Authority is borrowed before it is earned. Everything I have built so far runs on relationships — the mentors, founders, and operators on this page. Each one gets a real page here, not a logo wall: their work, what we built together, and links that help them rank on their own name. Dennis Yu taught me this habit by doing it for me: honor the people you work with, in public, with structure Google can read.
The rule I follow: everyone I build with gets a card below, and a first-person honor page when the stories earn it — the same two-tier system Dennis documented at dennisyu.com/card-vs-honor-page.
The people
Watch how we build
Dennis Yu and I on how meaningful connections actually get built — and the Pure Green Growth Summit workshop we taught together in Miami Beach.
Real moments, not stock photos
Every card on this page links to dated photos and videos. A sample:
People · conversations · shared work
People Jack Wendt Builds With
A flight to Nashville, a beach walk in Orange County, a workshop in Miami Beach, and the people who helped turn those moments into work worth sharing.
Caleb Guilliams, Dennis Yu, Ross Franklin, Matthew Januszek, and Sean Klongerbo have each played a different part in my education as an entrepreneur. Some of the lessons came on a stage. Others came from showing up with a question, listening over a meal, or helping a business explain what it does. The people cards above lead to their individual stories. Here is how those stories connect.
I want this collection to be useful to someone who is just getting started. You do not need to have a finished career plan before you can be helpful. The experiences below show different ways to contribute: learn how an operator thinks, make a workshop practical for its audience, or turn a useful conversation into something the next person can learn from.
Dennis Yu: learning together, then teaching together
Dennis has helped me connect personal-brand work with the people doing the work in the first place. Our story includes teaching together and turning ideas into work another entrepreneur can use. At DigiMarCon in Minneapolis, we showed a Topic Wheel: the subjects a person knows, the people they learn from, and the work that gives those subjects substance. Dennis published his recap on November 18, 2025.
The example he used was grounded in everyday service work. A plumber may have years of experience, yet a prospective customer has never seen that person explain a repair. Recording a useful moment and explaining it clearly makes the experience easier to understand. The same idea applies to a young entrepreneur. A workshop, a helpful conversation, and a small piece of completed work give people something concrete to remember.
Our recorded conversation about meaningful connections is a good place to start. It belongs beside the photos because it adds the part a photograph cannot carry: the explanation. For someone building a first portfolio, the practical lesson is to connect the person, the work, and the lesson. Ask a thoughtful question, do something useful with the answer, and make it easy for the other person to see what you learned.
Ross Franklin: making a workshop useful to franchise owners
Ross Franklin brought Dennis and me into a room of Pure Green franchise owners at the June 2025 Growth Summit at the Eden Roc in Miami Beach. His role in this story is very specific: he was the host who gave us an opportunity to teach the people building his franchise brand in their own communities.
We worked through the Content Factory and AI-assisted marketing in a live workshop. The audience mattered. A franchise owner needs to connect a national brand with the people walking into a local store, the team serving them, and the neighborhood around it. That gives a teaching session a practical job: help owners recognize the useful material already in their businesses and understand what to do with it.
Pure Green published the recording, so the workshop can continue helping people who were not in the room. The photograph with Ross, Dennis, and me brings back the human side of the event; the recording lets someone sit with the actual teaching. This is a model I like for a good event recap: introduce the host, explain whom the session served, show a real moment from the gathering, and leave readers with the work itself.
Caleb Guilliams: the Nashville trip and the decision to contribute
Twelve days after completing Army National Guard aviation intelligence training, I flew to Nashville to meet Caleb Guilliams. There was no job offer waiting for me. I wanted to learn and find a way to help. Dennis later told that story in his article about building strategic relationships, published on July 11, 2024.
That trip led to work as Strategic Partnerships Manager at BetterWealth. It is an important part of my story because the first move was a decision to get close to work I wanted to understand. BetterWealth gave me a setting in which to develop those relationship-building skills before my later work with High Rise Influence and Tree Savages.
For a young person considering a similar step, the useful questions are whom to meet and what you can learn about that person’s work before you arrive, which questions would make the conversation worthwhile, and what you can contribute afterward. Caleb’s individual page brings that Nashville story together with his BetterWealth work. The photo here shows Caleb with Dennis in Las Vegas, another part of the shared circle around that education.
Matthew Januszek: seeing a business through an operator’s eyes
At nineteen, I spent time in Orange County with Matthew Januszek, co-founder of Escape Fitness. The beach walk and dinner photographs on his page are reminders of a very different classroom from a course or a conference hall. I was spending time with someone who had built a fitness equipment business and could talk about business from the inside.
Dennis’s account of that trip also describes a conversation with Adam Townsend. The value of the day was exposure to how experienced operators think: the decisions behind a product, the business model around it, and the questions that matter as a company grows. It is easy to admire an entrepreneur’s finished work. A conversation creates room to understand some of the decisions that produced it.
The lesson I draw from this experience is to arrive curious enough to notice what you do not yet understand. A good follow-up can be as simple as explaining the idea you took away and the question you are now working on. Matthew’s page keeps the beach and dinner moments together, and our recorded discussion with Dennis gives the broader relationship-building context. These are parts of the same education, told through different media.
Sean Klongerbo: bringing relationship-building into local service work
Sean Klongerbo founded Tree Savages, and we partnered around trust-based marketing and strategic relationships. That connection brings the lessons in this collection back to a local service business. The point is to help the next person understand whom they are dealing with and why the work deserves their attention.
Dennis’s July 2024 account places Tree Savages alongside the earlier BetterWealth experience and the development of High Rise Influence. Those settings are different, but they share a useful question: how do you build enough understanding for a relationship to become productive? A local service business has a team, customers, work in the field, and practical knowledge that can be explained. Those are rich starting points for content because they already matter to the people the business serves.
Sean’s individual card is the place to continue into that work. Across this collection, the thread is the same: show up, learn what someone is building, contribute something useful, and keep the story connected to the people involved. That is what I hope a reader takes from these pages, whether they are beginning a first role, preparing for an event, or trying to explain a business they have spent years building.
Explore the people and ideas
Where should I begin?
Start with the meaningful-connections conversation with Dennis Yu, then follow one of the individual people cards. Caleb’s page tells the Nashville story; Matthew’s page brings together the Orange County photographs; Ross’s page leads into the Pure Green workshop.
How do the people cards and the longer stories fit together?
The people cards give each person a clear place in the collection. A longer story can then explain the shared work in more detail. Dennis has both an individual card and a longer page because the teaching, travel, and conversations cover more than one moment.
Where are the original photos and recordings?
The photographs link back to their existing collections on this site. The two players lead to the original recordings published by BlitzMetrics and Pure Green. The Media and Photos pages gather more of the wider archive.
Sources and further reading
- Dennis Yu: Jack Wendt’s relationship-building story · Published July 11, 2024.
- Dennis Yu: DigiMarCon Minneapolis recap · Published November 18, 2025.
- Ross Franklin: Pure Green Growth Summit · June 2025 event; individual page published August 30, 2026.
- Caleb Guilliams: Nashville and BetterWealth
- Matthew Januszek: Orange County photographs
- Sean Klongerbo: Tree Savages