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Foreign. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of Building Build Whip. This is number 51 titled South Korea Adventure, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It's a South Korea adventure. Before we get going, as always, this podcast is my best attempt at explaining what it is build. What does. Our mission is to build the dirt world's next generation. The dirt world. It is those building and maintaining the critical infrastructure, developing the natural resources that everybody needs to live every day of the week. It's the water out of your faucet. It's the the food to the grocery store. It's the power to your homes. It's your foundation of your homes. We couldn't live without this world. This world needs more people. It needs to be better. And that's what we're about here. That's what I hope you're about. That's probably why you're listening. You want to be better. You want to make the dirt world better. You want to make society better. You want to make our country better. If you're listening somewhere else, you want to make better your country better, your kids lives their future better. This is where it all begins. And we are doing our part to build a business to make that happen. The way we're doing that is through three things. We have Bill Whit and Prove, our daily training and development software product that is our bread and butter nowadays. We've got our leadership event, annual leadership event called the Ariat Dirt World Summit. It's sold out this year, so I don't even have to sell it to you, which is awesome. Thanks to all those who have signed up and have attended in the past. And then finally, we've got storytelling, which is my realm, my domain, my fiefdom, telling the story of the dirt world to build pride with the existing workforce, to attract that future workforce and to remind people that they couldn't live without it. Damn, I am on one today. Let's go. So to get into it, this is another edition of where the heck have I Been? Where the heck was Aaron and I spent the past week in South Korea, courtesy of Hyundai HD Construction Equipment. That's their technical term, but it's Hyundai. For all of you folks that have been following along, they're also Devil on as well. Formerly Doosan. I am obsessed with how. With learning how the world works. And to learn how the world works, I have to see the world. So that's what I'm doing. And when Hyundai offered me this opportunity to see not south. Not just South Korea, but also another country which I'll get to in a moment. I was like, when can we go? Of course, I would love to go. So we flew over. We flew from Nashville to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Seoul. It was only like 13 hours, 14 hours, not so bad. We flew into Seoul and then from there we met up with our hosts, which were just great, folks. And we took high speed rail, which is something America is completely incapable of. It is the saddest thing in the world. Our inability to build rail across the entire country of South Korea to, to Olsen, which is a city along the, the rocky shores of the Pacific. It looks beautiful. It's kind of like, like a Monterey, California vibe. Not the, not the, the town, but the, the. The landscape. It's, it's really, really, really gorgeous. And first on the agenda, they offered us a tour of the HD Heavy Industries shipyard. And I was like, absolutely. So we didn't do any content at the shipyard, but I've always wanted to see a shipyard. I have been to some in the past, smaller ones. This one, it's known as the world's biggest. It's known as the world's finest. When it comes to shipyards, this is the creme de la creme. And without ships, as we're finding out right now, with the war in the Middle east, without ships, the economy doesn't really work. You can't move goods, you can't move oil, you can't move other commodities, gas, iron ore, etc. And this shipyard is responsible for making the finest ships in the world, hauling all kinds of rich, really, really important stuff. So we toured this operation. I have been to a lot of huge industrial operations now. Steel mills, mines, all kinds of fun stuff. But I have never seen anything like this. It was on a completely different, different level. Tens of thousands of people working away day, night to build anything from the world's largest liquid natural gas carriers to engines that weigh 500 tons each. 500 tons for an engine? To submarines. They've got a military division as well. We didn't get to see that part all that closely. We got to see the more civilian side of things. But they do that there as well. And the craziest part about all of this is that they built their first ship in the 70s, which was when my dad was in high school. That's not that long ago. That's not that long ago. To build that kind of capability and capacity in less than a generation, it's like, okay, the United States, we've decided we just don't want to build anything anymore. Maybe we Want to start building stuff. And there's been even conversations about ship building in America. But it's like, well, we can't do that for XYZ reason. It's like, well, I don't know if we were serious about it. If we saw the, the, the strategic opportunity that it is, we could do it. It's possible. They've done it, we could do it. Who knows if we will do it. But to see them doing it again was an absolute treat. I hope I can go back and show the process in much greater detail one day. I could have spent weeks there just with a camping chair and some snacks. I could have just hung out and watched all these people work. It was mesmerizing. They had the biggest crane on site. It was a 1200 ton crane. 