This past year has been the hardest of my life, yet the best in a lot of ways.

My wife is facing ongoing health challenges, and we’ve spent countless hours waiting for answers in a medical system that too often moves too slowly. At the same time, I’m raising a toddler full of energy, leading at my church, and running multiple businesses.

There are days I feel stretched beyond what I should be able to carry: husband, father, pastor, builder, provider, all at once. The truth is, without AI tools and systems I’ve built, I don’t know how I would keep it all moving. Here’s the brutal truth: AI has helped my family more than most doctors we’ve encountered during my wife’s health journey.

You can literally upload bloodwork, symptoms, and test results and get answers that you weren’t able to get from doctors. It’s incredible what you can find out on your own with AI. Now it can never be a lack of resources, just a lack of resourcefulness. I don’t build systems out of luxury. I built them out of necessity. My mind is always calculating how things could be more efficient.

Before AI changed everything, I was already deep in the world of systems and community building as the Marketing and Software Systems Director at my church. The scope is massive.

To give you an example, in 2024, Easter drew 32,000 people, Christmas reached 40,000, and we spent 3.7 million dollars in missions and outreach, and we have many, many other large-scale events throughout the year, like our men’s, women’s, kids, and youth events.

It’s not one big organization so much as multiple “businesses” when it comes to deliverables operating under one larger mission. We have an incredible team, but the load is heavy: thousands of emails, text campaigns, advertising strategies, service scripts, creative briefs, and nonstop content across every platform.

These aren’t just events. They’re full-scale productions, each one demanding excellence because every detail impacts lives. Building content systems for various outputs that saved hundreds of hours. Those saved hours meant we could focus on what really matters while getting more output than ever.

That was when I realized structure doesn’t just save time, it multiplies impact.

But the foundation for everything that would follow was laid back in November 2022, when I tried ChatGPT for the first time. I don’t remember the exact words I typed, but I remember the feeling.

It was like a human was responding. In that moment, I knew this was not just another tool. It was a historic shift, like the Internet or the cellphone.

I told everyone about it. My excitement was at level ten, while most people around me were at level two. They thought it was cool. I thought it would change the world.

So I created a Facebook group. At first, I thought maybe ten or fifty of my fellow marketers and business nerds would join. “This will be a nice little mastermind group,” I told myself.

I had built communities before: it’s kind of my thing. My motto has been simple: document as you go and educate as you learn. Day 1: 15 members. “Awesome!”

Day 3: four hundred. “Wait… what?”

That’s when I knew everything would be different.

The growth shocked me and everyone else. Ten thousand members. Then one hundred thousand. Half a million.

Breaking the one-million-member barrier felt like stepping into another world. Each milestone was proof that this wasn’t just a group. It was a global movement.

But growth at that scale brings problems no one warns you about. The community started becoming a spam nightmare.

Generic posts, self-promotion, noise drowning out real conversation. I watched something beautiful turn toxic.

We had to bring in a full moderation team and completely restructure how we managed discussions. I learned that 3.6 million people isn’t just a number: it’s more than the entire population of New Mexico… almost twice over!

Most people can’t grasp that scale, and neither could I at first.