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Dirt Talk Podcast
Speaking, Waiting Lists and Solving Problems (Building BuildWitt #53) - DT443
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Foreign. Hey there everybody. Welcome back. This will be the Build Wit Build. Oh geez. Building buildwit number 53. What a disaster. Already starting off in the wrong foot. Titled this one. Speaking Waiting Lists and solving problems. Building buildwit number 53 titled speaking waiting lists and solving Problems. This is the weekly attempt to explain what the heck buildwit does. There are over 40 incredible people working here to tell the Dirt World story, to host I believe the best leadership event in the industry and and to build the dirt world's next generation with our continuous improvement software, BuildWit Improve. So sure I run around, but there's a lot more going on and this is what is going on. First up, speaking of me running around, I on my way home from India stopped through Chicago to speak at the Builders Asphalt annual leadership meeting based leveraging what I've learned from the industry's best leaders throughout my travels. There are so many great speakers out there. I am very grateful to have every speaking opportunity possible. Builders Asphalt, they've been a great friend of buildwit for years now. Huge supporter of buildwit Improve of Dirt world, of everything we've done. So it was fantastic, fantastic to have the opportunity to attend that event. It's a really cool event and it's cool to see companies like that having these leadership focused meetings themselves all over the place. It's that time of the year, especially a place like Chicago. It's seasonal asphalt, it's ramping up. Just before they go to work. They had about Maybe it was 150 folks a little bit more in the room. They were all leadership from the business to talk state of the company and then to hear from this guy right here about what they might be able to do better as leaders to support those actually making it happen out in the field. And the Builders meeting was just one of many that I've seen this past season all over the United States. Civil construction companies having these meetings to elevate their people. It is awesome to see and that is how we build the next generation. Doing just that, investing in our people on the product part of things. Our code base replacement project, it remains on track, which is awesome. It is not sexy as always, but we are in the testing phase which means we are exterminating bugs before we roll it out. We would rather work on new stuff but like the wise man, we can't skipped. We can't skip finding our rock to build upon. And the longer I've gone in business, the more I've internalized to that progress isn't really, when you step up to the plate and swing for the big one, it's more so made in the early morning training sessions, the late at night training sessions, especially when, when no one's watching. I don't even watch baseball, but it's the best analogy I can think of. So we are almost through replacing our code base, which is the foundation for the BillWhit Improve product. Once we do that, once we are through bugs, once we have it rolled out and it's working great, we can then move a lot faster on new features. So it's a very exciting time. But you can't skip the basics, you can't skip the fundamentals. You can't go build a great product on a flawed foundation. So I'm. I'm really grateful we've done it. This is always the stuff that it's not fun during, but you look back on it and you're like, oh my gosh, thank goodness we did it when we, when we did, because we would not be able to grow as we are now. So it's a really cool thing to see come together. And again, I think it's. It's indicative of anything in business, anything significant. It's just minor things, minor improvement work in a very mundane sense when no one's watching. All the sexy stuff, all the glitz and glamour, especially that you see on LinkedIn, just the junk. Most of it is completely made up, most of it is completely fake. Anybody doing anything significant, they are working away. No one cares. No one's giving them credit. But that's how the world moves forward. So if you are one of those people, thank you. Because takes all of us to make it happen. Next up, we had a phone problem surface a few weeks ago with our BDR team unable to reach people for a chat. Fortunately, we implemented a new tool this week that has solved the issue. But now that our team is speaking with more industry leaders than ever, we have discovered another issue. Go figure. And that is there's no consistency in our positioning and message. It's not our BDR team's fault. It's our fault as leaders. So fortunately, though, we've dug in. We've been working on a solution this past week, and we will hopefully have it implemented this coming week, which is great progress, I explained to people is kind of like pulling threads. You know, you find something little and you start yanking on it and then it starts to unravel further and further and further and you dig in on this issue and, well, it's actually this issue. But then it's actually this. And you solve each one at a time and