GoHighLevel Can Make You A Millionaire...Use This Guide

I just reached a million-dollar net worth at 27, and it all started about 5 and 1/2 years ago when I started my marketing agency. Then I found HighLevel about a year later—about four and a half years ago. Honestly, a lot of working up to this figure had to do with this software, so I'm going to talk about how I did that today and how you can do the same. But one really important thing I want to point out here is to get to this number, I actually had to make around this much in revenue—so $3.5 million. After taxes, expenses, paying my team, buying cameras, all that kind of stuff, you end up with about this much. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way; spent on stuff that I shouldn't have, tried to start other random businesses that didn't work out. And that's part of the reason it took that long. So you might be able to get away with less, depending on how much you spend and how much money you waste along the way. However, this is a fairly realistic scenario: to spend about 5 to 6 years if you really put your head down to save up to this amount. And to be clear, I was starting from around like $25,000 that I had saved up when I started.

So let's pull the HighLevel hat off, put it on, and uh, do some learning. All right, so the first way you can use HighLevel to get to a million-dollar net worth is starting an agency, which is what I did—at least that was the first half of it. Although not the majority of the profit that I made so far came from the agency. You've got a few different options here: you can start like a Facebook or Google Ads agency and maybe do some follow-up and some automations; attach a call center to that inside of HighLevel. You could do some sort of custom-build agency where you're building massive automation capability, all sorts of different stuff, maybe for HighLevel accounts or individual sub-accounts that you're delivering to Enterprise-level businesses. And I've heard of people charging like $10,000 a month for a single HighLevel account just because of the value that it brought to the Enterprise-level SaaS company that they were selling to. Kind of funny that they sold HighLevel to a SaaS company; it was my friend Ryan O'Connor from Growable that did that. So if you have questions, you could reach out to him.

The third option here is just going straight call center. So you could have a software where you provide the callers as well as a software that allows people to call and manage that entire thing. There's also an add-on to HighLevel called Eliza that allows you to aggregate all of the leads into one spot and follow up with all of them that way, so that you're getting the best speed to lead possible. But with the advent of AI, especially voice AI, a lot of people are heading this way with their HighLevel agency—whether it's bots, voice AI, or what I'm doing with my company, Agents AI or AI Launch—same company—we're replacing entire call centers with an AI follow-up system that does calling, it does texting, it does omni-channel follow-up, it provides contextual notes, all that kind of thing. Uh, you can demo it if you want to test it out, and we're charging around $2,500 a month plus $5,000 setup for that. So there's a lot of money that can be made here. Right now, I expect the competition and kind of what can be delivered for what price to come down over time, but for now, there's a lot of money to be made there, and I think there will continue to be a lot of money to be made there, especially for people who are paying maybe five, 10, $15,000 a month to a call center, plus they're spending on ads, and the call center doesn't even work 24/7. This can work 24/7; it's cheaper, you don't have to pay its payroll taxes, etc. So this is a huge opportunity; there's a lot of people taking advantage of it right now and selling much higher retainers than $2,500 a month to follow up with tons of leads from an AI call plus chat basis.

So those are the four main options I see when it comes to an agency. And these aren't hard and fast rules; honestly, I'm going to show you there's a lot of combo plays you can do. Like I said, combining call center with AI, or combining a custom build with some AI, or combining a normal Ad Agency with any of these, or some of the other models I'm going to show you. Just take some ideas and build your own custom model out of this; it's not like you have to follow these hard and fast rules.

So our next model—there's two main options I see here. You can have a coaching plus a SaaS; so that'd be like a high-ticket up-front, 6K, 10K, 15K plus, you provide the SaaS on the back end, or potentially an affiliate play, which I'll talk about in a minute, depending on who you're coaching and how that's going. Or you could do the more popular model that's kind of come out in 2024, which is community plus the SaaS. There's a guy named Will Hurst; he spoke at the HighLevel Summit, and this is exactly what he does for gyms. So I think they charge like 4 to 800 a month, and you get all the stuff you need to grow your CrossFit-style gym: you get the SaaS, you get the coaching, you get the new website, all that kind of thing, and maybe there's a setup fee in there; I can't quite remember his exact model. But he's grown—he didn't say the exact number—but between $5 and $10 million a year just doing this, which is pretty insane when you consider his cost for the SaaS and the fact that, you know, communities are some of the highest-margin businesses you can start. That's huge, and he does have a little bit of done-for-you with it as well; so something to consider. And as well, my friend Max Pen—who you've definitely seen—he's like top 10 in School Games every single month; they have a school CRM, so they're just giving HighLevel accounts for everybody that joins their monthly subscription for the community. What I really like about this model is being able to infuse yourself with cash up front, but also get the MRR, and that's huge, huge, huge in my opinion. All these people selling massive custom builds or maybe getting 10 to $100,000 per client that they bring on board but not building any recurring revenue need to have a recurring element, even if it's just slowly, slowly building over time, because there's nothing like being able to start the month at 5K, 10K, 20K and then sell on top of that—know you have a bunch of costs covered and not have to start every month at zero. Sweet.

