The day before Dennis Yu and I walked on stage at the Pure Green Growth Summit in Miami Beach, we woke up in Rome, had lunch in Portugal, and surfed before our flight. Three weeks in Europe — via ferratas in the Dolomites, 60,000 steps across two days — and we opened the workshop by showing the room our camera rolls.

That wasn’t a travel flex. It was the lesson.

Raw ingredients are the whole game

The photos on my phone carry dates, locations, and context — real signal that Google, Facebook, and the AI models all read. Franchise owners have the same ingredients in their stores every day: regulars, new team members, grand openings, a customer’s first açaí bowl. Most never hit record.

On stage we ran the system live, no slides:

• The 4-stage Content Factory — Produce, Process, Post, Promote — the same system we run for clients at High Rise Influence, scaled down so a 20-year-old shift lead can run stage one with an iPhone.
• Live AI demos — Dennis had deep research mine years of his email history with Ross Franklin and draft an EEAT-compliant article passing authority to Pure Green, while the room watched.
• Entity SEO in public — we pulled up Ross’s Knowledge Graph entry (confidence score 249, straight from Google’s API) and showed exactly which signals built it, so every owner understood what Google needs to see from them.
• A live audit that stung — we graded a Pure Green location page against Google’s quality rater guidelines in front of the owners. It earned a D. Not because the brand is weak — because the owner’s story wasn’t on the page. That’s fixable in a week, and it’s the highest-ROI week in local marketing.

What I love about this room

Franchisees are operators, not marketers. They don’t need theory — they need “pull out your phone at the next break and make a 15-second video.” By the close, that’s exactly what we asked for: you fill the first box; the factory does the rest.

If you run any local business — not just a smoothie chain — the playbook is identical. Reputation is the asset; the Content Factory is how you compound it. The paid-ads half of that stack is Dollar a Day on proof you already have.

• Full 28-minute Pure Green Growth Summit workshop
• How franchisees can get more store visits
• What we taught at DigiMarCon
• Claiming a Knowledge Panel at DigiMarCon NYC

Work with me

Earlier this year Dennis Yu and I taught a high-end mastermind how we combine AI, SOPs, and SEO so an agency can deliver without the founder living in every task. The private 43-minute replay is no longer public. I am not going to embed a ghost. Here is the write-up from that room, plus a public session that teaches the same stack.

That YouTube is DigiMarCon NYC, not the mastermind. Same teachers. Same factory. If you came for the replay button, this is the honest substitute.

What did we actually cover in the mastermind?

Claim and verify a Google Knowledge Panel so the person or the firm is an entity, not a string. Turn transcripts and Zoom calls into articles that can rank. Train assistants on repeatable tasks with SOPs and a QA pass — the McDonald’s fry-machine version of quality, not “the intern will figure it out.” Move from hustle to a factory so you can take more clients without lighting yourself on fire.

Dennis’s line from that day, which I still use: AI will not replace you. Someone using AI will. Most owners still try to grow by hunting more clients. The constraint is delivery. Every SOP, every transcript, every assistant you train is a permanent asset in the Content Factory.

What should you do with this if you cannot watch the original?

Watch the NYC session above. Then read the first-person Knowledge Panel article: Claiming your Knowledge Panel at DigiMarCon. If you have a young adult who should be running this on a live account, that is the AI Apprentice Program.

I run this through High Rise Influence. Dennis Yu is the partner in the room. Power Hour and the Knowledge Panel package live on our teaching sites if you want the paid implementation, not another pep talk. The public method is Dollar a Day on proof that already works.

Build one assistant. Document the task. Claim the panel. Embed your own videos in articles the way this page does — that last step is not decoration. It is how Google and the assistants see you teaching.

Work with me

I am a pastor’s kid from Minnesota who trained volunteers on cameras before I had a job title. That habit — build the system, then let other people run it — is what got me to High Rise Influence and to the work I do with Dennis Yu.

Dennis came to the house with no script. We talked family, church, and the rooms that opened because I showed up before I got paid. The quotes below are from that sitting, cleaned from the recording — not lines I invented later.

Where did it start?

I was born in Burnsville, Minnesota, to Tiffany and Jeffrey Wendt. Dad was raised in a trailer park and became a pastor. With my mom he founded a church in Northfield when I was six. Until I was 18, that was the center of the week. There were stretches I was in the building seven days, something like fifty hours.

Sundays were two hours of setup, the service, then teardown. Elementary school, then high school gyms. Pipe and drape. I was the oldest of what is now seven siblings, which is its own kind of crew-chief job.

Dad’s line, the one I still use: he wanted the ceiling of his life to be the basement of mine.

What did the church cameras have to do with a company?

Before COVID I pushed an upgrade to the video setup. I trained other kids — including my brother — on angles, lower thirds, who calls the shots. When lockdowns hit, the stream was already a system. Thousands of views. That is still the Content Factory lesson: you document what you are already doing, then you repurpose it. Dennis’s line in the room was that you already speak enough words in three days to draft a book. The work is capturing it.

Growing up as a pastor’s kid comes with a costume people want you to wear. I did not always fit it. That friction is useful. Leadership is not pleasing the room. It is being true to what you will actually build.

How did unpaid work get me in the room?

I met Caleb Guilliams at a business event in Denver as a teenager. He needed a free intern. I said yes. Years in the background, learning systems at BetterWealth. After military training I asked for a real interview. The earlier unpaid stretch was the proof. If I had only shown up when I needed a salary, there was nothing to point at.

Caleb is also how I got to Dennis Yu. Not a cold LinkedIn with no context. Work, then introductions. Dennis later put me in rooms with operators I would not have reached alone — including time with Adam Townsend while the Vizio deal was in motion, which I wrote up through our canon: from billion-dollar deals to AI and content strategy.

That stretch is when High Rise Influence stopped being an idea.

What is the job now?

Help people whose work already helps other people get a public record that matches it. Knowledge Panels, the Content Factory, the apprentice program. I still care most about being a brother. Leadership starts at the dinner table. The company is how that scales.

Watch next, all first person, all with the YouTube in the article:

• Claiming a Knowledge Panel at DigiMarCon NYC
• Real influence at Neuschwanstein
• AI Apprentice Program
• Relationships that compound

The article-grader we use internally, if you want the SOP behind how we QA this kind of page: Jennifer, the article grader.

Work with me