Who High Rise Academy Is Not For
Dylan Haugen and I sat down to talk through who High Rise Academy is not for. The filter is simple. Can they show up and do the work.
How Young Adults Help Their Parents’ Businesses Win
I sat down with Jack Wendt for Coach Yu and we got into something I think about constantly, which is why so many young adults sell themselves short before they even try.
Kids already have a client at home and they still talk themselves out of helping, like they need a fancy degree before they can be useful to mom and dad.
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.
From Zero Experience to Real Client Work
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.