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Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
United States Army Corps, Target Market & Freelancers (Building BuildWitt #44) - DT 425
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Foreign. Welcome back everybody. Dirt Talk Podcast Building Build Wit I have too many papers in front of me. This is number 44 titled United States Army Army Corps Target Market and Freelancers. As always, this episode is an attempt at explaining what the heck buildwit does. We are a training and development software company with our product buildwit Improve specifically for civil construction companies. We have our Ariat Dirt World Summit elevating the leadership of the civil construction industry. And then I run around the United States and world with a phenomenal team. Well, we do this podcast here and then I run around producing great content, showing people how the world works on YouTube and the social media to draw attention to the importance of this industry and to build the Bill Whit brand to allow us to ultimately our mission, build the dirt world's next generation who will then build the next generation. How about that? To get into it, the past week I began in South Florida with the largest environmental restoration project in America called the EAA Reservoir. And it was a really cool visit because I was hosted not by a contractor, but by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. And that is just incredible to me. I started shooting people, you know, building schools and doing driveways. And now here we are able to work alongside the United States Army Corps of Engineers and show people what they're working on. And they work on some extraordinary projects through a lot of world class contractors as well. So thanks to the United States Army Corps of Engineers and then contractor Odin as well, they were really good to us. While we were out there, we had a two day tour of the 10,000 acre project. This probably is the largest project civil works project I've been to. On an area perspective, 10,000 acres is a crazy, crazy area that this project is spanning. And the purpose of this thing is to build a, an enormous reservoir. Well, let me wind the clocks. Back when they went to develop Florida, long, long time ago, the place was a swamp, right? You had the little gators swimming around, some lizards, some snakes, everybody's hanging out. And then people find out, they discover Florida and they're like, wait a minute, this is a pretty good place. The climate's pretty nice, the beach pretty nice, the water pretty nice. Why don't we build condos everywhere, you know? So to do that they had to drain the swamps. And to do that, they created this, this amazing system of canals, levees, etc. To push the water from Florida, from the state, out into either the Gulf or the Atlantic Ocean. The problem with that is that over time it has begun to be a Little too effective. They did too good of a job. And dry the place out now, drying the place out, that's not just a bad thing for the Everglades and for the wetlands, but it's a bad thing for the people of Florida, because the people of Florida depend on the aquifer for their water. Now, if the aquifer starts to go dry, it's all based on gravity. And you have salt water then in the ocean wanting to intrude upon the aquifer to fill that space as the drinking water, the clean water is being pumped out for consumption. That salt water wants to take its place because nothing from the surface, from the wetlands is, is then replenishing that aquifer. So you have that saltwater intrusion potential. Saltwater intrusion. And if saltwater comes into the aquifer now, you've spoiled your aquifer, or you have to remove the salt to make it drinking water compatible, which the infrastructure of southern Florida is not currently equipped to do. And that's the water. For 10 million plus people, this is a really big deal. So there's an enormous project to make this happen. And the EAA Reservoir is only a piece of this overall system that they've been working on for years now and will work on for years to come. But this is, I would say, the crown jewel of the operation. It will then, when it's complete, take water from existing canals and store it during the wet season so that during the dry season, it can allow some of the nutrients within the water to settle out. And then it can distribute that water into the wetlands to ensure that the wetlands continue well into the future for decades. And then for the aquifer to remain strong for the people of Florida. And to do that, they are essentially building a giant levee all the way around this 10,000 acre area. So they're building a giant bathtub and this enormous pump station. It'll pull water from the canals, pump it into the reservoir, and then as they need it, they can use gravity to push it out into other canals and carry it further south. Really cool stuff. It was an incredible operation. They had dragline operations, they had crushing spreads, they had cut off wall installation. Everything was mind boggling. And we'll have a whole video on it coming soon that I am really, really excited about. And the craziest thing about this project was that Ron DeSantis talked to Trump, said, hey, it's not going fast, I want it to go faster. And Trump said, okay. So they accelerated, they cut the schedule in half. And so now they have half the time to do the project that they thought they did as they got it going and they're about to really ramp up as a result. So hopefully this is the first of potentially two or three videos on this project showing the foundation work, showing the cutoff wall work, showing the beginning of the material production and then maybe 12 months from now we can come back when placement is going full bore to actually see that levee structure that will retain the water future state. Incredible opportunity. And I am very appreciative of the United States Army Corps for reaching out and hosting us. And hopefully we'll be able to document a lot more of their work alongside the private contractors they utilize into the future. On the bill it improve front, we are continuing to refine