So that brings us to our next model, which is just straight-up SaaS. And to me, I think there's two models here that you can follow. You've got CRM SaaS, which is just going either broad or niche, but you're selling the entire CRM and the main benefits that people would need on that. That could be anything from a local business to an online coach to Enterprise-level SaaS companies like I mentioned, and where HighLevel really excels on the CRM side. If you're just selling the basic features, it's going to be pipelines, automations, power dialers, and a dashboard to have all of that in one spot. So if you don't know what to sell when I say CRM SaaS, I'm coming out with a video on that in the near future, so subscribe to see that when it comes out. But the core features are usually going to be the same depending on the niche, and there's plenty of people that have built amazing, amazing businesses on the CRM here. I know of one that's earning over $300,000 a month—personal friend of mine—they picked a niche, they're providing the CRM for them, and not only were they able to cancel all of the other tools they used to be referring their people to, now they own that, and they're just focused on building MRR, MRR, MRR, which is way sexier than again starting every month over at zero.

Now this one is what I call solution SaaS, and this is where you're picking a little bit of a smaller piece to solve for the person. So an example: friend of mine, his name is Clay, he runs a software called Review Harvest, and he only helps with reviews. So how do you get more Google reviews, Facebook reviews, Yelp reviews, and then how do you use those reviews to help you make more sales? So he puts it on their website, he helps them schedule posts with the reviews, etc. That's a really good example of a solution-based SaaS where they just narrowed in on the one thing that's really going to help people, and there's a clear ROI there, and people aren't overwhelmed and thinking they have to cancel five other software; instead, they can just start with him. And then if they're like, "Hey, do you have a funnel builder?" or "Hey, do you have a two-way texting software?" and that's something he decides he wants to offer to his people, he can just unlock that and let them go in. He might already do that, I'm not quite sure; he can just unlock that and say, "Yeah, go ahead, it's this much extra, or it's free," or whatever. But the main thing you want to focus on here is making a small desired result—which is usually just one thing or maybe two things—that you're doing for a specific avatar as easy as possible. So when people sign up for Clay's software, Review Harvest, they know Google reviews are not going to be a worry of theirs anymore because it's done such a good job of taking care of getting that done for them and making it almost effortless. So almost every single niched HighLevel white label, while they may provide some CRM elements, they're probably more of solution-based SaaS where they've got a snapshot that they're starting every single account with, and it's fixing the main problems that that niche has or that that specific avatar has. So when you go super general like this on features, you're going to have to go super niche on the avatar you're reaching out to, or understand that people are going to have a harder time understanding the value proposition and really lean into, "Hey, this can do these core things really, really well for you." But if you go un-niched, that's going to be tough because everybody's going to be attracted by a little bit of a different feature. So it may sound like I'm contradicting myself there, saying there's tons of businesses that have done super well with the CRM SaaS, but you should be careful for that because of X, Y, or Z. But really, it just comes down to your marketing being way, way better here because you haven't probably built such a niche solution as you would with the solution-based SaaS.

As far as what I'm doing in this realm, I'm leaning into more of the CRM side and marketing to people that already know what HighLevel is. Their brand name is getting out there more and more, and while some end-users of certain white labels might not understand that they're using HighLevel—it's just white-labeled—there are a lot of people that understand that and are totally fine paying more than the $997 they would pay to HighLevel if they went direct because of the value that's been added on top of the CRM. But let's face it, HighLevel's pretty tough to get started with, and there's a big learning curve. And so what I'm doing is marketing to people who've tried to sign up on their own, it didn't work out, and saying, "Hey, come back on board, we're going to give you a white-glove onboarding, we're going to give you coaching calls with me so that you can strategically understand how to use this and market your business, you can bounce ideas off of other people in the community," and all of that for $97 a month. If you want to check out that offer, the link is on the screen right now and in the description below.

All right, next up is going to be affiliate, and I bet a lot of you are watching this video because you know that I have leaned into this heavily and started to make a lot of money with this. For those that aren't familiar, if you refer someone to HighLevel, they pay you 40% of that person's monthly subscription for life. If they're paying $97, you make about $42 a month; if they're paying $297, you make about $108 a month; if they're paying $497, you make about $200 a month, just off of referring them one time. And a lot of people give additional help to those affiliates, but some people don't give any additional help at all; they just make a review video, people click the link, they don't realize that they've been affiliated to them, and HighLevel pays you that for life. And for those of you who are worried about the longevity of that and like, "You know, SaaS companies get greedy, etc., etc.," I was talking to the CEO himself, Sean Clark, a month ago, and I said, "Hey, am I still going to be getting HighLevel affiliate commissions in 50 years?" And he said, and I quote, "I sure hope so." And I know that doesn't like engender like all the confidence in the world, but then he went on to give me a five-minute spiel about how unethical it is that he thinks all these other companies—like certain ones that you've probably heard of—who will say, "Hey, if you haven't referred anybody in the past two years, we're cutting off all your affiliate income, and you have to keep referring people if you want to keep getting your affiliate commissions." He said he thinks it's super unethical, and when he says lifetime, he absolutely means lifetime. I think what he said, "I sure hope so," is just like, hands 50 years in the future, who knows what's going to have happened between now and then. But while I also don't have a crystal ball and I can't tell—I can tell you HighLevel is the company I would trust the most to keep paying affiliate commissions longer than anyone else. And usually it's this institutional pressure that comes in once they raise a ton of money and they say, "Hey, to boost earnings, you really need to cut a lot of these affiliates out." And I know for sure that the leadership team at HighLevel has said that if they sell, it will be in the contract that the affiliate commissions cannot go away. So I think that's about as good as you can get when it comes to affiliate income. For context, there are people making over $200,000 a month just from being an affiliate of HighLevel, pushing it. And there's a lot of pros, there's some cons, with hardly any. And this is a really good model if you have the right personality and you have the right kind of strengths here; this could be right for you. And there's no shame in going this route if you don't want to start an agency or a SaaS; you feel like you could lean into this more heavily and do well with it. You don't necessarily have to start a SaaS agency first; I think it certainly helps, but it's not an absolute necessity.

So in my mind, there's two types of affiliates: number one, promotional; number two, technical. Promotional affiliates, honestly, I think are going to be going away as much as they can in the near future because the FTC is cracking down hard on income claims and just outside claims in general. So these would be the affiliates—who you've probably seen them—that are saying, "You can start a software company overnight, you're going to make 10K in 90 days or 30 days," or whatever it is. And fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of people have made a lot of money promoting that way. I personally don't agree with it; I don't feel right if I say stuff like that, so I don't. And I'm more on the technical side of things, which is I just say, "Here's how I am doing this," or "Here's how to do this specific thing and the specific feature." I was at the HighLevel Summit like a month ago, and everyone I talked to about affiliate stuff that hadn't really gotten into the game yet said, "Hey, I really want to do a little bit of affiliate stuff, or I want to go all in on affiliate stuff, but I don't want to be the guy that's dancing around on TikTok or Instagram saying, 'You want to make 10K in 30 days, here's how.'" And I said to all of them, "Look, you don't have to. HighLevel already has so much brand power, and there's so many people already knowing about it, they're doing their own marketing, a lot of the entrepreneurial affiliates are getting the word out, and you can be the person that's helpful in their journey and really understanding the pieces that you didn't understand." And a lot of those people will choose you as their affiliate instead of the person that they originally found out about HighLevel through. So I think between promotional and technical, everybody has sort of a spectrum on where they feel comfortable landing. Good friends with a lot of the more promotional-based affiliates; I may not agree with the way that they promote it, but we're friends, and it's still allowed to do that. They have to see—is cracking down on a lot of stuff, so I would be very careful. Once you say—but another thing to keep in mind about being very promotional, very salesy, overhyping things, is A, it degrades your credibility over time, and B, you're going to have higher churn. I don't have numbers because they can't disclose what everybody else is doing in terms of churn and everything, but while my numbers may be lower in terms of new trials and signups every single month, I'm confident that if I just keep not overselling HighLevel and saying, "Hey, this is how it is, it's actually really hard to get started, and that's why I'm here to help you, and here's the expectations you should have going into this," I'm just trusting that that's going to make my churn way lower than the people who are saying, "Hey, let's make 10K in 30 days."

