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How Young Adults Help Parents’ Businesses – High Rise Academy

Grant Haugen on October 9, 2025

From Student to Teacher at High Rise Academy

Jack Wendt is the founder of High Rise Academy, an AI Apprenticeship Program that teaches young adults how to market for their parents’ businesses or sponsor businesses. In less than two years, Jack went from having no marketing experience to teaching applied digital marketing at Johns Hopkins University and managing national franchise accounts. His journey shows how young adults can become marketing heroes for their parents’ businesses by applying a clear process.

Why Young Adults Are Positioned to Help

Parents know their trade — whether it’s running a medical practice, repairing appliances, or remodeling homes — but most don’t know how to manage Google rankings, reviews, or social media. Young adults already understand smartphones, apps, and how people search for services. With training from High Rise Academy, they can convert that intuition into measurable ROI.

“Your parent is already doing great things. You don’t have to create anything new. Just amplify what they’re already doing.” — Jack Wendt

Getting Onboarded Into High Rise Academy

When a young adult joins High Rise Academy, they begin by learning the core systems and AI-powered tools that make digital marketing manageable. They don’t go through this process alone. Each new member collaborates with other students working on real businesses, gaining hands-on experience from day one. They also gain access to a library of resources, templates, and step-by-step checklists.

Support is built into the program through weekly office hours held every Thursday at 2 PM Pacific. During these sessions, Jack Wendt, Dylan Haugen, and Dennis Yu answer questions, review progress, and help students troubleshoot issues with their Metrics Analysis Action (MAA) or client work. This combination of structured training, real-world projects, and live mentorship prepares young adults to confidently start improving the businesses they work with.

Step 1: Run a Quick Audit

At High Rise Academy, the starting point is an quick audit — a way to quickly see what’s missing in a business’s digital presence.

Jack’s first project was helping his best friend’s parents, an orthopedic surgeon and an ophthalmologist in Minnesota. Their websites lacked detailed bios and clear service pages. By fixing those gaps and creating simple blog posts about knee, hip, and cataract surgeries, they began ranking higher on Google and booking more patients.

During a training session at Johns Hopkins, Jack and Dennis Yu ran live audits for businesses owned by students and faculty. One landscaping business had no reviews and an incomplete Google Business Profile. Within days of updating these, they began receiving new calls.

Step 2: Build a Content Factory

Once gaps are identified, the next step is content production. The Content Factory framework breaks this into four steps: produce, process, post, promote.

Jack used this framework to help a client with 190 franchise locations. By recording short Q&A videos with the founder and rolling them out across all locations, the business gained consistent visibility on Google and Facebook.

Dennis and Jack also worked with a roofing company in Texas. They filmed short walkthroughs of completed roof repairs and turned them into posts, blogs, and ads. Calls to the business increased as customers could now see real projects in their own community.

Step 3: Strengthen Reputation

Strong bios, customer testimonials, and online reviews drive trust — and trust drives rankings.

A husband-and-wife team running a $10M appliance repair company in Maryland attended a High Rise Academy session. Their website lacked case studies and their Google reviews were sparse. After adding detailed stories from happy customers and cleaning up their online presence, they called the training “the best ROI we’ve ever gotten in business.”

Another High Rise Academy student helped his father, a dentist in Sacramento, gather video testimonials from patients. Publishing those clips across YouTube and embedding them on the practice’s site quickly boosted local rankings and drove more inquiries.

Personal branding is essential for local leaders, as it shapes how they’re perceived in the community. Building a strong personal brand not only highlights expertise and values but also fosters trust, credibility, and long-term influence.

Step 4: Amplify With Dollar a Day

Once content and reviews are in place, the Dollar a Day method is used to scale.

In Salt Lake City, Chris Miles, a 22-year-old student of High Rise Academy, used Dollar a Day ads to promote his father’s remodeling company. Within the first week, they booked two kitchen remodel projects worth more than $40,000.

In Tampa, another student promoted educational videos for his mother’s chiropractic practice. Local visibility improved immediately, and new patients began booking directly through their site.

