Parents, if you own a local service business, you can equip your child to be an AI apprentice and take over the digital marketing. Dennis Yu said this explains what works and what does not, so your child can become a Jack Wendt or a Dylan.
A lot of local service businesses have been burned by the last few agencies. They need someone they can trust, like their own kin, to watch over things and learn the AI tools. Young adults naturally learn those tools faster, and they keep up with social media.
Dylan Haugen and Dennis co-taught a six week module at Johns Hopkins on applied digital marketing. Students teamed up with local businesses and worked on real marketing in the classroom. They drove phone calls and revenue. It was not theory from a textbook.
Why your own kin beats another agency
The person a parent can trust is their own family. That child watches over the business, learns the tools, and stays on social media in a way the last agency did not.
Dennis said he learns a lot from Jack and Dylan Haugen. They show him things he thinks are absolutely crazy. That is the point of putting a young adult on the work.
What to look for in your child
Dylan said the signs go back to being able to reason with the AI and being able to make videos. Communication is another one. If your child gets back to things quickly, that is a very good sign. If you have to chase them, and they say they will do it in a week, anybody can do that.
You can tell ChatGPT to do something and it will make timelines up. What you want is someone who takes action.
Metrics, analysis, action. The action is the important part. Analyze what you are doing, then actually do it.
What Jack is already doing for himself
Jack said that since starting earlier this year he has done a ton of things he did not even know about before. He got his knowledge panel. He got his personal brand website set up.
While he helps clients, he is also learning things he can apply to his own work.
Dennis said it is crazy how many valuable skills Jack learned along the way. He is being paid for it because he was able to qualify.
Dylan Haugen, Jack Wendt, and I sat down to talk through a question local operators keep getting wrong. Personal branding is not a vanity project. For a plumber, a roofer, or a remodeler, it is how Google decides you deserve to rank in your city.
Local businesses rank on people
If you are a Denver plumber, you have to show two things at once. You know plumbing, and you live and work in Denver. Those experiences do not live in a keyword list. They happen through people.
The strongest signal your local business can send is the founder. Then the team that is actually remodeling in Philadelphia. Then the customers. All of that is proof to the entity of your business that you deserve to rank when someone nearby searches for interior cabinet painting, roofing, or HVAC.
Local Service Ads ride on that same trust
Local Service Ads are an extension of your Google Business Profile. The stronger your organic base of experience is, the better those ads perform. More content and more trust help the ads. Trust is the whole game.
Scale still has to be local
What about a brand like Tommy Mello, with dozens of markets and more than a thousand employees? Scale does not replace the local rule. Tommy can be the Gordon Ramsay or Colonel Sanders of the whole brand. The operators, managers, and techs still have to become celebrities in their own city.
That is the beauty of a franchise. The brand can flow down to each location. It does not mean the person running that location gets to skip the work. Dylan put it plainly: we want local service owners to become the local celebrities.
The playbook is free, execution is the hire
Everything we teach on ranking in Google and making the phone ring for a roofer or HVAC contractor is free. The SOPs are public. There are hundreds of hours of real proof. You can follow it yourself.
If you are a $2 to $10 million operator and you want help doing it, you can hire a young adult as a Word AI apprentice through High Rise Influence. If you do not have a young adult in the family, you can hire one of ours. They document everything. It is based on your data and these same principles. Use Word AI Builder to train that apprentice and put the playbook to work.
A plumber expanding the company does not hire someone who watched plumbing videos on YouTube and call them a master. They get certified. Same with a pilot or a surgeon. Digital marketing should work the same way.
When the city inspector comes to a job site, you want green tags, not red tags. Why can’t your digital marketing be inspected the same way? SEO, the website, social, and ads should all pass a public checklist. Nobody should be afraid of the inspector. Google already publishes the rules. Why would you argue against what Google says?
I sat down with Jack Wendt for the Coach U Show and we got into something I think about constantly, which is why so many young adults sell themselves short before they even try.
They’re already driving results
Jack is working with his best friend right now, whose parents are both surgeons, dad’s an orthopedic surgeon, mom’s an ophthalmologist, and this kid is building out their digital presence to help them get more patients in for knee surgeries, hip surgeries, cataract surgeries. He’s already driving results in a short amount of time. And the thing that stops most kids from doing exactly that is a self limiting belief. They think, my dad’s got this fancy job he’s done for 30 years, who am I, I’m 18, I’m 20, what do I know. Jack was blunt about it. He just turned 20 and asked himself the same thing before he pushed through it.
