedIn page. But as I started writing this, I was at a fork in the road on one side to the right. You could say it was the easy road. I could have acted like everything was gravy, wrote out some of the positive weekly happenings. You know, there's always something positive going on and then just got on with my weekend, not thought twice about it. But to the left was the other path. That was the truth. Write about what really happened this week. The big news, as uncomfortable as it may be, I wasn't excited to do it, but I knew it was right. Transparency wins is a core value for a reason here at Build Wit. And if this really is the BuildWIT update, I have to cover the good, the bad and the indifferent. So to get right into was a week because we let some seven people go, which is a pretty significant percentage of our team overall. For some background, some context here, we've spent almost our entire business life financed by investment dollars from construction industry leaders and Caterpillar dealer principals. After a few early years of being held hostage by cash flow, which I'm sure many of you business owners can understand, Dan and I sought our ransom and an early customer, Randy, answered the call and loaned us money initially. So we went to Randy saying, hey, we Think we need some outside capital. We weren't expecting to get it from him necessarily, but he had recently sold his blunt contracting business and was getting into the next chapter of his life and wanted to play a more significant role in our mission of impacting the overall industry. So he initially loaned us some money. But what happens when a calorie restricted fat kid goes to their upper class friend's house, which features a pantry full of every snack imaginable? Well, they go nuts. They get the fruit roll ups, the fruit snacks, the gogurts. They go absolutely wild. I was there as a child quite a few times, honestly. And as a business, we were. We were the fat kid. That's the best way I can explain it. We just, we just went nuts for a few years. And the party continued as we formalized the initial loan into equity, raising funds from others as well. So Randy's loan became equity, and then we raised further investment from other great leaders in the industry. And while we thought we were doing what was right at the time, looking back, we didn't know what was right. We didn't have the experience to know what was right. So we genuinely believed we were making the right decisions. You know, no one walks down the aisle and gets married thinking, well, most rational people don't walk down the aisle getting married thinking, you know, maybe this won't work. They do it thinking that that's the best decision. That's what we were doing as a business. Oftentimes, though, turns out, well, you know, now that I have this information, not the best decision. So I'm sure I'm the only one that's ever said this in hindsight. Yeah, we didn't know what the right decisions were. So we merrily skipped along. We hired a lot of people. We were shouting from the rooftops, having a grand time convincing ourselves nothing was impossible. We were having a blast. Until we ran, skipped, walked our way into quicksand. Now, quicksand is pretty devious, at least cartoon quicksand. So picture cartoon quicksand here. I don't know if quicksand is really a thing, but cartoon quicksand will get you. The more you panic, the more it consumes you. But it's a really slow process, so it slowly consumes you, slowly pulls you under. And for us as a business, this process was years. It took years for us to be pulled under. And even when we thought. Even when I thought we were pulled under, we weren't really pulled under. It takes a long time. It took us a long time. And quicksand you can only free yourself from it once you calm down and you act carefully but deliberately so. Today, if you fast forward a few years, we were finally freeing ourselves from the quicksand. And I don't know if you've been in quicksand maybe from a personal standpoint, weight wise, maybe career standpoint, you're just on a plateau, you're comfy. From a business standpoint, you know, everybody's been there in some way, but we're finally freeing ourselves from the quicksand. It's been exhausting. And by this I mean we're leaving outside money behind and we're growing as a profitable software company that delivers real value, which is not only exciting, but completely necessary. 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. We have to be sustainable to fulfill our mission of building the dirt world's next generation. Serve our customers, care for our team and reward our investors. We had a lot of fun as a team, as a business while we were spending money. But it wasn't earned. It wasn't really us doing it. It was someone else. In the future, it will be us. And winning is way cooler than using somebody else's money. So the future, and I can see the future, I would say most clearly of anybody here, since I'm the visionary I think is way cooler than anywhere we've been and way more exciting. And I think people can criticize us, me very fairly. A lot of the criticism I think is completely fair. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm young. It's all about money, whatever it is. The one thing I don't think anyone can criticize with any merit is that we have been consistent when it comes to our mission of serving the dirt world and building the dirt world's next generation. We've been dead on. I've been dead on with that since day one, for eight years now, nine years now. It's never changed. The business has changed significantly. How we're going to get there has changed. A lot of things have changed. I've changed personally, but that has never changed. And it won't change because I genuinely believe that is my purpose. That is our company's purpose. So the future is really exciting. However, the retooling process has been anything but exciting. The first significant step to getting out of the quicksand was selling our marketing business, which was undoubtedly the right move. I've talked about that at length. That was the fieldwork sale. So we sold the creative business to Chase, which is now under the fieldwork brand. We don't perform creative services for construction companies anymore. They do that. We don't. However, as this happened, it exposed the remaining company build with the greater organization, which over the past six months has forced us to question everything, Question everything. There's been no rock that has been left unturned at this point. And our business is nothing but people. There's no plant, there's no property, there's no equipment. I don't have equipment to sell. There's no real balance sheet. There's none of that. And I love this because it gives us remarkable potential and I think is the only way to change the world and allows us to focus on our team to the best we can. You know, we don't have the resources to necessarily focus on the team all the time in the ways we do, but they're front and center. They're the ones making it happen. But the fact that our business is just people is completely brutal in other ways. Because when the business has to change, which it's had to change, the team has to change. It's the only way to do it. And this is where we were weeks slash or so months ago, realizing that we couldn't achieve profitability, which is safety for the overall team, without scrutinizing every single dollar spent. And with over 80% of our spending being people related, that meant looking at every individual and their contribution and if we could afford to keep them, no matter where they were, within the business, which is not fun at all. So everyone we let go over the past week is a great human being. Great human being. But they were either in positions we couldn't maintain or that weren't performing at the new standard, and this is far less them and much more us as a business is what I've had to accept as a business changes. The demands on people change. Some people can come along and are willing, others can't or aren't willing, which is fine, I completely understand. And so these were those positions. They either weren't willing or they just couldn't come along with this new structure. That said, we're continuing to invest in the business and in our team. So we're right now hiring for six positions. So we let seven go, we're hiring six and we'll likely be hiring more as time goes on, just in different areas. So these positions are mostly sales and software development. Now that we're a software company, which makes sense, we're having to cut investment in some areas to then further invest in other areas to get our business to where it needs to be for again, the business, the team or customers, the mission, investors, etc. All that said, any business owner leader understands it's just business, quote unquote. But it's not just business, it's people's lives, livelihoods. Which makes this process seem, even with that understanding, as time goes on, worse and worse, as your empathy grows, builds in life, as you get more life experience, it doesn't make this any easier, it just makes it worse. Again, even with that understanding and no knowledge that it's completely right. But at this point, I've have eight years of doing this, which is not a ton of time, but enough time to start to see some trends, start to understand myself better, start to develop myself as a leader a little bit better. Which means I know when decisions are right from a gut standpoint. And where we're going could not be more right for our overall team, our customers, the industry, our mission, even if it doesn't feel like that sometimes. And over the past week, despite me being able to digest it emotionally beforehand and knowing that it was the right decisions we were making, it oftentimes doesn't feel that way. Definitely not. So that's a little bit about what happened this week. Again, this is just part of a changing business. When you have to change your business, you have to change your team, it's just not fun. And when people don't perform, it's a little bit more simple. But when they're just good people, they've done good work, they just don't necessarily fit going forward. Those are the ones that really suck. But those are the decisions that anybody in a high performing world makes. I've noticed any high performing team, any high performing business. Those are the decisions they have to make to get them to the next level, to make the changes they have to, to get them to where they need to be ultimately. And that's what we're doing. So we'll see if it's right. I'm betting that it is. We wouldn't have done this if it, if it hadn't been right. We've messaged this to the best of our abilities internally in the past. We haven't always messaged stuff completely truthfully and not that we were intending to hide the truth, but you know, if someone's giving you the straight poop or not. We've tried to give everybody the information. It hasn't always come out in the right way. This time I hope it's been received that way. With our team. We are trying to give the information and be transparent and then here I am, hopefully being transparent with all of you as well. This is what's going on the company, you can take it for whatever it's worth. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but that's at least my side of the story. Our lawyer has not vetted any of this. It is just what I wrote, what I've thought about and where we are. So that's that. If you ever have comments, questions, anything of the sort, feel free to reach out to me anytime. Aaronillwood.com com A R O N at buildwit B u I l D W I t t com and I appreciate you all listening. See you on the next one. Stay there.