The College Kid in Wichita Can Fire Your Agency
How young adults get paid right now to fix the businesses that are scared of AI — and won’t admit it.
Back in my day we recorded our music on 8-tracks. I’ve been doing digital marketing for over twenty years, and I’ll tell you something I see in almost every business owner I meet who’s over fifty: they are scared to death of AI, and they will not say it out loud.
They nod along in the meeting. They say “yeah, we’re looking into it.” Then they go home and feel the floor tilting, because the agency they’ve paid $4,000 a month for three years still can’t tell them why the phone stopped ringing, and now there’s this whole new thing everybody’s talking about that they don’t understand and don’t have time to learn.
Here’s the part nobody tells them: the person who can fix all of it is probably nineteen years old and sitting in a dorm room at Wichita State right now.
The owner is drowning, and they’re embarrassed about it
I want to be precise about what the fear actually is, because it’s not really about AI. It’s about being exposed.
A guy who built a fencing company with his hands, or a roofer who’s been on ladders since he was seventeen, does not want to admit to a kid that he doesn’t know how his own website works. He doesn’t want to say he’s not sure what his agency actually does for the money. He definitely doesn’t want to learn ChatGPT, Google Business Profile optimization, and Meta ads on top of running payroll and chasing crews.
So he stays stuck. The website looks like it’s from 2014. The Google profile has the wrong hours. Three competitors are above him on the map. The agency sends a PDF report full of “impressions” that don’t turn into a single phone call.
What that owner needs is not a lecture about AI. He needs someone to walk in, take the technical stuff off his plate entirely, and make the phone ring — so he can go do the thing he actually wants to do. Install more fence. Open the next franchise. Train the crew. Spend the weekend with his kids. Eventually sell the business for the number that changes his family’s life.
That “someone” does not need twenty years of experience. They need to be fluent in the one language the owner is afraid of.
The proof is a kid who’s still in college
Let me tell you about George Paladichuk, because he’s not a hypothetical.
George is still a college student. He built a company called NaiL — an AI call center platform for home service businesses. He took it from nothing to $70,000 a month, which is a million dollars a year in recurring revenue. He now serves fence companies, roofing companies, and other home service businesses across more than 100 locations. In a single month, his AI recovered $400,000 in booked jobs for one fencing company alone — jobs that would have been lost to missed calls.
Read that again. The calls were already coming in. The business was already spending money to make the phone ring. They were just missing the calls — because the front desk was built to handle 80 calls a month and was now drowning under 500. George’s software answers every one of them, books the job, and the owner gets to keep money he was lighting on fire.
George didn’t start there. When he joined our program, he expected what most people expect: a curriculum you log into, videos you watch, a certificate at the end. Instead, on his very first weekly call, I sat down with him and asked one question: “What’s your actual problem right now?” He told me. I told him his excuses were stupid and to go do it anyway. He did. That’s the whole story. That’s why he’s where he is.
He didn’t have a CS degree or a rich uncle. He had a real problem to solve, a system to follow, and someone holding him accountable for doing the work instead of talking about it.
You don’t have to be technical. You have to be able to cook.
Here’s the thing that trips people up. They think “AI marketing” means you have to be a programmer.
It’s the opposite. We say it all the time: we’re chefs, not salespeople. We use the tools ourselves. And the actual skill is not coding — it’s being able to direct AI agents like members of your own team, the same way a head chef runs a kitchen.
Look at Cam Hazzard. He’s a twenty-year-old pro dunker — Shaq picked him for the Dunkman League. Cam built a Claude agent that gathers positive mentions of a business across YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, without writing a single line of code. His agent does in fifteen minutes what takes a human ten hours, for less than a dollar. At an AI summit, a business owner who’d been in business 34 years said Cam is the one who finally got her to adopt AI.
A twenty-year-old got a three-decade business owner over the fear. That’s the job. That’s the whole job.
What the work actually looks like
When a young adult comes into our AI Builder Program, we hand them a real business — usually a parent’s, or one we assign — and they run marketing for it like a one-client agency.
They’re measuring phone calls. Running Google ads and Facebook ads. Rebuilding the website. Fixing the Google Business Profile. Cleaning up the reviews. And using AI across all of it, because every one of those tasks now has an AI tool behind it.
Then they follow what we call the Content Factory — a four-step rhythm that’s the same whether you’re marketing a roofer in Wichita or a dental office in Dallas:
- Produce. Capture real work on camera. Not staged ads — the owner walking a job site, explaining why a cheap fence fails in two winters, talking about why he started the company. Real signal.
