← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Ritchie Brothers, Orlando & New Website Demo (Building BuildWitt #45) - DT427
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Foreign. Welcome back to building Bill Whip. This is number 45 titled Richie Brothers Orlando and new website demo. As always, this is my attempt to show you all how the billboard sausage is made. A lot of people ask what does Bill Wit do? That's what this podcast and newsletter is dedicated to. A lot of people think it's me running around the world and it is. But we also have a huge team doing all kinds of things to train and develop the dirt world's next generation. And this is how a week to week snapshot of what the heck is going on at Billwood. So with that let's get into it. Starting with me and Wyatt running around the world. Of course Wyatt and I, we spent the weekend in Sarasota because someone has to do it. And we then went to Orlando to attend the Richie Brothers equipment auction, also known as the world's largest. It is spectacular. This was my third time attending and I was very happy to be there because the yard, 200 acres was chock full of of equipment. They had over 14,000 machines sell for a total of $265 million over the five day auction. It's absolutely bananas. And the team, they rolled the red, the red carpet out for us which was really enjoyable. We spent time exploring their yard. We got a behind the scenes of how the auction works. We, we got to talk to one of their auctioneers. We'll have a whole video on the process very soon. We followed a truck through the auction process from the customer sending it to the yard to it leaving it was absolutely, absolutely fantastic. It's really cool to be working with such a big time company like the name Richie Brothers in this world is a big deal. A lot of people have sold equipment there, bought equipment there. It's a key part of the earth moving industry. Dirt world equipment, you can't do anything without it. And Richie Brothers is the biggest auction house for it. So it was cool to see the behind the scenes. It was really cool of them to be so welcoming for us. And I'm very excited about the video we'll have on the entire process coming soon from Florida. I jetted and when I say jetted, I, I was Delta economy plus you know, a little extra leg room because me, I need the leg room of course to Minnesota and up there. I gave a keynote talk to about 500 industry leaders at AGC of Minnesota's annual meeting. It was really an impressive operation that they're running there. And every speaking gig I have is another opportunity for me to improve in my message and to Reach more people, more leaders in the dirt world. So I don't take this for granted. I was very appreciative of the opportunity and the coolest thing was I want to shout out AGC of Minnesota for this. They not only did they have 500 plus leaders there from the industry, which is a huge crowd for one of these meetings, but they also had maybe 20 ish 25 college students from the state that were able to attend the entire thing, the two day event. They got to see all the talks, meet the executives. We had a little bit of a lunch with industry leaders and these college students. I spoke with them quite a bit. It was a lot of fun to see that next generation coming in. A lot of people talk about, you know, the trades, which is absolutely essential. But we need people everywhere. I don't care if you go to college or not. And so talking with college kids is is just as enjoyable as talking to somebody that doesn't go to college. For me, I love talking with young people so I give them a lot of credit for allowing these kids to be there. It was really cool to see and hopefully more associations and meetings can follow suit over time. I thought that was fantastic. On the bill it improve front our daily training and development platform. The stability of the platform overall is remaining strong as we continue to replace the code base. We're replacing the entire code base but the good news is the project is on track. Everybody knows a project that's on schedule is a great project and even better. We just onboarded a part time developer as a full time team member this week which gives us additional development capacity to dedicate to the product. Outside developers are great but they can only give you so much. You're not the priority. They have multiple priorities so bringing on developers full time is definitely the the desired outcome. Over time we want to grow our development team and bringing on this developer that we know is talented because we've been working with him for a while before making him a full time offer I think is going to be a huge win for the team. Very exciting on the product side of things. When it comes to support and implementation. We're rolling out billwhit and prove to help one of our biggest customers to date better train and develop their people at this point. The onboarding is now at the field level phase with some of their field leaders speaking Spanish as their first language. But not to worry. Fortunately one of our very own team members, Flo, helped conduct the onboarding in both English and Spanish meeting them where they are, which was awesome. A huge customer. Wow. That's one of our two objectives this year is wow customers. That was definitely a wow. Again, we have to meet the field where they are. We're building a field first platform that's very unique in this world. A lot of software products, most are not built for the field. They're built for the office. We're thinking with field first. The field doesn't take to our product. It will not be successful meeting them where they are, especially with their language. Spanish is awesome. So that was really, really cool to see. And it's not Flo's job. She was just happy to jump in. We have the best team. And again, big wow for a customer. When it comes to big dollars and cents of what the heck's going on. Big picture. Our. Our bhag, which is the big hairy, audacious goal. That's our big revenue number that we're. That we're setting our sights on for 2026. We're ahead of and we're well ahead of our budget revenue goal with one week to go in our Q1 of sales. And this is really interesting for us. We haven't been so far ahead before in a very long time. It's been a lot of years of struggle to get here. So it's a really good feeling. And with that, we're trying to celebrate the achievement that it is. We again, haven't been there in a long time. So we want to say to everybody, great job. This is awesome. But Randy and I especially know we're still in the early innings of the year. This is just Q1, there's still 2, 3, 4. And we can't let our eye off the ball in the slightest. And so it's. And you leaders that are listening to this can probably relate. It's the struggle. It's the balance that is, how do we say, awesome, but keep our eyes forward, focused and it's tough. It's tough. I don't think I have a good answer, but that's a little insight into some internal conversations that are happening right now. So our goal is to hit budget revenue. If we hit budget revenue, budget expenses, our team gets the full bonus. That is really cool. It's half in cash, half in company stock. But if we go beyond that, which is the bhag, which is a bigger number, to get the company even further ahead, which requires us to push further. But we think it's possible not only is the company better off, but we'll have a little bit more money in the bank and our people will get even more money as a result. It's huge. It's so cool to see us ahead. And especially being ahead in Q1, it gives us a little bit of a buffer for 2, 3, 4. For me, honestly, it's relieving more than anything else. And finally, our new product demo within the BuildWit website. The new Build it website is live, so rather than blah, blah, blah about it, talk all about it, I'm explaining a little bit. You can just go to billwhit.com demo the goal here. We've listened to Marcus Sheridan a lot. If you've attended the Area Dirt World Summit, you've probably heard Marcus talk. He's a amazing individual. He's very unique, a very gifted speaker. His big thing is that you don't want to gatekeep information from potential customers. And so we've been very diligent to answer customer questions on our website, give them the answers they ask, you answer, give them the pricing. So our pricing is on our website. And up until now, though, the product itself, a demo, was only available to those that were scheduling a time to. To meet with our team and walk through it, 1, 2, 3. Which is not best for everybody. So this allows anybody to go on the website at any time and it's not our actual product, but they can use the product as if they were in the actual product to understand the features, to understand how to use it, and to hopefully understand how it can benefit their team. And then once they have a grasp on, hey, this is actually pretty neat, let's set up a meeting to talk more about how we make this a reality. And now we have much better informed buyers, we have better sales conversations and hopefully we can convert more of these deals to closed, get these companies implemented and get their people training and developing themselves every day. Because that's the goal. So really cool there. It's not just a new pretty website. The driver behind the new website was to be as effective as possible and to inform our customers as much as possible, which is already happening. Very exciting stuff. So that right there is a window, a look into the workings of BuildWit over the course of the past week. I really appreciate you all listening. If you have questions or comments, send them to me anytime. Aaron A A R o n@buildwith.com and like always, I appreciate you all listening. We'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty.