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 Builder 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?
Parents, if you own a local service business, you can equip your child to be an AI Builder in the AI Builder program and take over the digital marketing. I made this so you can see what works and what does not, and 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. You need someone you can trust, like your 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 I 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 you can trust is your own family. That child watches over the business, learns the tools, and stays on social media in a way the last agency did not.
I learn a lot from Jack and Dylan Haugen. They show me things I think 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.
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.
It is crazy how many valuable skills Jack learned along the way. He is being paid for it because he was able to qualify.
I sat down with Jack Wendt on the Coach Yu Show to talk about something I see all the time. Young adults whose mom and dad run a business, and those kids have no idea they could be the ones who fix the marketing.
Your parents are already doing great things
Most business owners are like me. We fix roofs or air conditioners or do knee replacements, and we don’t understand how all this social media and digital stuff works. Mom and dad are good at doing the thing. But they’re not showing up on Google, they’re not showing up on social, and they’re probably paying some agency 3,000 dollars a month.
Jack said it perfectly. It’s not easy for everyone, but it is very simple. Your parent is already doing great things. You don’t have to create anything new. You just leverage and amplify what they’re already doing.
And you guys as young adults know more about social media and apps on the iPhone than people like me. That’s an advantage.
Self limiting beliefs are the real obstacle
Jack is working with his best friend right now. Both of his best friend’s parents are surgeons. His dad is an orthopedic surgeon and his mom is an ophthalmologist, and his friend is building out their digital presence to get more patients for knee, hip, and cataract surgeries. He’s already driving results.
But so many kids think, my dad has this fancy job, he’s been doing it 30 years, he taught me everything I know, how could I add any value? Jack just turned 20. He’s never been to college. He never even took a standardized test. All those metrics that schools rank kids on don’t apply here.
This isn’t rocket science. It’s derived straight from Google’s playbook. We just add our own philosophies, systems, and teams on top of it.
Jack went from zero to teaching founders in a year and a half
Jack has only been doing this for a year and a half and now he’s teaching on it. He went from not knowing anything about digital marketing to teaching founders doing 10 million a year. He just added a client with 190 locations.
Think about that. If Jack can do it for a guy with 190 locations, you only have to do it for one location. How much easier is that?
Within a few months of starting his own agency, Jack was making five figures a month. That’s more than the average four year college graduate will make.
We audit live and you see results fast
We just started teaching a class on applied digital marketing for Johns Hopkins University. We’re teaching senior administrators at a school Jack says he never would have gotten into. And we don’t just lecture. We work on their personal brand and their web presence live, right in front of them.
One older couple in the class runs a 10 million dollar a year appliance repair business, and they said it was the best ROI they’ve ever gotten in business. Other owners brought their son or daughter to apply it.
It’s like having an X-ray. With a set of tools and ChatGPT, we can instantly see how a business ranks in Google, what’s wrong with the website, and what content is missing. Every time we audit one location, we find something like a crappy weak bio of the founder on the About page. So we built a tool that grabs their experience, awards, testimonials, even the Little League team they coach, and builds a full bio and pushes it across social. That satisfies search, social, reputation, and reviews all at once.
For the orthopedic surgeon and the guy with 190 locations, we wrote articles highlighting what they do. In two days both articles ranked top three on their names. They’ve been in business for decades, yet our stuff ranked. That’s because Google trusts the authority and influence we’ve built over many years.
Why we give it all away for free
You know what drives me nuts? I have a lot of friends Jack’s age who want to be entrepreneurs, and they pay 10,000 dollars for a coaching program that promises 10,000 a month in 30 days. Most of them fail.
We publish exactly how we do everything. You can download all of it. You don’t have to pay us a dime. Google it. There are thousands of articles and videos showing exactly what to do step by step.
So why put better stuff out for free? Because reputation is everything. Every time we do something good and people tell their friends, that comes back. And when we publish about your dad the electrician on our media properties, that passes link juice to his business and to your personal brand, so other electricians find you.
How this gets us to a million jobs
My goal is to create a million jobs before I hang up the cape. If Jack and I tried to put a million people on payroll, we’d never do it. Walmart has about 2.3 million employees and Amazon about 1.6.
There are over three million local service businesses in the United States doing over a million dollars. If we train 100,000 young adults to start their own little agency and each hires 10 people, from Pakistan or the Philippines or wherever, that’s a million jobs.
We start our VAs around 500 dollars a month. Jack asked one of our VAs about pay in Pakistan, and the average there is about 75 dollars a month. Many of our VAs now make thousands a month and build generational wealth for their families. Everybody wins.
The math works for you too. Ten clients at 2,500 a month is 25,000 gross. Your team might cost 6 or 7,000. That’s a very healthy business.
Your first client should be your mom and dad
The biggest mistake I see is young adults trying 15 random things. I’ll be a copywriter, I’ll sell AI tools. If you get that first client and deliver repeatable results, you can get 10 more just like them. That first client has to trust you, and who’s going to trust you if you’ve never done it? Your mom or dad. Or partner with a young adult who already serves dentists or roofers.
Go through the training to learn a quick audit. Look at how the four stage Content Factory works to repurpose videos into articles, blog posts, YouTube, and Snapchat that help them rank. Get reviews, then local service ads and Google ads amplify on top of that. Then do it repeatably with virtual assistants and AI bots, and we’re giving you the code to load up your own custom GPT through our AI Builder program.
If you do good work, we may even refer you a client, because we have more businesses coming to us than we can handle.
Go look up Jack Wendt. Go look up High Rise Influence. Google the results and see for yourself whether this might work for you.
Henry Holm was one of the first AI Builders 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 AI Builder 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 AI Builders. 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 AI Builders 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.
