← Dirt Talk Podcast
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Aaron Witt
Foreign Monday Episode Build with update. This is number eight, titled YouTube Cash and the Content roadmap. I got home from Nevada last night visiting Ames at about midnight. So I'm going to muster every ounce of energy I have to give you a great reading of this week's happenings. Here we go. I'm just gonna get right into it today. No nonsense. First up, with thousands of training videos we've produced and thousands more we need to produce, the need for systems to understand what the heck we've covered and what we have yet to cover is more important than ever before. So on that note, we've established an integration allowing our training content production team to know what customers and potential customers are asking for from a content standpoint in real time. So this integration allows us to better understand conversations sales team is having. The customer says, boy, I wish we had more skid steer attachment training content. We have skid steer training content, but not a lot of skid steer attachment training content. So maybe like a milling head for asphalt crews with a skid steer rubber tire skid steer. Okay, cool. We can then automatically note that the content team gets word, hey, this is brought up by a customer, existing customer. They would love skid steer mill content. Great. We can go look at our content roadmap, which is the content we're scheduled to produce or planning to produce over the next 612 months. We can see if it's there. If it's not there, we can ask, well, is this something we need to prioritize over that period? Is this something we can work into something existing, an existing shoot? And we can either decide, maybe it's just not worth our time, there's other priorities right now. Or let's work it into the roadmap and deliver upon that content. We're doing our best to assume what kind of content civil construction companies need. Like I said, we've covered thousands of videos at this point, a lot of different topics topics. But it's a big industry, so the more information we can gather from those out in the field, the better. And this is a better way to do that, which is very exciting. Next up, we hit 500,000 subscribers on YouTube this week, which is a huge milestone that's taken many years to achieve. Our channel now has 220 million views with 1.2 million hours of watch time in 2025 alone, which puts us well ahead of the dirt world's biggest brands like Caterpillar and John Deere, which is pretty cool because they're not doing so bad. But to think that we're getting as many views, reaching as many people as we are is spectacular. YouTube has been a team effort. I, I know I'm the face of it, but I couldn't do any of it myself right now. We don't just have Jessica helping on scheduling, Jack and T.J. helping on the, the shooting front, as you've maybe seen if you've watched the vlog. But we have our whole production team now helping from an editing standpoint, production standpoint, which has been awesome. That's why we've been able to, I think increase our production quality in the right ways over the past few months. We have a lot more to go, so it's been a huge team effort. There's been a lot of people that aren't at the company now that have contributed to that as well. Matt Brisco, he's still with the company, but he's in sales now. He was helping with that in the early days. I started it myself. But we would not be here without the, the greater company making that happen. It's a huge channel for us. I think every channel is a big channel. Podcast is big, traditional social media big. But YouTube is special. It's just long form video content. Most of our videos are 20, 30 minutes plus now. And so the people are reaching and how we're reaching them is, is, is really high level, really high quality and we're going to now, I mean half a million subscribers is cool. But now next milestone, million. Get into the millions, reach as many people as we can with the story of the dirt world. Super, super cool. And on that note too, if you haven't watched yet, our latest video features Europe's biggest demolition excavator in Italy. So you can search my name, Aaron Witt on YouTube to find that video and all different videos. If you're looking for another industry event that is a snooze fest, this is definitely not for you. But if you're a leader looking to elevate yourself, your team looking for like minded individuals that are hungry, then look no further than the Ariat Dirt World Summit November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas. In our third year, we'll have about 1500 hungry industry leaders from about 500 companies looking to learn, grow, teach. It's going to be fantastic. We also have a world class lineup. We've got Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas, James Clear, Atomic Habits, Kim Scott, Radical Candor, Mark Miller, Chick Fil A leadership, Tim Grover who is Michael Jordan's trainer. You will not hear from a lineup like this. Anywhere else. So check out details now. Dirtworld.com you can use code AARON10 for 10% off any registrations and we'll see you November 5th through the 7th in Dallas, Texas next. We officially have one tool for monitoring all bugs, issues and failures fixes which allows our development team to understand what the heck is happening at all times and resolve problems with the build it improve product faster. This is another thing that's not big and sexy, but it's real business, you know, software business stuff and that's what we're working on this year. We're becoming a real software business and so all the things we've been doing are aligning us with that and systems and processes are one of those big things. So tracking not just bugs but fixes for that bugs. What the heck's in progress, what we're working on, what we've worked on, what we've completed in one place so the team can see what the heck is going on and can report upon what the heck is going on is essential. Seems simple, it seems like a no brainer but we haven't had a lot of those simple systems until now, so that's a big, big change. For most of 2025, our marketing team has focused on build with improve and other initiatives. But for for this month they're heads down on the Ariat Dirt World Summit, building out the event website, getting more information into the hands of potential attendees and engaging with those who are already signed up. Creating the industry's most valuable event starts well before the event begins and our marketing team plays a big part in the effort. Years ago when we became a software company, we scaled way up on the marketing side of things and in hindsight it was a huge, huge miscalculation. It wasn't any individual's fault on that team, but it was, it was a leadership fault. It rolls up to me, my fault. We, we, we, we built out our marketing engine to be way bigger than we needed it and that ended up in us having to let people go. Overall, you know, attrition over the past few years, getting us to the team we have now which is really nimble, led by Dan and then three incredible people, Tracy, Brandon and Sam, along with some part time people on the outside, some people here or there, within the business, there's others involved but it's really lean. It's really nimble. They're capable of doing so much, but it is lean. They can only focus on so much at one time. This year, again building that foundation as a software company, they've spent most of their time on that software product build what improve. But as we go into summer, as we're now June, July, August, September, October, five months out because I can count from the Ariat Dirt World Summit in November, we've got to put the pedal to the metal and ramp up our messaging. So that's what they're going to be working on this month, which is very exciting. Now that we have digested our accounting migration, we're transitioning accounts receivable back to the accounting team from sales. This will allow us to collect faster and keep our sales team selling and thus any small business. Cash is oxygen again. We're really lean on the system side of things. We've got Diane, we've got Kara, we've got Nikki helping out a little bit, Jessica, others people, you know, a bunch of people involved there. But Diane and Kara especially have been wrapped up in implementing this new accounting system for about a year now. It's been a monster, monster project. We're very grateful we did it over the past year instead of doing it this year, but it took up all of their bandwidth. So when it came to collections on stuff we're owed, it fell upon the account team, on the sales team, on executives, et cetera, me, whoever really could collect upon our money. But now that accounting team has a little bit more bandwidth that are able to focus on collections more. They're able to use some of these systems within the new accounting system to hopefully more effectively collect. Just the faster we can get money in, the better because cash flow is king. And then finally, our first new seller of 2025 starts this week with more in the works. Selling is a incredible skill set, but it's also a numbers game. So more activity means more people in Dirt world learning at the summit and training daily on build and improve it. It really we're trying to upscale our sales team. We've been working on that very diligently this year using folks like Marcus Sheridan and others to help from an outside standpoint, we've been working a lot internally doing role playing, all kinds of different things, but you can only do so much and at the end of the day it still is a volume based game. So the more people you have selling, the more you will sell. Go figure. Because we made some changes in the sales team structure as I think I've discussed on previous updates, we just have had reduced sales capacity until now. So it's really exciting to start adding to the team. So this is the first edition with hopefully some more additions just behind this individual has industry experience, so we're hoping he's able to come in, hit the ball, at least get on base. But if he hits it out of the park, we're thrilled with that. But it's a really, really good thing to just add more sales capacity, which should mean we should add more sales, which more sales means, again, more people out in the field. Training on build would improve and more leaders at the Erie at dirt world summit becoming better leaders than taking that back to the thousands, tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of people that they interface with. So really big deal helps with our mission of building the dirt world's next generation, making the dirt world a better place. We believe in our products and I want to go sell them to as many people as we can. So that's everything. Thanks for listening this week. Appreciate the feedback so far. I think people are enjoying these, so we'll keep the ball rolling. This is number eight. I'll see you on 80. At least I hope that will be, oh, a year and a half from now. I wonder what Bill wood update number 80 is going to be. But that is eight. We're still in the single digits. Thank you. If you have comments, questions, you can send them to me anytime. Aaronillwood.com would love to hear from you. We'll see you on the next one. Stay dirty, everybody.