If every other event has a stage, get rid of it entirely.
CoLab Live was never built to be another conference. No stages, no booths, no dark ballroom with one voice talking at a room full of people checking their phones. Over 100 leaders and six trainers from competing companies spent two days in San Antonio working through the same real problems, at the same tables, out loud.
This was round two. Charlotte sold out first. San Antonio sold out next. And judging by the response since, round three in April is going to fill even faster.
The Whole Point Was Never the Stage
Ryan Taft built CoLab Live around a simple bet: if every other industry event puts vendors behind booths, put them in the audience instead. If every other event has people quietly taking notes, make it impossible to stay quiet. If every other event has a stage, get rid of it entirely.
"CoLab Live creates space to step out of the day-to-day, reset perspective, and rebuild the clarity and energy required to lead effectively without burning out or becoming the bottleneck." That's how the event frames itself to attendees, and it shows in how the two days are structured. Every major session is followed by what the workbook calls a CoLab Activity, a working session built to send leaders home with something they can use immediately, not just something they heard.
Six trainers from six different companies led the sessions: Ryan Taft on culture and leadership architecture, Cory Charles of The Superhero Mindset on resilience and identity, Caleb Guilliams of BetterWealth on financial clarity, Cassy Williamson on relational leadership and trust, Lindsey Ayala on AI-powered leadership, Jen Barkan of Do You Convert on the buyer journey, and Jeremiah Gore of Crossroads Coaching on coaching systems and legacy.
What Actually Got Built in the Room
A few frameworks from the two days are worth pulling out on their own, because they're the kind of thing a leader can put to work Monday morning.
Ryan opened with the HOUSE framework, a way of auditing where a leader's time actually goes across Health, Occupation, Unit (family), Spiritual life, and Economics. The session's hardest truth landed early: you cannot add margin to your life without removing something first. The Elimination Habit that followed gives leaders three buckets for anything competing for their time. Delete it if it adds no value. Delegate it if it has value but doesn't require you specifically. Defer it if it matters, just not right now.
Cory Charles followed with a session built around one line that stuck with the room: you can't lead if you're broken. His framing of resilience wasn't about pushing through more, it was about staying clear when things get chaotic instead of reactive. "Your team will not outperform your internal state" was the sentence attendees kept repeating back to each other at the tables.
Cassy Williamson's session introduced the E.A.G.R. Leadership Loop, Empowerment, Action, Growth, Repeatability, framed around a distinction that reframes how most leaders think about pressure. Pressure-based leadership gets activity without initiative. Trust-based leadership gets initiative without being asked. "Fear creates compliance. Trust creates commitment," she told the room. "Those are two very different teams."
Jeremiah Gore ran two sessions that paired well together. The first introduced the Skill/Will Matrix, a simple radar for figuring out where every person on a team actually sits right now, not where they used to be or where they could be. High skill and high will means empower them. Low skill and high will means invest heavily, that's the highest-return coaching target in the room. High skill and low will means something changed and needs a real conversation, not a coaching plan. Low skill and low will means it's time to manage them out. His second session flipped the lens from who to coach to what to coach, introducing five ways leaders can actually gather intel on the microskills that are quietly costing their team deals, things too subtle to show up in a CRM report.
Cory Charles closed the coaching thread with a framework for turning observation into actual behavior change: See, Name, Link, Ask, Practice, Commit. The distinction he drew was sharp. "You're not a strong closer" creates defensiveness. "You presented price before asking for a commitment" creates clarity. Behavior over blame is the whole shift.
The AI Session That Had People Talking in the Hallways
Lindsey Ayala's session, The AI-Powered Sales Leader, became one of the most talked-about parts of the two days. She introduced what the workbook calls the AI Leadership Leverage Curve, a spectrum for deciding what AI should own and what still requires a human leader's judgment, coaching, and relationships. Not every task needs automation, and not every process needs full autonomy. The real work is deciding, deliberately, which is which.
She paired that with a practical framework for getting better results out of any AI tool: B.R.I.E.F. Background gives it the context it needs. Role tells it who it should be and who it's helping. Instructions define the job expectations and the outcome you actually want. Examples show it what good looks like. Feedback means coaching it, the same way you'd coach a person, refining the output until it's actually useful.
One attendee summed up the reaction well after the fact. Someone at a nearby table had never seen an AI session that wasn't theoretical before. This one was different because the person teaching it had actually built what she was describing.
What the Room Actually Said
The feedback since the event has been direct. Jessica Metcalf, Director of Sales, Marketing and Design at Thomsen Homes, put it this way: "CoLab in San Antonio was one of the best events I've attended in a long time. The room was full of leaders across the home building industry, and the collaboration was real, peers speaking candidly about what's actually working (and not working) for them, and genuinely willing to share both the struggles and the wins. Two days, and I walked away having learned as much from the conversations in between sessions as I did from the content itself."
Karolyn Shelton of Riverside Homes described a similar shift: "No matter where you are in your leadership journey, CoLab Live is 100% worth it. What made this experience so different for me was that it wasn't just sitting in a room listening to people talk about leadership. We were actually TALKING about leadership. The good parts, the hard parts, the things we're still figuring out."
One City, Once a Year
There's only one CoLab Live in 2027, and it's back in San Antonio. Charlotte sold out. This year's San Antonio event sold out too. Based on the early interest already coming in, from clients bundling seats into their renewal agreements before the general invite even goes out, next April is on the same track.
If your leadership team wasn't in the room this time, this is the moment to change that before the seats are gone again.
CoLab Live returns to San Antonio, TX on April 8-9, 2027. More info and registration: