What Are Local Businesses Struggling With? We Asked 23 of Them.
This summer, we decided to test an idea at AJC Company.
Could capable late-high-school and early-college students take on discrete, project-based work for local businesses—giving companies additional capacity while giving young people meaningful, real-world experience?
We call the idea AJC Rookies!
But before deciding what these young people could do for businesses, we needed to answer a much more important question:
What do local businesses actually need?
So my daughter Lucia took on a summer research project to find out.
23 Companies. 7 Industries. Some Very Consistent Challenges.
Lucia interviewed leaders from 23 local companies across seven industries: construction, professional services, manufacturing, banking, technology, entertainment and agriculture.
She asked about the opportunities they see, the challenges they're facing, and the kinds of projects that could potentially benefit from some additional horsepower.
When we categorized the responses and looked at them as a Pareto, five issues rose to the top:
AI Adoption & Internal Efficiency — 52%
Talent Acquisition & Retention — 39%
Capacity & Management Bandwidth — 35%
Product & Service Innovation — 35%
Sales & Business Development — 26%
What struck me wasn't simply that AI came in first. That probably won't surprise anyone in 2026.
It was what came immediately behind it.
People. Capacity. Innovation. Growth.
Businesses want to figure out AI. They want to improve how they operate. They want to develop new products and services and find new customers.
But many are simultaneously struggling to find the people—and the management bandwidth—to actually get those things done.
As someone who has spent a career working on projects inside businesses, that sounded awfully familiar.
What If Some of That Work Is a Project?
That's where the AJC Rookies! hypothesis gets interesting.
Not every item on a company's wish list requires another full-time employee.
Some things are simply projects that need an owner, some dedicated time and a defined finish line.
So Lucia also tested potential project ideas with the businesses she interviewed.
The most frequently cited opportunity was social media support, followed by several ideas that lend themselves particularly well to a combination of energetic young talent, AI tools and experienced oversight—including AI-assisted research, AI/search website optimization, in-person event support, competitive landscape research, customer appreciation campaigns and customer feedback projects.
These aren't internships designed around giving a student something to do.
The goal would be the opposite:
Start with something the business genuinely needs accomplished, scope it as a real project, and then determine whether a Rookie team can deliver it.
There's Another Side to This Experiment
As interesting as the business need is, I'm equally interested in what this could mean for young people.
Students hear constantly that they need "experience" to get their first meaningful job.
But how exactly are they supposed to get it?
Imagine graduating from high school or entering college having already interviewed customers, researched a market, analyzed competitors, helped execute an event, used AI to solve an actual business problem, or presented recommendations to a business owner.
That's different from learning about business.
That's doing business.
And it creates the possibility of a pretty compelling exchange: local companies get additional capacity to tackle projects that might otherwise remain on the "we really should get to that..." list, while young people get a chance to develop judgment, confidence and real professional experience.
So, Does AJC Rookies! Have a Future?
That's exactly what we're trying to determine.
This summer project wasn't designed to prove that our hypothesis was right. It was designed to learn.
And 23 conversations later, we've learned enough to believe there's something here worth exploring further.
We are actively considering adding the ACJC Rookies to our service model, and piloting with Lucia and some of her talented friends.
In the meantime, there's one question we'd love more business leaders to answer:
What's sitting on your company's "we really should get to that..." list?
Because there just might be a project in there.