Proof From the Classroom

Teaching at Johns Hopkins gave Jack and Dennis a chance to prove the system in front of academics and administrators. Senior staff admitted that the live audits provided more actionable takeaways than many courses offered through their own departments. Students left with real improvements made to their businesses in real time.

A High Rise Academy participant in Denver put the same system into practice for his uncle’s contracting business. By building a proper bio page and publishing project content, the business began ranking for “kitchen remodeling Denver” within weeks.

Building Jobs Through Micro-Agencies

High Rise Academy’s goal goes beyond helping one family business. The program is designed to create a million jobs through micro-agencies. Young adults learn to run audits, build content factories, and manage reputation, then hire virtual assistants to execute the system.

Jack himself now manages a team of overseas VAs who edit videos and distribute content. These jobs, often paying $500–$1,000 per month, are significant sources of income in places like Pakistan and the Philippines.

Why High Rise Academy Matters

Joining High Rise Academy gives young adults the training and mentorship needed to put these systems into practice. Running a quick audit, building a content factory, collecting reviews, and amplifying content with Dollar a Day are all outcomes of the program. By becoming part of High Rise Academy, you gain the structure, community, and live support to apply these methods to your parents’ business or a sponsor business.

Jack used these systems to help surgeons in Minnesota, a $10M appliance company in Maryland, a roofing company in Texas, and a multi-location franchise. Other students have repeated the process for dentists, chiropractors, contractors, and remodelers. The results come as a byproduct of following the program and working alongside peers and mentors.

High Rise Academy is a pathway for young adults who want to build marketable skills, help their families, and create opportunities for themselves. You can learn more and apply by visiting High Rise Academy website. “In just a year and a half, I went from knowing nothing about digital marketing to teaching it at Johns Hopkins. Anyone can do this if they follow the steps.” — Jack Wendt

Grok Heavy vs Expert Mode: Using AI Agents to Tame Your Content Inventory

Dennis Yu on October 6, 2025

Welcome to the content avalanche. If you’re a local service business — a plumber, roofer, dentist or HVAC wizard — chances are you’ve been cranking out videos and social posts for years. Many of our clients have hundreds of videos scattered across YouTube channels, Facebook, Google Drive and dusty corners of their websites. Trying to make sense of it all can feel like sorting through a teenager’s bedroom after a tornado.

That’s where the new crop of AI agents comes in. Models like xAI’s Grok‑3 and Grok‑4 Heavy, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT‑5, are no longer just chatbots. They’re coordinated fleets of sub‑agents that can search, reason and execute tasks on your behalf. In this article, I’ll show you how we use these tools in our content factory process, when to pick “expert” or “heavy” modes, and why the YouTube API still beats any AI at one job: pulling every last video from a channel.

The Problem: Too Much Stuff, Too Little Time

Local service entrepreneurs are prolific. We coach them to shoot short tips on clogged drains or roof maintenance, and they deliver. Before long they’re sitting on a goldmine of content — but it’s scattered across platforms. A new assistant hired to repurpose clips into ads will ask: “Where do I even start?” Without an organized inventory, good material rots away.

Our solution is to divide and conquer. Instead of asking a single large language model to do everything, we break the job into smaller pieces and assign them to specialised agents:

YouTube crawler – uses the YouTube Data API to enumerate every video in a channel. There isn’t a single API endpoint to download all your videos; you have to loop through pages using the nextPageToken until it’s gone【966214574924081†L20-L27】. Requests fetch up to 50–100 results at a time, and you can specify parameters like channelId, order=date and maxResults【650976862157015†L60-L103】. This agent generates a spreadsheet with titles, links and timestamps.
Social media scraper – pulls posts and comments from Facebook, Instagram or X. Each platform has its own API or export tool, and we give our agent the right keys and instructions.
File‑system indexer – uses connectors like Google Drive to walk through folders and index PDFs, slides, and blog drafts. Because we use agent mode, the AI can read file names and extract key metadata instead of hallucinating.
Aggregator agent – stitches together the outputs. This meta‑agent removes duplicates, tags each asset by topic (e.g., “water heater repair”), and hands the clean inventory to our human editors or another AI model for repurposing.

The magic is not just in the code. It’s in the architecture: multiple agents working in parallel, each with a clear job, and a coordinator to merge their work. This setup mirrors the multi‑agent design described by xAI for Grok‑4 Heavy; their model spins up 8–10 sub‑agents that brainstorm, debate and merge answers into a final response【655535755099413†L77-L86】. Elon Musk calls it “study‑group mode,” and the engineers call it test‑time parallel compute【655535755099413†L83-L86】. We took that idea and applied it to content.

Grok’s Agent‑of‑Agent Approach

xAI’s Grok‑3 introduced DeepSearch, an agent built to relentlessly seek the truth across the entire corpus of human knowledge【470093476559074†L466-L474】. It synthesises key information, reasons about conflicting facts and opinions, and distils clarity from complexity【470093476559074†L466-L474】. When we use Grok 3 or 4 in our process, we harness this search agent to pull background info or competitor research. The model’s reasoning mode can think for seconds to minutes, exploring alternative solutions and correcting errors【470093476559074†L20-L45】.

We often upgrade to Grok‑4 Heavy when tasks demand extra diligence. Here’s why:

Model	Agents per query	Token/context limit	Tool access	Monthly price	Key strength
Grok 4 (SuperGrok)	1	256 k tokens	Python, X search, Web search	≈ $30	Fast, cheap baseline
Grok 4 Heavy (SuperGrok Heavy)	8–10	256 k tokens + extra compute headroom	Same tools as Grok 4	≈ $300	Spawns a miniature think‑tank; sub‑agents brainstorm and merge answers【655535755099413†L77-L86】

With Heavy, each sub‑agent receives the prompt plus a unique “temperament” — one is cautious, another loves math, another loves web search. They think in isolation, publish rationales to a shared scratchpad, and a referee stitches the final answer【655535755099413†L88-L199】. The result is slower but more thorough. In our experience, Grok 4 Heavy’s agent‑of‑agent design finds obscure details and cross‑checks sources better than anything else. If you’re digging into the physics of a black‑hole animation or a complex plumbing regulation, Heavy pays for itself.

ChatGPT‑5 Modes: Auto, Fast, Thinking and Pro

OpenAI’s ChatGPT‑5 takes a different approach. It uses a dynamic router to decide which sub‑model to run, balancing cost and reasoning depth. Users can still override the system and choose specific modes:

Auto – lets the system decide whether to prioritise speed or reasoning.
Fast – delivers instant answers with minimal delay.
Thinking – takes more time but provides detailed, step‑by‑step reasoning【292075143200784†L194-L199】.
Pro (sometimes called “Expert”) – offers the highest level of accuracy and reasoning depth for research‑grade tasks【292075143200784†L194-L199】.

Unlike older versions where you picked between GPT‑4o or GPT‑4o‑mini, these are now variations of the same core model. A dynamic router decides in real time whether to deliver a quick reply or switch to deeper reasoning【292075143200784†L194-L206】. In our tests, the Thinking mode is usually sufficient for summarising a Google Drive folder or analysing a Facebook page. Pro shines when writing long‑form articles or doing technical research. The lower‑cost modes are great for trimming transcripts or generating quick email drafts.

YouTube API: Still the Best Source of Truth

No matter how advanced the agents get, there’s one place where a plain API call still beats everything: collecting your own videos. The YouTube Data API doesn’t offer a single endpoint to list all videos; you must iterate through paginated results. Each call returns up to 50 videos and includes a nextPageToken if more results are available【966214574924081†L20-L27】. A simple loop using the search endpoint with channelId, order=date and maxResults can retrieve IDs, titles and thumbnails【650976862157015†L60-L103】. We then feed that data into our agent pipeline. This approach is faster and more reliable than asking a language model to scrape YouTube because it avoids hallucinations and respects API quotas.

Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

So which model should you use? Here’s how we decide:

Inventory tasks – Use dedicated APIs (YouTube, Facebook, Google Drive) and simple scripts. Agents can orchestrate the calls and assemble the results.
Basic summarisation and classification – ChatGPT‑5’s Fast or Thinking modes are usually enough. They’re cheaper and good at clustering topics.
Deep analysis or compliance checks – Grok 4 Heavy’s multi‑agent “study‑group” mode digs deeper and cross‑references more sources【655535755099413†L83-L86】. Use this when accuracy matters more than speed.
Long‑form writing and technical research – ChatGPT‑5 Pro (a.k.a. Expert) or Grok Heavy both work. ChatGPT‑5 Pro offers step‑by‑step reasoning【292075143200784†L194-L199】; Grok Heavy brings multiple perspectives.
Cost‑sensitive tasks – Stick with standard Grok 4 or ChatGPT’s Auto/Fast modes. Save the heavy modes for high‑impact projects.

Final Thoughts

AI agents aren’t magic fairy dust. They’re tools that shine when you give them clear roles, reliable data and a well‑designed workflow. By dividing the grunt work among specialised agents, local service businesses can finally tame the chaos of their content libraries. At the end of the day, the combination of API‑driven data collection and multi‑agent reasoning gives you the best of both worlds: speed, accuracy and sanity. And if you’re wondering whether to splurge on Grok’s heavy mode or stick with ChatGPT’s Pro, just ask yourself: Is this job worth a study group of eight AI brains? If yes, fire up the Heavy engines; if not, keep it lean and mean.

To explore more insights and training resources, check out our other platforms: BlitzMetrics, DennisU.com, and JackWent.com.

High Rise Influence University Program: Detailed Guide

Dennis Yu on October 5, 2025

This expanded guide builds on our overview of the High Rise Influences AI Apprenticeship Program, or High Rise Academy, giving you deeper insight into how we help apprentices turn passion into a professional career. From paid client work to mentorship and advanced certifications, here’s what sets our program apart.

Hands-On Paid Work & Real Client Experience

Our apprentices don’t just study theory – they learn by doing. After completing the foundational courses, apprentices can qualify to become part of the Digital Marketing Training System. Entry-level specialists start at $10 per hour, with tiered raises of $5 per hour as they earn certifications. This paid work isn’t busywork; apprentices produce deliverables for real clients, gaining the experience and case studies needed to build personal brands and portfolios.

Mentorship & Career Guidance

Mentorship is at the core of our program. Dennis Yu credits his own success to mentors and encourages apprentices to follow the same path. We teach a simple four-step approach: follow the mentor’s content, show you’ve done your homework, demonstrate gratitude, and offer small favors in return. Our faculty members and industry professionals guide apprentices through project reviews and career planning, helping them make the leap from apprentice to marketing professional.

Entrepreneurial Skills & Building Agencies

Many of our apprentices aim to start their own agencies. That’s why our curriculum covers practical advice on scaling, managing freelancers, and working with big clients. We emphasize balancing learning with networking and execution to avoid common startup pitfalls. Whether you want to launch your own agency or become a high-impact marketer in a larger organization, this program equips you with entrepreneurial skills.

Faculty & Administrator Options

We offer a range of options for universities and organizations interested in collaborating. These include one-hour live webinars on topics like Facebook Ads for $1 a day, project management, personal branding, content marketing, and measuring social media ROI. Qualifying apprentices can join the specialist program to earn while they learn, advancing based on performance. For colleges and student groups, Dennis Yu waives his standard speaking fee for on-campus workshops and keynotes, sharing his experiences from Yahoo! and his predictions for the future of digital marketing.

Partnerships & Schools

The High-Rise Influence University Program collaborates with a growing list of educational institutions. Partners have included the University of Louisville, UC San Diego, BYU, Hofstra University, Ridgewater College, Syracuse University, the University of Connecticut, the University of San Diego, LDS Business College, and Baruch College. These partnerships help integrate our curriculum into degree programs and create employment pipelines for apprentices.

Real-World Systems & Processes

We use checklists and processes similar to those found in aviation and surgery to ensure repeatable excellence. Frameworks like the Topic Wheel and 3×3 Goals help apprentices structure their personal brands and content strategies. Our specialist and virtual assistant collaboration model ensures that tasks such as video editing, ad management, and micro-targeting are handled efficiently.

Scale & Ongoing Growth

The program offers access to over 44 professional courses, with more added every month. This ensures apprentices can continue advancing their skills long after they complete the core curriculum. As the program grows, we measure social media ROI and define the impact of likes, comments, shares, and reviews to set the standard for social measurement.

Conclusion & Next Steps

The High-Rise Influence University Program doesn’t just teach marketing; it creates employable, experienced marketers with personal brands and real client results. Whether you’re an aspiring marketer, a university partner, or a business seeking certified talent, we invite you to explore the program and discover how it can accelerate your goals.

Interested in joining? Read our main overview of the High-Rise Influence University Program here: https://highriseinfluence.net/high-rise-influence-university-program/. Or contact us to learn more about partner packages and opportunities.

Building Practical Skills with High Rise Academy

Jack Wendt on October 3, 2025

Many young adults wonder what comes after high school. Retail or fast food jobs are easy to get, but don’t provide transferable skills. College is an option, but it doesn’t always connect directly to real work. High Rise Academy offers an alternative: apprentices work with real businesses, apply AI tools, and learn by producing measurable outcomes.

This article is based on a session led by Jack Wendt and Dylan Haugen, where they discussed how the program works in practice. You can watch the original video session here.

Who This Is For

The GCT framework—Goals, Content, Targeting—is a simple way to clarify who a program is designed for and how it delivers value. It helps align expectations by showing what you’ll learn, how you’ll learn it, and who the program is best suited for.

Goal: Learn practical digital marketing and business skills by working with real clients.
Content: Apprentices apply frameworks, such as the Content Factory, to show results and accountability.
Target: Young adults who want to build portfolios and experience instead of settling for jobs that don’t transfer into long-term skills.

It’s also for parents who run local service businesses and want their kids to gain meaningful work experience early—whether by contributing to the family business or working with other real clients. High Rise Academy provides proof of work—real numbers, real businesses, and clear documentation. Anyone who values learning through action rather than theory will find this program a fit.

What Apprentices Do

Apprentices are matched with real businesses and given practical tasks. They gather raw content from business owners, create social media posts, manage advertising campaigns, and document outcomes. Every week they submit reports following the MAA framework—showing metrics, providing analysis, and outlining actions for the next week.

The focus is on producing measurable improvements for businesses. Apprentices learn to set up campaigns, analyze performance, and present results in a professional format. They also get practice in communication, coordination, and accountability by working with both clients and mentors.

Learning Beyond Technical Skills

Jack described it this way:

“Most jobs extract value from you. Get a job that you can extract value from. Learning from the job, adding to your resume, improving your interpersonal skills and your soft skills—all those things are going to be huge and you’ll never lose that value.”

The program develops more than technical expertise. Apprentices practice project management, communication, and leadership on every campaign. Writing weekly reports, presenting results, and coordinating with teams mirrors what’s expected in professional roles.

Dennis Yu—who has worked with major organizations like Nike and the Golden State Warriors—personally leads weekly office hours, which are open to every member of the academy. Apprentices review campaigns, identify weak points, and adjust strategy on the spot. Understanding what happens in office hours and why documenting progress is critical helps ensure steady growth and accountability.

Building a Portfolio That Matters

Every campaign turns into a case study. Apprentices save screenshots, MAA reports, and before-and-after analytics. This evidence becomes the backbone of their portfolio.

Instead of saying “I know social media marketing,” apprentices can show:

A Facebook campaign that generated a specific number of leads.
A Google Ads report showing cost per lead reduced by half.
An SEO dashboard proving month-over-month traffic growth.

This level of documentation prevents fluff and builds credibility. It aligns with industry best practices such as E-E-A-T principles. Apprentices present their portfolios in review sessions with mentors, practicing how to explain results clearly and answer questions.

Visuals include:

Screenshots from campaigns.
Sample MAA reports.
Quote cards from apprentices and clients.
Analytics charts showing measurable improvements.

Employers and clients value proof. By the end of the program, every apprentice has a body of work they can point to as evidence of skill.

Get Started Here

If you want to stop guessing about your future and start working on real projects, apply to High Rise Academy. You’ll build campaigns, work with mentors, and graduate with a portfolio of documented results. This is not theory. It is work you can prove.

Start your application to High Rise Academy today. Build your first case study and show results that matter