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?
We sat down at our booth in New York to talk about how a service business can grow. Scaling one takes a clear offer, proof people can find, and a process you can run the same way every time.
What a knowledge panel actually proves
Here’s the easiest test I know. Google your name. Does a knowledge panel pop up on the right side? If it doesn’t, the people who want to do business with you are seeing the same thing when they search you.
We work with seven and eight figure founders who have great reputations but no knowledge panel. For one fixed price, our team follows a set process. We collect the ingredients from the client, do the work and get that panel claimed.
Why we give away the recipe
We’ve put out a ton of content showing exactly how we do this. There’s no secret to flying a jet or doing heart surgery either. The know-how is out there. Actually doing it is something else. When all of that lines up, you have the ingredients that can trigger a knowledge panel.
Google looks for proof. It wants to see clients talking about you, your expertise shared on industry sites, and signals across LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and your blog.
One tool gave me free access to their AI search results, and the numbers blew me away. In three days, AI bots visited our site 4,253 times. Claude‘s bot came more often than Google did. And 23 real humans found us through conversations they had with AI.
People I’ve never met now message me on LinkedIn saying they asked ChatGPT about knowledge panels and it sent them to us.
These leads come from playing by the rules, not from some trick.
Custom versus customized
I see a lot of agencies customize everything for every new client. How do you promise a deliverable or a timeline when every job is different?
You can customize, but you can’t do custom. I drive a Tesla Model X. You can pick the seat color and the package, but you can’t put a gas engine in it. At Chick-fil-A you can swap the lemonade for iced tea, but you’re still getting a chicken sandwich.
The best way to get more of the right traffic is to say who you don’t serve. When we’re clear about that, people who fit lean in, and the ones who don’t sort themselves out. I love working with plumbers and HVAC folks, and more of them show up because they see the work we’ve done for people like them.
You can’t make a beef Wellington out of bologna. In a service business, the ingredients have to come from the client. If you make them up with AI, Google sees right through it. The better you are, the better we can make you look online.
If you want to keep going, just Google my name and see what comes up.
I recently sat down with Jack Wendt and Dylan Haugen to talk with parents about something we are all excited about. Jack is the founder and CEO of High Rise Influence, and together we are offering a young adult package where your son or daughter gets mentorship working on real businesses, including yours.
The outlet Jack never had
Jack told a story I love. When he was 12 and 13, he built his own business buying and reselling watches, then took that money and invested it. That was his outlet for the entrepreneurial drive he had.
Nothing like this existed for him at 13, 14, or 15. He had to search it out and build it himself, and that is hard. So he wanted to create a clear outlet for young people who have that same drive.
Now we can team these young adults up so their drive actually benefits your business. That means more calls and more revenue for you.
No age is too early
I am a former search engine engineer, and I am very excited about our AI Builder program. Folks like Jack and Dylan have ignited their entrepreneurial capabilities, grown their brands, generated income from working on clients, and grown their parents’ businesses.
If you believe your son or daughter has potential, and who doesn’t, take a close look at this. There is no age that is too early to start building a brand, learning how to use AI tools, connecting with other people, and learning things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
I bet your son or daughter knows so much about social media and how to fix the iPad, things old people like us don’t understand. Why not give them this opportunity?
Young at heart and learning from practitioners
Dylan is 17. We also have people in our program who are 60. They are all young adults too, because it is about being young at heart.
AI is not just the next thing. AI is like electricity. It is in everything we do, and we have to use it.
I am biased, but I think this is the best opportunity for your son or daughter to learn AI, because they learn from other practitioners. Everything we have is organized into checklists and SOPs, plus live weekly coaching. It is a proven framework we have run many times, which is why there are a lot of Jacks and Dylans. They can talk to any of us, and we have a Facebook group with 40,000 people in it.
If this had been available when I was just getting out of college, I would have signed up.
Growing up with this opportunity
Dylan is a professional dunker who does dunk contests and shows, and he has documented his journey on social media his whole life. We met in late December, early January, and even after five or six years of making videos, he said he immediately learned so much.
What makes Dylan different is that Jack and I grew up without this opportunity. Dylan is growing up with it. He is helping real people who are really good at what they do see results in their businesses, he gets paid, and he is learning skills he applies to his own personal brand.
Come check it out
If you have a son or daughter with that spark, I encourage you to come check out the AI Builder program. Jack, Dylan, and I would love to help them build something real.
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 Haugen.
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 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. 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.
Dylan 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 Dylan learned along the way. He is being paid for it because he was able to qualify.
Dennis Yu explains how franchise owners can train a son, daughter, or designated young adult to be their digital marketing and AI social media expert through Office Hours, training, and coaching.
Influence is not a fairytale. I stood in front of a castle that inspired the Cinderella palaces at Disney World, and the lesson was the opposite of magic. Real influence is structured.
What real proof looks like. Most of what makes you credible never shows up online. It sits in your reviews, your clients, your mentors and the work you have done for years.
A lot of it is stuck on your phone. Google cannot see any of it. If nobody records the real work, the influence fades when the people who remember it are gone.
Why fake media does not work. Paying for a mention on a site nobody reads does nothing for you. Fake AI generated stuff does nothing either. If you hear the word fluff, it usually means a machine wrote it. Real beats fluff every time.
What a knowledge panel actually proves
If you are an entrepreneur and you care about your reputation, you want a knowledge panel. It is the box Google shows when someone searches your name. It tells strangers who you are before they ever call you.
Your confidence score. Everyone has a confidence score, and it measures how well Google trusts you. Most people do not know you can look it up. Even people who claim to be SEO experts miss this. We can also see your domain rating and the backlinks that point to you.
Measure it with real data. PR counts mentions and potential eyeballs. We count what you actually rank on, how much traffic you get, how many reviews you have and your average rating. If nobody has ever pulled that report for you, you are guessing.
An X-ray for your business. When you go to a doctor with heart pain, you get an X-ray, an MRI and some blood work before anyone recommends anything.
Your reputation deserves the same. Until we see what is going on, any recommendation is nonsense.
Who this is for
This is for people who do great work and have customers who love them. It is for people who have been burned by the last few agencies. It is not for anyone who wants a quick buck.
Start with the audit
Bring the ingredients and we will organize them into the blueprint. The first step is an audit. We look at the technical parts of your influence, and then we decide what comes next. Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
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.
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 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 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.
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. Go look up High Rise Influence. Google the results and see for yourself whether this might work for you.
