Kill the Baby.

Phill didn’t argue.

The baby was his side business. He’d spent a year and a half on it.

Andrew was telling him to stop.

A few minutes later, Phill told him nobody else had been that straight with him.

Phill Tomlinson had been a commercial real estate broker for twenty-five years.

He was good at it. Years earlier, he’d hired a virtual assistant while he was sick, and it changed everything.

Other brokers wanted to know how. So he showed them. Then they asked him to do it for them, and Leverage VA was born, a done-for-you service placing trained virtual assistants with commercial brokers.

Phill threw himself into it. He hired help with cold email. He hired help with his offer. He hired help with webinars. He built a Skool community for brokers.

By the time he sat down with Andrew one-on-one, here’s where it stood.

A year and a half of work. Two hundred and ninety-six dollars ahead.

Meanwhile, his real business was slipping. His brokerage partner had brought in eighteen transactions.

Maybe you know this feeling. The side project that was supposed to free you up has quietly become the thing everything else orbits.

Phill and Andrew didn’t meet on that call. They’d met long before.

Phill had joined LeadGenJay’s program to learn cold email for the VA business. Andrew ran the support calls. Phill expected help with software. He got help with his words, his offer and his business, and that help turned into five strong replies from cold outreach, a new customer and $23,000.

That’s what brought him to Andrew’s door.

He said as much on the call.

Then he asked the question.

Before they got to that, Andrew said the thing most coaches avoid.

He looked at the VA business and didn’t see a marketing problem.

Before AI, virtual assistants were the cheapest way to get more done. Now everyone wanted AI.

Andrew had a reason for being blunt, and he said it out loud.

He also had a picture for it.

Phill told Andrew why the advice landed.

Andrew laid out what the work together would aim for. Phill’s answer:

Again. He’d already been paying to learn from Andrew. Now he was signing up for more.

The first problem after the baby was his own calendar.

Phill tracked every minute of his working day for two weeks and gave the record to AI. It told him he was all over the place. He blocked 8:30 to 11:30 for calls and nothing else, and started using a dialer that rang three numbers at once.

Forty prospecting calls a week became fifty to a hundred a day. Three or four leads a month became eight to ten a week.

The next problem was a stage.

Phill hadn’t presented at the Corfac conference, his network of commercial real estate firms, in years. The prep used to take him about sixty hours. He called Andrew from New Orleans the day before his panel. The new deck was done in about fifteen minutes, and he went back up.

Then came a copyright claim about the images on his website.

That time, Phill didn’t call for help. He found all forty-six images with AI, replaced every one and had the site running again by the end of the week. Then he walked Andrew through how he’d done it.

The problems were getting bigger.

Phill was handling more of them himself.

Then came the biggest build yet.

Phill wanted a CRM that worked the way a commercial broker thinks. The off-the-shelf option, he said, had an interface that "sucks."

So he did. Phill built CRE Fuel, his own CRM, working live with Andrew.

He was very clear about what he was and wasn’t.

When Andrew sat down and went through it as a new user, he had plenty of notes. Too much text. Pricing too early.

And then this.

More than two years in, they’re still meeting.

On a recent call, Phill opened with a thank-you.

Andrew had pointed something out the week before. Phill had built a long career doing commercial real estate one way. He wanted to learn a new way, but he hadn’t built the habit yet. Even the cold-calling coach he admired hadn’t started at three hours of calls a day. So Phill didn’t have to either.

Phill went down to thirty minutes of cold calls a day, and started calling every past client he’d ever worked with.

Andrew didn’t take all the credit.

Phill had more news. His assistant had noticed a change.

And a referral had come in from a broker he’d shared a cab with at a conference. A buyer looking at a building of 140,000 square feet.

Comparing Andrew with another coach he works with, Phill put it simply.

Then the conversation turned to CRE Fuel.

Brokers had signed up to try it. Answering their questions would eat into the mornings that now paid his bills. Phill was torn. He loved the software. He didn’t want to give anything up.

Remember the first call.

The coach who’d told him to kill the baby now told him something different.

He didn’t have to kill everything to change. He could limit what he was doing and how much of it.

Phill heard it.

So the software went on the shelf for now, still running for Phill’s own business. Andrew told him not to worry about selling it.

That’s what this relationship has looked like for more than two years.

A side business to shut down. A calendar to rebuild. A stage to get back on. Images to replace. Software to build. And now, permission to slow down.

The problem kept changing.

Andrew kept being there. </content>