Bill (0:00)

Foreign welcome back Monday episode Dirt Talk Podcast today this is Bill with update number 11 titled Simple Feedback and Migration. This is the weekly account of how how our sausage is made here at Build Whip. If you have questions, comments, feel free to email me anytime. Aaron Wittwit.com would love to hear from you. And with that, here is what happened this past week. First off, we returned to the drawing board on our quarterly rocks, reducing the list, which was I believe maybe like six or seven down to three. You can't have multiple priorities. We wanted our rocks to be memorable, focused, so reducing them to three was essential. All three have to do with either growing or supporting our Buildwood improve product or growing and supporting the area Dirt World Summit. These are by far the simplest rocks we've ever had, making them much more effective. And if we as leadership can't recall these rocks and explain them very simply, we won't have alignment with the business, the rocks are worthless and we won't have the focus we need. So pretty obvious realization, but an important one because I think in the past quarters, past year, we've been on Eos now for maybe two years, I would say it's been a while. Each quarter there's a lot of rocks, a lot of priorities and it's hard to message, it's hard to focus. So as a business this year we've said, hey, we need to focus on being a software company. The dirt world supports that. It's, it's big time. It helps us build trust with the industry, which then helps us grow the, the primary business, which then helps us make more of a difference. Go figure. Um, the biggest move we made this year was selling the creative business to focus all in on software. But we need that focus across the board. That starts with those quarterly rocks. If we're not focused, it doesn't matter. So really excited there. Very simple. And just to finish up here on this point, as Jocko says, in extreme ownership, it's leadership's responsibility to ensure everyone understands the message. And the best tool for understanding is simplicity. It's our responsibility as leaders to ensure everybody within buildbit understands what the priorities are every quarter. If they don't understand, we lose. And to help them understand, simple is key. Simple is best for everybody. It's not to say anybody is not as smart as anybody else. It's just that there's a lot going on in life, in business and if things aren't simple, if messaging isn't simple, people aren't going to understand. If they don't understand, they're unable to execute. So that was a huge lesson learned and a huge improvement to our quarterly planning. 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. Next up with our focus on simplicity for Q3. See the theme here. We paused two other initiatives that consumed substantial executive and marketing resources. Doing a lot has helped us understand the dirt world's issues and iterate as a business. But now's the time for total focus. So if it doesn't contribute to improve or to the summit, it's on the shelf to further notice. For further notice. So we had two other big initiatives going on and thanks to the team and, and and and leadership. We ask questions, hey, maybe this is a good idea. Maybe there's merit to doing this at some point, but is this essential right now and can we afford to be doing this right now? The answer was no. We have a lot of work we need to do on software on the event to make them world class, to get our business to where they need to be. And until we do that, we can't afford to go elsewhere. Over the past eight years now we've done a lot of things and like I said, it's been essential. I think we've been criticized in the past for doing too many things, but that is part of innovation, trying and figuring out what works, what doesn't work. So I'm grateful. We've tried so many things but now we have enough data. We understand where the industry is, we understand where the industry needs to go. I think we want to be a big force in helping the industry get there. We understand then what kind of business we need to build to make that happen. And now that we have that Greater understanding through the trial and error which was essential. We can go all in. Hey, I know what hand we now hold. So let's put all our chips in the middle of the table. That's exactly what's going on here. And anything that doesn't contribute is either out the door or on the shelf until further notice, which will be a while. To further broaden our training video library, the team is re editing vlogs into smaller segments. Our YouTube content is better than ever with 1.3 million hours or 148 years of watch time alone in 2025. So why not squeeze even more juice out of these videos? And they put together with that 15 new videos which are now live with more on the way if you don't know. We publish weekly on YouTube and we I explain alongside best in class experts across the industry around the world how the industry works. There's a lot of educational value. It also is for entertainment, but primary focus is is education. We educate on a lot of different topics from earth moving to paving to concrete, to why big projects exist in the in. In the. In the in in the first place, how equipment works. So our team is working through these vlogs, seeing what we can pull out and then making smaller points into those two, three, four minute videos for the training platform, which is awesome. I think it's really valuable and it's cool to see us reusing that content in a different way to further the business and further our customers. Next up, we kicked off quarterly feedback for the entire buildwit team for the first time this week. This very exciting. Every quarter from now on, everybody with direct reports will spend at least 30 minutes considering the performance of everyone on their team and then schedule at least 30 minutes for a feedback session with each individual. The feedback format is simple. Start, stop and continue. Within the next two weeks, everyone on our team will have useful feedback to help them perform better. We, we've been around the block on feedback. We have considered all kinds of things that were quite complicated when it comes to feedback, but the core desire is that, hey, how do we get our team helpful information to just help them perform better? Everybody wants to perform better. Who doesn't want to do better and who doesn't want to want to want to know what they're doing right? So instead of a complicated system or an expensive system, whatever it is, we went with the very simple start, stop, continue format. And that is here are some things next quarter based on this quarter that you should start doing to perform better. Here are some things that you should stop doing to help you perform better. And here are some things that you should continue doing. These are great things. Keep it up. It is a very fun format. It's a very easy format. It does take time to consider, but I have found this by far to be the most helpful structure for feedback, period. Start, stop, continue. It allows you to correct course correct and it allows you to recognize great behavior. So I'm really excited for our company to be doing this now. The, the, the first ones that have done it. It's been great feedback in general and I'm really excited to now have a system for this quarterly from now on. So that is feedback for our team. And then finally this week, we started migrating existing BuildWit training customers to the new BuildWit Improve platform. With 15 companies in the first group. Until now, we've only onboarded new customers without existing data, and we must ensure these existing customers can use the platform effectively and accurately move all of their existing use data. So we've had two groups came out with the new Build with Improve product earlier this year. Before that it was Build with Training. So it wasn't just us renaming it. We built an entirely new product. We had to rebuild everything based on everything we'd learned over the past few years. So we had sold new customers and instead of putting them on build with training for only a few months, we said, just hold on, we'll get you on to improve and you can just start from scratch. So that's what we've done until now. We've brought those new customers who haven't been on our platform at all onto the new platform. They're off and running now. We then have this cohort of existing customers that have been on the training platform with all of that data that need to move to the new product. So not only do we have to explain how they can effectively use the new product, which is similar but not exactly not identical, we also have to take the user data their people have generated from over here and put it over there, there. So the first 15 companies are in the works. We're very excited. Then once we can get through those 15 as that pilot group, ensure they're good to go, they're off and running, we can then do the rest. And once that process is completed in the coming months, we can then sunset the old training platform and everybody will be on Build with Improve, which is very exciting. It's been a long time coming, so to have that in the works is. Is fantastic. Very happy about that. So that is our Billwit update number 11. I hope you enjoy these episodes as far as what the heck's going on within our business. And like I said, if you have feedback ever, send me a note. AaronBillwith.com would love to hear from you. And with that, we will see you on the next one next week. Until until then, stay dirty everybody.