So what are the pros and cons at the end of the day here? The first pro is you don't have to deal with support; HighLevel is going to do that. Depending on who you are, that's a con because HighLevel support can be very, very hit or miss. When it's good, it's very good; when it's bad, it's very bad, and your churn could be higher because you're outsourcing support to HighLevel. But after people get over the initial hump—hopefully you're helping them with that—you don't ever have to pay a support bill, which is pretty insane. The next one is that it's win-win-win: so HighLevel's winning because they're getting customers and they're keeping those customers longer because you referred them and you're helping them stay. Hopefully, the second one is you winning because you're making money just off of promoting a software that's amazing and has this juggernaut influence behind it. And then the last one is the affiliate; they win because they get a ton of extra bonuses and help when they come on board with you instead of just signing up directly. And HighLevel really, really understands this; they lean into the affiliate system hard; they don't have a traditional sales team because they want you to be creative and they want to incentivize you to make big bucks with the HighLevel affiliate program, and they become this household name without even having to do the promotion themselves. The other pro is there's a lot of adjacent software; HighLevel doesn't work out of the box for a lot of industries perfectly. So there's a lot of things that you can add on top of it, whether it's an ad manager like Playbook or Upsell, support companies like Extend, H Pro Tools, GrowthBar, or just like custom dev built on top of it, like something like GHL plugins. When people sign up for HighLevel, they will be in the market for those extra tools, and so you can literally just say, "Hey, you should sign up using my link here; some more bonuses," or maybe just listed in the course that you give people when they sign up, and it feels nice to have a little bit of diversification. While my affiliate income is like 95% HighLevel, I've been building up a solid base of like 3, 4, 5K a month that's coming from these other adjacent software, which is great. And then my last point here is coattails; you're riding HighLevel's coattails—like they literally are doing something so unprecedented, they're blowing up, and you get to ride that wave; they make you look really good because you literally just make a video about them and it gets views because people are searching and they're interested. And you don't really get that benefit when you have your own agency or your own SaaS because you're trying to be the brand name there, whereas being an affiliate, you get to do that, which is great.

The cons here are you're going to have less control over the support, over the onboarding, etc. When you're running your own SaaS, your own agency, you really get to obsess over the customer experience. And speaking from experience, a lot of people probably think I'm not telling the truth because I referred them to HighLevel, they got brought on board, their onboarding person was brand new, their support person was brand new, and they were like, "This is so confusing, I can't figure out how to use it," and for some reason they didn't, you know, use the affiliate bonuses and they just churn and they're like, "That whole thing is a cult," or whatever. This is a con, but I think it's far outweighed by the pros, depending on who you are. And then lastly, it's not a real business; depends how much this matters to you, if that's really a con. For me, I actually feel a lot more pride and joy over the software, the white label that I'm building, Streamline, over the affiliate stuff because it just doesn't feel real that I'm just like referring people to this business and then they pay me this massive check every month. Hey, maybe that's exactly your thing, exactly what you want, then this could be a really good fit for you. I'm going to give some more tips on the general like how to actually make quite a bit of money with this later in the video, but just so you know the general process: it's going to be content, to some kind of free courses, bonuses, etc., that they get when they sign up with your link. Some people have two courses—like, "Hey, sign up for my free course," and the free course teaches them how to use it, and then the affiliate link is in that description and maybe in the free content description. And then lastly, you want to retain those people as much as possible. A huge, huge, huge part of this is building community. I know some affiliates that get on calls every single day—small group calls; I'm more of a once-a-month kind of guy because if I did every single day, I know that people aren't going to show up. And I love having a big group once a month that can really benefit from all of the conversations, and then we do another guest expert once a month as well, talking about things that people need that I'm not as well-versed in. So generally, it really is that simple. And once you set up this backend mechanism for getting people to convert and then retaining them, it's just about feeding more and more and more eyeballs into that and getting better and better at making content and, of course, getting better and better at retaining, giving more bonuses, better bonuses, more helpful stuff, etc.

