After one month with Grok Bot, the Southern California audiovisual company finds more productions, prepares estimates in seconds, and shows up in venue searches.
Kevin Luke has spent nearly 16 years growing Above the Line. The company has been producing events since 2010, building a client list that includes Apple, Disney, Netflix, and Sega along the way. Its crew of technicians travels with the company's own equipment to hotels and venues, sets up cameras, sound, and lighting, runs the show, and brings everything back to the shop before the next one.
For an AV company, revenue depends on how many days the gear and crew spend out on shows, so every open week on the calendar is money left on the table. A client might book one big show a month, and for the rest of that month the crew would be back at the shop cleaning and testing gear that wasn't earning anything. About a month ago, Kevin Luke (President and Founder, Above the Line) started using Grok Bot and asked it to look at his calendar, spot the empty stretches, and start pursuing leads. Since then Grok Bot has built him a new company website, aboveav.com, 146 venue landing pages, an inventory control and quoting system, and a pair of sales Bots that work every day. Above the Line's sales pipeline has already increased by 140%.
“My plan is for the company to double in revenue in the next 12 months based on Grok Bot alone, just by looking to see when we have open weeks and doing sales to fill those spots.”
Kevin's two busiest Bots are Clarity, which handles research, and Synergy, which handles sales and marketing. Every two hours they search for events happening in Southern California, pull 4 new leads, and write an outreach email for each one based on Kevin's direction. The copy lands in Kevin's email drafts folder, where he checks the content before telling Grok Bot to send. He says he rarely has to change one. The email even encourages the planner to get a quote from the venue's in-house AV company so they can compare prices.
Finding the right event decision maker used to be the slow part. The AI tools Kevin tried before kept leaving the event planner's email column empty unless he walked them through company websites, LinkedIn pages, and social media himself.
“As soon as I brought in Grok Bot and gave it a prompt, it just did what I was looking for. I didn't have to give it extra instructions. It was just doing it. Grok Bot was filling in all the columns with email addresses immediately.”
Kevin gave Grok Bot about 20 terms planners use for events, like conference, gala, and fundraiser, and had it check each hotel for matching events over the next 14 months. Bookings from that outreach quickly filled the open weeks on Above the Line's Q4 show calendar. In the last three weeks more than 30 planners have replied to the outreach email with a request for proposal. So far, 11 events have been booked from that outreach, and about 15 more quotes are awaiting approval.
“My bottleneck before was the number of shows on the books, and that's no longer the case. The next bottleneck is the new number of detailed quotes my producers need to create, which I'm getting Grok Bot to help with.”
When a recent RFP came in, Kevin dragged its two attachments into Lucy, his chief of staff Bot, and asked her to make an estimate. Lucy put it straight into AboveHub, the inventory, quoting, and labor tracking system Grok Bot built for Above the Line. AboveHub fills in every item the client asks for and warns Kevin when gear is short, like an event that needs more equipment than the shop has on hand. The PDF it produces breaks out equipment by room, adds subtotals and a labor breakdown, applies a 3.5% fee for credit card payments, and adjusts the cancellation terms depending on how the client pays.
“Grok Bot created an accurate estimate for me in 30 seconds, which normally would take one of my producers an hour or two to create.”
Kevin's team has gone from building 2 to 3 quotes a week to about 10 to 12, which means Above the Line can bid on four to five times as many shows. Every extra quote is another chance to fill an open week.
AboveHub also tracks incoming payments and every upcoming show. It replaced a separate paid subscription Kevin no longer needs, along with work his team used to do across a few other tools.
Grok Bot also built Above the Line's new website, including a scrolling ticker of client logos and a client list. Kevin then had it put together a target list of 146 hotels and event spaces in Southern California with more than 5,000 square feet of meeting space. Together they built one pilot venue page, for the Hyatt Huntington Beach, with ceiling heights, ballroom specs, room layouts, downloadable capacity charts, photos of the ballroom and lawn, and a button to reach Above the Line's sales team. Over one weekend, Kevin had Grok Bot duplicate that page for the rest of the list, check a few times for duplicates, and make sure the photos matched the right rooms.
All 146 properties now have a live page, built to show up when someone searches for audiovisual services at a specific venue.
Kevin manages much of this from his phone, with Grok Bot handling the execution. While Above the Line was running production for an event in San Francisco, he asked Grok Bot to add a new client logo to the website's ticker, along with a photo of the stage and LED wall. The first version of the logo was a light gray that was hard to read, so he asked for black, and it was done within a couple of minutes.
Not every Bot is about the business. Kevin has a family Bot that keeps track of his daughters' soccer and tennis schedules, PTA meetings, and whose turn it is to bring snacks.
“I get so wrapped up in my events and my business that now I have the family Bot that reminds me, hey, don't miss the soccer game.”
All of Grok Bot's leads so far come from searches limited to Southern California. Above the Line also works in San Francisco and Las Vegas, so widening the search to those markets is the obvious next step. More booked shows will eventually test how much gear, how many trucks, and how many people the company has, but those are the kinds of problems Kevin is happy to have after years of trying to fill his calendar.
“I don't see limits now on what the company can do.”
Whether you need help finding new customers, handling the busywork, or building the tools your team runs on, try Grok Bot and see what it can take on for you.
