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Welcome back, everybody, to building Bill Whip. This is number 49, titled Texas Concrete tunneling and dredging. As always, this is the weekly account of how our buildwit sausage is made. We are building a business not to just serve ourselves, but to serve the dirt world, to build the next generation, not just of workforce, but of companies. And it's really important to share what we're doing because I want the industry along for the ride. I want the industry to be part of what we're doing. They have to be part of what we're doing for it to work. We're all in this together. One of our values is we're the stagehands, not the stars. Build, Whip. We're here to build the stage, but we know we're not the stars. It's the industry. It's those of you making it happen out there that really keep our world turning. We're just here to support you. And sharing what we're doing helps you be part of it, helps you carry this whole thing forward, and helps you make our mission of building a better dirt world your mission. Because, again, that's the only way it works. Now for a little bit of inside baseball. I've talked about this in the early days, but where do these updates even come from? We started a few years ago. There's a concept of debriefs. It was made familiar to us through the military. In special operations especially, they'll come off an op and before they put anything down, they'll go into a room and they'll talk about what went right, what went wrong, and what needs to happen. Future state. It's a forced moment of reflection. And I think that is really important because it allows for more frequent iteration, which I don't think businesses are all that good at. A lot of us can just get busy. We don't have moments for reflection. But those I've learned that can reflect more frequently can get better a whole lot faster. So we built out these debrief documents. They're very simple. Every leader on the team has their own section. And within their section, there's two parts. One for wins of the week, you know, key happenings. Here's what really happened this week. Here's where I made some. Some big moves happen. And then the second section, which I would say is the most important, is lessons learned. Here's what I learned this week. It forces reflection with every leader, my. Myself included, for even just a few minutes to think about the week. And then it allows everybody on the team to see what everybody's learning. And for me as a leader to just keep up to speed, situational awareness is key. We are a remote business. Any construction company is also a remote business. It's hard to keep up with what's happening with people spread out on different projects, in our case different states. So this document, especially when I'm traveling, just helps keep my bearings within the business as time goes on so that I can be as effective as possible. Now that debrief document, it serves a tremendous value internally, but there's also tremendous value externally and so on. Our team fills it out on Friday and then I review it typically Saturday mornings. This week was Saturday evening because I was working Saturday at the airport and I read through it and not only am I getting myself up to speed, but I'm pulling key things out. First and foremost, I'm pulling key things out. For our investor update, we have about 15 investors. They're all either civil construction business owners or Caterpillar dealer owners. And I like weekly to fill them in on what the heck is happening at BuildWit to be proactive with, which has been a really good thing. So I send that out via email. It's just a few bullet points. I try to keep it very high level. These are busy people, so if they want to keep along, I try to make it very simple for them. Then with those key points, I record a 4 to 8 minute average video every week. I use my phone and I record it for our team again to just let them know what the key happenings are, what's happening within each team. You know, they might be on customer success, but customer success might not that week be interacting with training or with the brand team or with marketing or just trying to keep everybody up to date so that they one, know what the heck's going on and two, they can be most effective in their role. It's really simple. There's zero production quality to it. Again, I recorded on my phone, I record it anywhere, I upload it to Google Drive and I send the link out in an email. It's as low tech as it gets. Anybody can do it and it is by far one of the best things I've done as a leader. And then the third thing that comes out of these debriefs is of course, this podcast is the weekly newsletter that I also publish via email and via LinkedIn that you might get as well. But you're definitely, you're listening to this, so you're part of this whole DB process. And that as I explained at the beginning of this episode is to hopefully allow you to keep up with how we're building our business. Because I want the industry as involved as possible in build wit, because we're not just here to serve ourselves. We're here to serve the dirt world, to build the dirt world's next generation. That's what it's about. And I'll elaborate upon our mission and purpose in a future episode. I've written some about it. I want to get my thoughts down before I do that, so that's some background. As I was reading the update this past Saturday at Houston Hobby Airport, I, you know, I don't think about what I'm noting. I'm just noting anything that I haven't already noted in the past that is critical for people to know that. I think I read through everything. I made my notes, and then I went back to my notes, and it wasn't very much. It was like