← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
SoCal, Credit Cards, and a New VP of Product (BuildWitt Update #7) – DT 351
00:09:22
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back. Bill it update number seven. This one's titled SoCal Credit Cards and a new VP of Product. Happy to have you all. Questions? Comments? Send them my way. Aaron buildwith.com would love to to hear from you. And with that I spent another week on the road. Starting the week in Southern California, we visited Sukit Construction which was busy moving millions of yards for a county landfill project. And then after that we watched SA Recycling's 9,000 horsepower shredder eat police cars and buses, which was my six year old dream. And keeping with the week's theme, we ended the two week adventure in California's Central Valley where we use D10 dozers to flatten a limousine courtesy of McKay Hill Bulldozer Services. And yes, we recorded everything. So all of these visits will appear do appear on my social media and especially YouTube. We've spent a lot of time trying to better our YouTube presence. We have weekly videos going up now. They used to be between 8 and 13 minutes. Now they're typically 20 to 30 plus minutes. We have dramatically increased the production quality, storytelling quality of visits. Everything has gone up I feel like, especially this year. So all of these visits I'm talking about were out there to tell the story and eventually produce a YouTube video. So all these visits will have a full length video explaining what the heck is going on. So like SA Recycling for example, how they take a police car and turn it into its individual commodities. And we'll take you through that entire process. So really exciting stuff. You haven't checked out the YouTube channel. Honestly, highly recommend it. We're having a lot of fun. So that's a little bit more on travel. Our new VP of product started this week, marking one of our most critical hires in many years. Uh, he's coming from a long tenure at a major heavy civil construction firm and he's worked with every construction technology imaginable. Now, he doesn't have the background a traditionalist software company advisor would probably recommend. However, his skill set and perspective are absolutely perfect for our goals. So we, we could not be more excited to have him. And to do something different, you have to do different things. You have to get different people involved. So I'm, I'm really excited to have this person on board filling this position. This was a key hire, our most critical hire this year and again, probably one of our most critical hires to date. So really, really, really looking forward to getting him in the door and up to speed.
- [03:13]
B
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.
- [04:17]
A
We have built version one of a dashboard to monitor build with Improve customer help. This dashboard helps us identify friction and trailing customers early before major issues arise, which is a huge step in helping us transition from being proactive rather than transition to being proactive rather than reactive with our software customers. Until now we've been very reactive. We don't react to a problem until we hear about it. We don't react to friction until we hear about it. However, we have now this new tool other tools to allow us to spot issues before they cause major frustration so we can step in, we can solve them potentially even before some other customers recognize them. So this is going to go a long ways to helping our customers be better, use the product better, make the product better overall and really excited about this additional visibility into what the heck's going on. We re engaged our entire sales team with the area Dirt World Summit. Even though we've already sold over 750 tickets now to this year's event which is more than the entirety of 2023's event, we still have many hundreds to go. Fortunately it's an easy sell as we believe it's the most valuable industry eventually and any civil contractor, big or small will benefit enormously from attending it. And then beyond renewed focus with our existing sales team. So we've said hey to our existing sales team. If you have capacity time, talk to these companies about attending the summit. It's in any civil construction company's best interest to be there. Any infrastructure company's best interest to be there big or small. No matter the position, I wholly believe everybody coming will be better leaving than when they show up. So with our existing team if they have additional capacity, hey, if you can sell tickets. Great. But beyond that, we're also hiring a few more sales reps to establish even more momentum. Like I said, it's, it's an easier sell, quote unquote, because it's a more proven product. We have a few years of, of data now. We've got many hundreds of people that have attended with very, very positive results feedback that are attending this year. And it just, it fits the market very well. It's a need that's not being filled. So the leadership training, development community that we're providing I think is really unique. And so I think even though these new cell reps will be just a little bit more green to, to our business and the industry, I think they'll be able to be very effective very quickly. And then finally, we signed a new deal for a credit card platform. And this is seemingly mundane, but anybody in business knows this is a big deal. Because of our startup status, we've had to use a debit card system until now, which sucks because you're operating off cash. You can't leverage anybody else's cash. It's just your cash. But with this new system, we can finally buy ourselves some more wiggle room and then hopefully make our expenses a lot easier to track. So we're always looking for new systems. We had the former system for maybe 18 months, but because we're growing, because we're building that credit history, financial history, we have more access now to tools and we're going to get that new credit card system, which I am really, really excited about. It's been a struggle for us, cash flow because we don't have, we can't borrow traditionally. I don't personally have any credit. I haven't had a credit card in, I don't know, quite a few years. No mortgage, nothing, no debt, which doesn't help me out from a credit standpoint. Oh well, shout out to Dave Ramsey. And then the business, because the business, it's a software company or before was a media company, we don't have assets so you can't really secure any kind of loan. You can't borrow against anything. So our ability to get outside capital from traditional like banking institutions been very limited and it's been a, it's been a grind since the very beginning. We have struggled with cash flow since year one. But again, tools like this I think are going to help us in a big way. So those are the highlights for this past week. That's number seven, Buildwood update. I hope you're enjoying these, finding them insightful. If you have questions, feedback, comments, send them my way. Aaron buildwith.com would love to hear from you. And with that, we will see you.
- [09:17]
B
On the next one.
- [09:18]
A
Stay dirty everybody.