Sixty hours.
That’s a week and a half of full working days.
For one talk.
And that wasn’t even the whole of it.
Sixty hours and a round of lunches
Phill had been going to the Corfac conference for well over a decade. Corfac is a network of commercial real estate firms, and its conference is where its brokers meet.
Early on, he needed to make a name for himself. So he volunteered to share best practices. Over time he became one of the main speakers, with an hour and a half to show the room what was new in technology for commercial real estate.
He took it seriously.
"And then I would do a full presentation to all the brokers at my office and I’d buy them all lunch, just so they could critique me and tell me what they liked, what they hated, what made sense, what didn’t make sense."
It worked.
"So I have blown the socks off these guys."
When brokers in that network had a tech question, they went to Phill.
Then he stopped presenting.
Years went by. The brokers noticed.
"Phil man we haven’t heard you talk."
Now he’d been asked back. He was moderating a technology panel the next afternoon.
And the old way was not an option. There was no week and a half. There was barely a day.
The call
The morning before the panel, Phill called Andrew from the conference.
He had the pieces. A Google Slides deck. Questions for the three panelists. A live survey so the room could see which AI tools their peers were using. A QR code. And Grace, the AI assistant Andrew had built for him, who was only a couple of weeks old.
He couldn’t find half of it on his phone. He sat down at his laptop and shared the folder.
Then Andrew asked the question that shaped everything after it.
What was the perfect outcome?
Phill hesitated.
"This will sound stupid probably..."
Then he said it. He wanted every broker to walk away with one tool they’d look at and think, damn, I need to use that. And personally, he wanted them in his Skool community.
Andrew had seen how that usually goes.
"People find a ton of tools, and then they don’t actually use them, or they use them for something silly. And then the novelty wears off and they go right back into what it is that they do on a daily basis, right?"
Maybe you’ve sat in that audience. A great talk. A page of notes. Back at your desk the next morning, and nothing changes.
Andrew didn’t want that for Phill’s room.
So he went through the plan piece by piece.
The survey couldn’t compete with the panel. Andrew didn’t want people filling it in while the speakers talked.
"You want them paying attention to you, not distracted by their phone."
Phill had already planned for that. The survey would be on screen for fifteen minutes before the panel started. Perfect, Andrew told him.
The closing ask sounded like a sales pitch. Join my community tells a room you want something from them. Andrew suggested offering them something instead: a follow-up call for everyone who’d been in the room, to answer their questions and keep them moving.
And then he reminded Phill why he’d hired him in the first place.
"So Phill, this is when we go back to when you first hired me, right? And I told you what we need to do is get you using AI in your business every single day. So that when it comes time for you to have this event, basically, you are going to be able to have these guys come into a room where you’re no longer going to be trying to sell them something. You’re just going to be showing them all the cool shit that you’re doing, and they’re naturally going to want to follow you, right?"
That was the plan all along.
This was the event.
The baby
There was one more piece of advice. It wasn’t strategic.
Andrew asked Phill how old he was.
Fifty-seven.
So Andrew pitched him an opening.
"Hey, guys. I am fifty-seven. And I have some incredible news. I just had a baby."
Let the room think it’s a real baby. Give them a couple of her specs.
Then:
"This is my AI baby."
Andrew’s point was simple. People remember what surprises them.
Fifteen minutes
Then Andrew went to work.
He rebuilt the slide deck with an AI agent. He set up a landing page and an opt-in so the people who scanned the QR code had somewhere to go, with follow-up emails going out from Grace.
Afterwards, Andrew described the difference in his own words.
"It used to take him sixty hours to seven to ten days to prep all of his slides, all that stuff, right?"
And this time:
"His slide deck was done in fifteen minutes. We put together an entire offer with the landing page and an opt-in and everything within five to ten minutes."
Sixty hours, and a round of lunches for the office.
Against fifteen minutes.
The sixty hours had kept Phill off the stage for years. This time the work fit into a single day at a conference.
On stage
Phill went up the next afternoon.
He didn’t pretend he’d mastered it all. He told the room exactly how he’d done it.
Later, he repeated what he’d said up there.
"When I was at the New Orleans conference and I stood up and I began talking about grace, I just said, hey, guys, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t have the bandwidth to really learn this. So what I did is I hired a coach that forced me, because I paid this coach, it forced me to take two hours a week and just learn."
And then he gave them the same advice.
"And so I told them my recommendation is you guys hire somebody that can just baby step you through this."
He wasn’t selling anyone anything.
He was showing them what he was doing.
Exactly what Andrew had said would happen.
After the panel
The talk didn’t stay in New Orleans.
A Corfac firm in Vancouver got in touch. Their brokers hadn’t made it to the conference.
"We couldn’t attend the conference. We didn’t get to see your talk."
Would he give it to their firm?
He said yes.
Not long after, Phill and Andrew ran a live webinar together for Corfac brokers, built around the same idea: AI for commercial real estate, made simple enough to use.
And when Phill later talked about New Orleans, he mentioned something else.
"New Orleans was the fourth time me going up on stage and getting an award because I somehow had done something with somebody in the organization."
What was really in the way
It would be easy to call this a story about saving time.
It is. Fifty-nine and three-quarter hours is a lot of time.
But think about what those sixty hours had really cost Phill.
Not just the evenings. Not just the lunches.
They’d cost him the stage. A broker who loved showing people what technology could do had stopped doing it, because getting ready had become too heavy to carry.
Take the weight away and he went right back up.
The day before, he’d been hunting through his phone for files.
The next afternoon, the brokers who’d been asking when they’d hear him again finally did. </content>