two points, three points. Usually it's like eight points, something along those lines. Maybe. Maybe a little less. Six to eight, I would say. And I thought, well, does that mean nothing happened? But then I was like, no more is happening than ever before at the business. It's unbelievable what's happening. But. But it's just a little like, every week is kind of similar to the last. Right now we're focused, we're executing, we're just delivering. And when you are just delivering, when you are just executing, when you are focused, there is a monotony to it because you're kind of doing the same thing every day. You're kind of doing the same thing every week, every month. And I think that's where we are as a business right now, which is really exciting to me. And we've paid our dues for years to get to this point of just delivering, of just, we know what we need to do. Let's just go do it. And even this week, we're doing quarterly planning, and it's like, well, this quarterly plan, this upcoming quarter, not all that different from this quarter. Like we already kind of know we need to do. It's. It's completely different than the conversation has been in the past. And it is, I think, proof we're on the right track. And when I think about this as well, I think about Japanese manufacturing, I think many of you have probably heard of Japanese manufacturing, have read about it potentially, for. For sure you have benefited from Japanese manufacturing. They have informed the modern manufacturing process. Just about everything is manufactured according to Japanese principles in some way or another. And if you've never been in a factory before and you hear about all the people in there, all the parts, all the machines. If it's a machinery factory that, that the thing is churning out, you expect to go into it with all kinds of stuff happening, just a lot of things going on, a little bit chaotic. But when you go into a factory, and I've been in Japanese factories, thanks to Hitachi, there's no chaos, there's no shouting, there's not even a whole lot of talking. No one's walking in a hurried fashion. All the forklifts are moving exactly as they need to. Everybody's moving exactly as they need to. No one's going very far. It's honestly, it's almost underwhelming in some ways because you're expecting it to be more chaos, but it's not. It's very simple, it's very careful, it's very choreographed. But that's the telltale sign of a well oiled machine, of not just a factory, but a job site as well. I can now watch a job site and based on the, the chaos or lack thereof, you can pretty quickly tell what kind of operation they're running. And I think that's what's going on here is we have had nonstop chaos, chaos for years and we're finally in a phase that's just not all that chaotic. It's not sexy, but that is a great thing. That means we're doing exactly what we need to do. And so this week all of that is to preface me saying I don't have very many points to report on when it comes to what happened within Buildwit. A lot of stuff happened this week, but nothing all that sexy, nothing all that that I haven't reported on in the past this week. So instead I thought I would briefly cover our most recent adventure on the brand team side of things. So this week me, Ben and Wyatt, we're part of the brand team. We also have Ken on podcast, Hunter doing editing, Jessica helping behind the scenes with logistics, everything. Me related. Tiana now helping. From a social strategy perspective, it's a really great team. But me, Ben, Wyatt, we flew. Wyatt lives in Texas, so we met up with him. Me and Ben flew to Austin Tuesday afternoon. We drove from Austin to New Braunfels, Texas. Now this was funny. We had a 4:30 start the next morning. So I ran through downtown New Braunfels at like 3:15. I would say I run every day while on the road, no matter what. I have for many years now. I ran through downtown. There was nothing going on, but I Haven't been to New Braunfels since I drove there. I worked my, my office job in Houston with hcss and then I drove a few hours from Houston to New Braunfels to a steakhouse to have dinner with Keaton Turner. I had met him through Instagram and we talked. World domination. Now he had just started a mining company. At this time, I had not started Build Wit yet. I had been posting on social media, but it wasn't an official company. And a few weeks after this dinner, this was in January, I ended up starting billwhit, quitting my job in February. It was the last time I'd been to New Braunfels, which was really funny. And after that dinner I then drove back to Houston, went to work the, the next day. And as I was running through, it was just funny to think, wow, you know, not a lot's changed. I think I'm still in a lot of ways the same person. I'm a very different person in a lot of other ways, but I'm still just as hell bent on making a difference in this industry. My love for this industry is the same, if not more. However, my access to this world has changed dramatically. And our mission in New Braunfels to that point was with cemex, one of the world's biggest building materials companies. I pitched to them a video on how concrete works. Concrete is the world's most used building material and it was just the right time. Everything aligned and they said, absolutely, we'd love to have you. They're vertically integrated so we could follow the process. So at 4:30 we did some safety training and then went right out to the ready line to see the trucks take off. And then we went to the pit. It was unbelievable. It's the Balcones quarry. It's the largest quarrying operation in America. I think last year they did many millions of tons into the eight figures. Millions of tons. I don't know