our target customer which leads to better outcomes on sales support and of course our end users. We've been at this for a few years now, the training and development side of things. So we've learned a lot. And based on the hundreds of companies we've worked with, the years of experience that we have doing this now, we have learned that civil construction companies over about 100 people are best for build with improve. This is not to say that we don't serve those below 100. That's still a very important market and one that we love to serve. But here's the rationale behind why we are defining who we're best for. Once companies grow past about 100 people, they need a framework to effectively train and develop their people. Because the business leaders who potentially got the company there in the first place, they can no longer reach everyone regularly. So when you're a smaller company, you can, you can keep your hands around it. You know, If I have 20 people out in the field and I'm the owner of a civil construction company, I am probably interfacing with my entire workforce at least every week. You know, I'm getting out to jobs and as I interface, as I'm out on jobs, I'm naturally training and developing people as needed. And then even as it gets a little bit bigger, I'm reaching those immediately under me and they're reaching everybody within the company. So they're in theory able to continue to train and develop without a serious infrastructure needed. But once you get beyond 100 or so, you can't reach everyone regularly. You need a framework, but you don't need an overly complex system to make it happen. So there we go. Bill wouldn't prove bingo bango. And not only does Bill whit and prove help these companies create a training framework for their operators or laborers or crew leaders on how to do their job better. Specifically, I've talked a lot about that. It gives them a framework to offer their people the ability to take better care of themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. And that's a big piece of ensuring that we have the future generation we need to build. The infrastructure that we need is not just treating people like tools, but treating people like people by investing in them as people, not just workers. So that is the rationale behind why it's best and typically most successful within companies of 100 plus individuals in civil construction. Again, we serve those underneath. But by defining this, we can then put the majority of our time and our efforts in especially to selling the product into those companies that are within that target market. About 100 to 1000. We are working with some bigger companies as well with a lot of success. But 100 to a thousand they need training. They typically don't have an enormous infrastructure to make that happen. Bingo bango Bill wouldn't prove is there to serve. Finally, on the media front, we're adjusting our approach to media right now, which is really exciting. As I've previously explained. We had three people resign in January, which was unexpected but presented us with a fantastic opportunity to ask a lot of questions, to dig in and to evaluate what we need to do and how we can best organize our teams to make that happen. Now I will get into this more in future updates, but we are likely focusing the team in either one of two directions in training on training content or on influence content. And we've gone down this road a few times before with very mixed results. But we have a very well thought out plan this time based on the lessons we've learned over the past years. But we will focus some of our team on training 100% and that means we're going to need additional editors and additional shooters. Now if this was a few years ago, what we would go do is we would go hire full time editors, full time shooters, which is great because you get exactly what you need from a culture standpoint. You can train and develop people more effectively, so on and so forth. But when it comes to shooting and editing training content, it goes up, it goes down, it goes sideways, this, that all over the place. And it requires a degree of flexibility that you don't have when you have a full full time team. And that's not really, really how the agency model works. The agency model works by having a core team, which we do and will continue to have from a pre production, production, post production standpoint, managing the work, but then allowing the work to be executed primarily by freelance videographers and editors. This allows us to not only scale up and scale down as needed, but, but it gives us a bigger bench, a broader level of experience and flexibility to shoot across the United States without sending people all over the place from a more central hub, keeping people a little bit more local. So I'm really excited about this approach. We're not 100% if it's going to work, but it works great for a majority of agencies. And I'm really excited to build a bench of freelance editors, freelance shooters, to execute the training content that we need to under the direction of our full time team that's been doing it for many years and is by far the most experienced team when it comes to training content in the civil construction industry. So it's a little bit different of a model going forward, but I think now's the time to try this out. In years past too, there weren't a lot of people shooting in this world, editing in this, in this world. Now, partially because of what we've done over the years, there are a lot more people shooting and editing and I think we can leverage them because they're very talented and a little bit more flexible than we could be if we tried to do it all in house. So that's a little bit about what the heck's going on into next week. I go to Florida, I go to Minnesota and then we go to Canada. So there's a lot of exciting stuff coming. There's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes. Every week we've got more coming. Building buildwit. Thank you for listening. If you have questions, comments, anything you want me to elaborate on further, feel free to write me Aaron buildwith.com we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody.