How We Got Paid to Learn Business Instead of Paying Tuition
I’m Dylan Haugen, and I want to be straight with you about something. For a long time I thought about starting a business, but I honestly didn’t know where to start. Then I got involved with Local Service Spotlight, which we call LSS. Over the last few months I’ve learned more about business than I had in my entire life up to that point.
The best part is that we got paid to learn this stuff. We didn’t pay tuition. We were doing real work for real clients the whole time.
I sat down with Jack Wendt and Sam McLeod to talk about what we’ve learned. Here’s how it went.
Sam opened by laying out what this has taught us. It’s more than tools. It’s communication, business skills, dealing with equity, figuring out how to pay people, and handling client relations. Those are the skills that actually carry you forward as a young entrepreneur.
The reply all lesson school never taught
Jack’s story made me laugh because I think a lot of people can relate. When he first started using email, he’d hit Reply instead of Reply All every single time. He had no clue how to work in a team. The guys had to tell him, hey, you just replied to me, this is a thread with 20 people on it. Nobody teaches you that in school. It’s so simple, and you just don’t know until somebody tells you.
That was only the start for Jack. As we put together the business plan for LSS, he got into the details of vesting schedules, how many shares we’d put out, and how our investor pool would work. Maybe some high level accounting class touches on that. We’re learning it by actually doing it.
Learning business by doing real work
For me, a big shift was how meetings work. During COVID I did some Zoom for school, but it wasn’t structured and it definitely wasn’t talking to clients. Most of us just sat there with our cameras off. Now I get on calls with really high level entrepreneurs and business owners and help them claim their Google Knowledge Panels. That’s a huge skill, and it isn’t taught in school or pretty much anywhere else.
Jack put it best. Everybody would agree it’s way better to get paid to learn business than to pay to learn business.
Helping a billionaire claim his knowledge panel
A few weeks ago Jack and Sam got on a call with a billionaire in the home services industry. Thousands of businesses look to this guy for help, and he already has one of the biggest brands in home services. And here they are at 20 and 22, helping him claim his Knowledge Panel and improve his brand. If you look at that from the outside, you’d ask what two guys that age could possibly offer him. Turns out, a lot.
If you have never seen a knowledge panel, it is the box that shows up on the right side of a Google search for a person or brand. Claiming it is a real, practical skill, and we are doing it for people at the top.
Client relations, ownership and delivering fast
Sam talked about what it means when clients trust you. They pay us, and they trust us with their reputation. That comes with real responsibility. Part of it is communication and being able to put your thoughts into words. The other part is ownership. If you mess up, you own it, and you have to be okay with that. Those lessons are hard, but they’re good ones.
He also said you have to deliver, and deliver fast. Clients want to feel taken care of. They want to know their money is going to come back as a return and not just sit there as an expense.
I added that this ties right into working on a team. People think teamwork means pushing things off onto someone else. A lot of the time it actually means taking one thing and doing it all the way through yourself. We use do, delegate, delete to figure out the best use of each person’s time. But a lot of the time, carrying a project start to finish yourself is just faster.
Passing mentorship forward
Jack wrapped up by talking about our mentor, Dennis Yu. Dennis has spent 30 years in some of the most influential rooms out there. Masterminds, big stages, even meetings with sitting presidents. Now he’s pouring that into us, and we’re learning from someone who has already done it firsthand.
Dennis was sitting right there while we filmed, and Jack thanked him on camera. Jack said we want to take that gift of mentorship and pass it forward the same way it was passed to us.
If you want these skills
Sam closed it out. If you’re a young adult and you want to learn how to run a business, how equity and investing work, how to handle clients and deliver results, and how to get better at accountability and communication, reach out. That’s why we built the AI Builder program. It’s a real program with a real investment, and it’s built so we can help you learn the way we did.
So what would you rather do, pay to learn business or get paid to learn it?