Builder Marketing Summit 2026 Takeaways

Builder Marketing Summit: 3 Topics I Can’t Stop Thinking About 

The best conference sessions don’t just hand you ideas; they hand you permission to use them. That’s what three speakers did for me in Dallas this September, and I’ve been carrying their slides around in my head ever since.

Barrett Davis showed us how to stop doing the work alone. Kimberly Mackey reminded us who we are while we lead. Cory Charles sent us home with our thumbs over the send button. Taken together, they form a surprisingly complete playbook: build the system, protect the person running it, and ship the idea before Monday swallows it.

If you’re a builder marketer wearing a thousand hats (and I’ve yet to meet one who isn’t), these are the takeaways worth stealing.

Barrett Davis: The “A” in AI Is Really Agency

Barrett Davis (CEO at NterNow and a 40 Under 40 Builder honoree) opened with a line that got a knowing laugh: AI stands for Artificial for a reason in home building. Then he flipped it. The “A” that actually matters is agency. His advice was blunt and freeing: “Just do stuff; and do it quick.”

He named the three excuses that stop everyone, and I felt seen by every one of them:

1. Your data is garbage. It will never be clean. Start anyway.
2. You don’t have time. You won’t find time; you take it. Thirty minutes, today.
3. There’s always a shiny new thing. New model, new tool, new hype. Ignore it and ship.

The heart of his talk was a mindset shift for marketers who carry the whole department on their backs: stop doing the work alone and build a system that does it with you. He described three kinds of support to build around yourself: a Coach that keeps you accountable to weekly progress, a Critic (his words: “the a-hole friend”) that gives brutally honest feedback on your campaigns and copy, and your Peers, because, as he put it, no one knows what they’re doing. Make the group chat. Share the wins.

He walked us through a leveled path, from connecting your CRM, documents, calendar and email, to building repeatable skills, a brand system saved as a file, and scheduled agents, all the way to a weekly improvement loop. His suggested first task was so practical it made me grin: have AI go check every community page on your site and list what’s out of date. (Every builder marketer reading this just winced a little. Me too.)

And then came the coolest giveaway I have ever seen come through the Summit. Barrett built a Claude tool exclusively for Summit attendees that each person could personalize to their own company’s website. Not a swag bag; a working system you could take home and use Monday morning. That is agency in action.

The line I wrote down twice: “You stop being the person who maintains the system. You become the person who decides what it should do next.”

Kimberly Mackey: Lead Without Losing Yourself

If Barrett’s talk was about building systems, Kimberly Mackey’s was about protecting the human at the center of them. “Lead Without Losing Yourself” was incredibly empowering, and it’s a message I think every one of us needs right now, as the world keeps speeding up and the pressure to keep pace never lets go.

Kimberly grounded her talk in a piece of timeless wisdom attributed to Robert Woodruff, the longtime leader of Coca-Cola:

• The five most important words: “I am proud of you.”
• The four most important words: “What is your opinion?”
• The three most important words: “If you please.”
• The two most important words: “Thank you.”
• The least important word: “I.”

Read that list slowly. Not one of those phrases costs a dime, and every one of them is easy to skip on a hectic Tuesday. As a business owner, I know how quickly leadership can shrink into a to-do list; you start managing tasks and forget you’re leading people. Kimberly’s reminder was that the words we choose with our teams are the leadership.

She paired that heart with accountability through her 10-5-2-1 approach and a simple truth about scorecards: numbers don’t lie. The 10-5-2-1 formula is a weekly sales productivity rhythm that makes consistent results predictable:

• 10: Engage 10 new prospects every week.
• 5: Secure 5 first appointments from those prospects.
• 2: Hold 2 follow-up (or “be-back”) appointments.
• 1: Close at least 1 sale.

Keep that pace all year (with a well-earned two-week vacation) and you land at 50 sales. What I love most is where it puts your focus: on the daily and weekly habits you can control, rather than the outcomes you can’t. (And if your leads are highly qualified, you may need fewer first touches to hit the same number.)

Kindness and clarity are not opposites. The best leaders hold both: they say thank you, and they keep score.

That balance is exactly how you lead without losing yourself. You don’t have to become colder to become more effective.

Cory Charles: Send It

Cory Charles closed the Summit with the perfect motivating send-off. He started with a story about a kid (him) at the top of Coffin Hill with a used Huffy, a prayer, and four seconds of conviction. No plan. No trusted brakes. One decision: send it.

Then he pointed at something every marketer in the room has: the drafts folder. He called it “the best-organized graveyard in America,” full of campaigns, scripts, and conference notes waiting for one more revision. What happens to everything you learned at a conference? Usually, nothing. Not because we lack skill, but because we’re waiting for permission.

His S.E.N.D. IT framework is simple enough to tape to your monitor:

• Sort: pick one idea for this week. Forty options kill action.
• Erase the excuse: your excuse isn’t a fact; it’s a draft, and drafts get edited.
• Name the date: an idea with no date is just a nicer-sounding excuse.
• Deploy: imperfect, public, shipped. A live campaign beats a perfect one stuck in review.

The moment that stuck with me most was the simplest. Cory had us say our one thing out loud to the person next to us, then pull up a text or email with our thumb hovering over send. He reminded us that we don’t have to do this alone: we can ask people to be our accountability buddies as we put our ideas into action. Saying it to another person turns a nice idea into a promise.

His closing line is the one I’ll be quoting all year: “Good ideas don’t build homes. Sent ones do.”

Put It Into Action (and Save Your Seat for 2027)

Here’s what strikes me about these three talks side by side: they’re really one lesson told three ways. Build a system so you’re not doing it alone. Lead your people with words that cost nothing and mean everything. Then pick one idea, give it a date, and send it.

So in the spirit of Cory’s challenge, here’s mine. Choose one takeaway from this post. Tell a teammate (your new accountability buddy) what you’re going to do and when. Then do it before Monday moves you.

And if these sessions sound like the kind of room you want to be in, I’d love to see you at the next Builder Marketing Summit in 2027. It’s built for the people who market, sell, and lead in home building, and it’s the one event every year where I come home with a full notebook and a lighter heart. Keep an eye on buildermarketingsummit.com for dates and registration.