← Dirt Talk by BuildWitt
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Foreign. Hello everybody. Welcome back. This is building build with number 32. We've rebranded a little bit. I've had that name in my head for a long time. I have plans for it. Figured we would rename this as Building buildwith because that's exactly what it is. This is the weekly account of what the heck is happening within the Buildwood organization nowadays. Much bigger than me. There's a lot going on and hopefully this gives you a little bit of color, allows you to peek behind the scenes, pull the curtain back, see how the sausage is made. This one is titled YouTube and $177,000 for charity. How about that? First up, our online activity like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and the Dirt Talk podcast and YouTube. You know what we're doing right here, right now is what we've always called buildwit's influence. Influence creates trust and trust grows our business, which then allows us to build the dirt world's next generation bigger and in faster ways. So while each one of these is a weapon, I love podcasting. I think it's, it's super. There's more context to it, but YouTube is by far the trickiest. It is very difficult, yet I think it's the most impactful one that we have because it, it's the most wide reaching. It's amazing. We'll have 3 year olds stoked about our videos and we'll have 73 year olds stoked about our videos and I'll have met some of these people within like the same 10 minutes. It's incredible. I didn't even honestly realize the breadth of people watching our YouTube videos until this year. So really cool. But boy, has YouTube been a thorn in my side. Podcast, it's ebbed and flows. It's ebbed and flowed, but I really enjoy it. I think we do a good job at it. I think it's very effective. Social media, I can pretty consistently hit doubles. It's not that hard. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, it's all pretty straightforward. You just be original, do a good job, be consistent. There you have it. YouTube though. Putting together a 30 minute story. Oh boy. It's a thorn in my side to say the least. And despite what people may think given my online presence, I. I'm not an influencer. I don't know what I'm doing. My success I owe to again, like I just said, consistently telling stories. That's it. In a high quality matter. It's not because of my technical know how. I don't know how to shoot a Video. I don't really know how to edit a video. I'm not all that worthy of any kind of technology that we use. My photography is very straightforward. I don't know 99% of what my camera probably does. I use one lens, one camera. I've used the same camera the entire time. Like, I'm pretty straightforward. But that ignorance, it only gets us so far. And I feel like we're. This year we've been hitting that ceiling in a lot of ways. And I have been to blame for holding us back on long form. I mean, we have 500 something thousand subscribers on YouTube. We do. We'll do millions of hours of watch time this year. Many millions. I don't know how many. So the numbers are good. It's not like we're doing terribly, but the potential for what we're doing is so much better. And we've been hitting this artificial ceiling. It's not a real ceiling, but we've been hitting this ceiling that I have created through my inability, through my ignorance. And that's just not acceptable because that doesn't just screw me, it screws the whole organization and it screws the dirt world. We have amazing access. We need to make the most of it, every single opportunity that we have. And if we're not making the most of it, something's gotta change. So earlier this year, a few months ago, I made the tough call. It wasn't at all fun, but. But it was right to disband our previous influence team in favor of leveraging our overall production team. The production team at this point. We sold the marketing business in January, but we retained all of the video production folks. And we had two teams within video production. We had one team focusing on our training videos now numbering over 2,000 on the bill, would improve platform. And then we had a small influence team which I led. We had somebody full time on podcast, two people full time on social and vlog. But that structure was again not getting us to where we needed to be. And so I decided to wipe the slate clean and to leverage our entire media team in our influence activities. So the media team is not just producing our training videos now, but they're helping produce the podcast, for example, create occasionally clips for social media. Most of that is still what I'm doing, but then especially edit and publish and produce now the YouTube vlog, which is really exciting and it's been, you know, a little nerve wracking. Not nerve wracking. I'm confident in the team. But when you make a big decision, you're always just like, I hope this works out and I hope this is better. Because when you make decisions as a leader, you're not making them to intentionally make things worse. You're always trying to make things better. But there's this unknown. That's what makes decisions hard because you just don't know how it's going to actually pan out. But this week especially, it's been awesome. I think the, the overall media team is diving in head first. There are so many new ideas coming around. I have not been involved in producing some of our newest videos that will be out soon, if not are already out by the time you're listening to this. And it's really, it's exciting and it's relieving. We have such a talented team and I am so grateful that they're involved in this. And it's one of those things too that you look back on it, you're like, man, I was a dummy for trying to keep this within my realm. I like my intentions were not to distract anybody. But again, if, if, if we're not doing this right, we're hurting the overall business, which hurts the team. And so involving the team to make a better product on the influence side grows our business more effectively, benefits everybody and it's just a lot more fun. So that's a little bit about the changes on Influence Media. Now a lot of people, especially when I go with like a, if I attend event, which I don't do all that much anymore, but an event with like a bigger company, they'll call me an influencer. I, that's just not how, how our income is derived. Our income is derived primarily through the software product Bill would improve and then the Dirt World Ariat Dirt World Summit, the, the annual leadership event we, we host. I have one sponsorship deal and that's with Ariat. Otherwise I haven't done any other sponsorship deals, any paid advertising, anything of any sort. It's just not been that exciting to me. There's a much bigger play here and it just doesn't fit our model. So if people use their following to make money, that's great. That's just not necessarily how we've done it. We've always done it in a much more big picture, roundabout way. So we do call it influence, but it's just a different model. We're trying to get the brand out there, trying to get the dirt world out there as much as possible to grow the industry and to grow our business, which is the ultimate play. The top question I'm asked Is what does Bill Witt do? Our purpose is to build the dirt world's next generation. The dirt world is the companies and people building the critical infrastructure and supporting those who build our critical infrastructure that we need to live the lives that we do. Our business is much bigger than me. I run around the world building our brand. But the business itself does two things. One, we help develop the next generation through our product