1200 ton crane. Yeah. Yeah, let's go. But that wasn't, that wasn't why we were there. We were there because the next day we were visiting Hyundai's HD Constructions excavator factory. And I have toured manufacturing plants on three continents in Japan, in China, in France, in Germany, in America. And this was by far among the finest I've seen. It was beautiful, this factory. It was gorgeous. The people were as kind as could be. And the obsession with product quality was second to none. Every turn they were like, here's what we do. Here's all the hoops we jump through to make sure this excavator is as good as it gets. And so we walked through the whole process. It was just awesome to see. We got to record it all. We'll have a video on how they make their excavators from start to finish. Coming soon to YouTube. It'll be awesome, so stay tuned. And finally we went from there to the middle of the country to visit a few quarries, a few quarry customers running 80 ton machines. Both of them, I think, yeah, both of them had 80 ton machines. One had Devlons, the other one had Hyundai machines which were both awesome to see. I then went to their training facility where I tried to get forklift certified in the country of South Korea. Spoiler alert. I did not pass the forklift test. I got close, but I didn't pass. So I'll have to go back to actually get my forklift certification. It's a dream of mine. And then we finished everything at the proving grounds, their testing facility. So off in the distance we saw all kinds of machines just getting tested in various ways. And then they let me run some of their equipment for the video, which was a lot of fun. So, so stay tuned. We've got tons of social content coming soon and the following week I'm recording this after the trip, but we left from Korea to then India for part two of our HD Construction Hyundai Adventure. So stay tuned. That's what I will cover in next week's podcast episode. Now, back home, there's all kinds of stuff going on. It doesn't matter where I am in the world, the company is making it happen. That is why I've handed as much as possible within the company to our extraordinary leaders at the executive level, at the different team level, and then our team in general. They are all better at this than I am. So I don't stress one bit when I'm in South Korea, I know they're making it happen in the best way possible. On the product side of things, our product team added additional development resources to accelerate our new feature efforts. So our product team now has been focused on building a great product foundation. We, we've had to restructure the product a few times over, most recently now. And that's where most of our development resources have gone, which has been, it's been a bummer. It'll allow us to move faster. Future state. We've had to do it, so it was just something we had to do. But the bummer was that you only have so much development capacity and sure, you can move faster and faster, but again, you only just have so much capacity. So what they've done, rebuilding the product and the timeframe they have is crazy. But that's consumed our resources. So we've only had a little bit for new features. As they've rebuilt the product, they've along the way introduced the new features. But we have these new development resources to go completely in on new features that will benefit our customers more and more. So really, really exciting. All gas, no brakes, as the kids say. It's a very cool place to be and I cannot wait to see, I mean, just a few more months where the product is at. Let's go. Let's go. On the content side of things, our training content team shot 20 plus new videos on concrete production. Thanks to the help of Aztec Industries, this will eventually get added to our library of over 2000 videos on the civil construction industry. Anything from concrete to driving to mental health to safety to leadership, communication. It's awesome. Huge library for any customer to access at any time. There's nothing else like it. Whenever a customer, company, potential company, customer, says or going with a different learning platform, it makes me just want to cry because I know they're going to go get a platform and then they're going to go have to make all of their own content or use stuff off the shelf that's not made for the construction industry. It's not going to go well. But they brought, bought the product and sure it does some other things. It's just like, and that's on us. We need to do a better job messaging what we have. But there is nothing that comes even close to the library that we have right now. The depth of training that we have available to the civil construction industry that will benefit anybody from labor to CEO. There's something for everybody. And it's not an eight hour course, 16 hour course, 24 hour course. It's three minutes a day, four minutes a day, five minutes a day. It's working out great for the companies that are serious about it. So really exciting to see that library growing. And our intent is to keep growing it as time goes on on the sales side of things. Speaking of improving our means and methods, the team hit 100 booked meetings for March, which is our first time of hitting that goal that we set last year when we began retooling our approach and team. To begin with, we knew that we had to be at 100 booked meetings every year because if you have a hundred booked meetings and you close, you know you have a certain percentage of those meetings that result in potential deals and you close a certain amount of those deals and then you need a certain amount of revenue per month to hit your goals. You can start to do the math backwards, of course. And that's where that hundred booked meeting number come from came from. Now it's taken us months and months and months and months and months to build up to that point to get our process right, to get our, our BDR team right. But to hit 100 book meetings in March is an awesome, an awesome thing to happen. And that is the best indicator of where sales will be in the coming months. Because those booked meetings, there'll be meetings held in April, which then could be deals closed in April, maybe May, maybe June, and on and on. So really cool. There's a fresh month coming, so we've got to do it all over again. But it's awesome momentum going into that month, going into the rest of the year. And we are very happy about that. So that's everything for this week. I really appreciate everybody listening as always. I love having you here. I do these podcasts not to just educate people about what it is that we're doing, but Our mission is building the dirt world's next generation. And one of our values is we're the stagehands, not the stars. We're not the star of the show. We don't build anything. We're there to support those that do. And I want people, I want people along with us. Like, we're not self made. I'm not sitting here, I'm like, oh, I'm this smart, visionary guy that has it all figured out. Oh, Buildwith's like, oh, Billboard's gonna be the company to make it all better for the dirt world to figure this out. No, it takes all of us. It's a collaborative effort. It takes everybody. We've all gotta be doing our job, rowing in the same direction. And so the more that you can feel connected with what we're doing, the more you can be along for the ride, the better. Because it's not just a company we're building for us, it's a company we're building for our customers, of course, but the dirt world as a whole. So thanks for being a part of it and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty.