← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Office Cleanup and Project Updates to Close Out 2025 (Building BuildWitt #36) – DT 409
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Foreign. Hey there, everybody. Welcome back. This is the final 2025 build with update building build wit number 36. This is the last update of the year. As always, I've said this 35 other times so far, but this is the attempt at giving you a behind the scenes look of Build Whip and what the heck we're doing as a business, how we're building the business, the lessons we're learning, the decisions we're making, what the heck our team is up to. Everybody's always like, is it just you guys, whoever's out on site, me and probably two other videographers for the vlog? And I'm like, no, no, no. We've got a team, we've got a software product, we've got a world class leadership event. There's a lot going on in this kitchen and this podcast is dedicated to what's cooking. And that is terrible. I'll workshop that, I promise, in 2026. This is the final update because we close for the two holiday weeks, or we closed for the two holiday weeks. We returned to work on January 5th. But don't worry, I don't stop working. I change gears a little bit. I do a different flavor of work over the break, which I love. It's. It's my two favorite weeks of the year. So I have a few special editions of the building buildwit coming your way. But this is a typical update format. What the heck happened this week within the company? First and foremost, we, before we left, hosted an office cleanup party, throwing away a dumpster full of junk that we somehow accumulated. This is from Jesse Itzler's concept. He was a speaker at the 2024 Dirt World Summit. Jesse Itzler's concept of starting the new year long light. And I, outside of the office, I cleaned my entire house, which is awesome. And I know it's a simpler undertaking. Me as a single male that lives in about 600 square foot above somebody's garage. No children, no spouse, nothing else going on. So pretty straightforward operation. But I cleaned my entire house. I cleaned my desk, I cleaned my computer, I cleaned my phones. And then, of course, we cleaned the office. I try to start the new year as light as possible, which means at the end of every year, shedding all kinds of physical and digital nonsense. Now, our office, it's pretty big. It's far more than we need nowadays. About 7,000 square feet. There's a lot of people coming and going, as you can imagine. Stuff just shows up and we're like, what the heck is this? How'd this get here? Do we need this? Does anybody know what this even is? The answer is, obviously, oftentimes no. So I had a little bit of a party. We had lunch, and we had our Nashville team in here to scour every square inch of the office. The refrigerator, the kitchen drawers, the storage closet, the store, everybody's desk. And we took no prisoners. We got rid of so much junk. And let me tell you, I'm recording this the very first day of the new year. We're a little delayed on these podcasts because of my travel schedule, but walking in here, man, I feel like a million bucks. I have never started a new year feeling this good. I feel so good right now. And a big part of that was starting the new year light, getting rid of nonsense so that I have less friction, less chaos in my life, and I can just do as I need to do for the year. And it's not too late. If you didn't organize, if your life is still a disaster, even if your desk is still a disaster, or your car or your phone or your computer desktop, whatever it is, it's not too late. You can get in there, you can tidy it up. I promise you, that effort will go so far for you here now in 2026. So, big deal. Office cleanup party. It was awesome. The top question I'm asked is, what does Bill Witt do? Our purpose is to build the dirt world's next generation. The dirt world is the companies and people building the critical infrastructure and supporting those who build our critical infrastructure that we need to live the lives that we do. Our business is much bigger. Me, I run around the world building our brand. But the business itself does two things. One, we help develop the next generation through our product called billwhit Improve. It's a daily training and development platform that about 300 civil construction companies are using to not just make their people better workers, but better people. And of course, we have the 2026 Ariat dirt world Summit, the best opportunity to develop yourself and and your teams as leaders. So check us out. Billwhit.com, book a meeting with us and we'll talk to you soon. Next up, our training video production team had a fantastic time working on a first project with CRH in Florida. This marks hopefully the first of many training series to serve their many civil construction subsidiaries across America. We have two different options when it comes to training content. Now, towards last year and now this year, we have custom content where we offer companies the ability to buy a certain number of training videos. Now we don't do this a lot, we do this in select cases where it makes sense. But we do offer the ability to produce custom training content. And I believe we produce by far the best training content within the construction industry in the world. Now, having done it thousands of times, we've spent many millions of dollars learning how to do it. And then the second way is the companies buying a three year deal, a three year contract with Bill Witten Prove our daily training and development software. They get a certain depending on the size of their company, a certain number of videos. So most of our training content development this year will be servicing either the training, the custom content or those three year deals for our new customers to get them the most relevant training content for their people on top of our already existing library of 2,000 videos that they get. So crh really, really big company, they over the past decades have bought many civil construction companies throughout America. And at the corporate level they came to us, they said hey, could we produce a first training series to then offer to our subsidiaries on asphalt, recycled asphalt? And we said absolutely. So hopefully this is the first of many projects with CRH because they have many civil construction companies across America that we can hopefully support with their training and development needs. Future state so it's a little bit on the training content production and our plan going into 2026. Our development team has begun on infrastructure work for Billwhit Improve to eliminate performance issues for our customers and of course our users. Ensuring everything works seamlessly every single time is crucial in maintaining usage growth and reducing churn in 2026 which is one of our two goals for the year. There's a lot more to come in the but we are not a let's wait till the new year kind of crowd. I understand that works in corporate America because the risks, the everybody's a little, you know, further from what the heck's happening but we don't have that luxury. We eat what we kill and if we're waiting, if we take our foot off the gas, boy we will pay for it. We don't do that. We run into the break and the development team certainly did. The performance issues are it's