called billwhit Improve. It's a daily training and development platform that about 300 civil construction companies are using to not just make their people better workers, but better people. And of course, we have the 2026 Ariat dirt world Summit, the best opportunity to develop yourself and your teams as leaders. So check us out. Billwhit.com, book a meeting with us and we'll talk to you soon. Next up, we made more progress on 2026 Area Dirt World Summit ticket sales. This is my focus through the end of the year. We hit our November goal and we are on Track to sell 1,000 tickets by December 31st, which means we'll then sell the remaining tickets out in what's likely Q1 for the first time. Very exciting. So the goal now we hit 750. Now we're on to a thousand by the end of the year, which I think is very achievable. Just focused on those that attended this year and we have 1250 available. So at that point, a majority of the tickets are sold 80%. Big deal. Big deal. We're safely over half now, about two weeks out of this year's event. That's just incredible. It's. It's incredible. It speaks a lot to the team and the effort put into the event overall. And by selling it out as quickly as possible this year, it'll allow us to dedicate all of our bandwidth to, to making the event better and better and better. On the software front, our Bill would improve development team that are full bore on seamless daily training user experience for the remainder of 2025 with some significant updates planned for the first quarter. We have been striving for focus all year. I think we're just now seeing the benefits of it. And on a product front, rather than going and looking at whatever the next shiny thing is, which we've been accused of many times over and which we have done many times over, we are really dialing in the existing product experience and our ability to support that product. And so anything outside of a seamless user experience of the existing daily training product, it doesn't matter. We've got to make it work damn near perfect before we can get on to anything else. So that's what the development team is working on for the final quarter of the year. And again, I think that's a. A result of our focus for. For this year, our campaign for focus. We are focused. We have one product, we have one event supporting one industry. It's a really good feeling on the sales team. We are building a bench of potential hires to maintain momentum in case team changes happen or we have to expand the team in 2026. We have some monster goals next year, which leave little room for error. And so we've got to start recruiting now, and we can be open with, you know, honest with timeline. It's. Tell them up front, listen, we're not exactly hiring for this position today. We're not leading people on, but we can do a lot of work to see who's interested and to vet people before we really need to slot them in. So Dan's working on that for those positions. I think the biggest weapon for us is LinkedIn. We've. We've deliberately built our LinkedIn presences. Dan has a huge presence, and, you know, after one post, he can drive a pretty solid applicant flow and can dig through those applicants over the next month or two, build that bench and have those people hopefully ready to go when we need them. And we don't just need to do that on the sales front. We need to do that across the board, across the business. But sales is the first opportunity to start proactively hiring, which is. Which is not something we've traditionally done outside of video. We've always used contractors for video that we've then hired because we've been able to vet them over time. But this is like the first formal team that's hiring on a. Or going through the hiring process on a preemptive basis. On the summit front, we have fully debriefed on the 2025 Area Dirt World Summit, and thanks to extensive feedback that we facilitate from attendees and from our teams, we've already implemented significant changes for next year, which is awesome. So that's the. You know, the struggle and fun thing about events is that you have one a year, which is not a lot. The data. You get a huge quantity of data only once a year. And so you can very quickly see the problems in the plan that you just executed and the upcoming plan once you have that data in hand. But until then, you're kind of guessing. And so we have to plan the 26 event before the 25 event based on the 20, 23, and 22. I'm getting my math. So we have to plan, excuse me, the 26 event with the 20, 25 before the 2025, eventually, based on the 24 event and 23 event information. But then the most relevant information is 25. So once we get that information, which we have over the past two weeks, we can then take our plan for 26. That was good, and make it great. Oh, you know, we didn't have enough breaks or the flow wasn't right here or there, or the hours weren't right there, there. It's all about guiding behavior. What's the behavior that we want to create within those three days? And I think the most important thing is to maximize connections. And I think we did some things this. This past summit that. That did that, that facilitated those. Those people meeting, making those important connections that they can then take home and nurture over the coming year. And we want to do more and more of that. And so it's not just about picking a venue, picking speakers. It's about every detail, the flow, when people come, how they come, the order of operations. There's. There's a lot to it. And with more data allows us to make it better. So really exciting there. It's awesome to see the team hungry to make each one way better. We're not looking at any other event out there. We're looking at the last event we just had, and we set, honestly, the bar pretty high with 25. But that's the competition now. We've got to go crush it. And that's what they're doing. But without that feedback, we wouldn't be able to. And so we're really grateful for all the feedback from our team and from attendees because, of course, transparency wins. Finally, we had a charity auction. It was the second time we did it at this year's summit. This year it was benefiting Dream On Three, an amazing organization, and then the ESS Foundation, Emory Sapp and Sons. And so we had a lot more items. Purple Wave was the auctioneer at the event we hosted it at on the hotel campus, but at a restaurant, which we wouldn't do again. That was probably the one major challenge of the event, was the auction. It just wasn't in the right setting, unfortunately, to make it as successful as possible. So we've already changed that. But despite that, we raised $177,000 for both of those charities. They'll split it, which is awesome. And that's the money we raised that wasn't total sales. Total sales was far beyond that of the auction. So $177,000. You know where we've been in business we haven't been able to give a lot because we've still been trying to figure out our affairs financially. But we can use our influence, our impact, our connections to make a difference in the world and this is one of those ways we can do it. So very grateful to all of those that participated in the auction. We sold some machines, we sold the car, we sold all kinds of smaller things. It was a lot of fun to see it all unfold and we hope to make the future auctions a lot more successful to raise a whole lot more money for some great causes. So that's everything this week. Building bill wit number 32. Thank you so much to those following along in our journey listening. If you ever have questions, comments, write me anytime. AaronBillwith.com and with that we'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty everybody.