if I can talk specific numbers yet. We'll see what's public. It should be public somewhere, but I'm going to avoid that for now. But seeing a quarry operation loading 785s with tailgates, and not just loading them, but loading them with 993 loaders, which are enormous. Biggest I've seen in a quarry. And not just 993 loaders, but they were tandem. Loading these trucks with 993 loaders, it was spectacular. So we got to see the quarry and then we got to see the trucks dump at the crusher. Which of this Kind is the largest in North America. Then we got to follow the rocks through the plant to see how everything is split up between aggregate and then cement limestone because they produce both products within this facility. And then from there we went through the entire cement production process, which honestly kind of made sense to me. And then some of it was a little too science for my small mind. So I'm going to have to brush up on the concepts before our video debuts. But at the end of day one, we had concrete or, excuse me, cement trucks getting loaded with that gray powder cement and then rail cars getting loaded with cement for distribution across Texas. Then that afternoon we drove from there to Houston for day two. Day two, we started at one of CMEX's many ready mix plants. We saw that process, how it all comes together, how they put the, the concrete into the truck to make the final product. Then we followed the truck out to a customer pour and saw the end of the line, the end of the road, a concrete road getting poured. It'll be an awesome video. I don't think it could have gone better. We really appreciate everybody with CEMEX for making it happen. Huge respect for them to open their doors to us. They've never done anything like this. So very appreciative. And it'll be a phenomenal video. So watch out for that one on the YouTube channel. It will be coming soon. Next up, we were also in Houston. We were with Harper Brothers. There is a monster project coming down the line for TxDOT. They're reorgan realigning some interstates around downtown Houston. Before they do that, it'll be over, I think $10 billion of work. Before they do that though, there are some massive drainage improvement projects that need to happen, especially with big storms like Harvey. In the past, Houston has had a flooding problem. So we need more, they need more infrastructure to address that in future storm scenarios. And Harper Brothers is well known in that market, Texas market and in other markets for really tough, complex underground type projects. And that's exactly what they were doing there. So the Harper Brothers team, including John Harper, which was awesome to be there with the guy, I always appreciate that, really, really respect it as well. We got to see some 12 by 12 concrete box get put in the ground and unloaded by 395. It's as big of concrete box culvert as I've ever seen. It's unbelievably huge to see it in person. It's bigger than you think. We got to see that. We got to go into a. I think 96 inch micro tunnel that they broke through. A few hours after we visited we just missed it. But we got to go down into the tunnel, see the tunneling machine, the whole process, etc. Absolutely fantastic. We got to see some of the road reconstruction work. And then finally we got to see where they put box. They put 12 by 12 box, 40ft deep, next to an existing interstate which I don't think I'll ever see in my life. We just missed the actual installation unfortunately. But we got to see the, the, the. The shoring system that they had. It was all sheet pile with bracing. And we got to see them backfilling. It was pretty impressive. So that was a really enjoyable day. And then we finished our Texas operation. Our Texas trip with. By taking to the seas with Curtain Marine. I have watched them build a few new dredges. It's very unique in North America to see new dredges, mechanical dredges. They've built two. They've posted a lot of pictures of them on LinkedIn. One is the DB Catalina, the biggest mechanical dredge in North America now. And I've seen videos, pictures, et cetera. And they sent me a message on LinkedIn. They said hey, do you want to come out and see it? I said boy do I. So we got on a crew boat at about 6:15 in the morning Saturday we went out to the dredge and we got to see everything about the dredging operation from start to finish. It was just brilliant. They had their biggest bucket on the dredge at the time. It was 103 cubic yards of material giant. It was so cool to see. I might have gotten a little bit seasick because when I'm in an excavator cab or crane, you're, you're turning back and forth and it's not so bad. But on this dredge it was really steady. But there was still, still some as the machine would turn some side to side motion as well. So you were moving across multiple axes which my, my ears, inner ears did not appreciate. So it got a little, little queasy. But we held it together. We got some great footage. That'll be another phenomenal video. America's biggest dredge. Maintaining one of the most important shipping channels in America as well. Huge shout out to Kurt Marine for having us. They were nothing but good. So that was this week again, business humming along. Our team brand team adventuring as we do. Having a lot of fun. Being able to talk about it, share it with you all. Check out social media, our YouTube channel, especially the Bill Wit YouTube channel. If you haven't, that's where all of these videos end up. And as always, I really appreciate you listening. Feel free to send me any kinds of questions or things you want to hear in Fear Future episodes. My email is Aaron Aaron at buildwit. Com and we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.