one of two focuses for Q1 for the product. We have had some performance issues. The product has been at times a little slower than we would like it to and that's frustrating for our users. If they go on there, if they do training and there's a lag to it marking as being completed or showing up on their phone to begin with, that's Enough to say I'm not doing this and we can't have that. We've made a lot of progress to improve the performance, but there's still a little bit to go. That's what the development team's working on now and then coming down the road and I'll talk more about this later, but there's a huge improvement to the overall homepage, the feed, the actual user experience as well that's coming, which is really exciting. And again our development team dug into that before the holidays to get head start. Also before the holidays we closed our largest build with improve deal to date, which is sick. Supporting the training and development efforts of a major civil construction company for the next three years. So they signed one of those three year deals which means they will get a lot of that custom training content as well that we'll be working on in 2026. But boy, that is one heck of a way to close out the year and a big shot in the arm. It's really cool to see some of these bigger long standing civil construction companies getting on board and leveraging our content, our platform to help train and develop their people every day. Super exciting. On Bill IT improve features I talked about what's coming for development, but our development team's always at work. Over the past few weeks month they've worked on a few additional features that will be rolled out in January. These include the Training Streak pause, the monthly executive update and announcements. Take a couple a little bit of water here. To run through each one of these. Training Streak pause is pretty straightforward. Every day you complete your training, you add to your streak. If you miss a day, your streak goes away. Right now I have top three streak at Bill Wit. I'm a pretty big deal. What about it? The problem though is there are holidays there. You might give your team a week off around Christmas, whatever it is. And if people lost their streak, that's frustrating. And so it's a simple, a simple feature. But we're now allowing for training streaks to be paused during company holidays, shutdowns, et cetera. The next feature I've talked to about a little bit on past updates, but it's the monthly executive update. This will give the company leadership of each company on the platform insight and into what training is being completed within their business, who is most active, et cetera. So that they can reward people, they can reinforce habits. They just they know what's going on within their business from a training and development standpoint. For the first time, most companies don't have any kind of insight as to what the heck is going on from a training and development standpoint in real time. So that's really exciting. And then my favorite of the bunch is the announcements feature which will allow leadership like myself to record a quick video like I do already and then publish it on the Bill Whitnprove platform. It'll show up at the top of everybody's feed first thing Monday for example, and then they can watch that video. And so at our company, for example, it would be today, Monday at the top of their Bill would improve screen as they go on there, they'll see an announcement from Aaron. Bill would Update in a 5 minute iPhone video. I'll catch them up on what the heck is going on or today. It was the beginning of the year and I said, hey, you know, here's the focuses for the year, let's get after it. And then I can see who's watching those announcements and allowing me to communicate with our company, with our team in a really intimate way, a really important way. Right now I do that through our Google Drive, just sharing it with people with the billwit address. But now I'll be able to do it through the BuildWit Improve platform. How cool is that? And then finally, our systems team, they have all their ducks in a row to roll out our team scoreboard for 2026. This is crazy exciting as well. This will enable our team to view our finances and core software metrics every month and oftentimes in real time, which will allow them to understand the current status of the business and adjust their performance accordingly. So transparency wins. We have been, I'll give us like a pretty good score when it comes to transparency, but we haven't always been extremely transparent, especially with finances or key metrics because we haven't had the right systems to track a lot of that information is really the biggest hang up. But last year we implemented a new accounting system fully and then we've established some really good core metrics. We have much better systems to measure those core metrics on a more reasonable regular basis. So now our systems team, they've, they've taken all of this information so they're using all these APIs to pull all that information and then they put it on this Zoho dashboard that our team will have access to and that we can review as a team every week, every month. So we have a definitive scoreboard. Here's exactly where we are as a business and here's where we need to do better. Here's where we're doing great it's super, super exciting. It's the first time we've actually given our team this much information. And it's not, in an overwhelming sense. It's not like too much information, or at least I hope it's gonna require a lot of education to explain what some of these core metrics are, especially when we get into the software metrics, when we get into dollars and cents, because finances at a business are a little bit different than personal finances, but that's on us as leaders to continuously educate our team so that they understand the information and they can leverage the information we're giving them. But huge shout out to our systems team for putting all that together. Well, that was a big rock for Q4, and we'll have that for the entire year of 2026. So there we go. With an update like that, hopefully you can understand why I was so fired up. I was, you know, I was tired at the end of 25. It was a. It was an exhausting year. We. We really went through it from a business standpoint, but it was a great year and we did everything we needed to do last year to tee ourselves up in the best possible way for 2026. And stuff like this is proof we're starting to see the results on the board in the very, very early innings of the game. And I think this year is our year to start stacking it up and make huge progress and. And ultimately help build the dirt world's next generation by building a great business and supporting our team and our customers. So that's everything. As always, thank you so much for listening. Please reach out anytime. Aaronillwood.com Nick Frederick if you're listening to this, I owe you an email. I haven't forgotten about it. I'm working on getting Randy's best bonus structure together so I can share that with you. I do respond to every email, every note, every dm. Sometimes I miss them. Honestly, there's too many. But I try to get to everybody. Feel free to write me anytime. Would love to hear from you. And with that, we'll see you next week. Stay dirty.