What we teach is not complicated
Here’s what I keep telling people. What we teach isn’t complicated. It’s derived straight from Google’s own playbook on how to dominate SEO. We just applied our own philosophies, our own systems, our own teams on top of that framework, and we made it digestible. Jack himself went from knowing nothing about digital marketing eighteen months ago to running a client with 190 locations. If he can go from zero to that, think about how fast someone could go from zero to just helping one local business, their own mom and dad.
We do it live at Johns Hopkins
We just started teaching a class on applied digital marketing at Johns Hopkins University. Jack pointed out how wild that is, we’re teaching heads of departments in molecular biology and immunology, people overseeing programs that admit five percent of applicants, people he never could have gotten in to see as a student. And in that class we don’t lecture and leave it at theory. We do live audits right in front of everyone. One of the students last week was an older couple running a ten million dollar a year appliance repair business, and they said it was the best ROI they’d ever gotten. We look at their Google rankings, their website, what content is missing, right there on the spot. It’s like having an X-ray. We’re the only ones with the X-ray, and the tools plus ChatGPT let us see exactly what’s wrong and fix it immediately.
First client is mom and dad
So if you’re a young adult and your mom and dad run a local business, bathroom remodeling, landscaping, whatever it is, and you know they’re not showing up on Google or social media, maybe they’re paying some agency three grand a month for not much, here’s what Jack told me. It’s simple, not necessarily easy for everyone, but simple. Your parent is already doing great things. You’re not creating anything new, you’re leveraging and amplifying what’s already there. Your first client should be mom and dad.
Why we put it out for free
What drives me nuts is watching kids pay ten thousand dollars for some coaching program promising they’ll be making ten grand a month in thirty days, and most of those programs fail. Meanwhile we publish everything we do for free. You can Google it, there are thousands of articles and videos showing exactly what to do step by step. People question our motives on that, but Jack said it well, if you know anything about either of us, our goal is to create jobs and help people. That’s it.
A million jobs
My goal is to build a million jobs by the time I retire. Not by building one company with a million employees, nobody does that outside of Walmart or Amazon or a national military. It’s by training up young adults to build their own small agencies, each of them hiring a handful of people, and it compounds into an economy of its own. Part of how that works is VAs starting around 500 dollars a month, which sounds small here but changes lives elsewhere. The average salary in Pakistan is around 75 dollars a month, so 500 is real money, and many of our VAs grow into making thousands and building generational wealth for their families.
How you actually start
The last piece is the four-stage content factory. Once you understand how to do a quick audit, you follow that process to repurpose video into articles, blog posts, YouTube, Snapchat, whatever fits, and it helps that business rank. Get the reviews flowing, layer in local service ads and Google ads, and it all amplifies together. That’s the AI Builder Program.
Do it first for your own family’s business, prove it works, then do it again for the next one. That’s how Jack went from knowing nothing to where he is now, and it’s exactly how anyone watching this can start too.
Henry Holm was one of the first AI apprentices in the AI Builder Program. Jack asked him what he loves about it. Henry said the biggest thing is versatility and freedom while he works.
He has done the work from his house and from his cabin. He can work from wherever he wants, as long as he has internet and Wi-Fi.
Jack said that has been huge for him too. Over the last month he and Dennis Yu went to eight countries and spoke at conferences in five or six different states. They still got the same amount of output done they would have at home, while balancing the work with those trips.
Real dentist client and repurposing
Before this, Henry had little to no work experience. What he picked up first was how to communicate with people, get work done on time, and finish what he said he would finish. Following through.
He used to treat AI like a search box and use fewer words. He learned to reason with it and work with it, instead of only using it as a search tool.
One of the bigger projects has been a dentist in Atlanta, Flax, working with Jack. Henry said they talk with the actual client. They are not just assigned a task. They work with the person to figure out what they need and then do it. That is firsthand experience with a real client.
A lot of the work so far has been repurposing videos the client produces. The dentist sends the original footage. Then they turn it into blog posts, long form or short form videos, and post those to the website, YouTube, or Facebook.
Jack said those are the skills everyone is going to want, and already wants. The AI Builder Program puts you next to people who need exactly what you are learning.
The work transfers
Henry said a lot of what he learned is transferable. The model they use to repurpose a video for the dentist can work for a plumber or a landscaper too. You change the specific details and keep the same repeatable process.
Jack said that only gets amplified by AI tools like Descript and Underlord. You can prompt them to help edit a video. You still have to understand the goals, content, and targeting for that piece if you want it to be good. It is not quite there yet in some areas, and it keeps getting easier.
The first week was mostly setup. Henry signed into the new accounts he got access to. He does not aim at a fixed number of hours. He aims to get the projects done. If one week is tight, he can say he cannot take a project right now, or pass it to someone else.
