Back then it was on Bellevue Gold (ASX:BGL) , which two years earlier had picked up its namesake gold project in Western Australia.

Parsons’ brought his “playbook” to Bellevue of using the drill bit to create serious value uplift for previously unloved assets.

The Bellevue gold deposit had been unloved for 20 years on the assumption that it had run out of its high-grade ore.

Parsons and crew changed all that by discovering new high-grade ore shoots so by the time he first appeared at Cutting Edge in 2019, Bellevue had grown from a penny dreadful to a company with a $350 million market cap.

Bellevue has since gone on to become a gold producer and now boasts a $2 billion tag.

Parsons moved on from executive duties from Bellevue a while ago but remains on the board.

All that is by way of background to Parsons’ return visit on Tuesday night to Cutting Edge, this time running the playbook as managing director of FireFly Metals (ASX:FFM) .

Parsons told the Town Hall gathering that while Bellevue has been a great success, FireFly would hopefully be a repeat performance “because it is exactly the same playbook.”

FireFly’s Bellevue is the Green Bay copper-gold project in Newfoundland, acquired at the end of last year for what Parson’s said was an absolute bargain price of $A65 million.

It came with a 39.2Mt resource grading 2.07% copper equivalent for 811,000t of contained copper, as well as $250m worth of infrastructure left behind by the previous owner when it ran out of working capital.

“Having that infrastructure there is a massive head start and will allow us to get into production quicker,’’ Parsons said.

But as was the case at Bellevue, Parsons has a team of drill rigs whirring away at Green Bay to first grow the resource in support of a bigger Green Bay on its return.

“There is a resource statement coming out in September/October and there will be another resource statement coming out in March of next year, and you will see upscaled (development) studies coming out immediately after that,” Parsons said.

The market’s expectation is that Green Bay could be returned as a 40,000tpa-60,000tpa copper equivalent producer.

That sort of expectation is what has powered FireFly’s market value since it acquired Green Bay to $404m this week at a share price of 84c.

Unlike fellow ASX copper stocks Sandfire Resources (ASX:SFR) and Metals Acquisition (ASX:MAC) , to which FireFly will increasingly be compared as its 40,000tpa-60,000tpa potential unfolds, FireFly has held its share price since May when the copper price peaked at $US5.20/lb.

Copper is back at $US4.15/lb – still up on last year’s $US3.85/lb average – and the share prices of Sandfire and Metals Acquisition have fallen 17% and 13.5%, respectively.

Another worthwhile comparison is with Canada’s Foran, which is developing the McIlvenna Bay copper project in Saskatchewan. Its shares are down 21% since May.

A bigger point is that the two companies that make the most sense to compare FireFly with in terms of the scale of their projects – Metals Acquisition and Foran – each have market caps in Aussie dollars of $1.7 billion.

So there is a big prize to be had for FireFly to get in to the 40,000tpa-60,000tpa groove as a copper producer. That is partly reflected in the mean of analyst share price targets on the stock of $1.27 ($610 million market cap), 51% higher than the current share price.

Barrenjoey is the highest with a $1.60 price target ($769m).

The pages of Parson’s playbook are flipping over fast, with that previously mentioned resource update in September/October now just around the corner.