Operationalize Your Dirt Business

Process engineer Zack Estes and experienced dirt business owner Tyler Tapani share their most important lessons on implementing great processes. Recorded at the Ground Crew Phoenix workshop in February 2025.

Member Feedback

Studying processes like this showed me how to build a foundation of clarity and efficiency within our company, setting our team members up for success and gratification. Not only professionally, but personally, where it really matters.

Dave Newby

Great Divide Earthworks
Afton, WY

Sign up. I got more value out of two days than I could learn on my own in years of stumbling through the challenges to figure them out.

Patrick Dunigan III

Dunigan Brothers
Jackson, MI

I saved $25,000 in the first 15 minutes of the Ground Crew Workshop in Phoenix. Everything after that was just extra.

Aaron

Course Outline

Lesson 1: Production is a Process

Throughout this lesson, you’ll learn how to think about building processes and systems in your business is a simple way. You’ll learn how to start at the basics in order to build valuable, repeatable systems that others can step into and use.

Lesson 2: The Ins and Outs of a Process

What is a process? In this lesson, we’ll talk about what needs to happen for a process to create value, how to do that (without over-engineering it!), and the three things any process needs in order to be useful to your business.

Lesson 3: What is an Input and Output?

When built and executed successfully, what goes into a process? What comes out of a process? This lesson is all about how you build proper inputs so that the right process gets executed and what outcomes you can expect when it’s done well.

Lesson 4: Uptime and Downtime

In the dirt moving business, no one needs to explain what downtime means. You know too well.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to engineer your whole business to maximize for where the money is made: During uptime!

Lesson 5: Creating a Culture of Improvement

What is a company culture? It’s a set of shared behaviors. So creating a culture of improvement is really about having a team full of people who behave in the same way – constantly improving.

This lesson walks you through examples of a good culture looks like where everyone is in it to improve and how to start or keep building on that culture.

Lesson 6: Implementing 3S

One of the most simple, practical principles of this whole course is the concept of 3S.

Sweep, Sort, Standardize. Every single day.

This is not a little hack to help you clean off your desk now and then. No, 3S is a habit – a dead-simple system that will drive your team to improve every day. Let’s get into it.

Lesson 7: A Process for Communication

Meetings can be brutal. So hard to shorten or eliminate, so easy to justify.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about the purpose of meetings, how you can increase the value of your meetings, and other ways you can communicate without wasting valuable time.

Lesson 8: The Skill of Observation

If you’ve ever pulled onto the job site and immediately saw a dozen things that need to be fixed, congratulations: You are normal.

It turns out, being able to objectively observe is a real skill that takes time and effort to hone.

In this final lesson, you’ll learn the value of observing, how you can start building this skill, and hear some final thoughts from the instructors.

About The Host

Hey, I’m Benjamin. I like people and construction and I never turn down a cup of coffee.

Construction is all I’ve ever known. I love the construction industry because it’s full of my kind of people. I love equipment, dirt, and the smell of diesel in the morning.

When I’m not launching construction courses, I spend time with the Ground Crew community and organize peer groups for dirt contractors.