- Process. Use AI to repurpose that raw footage. One phone video becomes a YouTube clip, a blog post, and ten social snippets. We use AI to repurpose, never to fake — the authenticity of the original is the entire point.
- Post. Push it everywhere — YouTube, the website, social. Sometimes the rawest, least-edited version wins, because it feels true.
- Promote. Run “dollar a day” ads — a technique I built almost twenty years ago. Put one dollar a day behind a video and real humans engage with it. Their genuine engagement is what the algorithms reward. You’re not gaming anything. You’re putting real content in front of real people.
That’s it. No agency jargon. No 60-page strategy deck. A checklist, a camera, and the discipline to run it every week.
A young adult can out-market an agency ten times their size
If you think a college kid can’t compete with a “real” agency, meet Ethan Van De Hey.
Ethan started as a college student doing digital marketing. His agency added $30 million in revenue to a roofing company in a single year, and helped grow Infinity Exteriors from $45 million to $65 million. We call him the Mr. Beast of roofing. He’s 26. He is living proof that a young adult with the right system will outperform agencies ten times their size — because he actually does the work, tests every week, and tells real stories instead of buying stock photos.
The owners who hire people like Ethan aren’t doing charity. They’re doing math. They’d rather have a hungry, accountable young builder running their marketing as if their life depended on it than a faceless agency that treats them like account #4,712.
Why I’m telling you this now
A couple of weeks ago, George and I were in Jacksonville with Zach Peyton. Zach built Superior Fence & Rail into the largest fence franchise in the country — over a hundred locations. He’s not a guy who needs convincing about whether marketing works. And he goes on and on about what NaiL is doing for his business: calls that used to slip through the cracks across all those locations are getting answered now, and that turns straight into booked jobs and revenue.
Here’s what I want you to notice. The reason Zach trusts George isn’t that George wrote the slickest software. Anybody can vibe-code an AI voice agent this year — the technology is everywhere. The reason is relationships. George has real customers, real results, and a real reputation among home service operators who all talk to each other. When a roofer is deciding whether to bet his phone lines on an AI, he doesn’t want the cleverest demo. He wants to know that a hundred other operators like him are already winning with it. That trust is the one thing you can’t download.
That’s the real opportunity for a young adult. Not “learn AI.” Build real relationships with real business owners, do real work that makes their phone ring, and let the results speak. The software is a commodity. The trust is not.
If you’re at Wichita State — or anywhere — and you’re nineteen and broke
You have something the fifty-five-year-old fence guy would pay almost anything for, and you probably don’t even know it’s valuable: you are not afraid of this stuff.
You can learn a new AI tool in an afternoon. You can talk to an agent like it’s a teammate. An interface change doesn’t throw you off the rails. To you, that’s just Tuesday. To him, that’s the thing keeping him up at night.
Here’s how you turn that into money. Find one business owner who’s stuck — start with your own parents’ business if they have one, or a family friend’s. Offer to run their marketing. Make their phone ring. Get the proof. Then do it for the next one, and the one after that, until you’ve got an agency. Some people take it even further and build a software company, the way George did with NaiL.
We built the AI Builder Program for exactly this. It’s a hands-on apprenticeship — like an apprentice plumber or a dental assistant, not a classroom. You get a real client (we’ll give you one if you don’t have one), the checklists and SOPs, a live coaching call every Thursday, a private group of 400+ builders running 24/7, and people analyzing your weekly numbers and looking over your shoulder. You graduate when you can prove results on a live client — not when a year is up.
It’s $7,500, one-time, for a one-year program. Most people who actually do the work earn it back within weeks. There are no sales calls and no gimmicks. We want self-motivated people who try things first and figure them out, who can follow a checklist in spite of their excuses, and who are nice, humble, and hungry. If you need babysitting or you’re afraid of technology, this isn’t for you.
To apply, make a one-minute video about anything — a thought you have, what you did yesterday — and email it to operations@localservicespotlight.com. That one video tells us the only two things we need to know: can you communicate clearly, and will you take action?
The business owners are scared and they need help. You’re not scared. That gap is worth real money right now. Go close it.
Dennis Yu is the CEO of BlitzMetrics and the force behind Local Service Spotlight, where young adults learn to run real marketing for real local service businesses using AI. The builders named here — George Paladichuk, Ethan Van De Hey, Cam Hazzard — are real people. Everything in this article is something they actually did.