hopefully get to a much, much better place. But it's a. It's an incremental process. You're not tackling these giant issues head on. Typically, it's. It's just one piece at a time. And there will always be challenges. Always. It's a lie I've told myself, oh, once we get here, we'll be good. That's not actually how it works. I still lie to myself. That's. I still do tell myself those lies to make it maybe a little bit more palatable some days, but it's just not how the world works. There will always be challenges. You can sit there, especially with the big ones, and be very overwhelmed, or you can just take them one piece at a time. So this one, it's been a really, really good exercise for the team, for leadership, to piece this one together one challenge at a time. Our. All right, we fixed this. Now what's going on here? Okay, we fixed that. Now what's happening? But I'm really excited about this one because I think it's going to get us to a fantastic place in the coming months. And speaking of the solution here, to touch on it a little bit, we've talked way too much about training and not about quantifying the challenges civil construction companies are facing that training and leadership development and continuous improvement can help address, like, the cost of rework, like safety incidents, equipment damage, turnover, unseen employee struggles. So when we're talking with contractors, we're coming into it, well, the solution you need is more training. It's like, well, they. They do need that, but we need to put it in their terms. Like, you have a lot of turnover or you're hiring a lot of people. You got to get them up to speed. How are you doing that? How are you ensuring really that the people that are new to your sites are safe? How are you ensuring that when you elevate somebody to a leadership position, they are equipped to lead? And that's where Bill Wittenprove comes into play. I think it solves the industry's biggest challenge right now, which is people. But I think people. It's not the industry's biggest challenge. It is the biggest. It is the industry's biggest opportunity. There's all sorts of talk about equipment, about methods, about technology. All that's great. But human potential. People are by far the greatest untapped resource in the dirt world. And Bill would improve is helping contractors, dirt world companies, unlock that potential in really exciting ways. So that's a little bit of, of of some insight on how we're positioning. Bill would improve better to hopefully get it in the hands of those building the world, those craft level individuals to make them not just better workers, but better people. It is a really exciting time, everybody. And finally, we have five Dirt World tickets remaining, but we're sold out. Spoiler alert. I'll get to that next week. But when I wrote this, we had five remaining. And since we had five remaining, our team tested for the first time ever, a waiting list functionality that would, once we sold out, be triggered immediately go live. So replace the event sign up with, with that waiting list on the event website. And it's really, really cool to have that already set up. It's indicative of how great our team is. They are always looking for, okay, if this happens, then what? Well, once we sell out, we still, we might have cancellations. So we, we want people to be waiting and we want to get them in line. How do we do that? What's the system to make that happen? All of those things are done so that when it happens we can just switch it on over. And the waiting list is really important for us because I think 27 will sell out far faster than this year. Sold out. So we hadn't sold out before. We'd gotten kind of close each year. This year we hit the limit six months ahead of time. I think for 27 we'll hit the limit within by the end of this year. The event is early November. I think by Christmas for sure we'll be sold out, if not earlier. And so the way it'll work is the waiting list. If people cancel for 2026, it'll be first come, first serve. They'll get offered tickets, so it helps them this year. But then for tickets for 27, we'll offer them first to those that have attended, the companies that will attend this year, and then second, it'll go to the companies on the waiting list. And then third, if there are tickets remaining, they will go to the general public. So if you are not on the waiting list, if you are interested in Dirt World, get on there because even if you don't make it this year, you'll be in line for coming years, which is, I think, exciting. And we're trying to make the event potentially a little bit bigger next year, but we have the group we need. I'm tired of selling it, frankly, trying to convince people of its value. We have those that understand its value, which is really exciting. And we're honestly just trying to cater to those individuals, those leaders, companies that are hungry to grow. We have them now. We're just gonna keep working with them. So that's a little bit about this week. I appreciate you all listening as always. Feel free to reach out to me anytime. Aaron. Aaronildwit.com would love to hear from. And we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.