For an apprentice working on one business, a parent’s business or someone they already know, Henry said probably no more than an hour a day would suffice. You could do more. It would not be a huge amount of time.
What to do if you have no experience
Every week they do MAA end of week reports for Flax. Metrics, analysis, action. At the start it was a little content. Over the months the reports got bigger because they added new pieces, including an SEO report they have to change every week.
A lot of clients do not have much set up. At the beginning the team has to stand up websites and update a site that probably has not been touched in a while. Once that base is off the ground, they can automate more, and the work gets quicker.
Henry’s advice for someone in the same spot, not much experience, not entirely confident, is the same thing that got him through week one. He did not know much either. There are resources, and team members who have done this thousands of times. You can fall back on them, learn, and then start doing it yourself.
Everything is documented. Everything Dennis Yu and BlitzMetrics have done is out there. When Henry needs knowledge panel material, he searches knowledge panel BlitzMetrics and it comes up.
He can ask ChatGPT. He can ask any team member. Tons of resources.
A year ago I was 17 and hearing the same thing from everyone around me: you need to get a job. You’re old enough now. Time to get out into the real world and get some experience.
I did well in school, so a job felt like the obvious next step. The problem was what that step actually looked like. My options were basically retail or fast food, standing at a counter handing people their orders. And I kept asking myself the same questions. Is this really worth my time? Is this actually building a skill? Is there any room to grow here?
There was another issue too. I’ve spent most of my life making social media content around professional dunking, which means I’m training constantly and traveling to events. I didn’t need a job I had to arrange my whole life around. I needed something that worked around my life.
Then in January I met Dennis Yu. He showed me things I could do for my own personal brand, and then he showed me what BlitzMetrics was building with their AI builder program. It blew my mind.
What I actually do
The work is simpler than it sounds. You take a client’s raw ingredients and turn them into digital assets.
Picture a plumber. He’s on a job site filming quick clips on his phone, explaining what he’s fixing and why. That’s the raw material. My job is to take that footage and repurpose it into content that lives on his social media and his website, run ads against it, and build out the pieces that support his SEO. The goal at the end of all of it is simple: make the phone ring.
You also document everything as you go. At the end of each week you send a report in the MAA format. Metrics, what you actually did. Analysis, how it went. Action, what you’re doing next. The action part matters most, and it’s the part most people skip.
Every Thursday at 2:00 PM Pacific we get on a Zoom call together, me, Jack, Dennis, and the other apprentices. We go through everyone’s real campaign data, figure out what’s winning and what’s losing, and work out the next move together.
Why being young is the advantage
Sam Altman said something in a podcast recently that stuck with me. OpenAI has been tracking how older people use AI versus how younger people use it, and the gap is enormous.
Older users mostly treat it like a Google replacement. Ten-word prompts. Where can I find bagels in my hometown.
Younger users treat it like a therapist, a life coach, a career coach, a tutor. They use it to break big abstract projects into small digestible tasks. Same tool, completely different relationship with it.
That gap is the whole opportunity. If you’re already on Instagram and Facebook, already filming things on your phone, already reasoning with ChatGPT or Gemini, you’re not starting from zero. You already know what good content looks like because you’ve been consuming it your entire life. Most clients are plumbers or contractors focused on their actual trade, and they have no interest in learning new AI tools. That’s where we come in.
The part that actually compounds
Here’s the framing that changed how I think about work. Most jobs extract value from you. You give up your hours and get a paycheck, and that’s the end of the transaction.
Get a job you can extract value from instead. Something that adds to your resume, sharpens your interpersonal and soft skills, and teaches you how business and marketing actually work. You never lose that. It shows up in your relationships, in your family, in whatever career you end up in, even if you go a completely different direction.
That’s the real contrast with college. You can do this alongside college, but college gives you one degree and the hope that it translates into one job. These skills translate into anything.
There are three things I’d point to. It’s a genuinely high-level position, you’re managing ad spend, socials, and a website for a real business, and that looks serious on a resume. It’s financially scalable, and these are the exact skills companies will be hiring for over the next several years. And you’re building your own personal brand at the same time as you’re building theirs.
AI is going to be like electricity. Everyone will use it the same way they flip on a light. If you’re an expert in electricity heading into the next few years, you’re valuable no matter what you decide to do.
Where to start
You don’t need to find a stranger to work with. Start with someone who already knows you, a parent’s business, a friend’s business. Deliver real results for one client before you try to scale anything bigger. Most of the apprentices we have actually get their parents to cover the program, which is a pretty good deal for you.
I’m still 18. I’m still training and traveling for dunking. And I’m doing client work that’s teaching me things I’ll use for the rest of my life, and getting paid while I do it.