All right, progressing—this is the last one, and I'm calling it the ecosystem helper, and it all comes down to this graph. Right now, I don't know exactly how many HighLevel users there are; a year ago was about 60K, so I'm assuming it's 70K; it could be a lot higher than that, but just to be safe, let's say it's 70K. I think the amount of people that actually know it and know how to use it and are good at it is about 7K—okay, so 10% of the people on the platform actually understand it super well, and that's agencies, not businesses; businesses that have way, way more than that. There's a lot of money to be made here teaching people how to use HighLevel, helping them implement it, helping them support it, helping them onboard their customers, etc. And depending on where you are in your career, supporting people that already have huge audiences and are going to start a SaaS or helping beginners just get up and running for their own business or whatever is a really amazing way—

To get pretty much all the benefits that I talked about in the affiliate realm, but charge way more and get faster revenue for it. So, some examples of what you can do here in teaching and coaching: Most Affiliates already do this, so that would probably just be for an affiliate fee.

Build-outs: This one's huge. Again, people are paying $500,000 for build-outs. Most people are not, but you could easily charge $25,000-$50,000 to the right types of clients to build out a system that's going to make them five times that every single month, or 10 times that every single month. There's a lot of companies that do this, and I know they do quite well. And honestly, you get one good partnership with them and you say, "Hey, I'm going to take a piece of the business because I'm doing this build-out, and I'm going to support you technically for the rest of the lifetime of the business." You can do really well by helping them launch and helping them continue.

Next up is development. So, a lot of people, like I mentioned, want to build middleware or extra tools on top of HighLevel that they need specific for their industry. So, a small example: The videographer that I have here filming, his wife is a tattoo artist. A lot of tattoo artists, when they open their books and they're, you know, booking out the next 3-4 months, it's this huge ordeal, and they have to do everything manually. HighLevel could probably help with 80-90% of that. And I was just like, maybe there's one or two things that this automated system that would talk to people, ask them exactly what they want in their tattoo, ask them to provide examples, etc., go back and forth, and actually book them. Maybe there's 10% that HighLevel can't do natively, but I can guarantee you there's a developer that can do the rest of it, and that's where these people come in. I have a friend that's starting a development agency: small business websites, small business tools, whatever. And I was like, "Dude, you got to get in the HighLevel world because there's tons of people that want to build stuff right now." So, if this is your skill, really consider this model.

In addition to that is add-ons. This is basically like development. I mentioned JL Plugins before—that's my friend Jason Ru—and they have this thing where somebody wants an integration built, let's say with dental software like Open Dental or Dolphin or something like that. It doesn't do what they want them to do. Jason will go to that software, try to get in touch with the developers and say, "Hey, we want to build this. Can you give us access to your API?" Whatever. Explain that if they don't, they're missing out on a lot of customers. And then he tells the person that originally came to him, "I have two prices: It's really expensive if you just want to own it, or I'll build it for you if you let me sell it to everybody else too." And that's going to be less. Link below for JL Plugins, by the way, but that's a very small example of the add-ons that exist. The ad management companies I mentioned before, AEX, Play, Ad Launch, is another one that has lifetime links for all of those below in the description. These are standalone tools that happen to integrate very well with HighLevel and have been launched to the HighLevel community. And if you have an idea for one of those that you think would do really well, totally amazing way to get launched. And I know people who are doing very, very, very well with an add-on and not even running a HighLevel agency, or used to running an agency, sold that, they could just focus on the add-on that they built because it was providing so much value to users, and they were easily getting signups because, again, this ecosystem, like everybody knows everybody, and they can refer you out like crazy.

And then lastly, support and onboarding. Technically, this is an add-on. There's a lot of smaller vendors that can help you with onboarding: a lot of virtual assistants in the Philippines and other places that know the software like the back of their hand, maybe don't have the skills or the desire to go start their own white label and try to sell to Americans, so they're trusting you to sell to the Americans or other more affluent countries, and they can handle the onboarding. Or I had a student the other day asking me about, "Hey, I need people who are really good technically with building websites and funnels and automations, etc." And if that's your skill and you don't want to worry about getting customers at all, you can just plug into like five to 20 agencies and be the person that builds out all of that stuff for them. Super, super valuable, and you'll probably have work for the rest of your life doing that. If you want to check out those big three support companies, check out this video here because I reviewed them and kind of explained the differences there. And if this sounds like something you'd like to do but you don't know the system well enough, just go learn it, get a few customers, service them really, really well, learn the software like the back of your hand, watch my other videos that are very technical, and you're going to be leaps and bounds ahead of everybody that's signing up for HighLevel and thinking that they don't have to know the tech. And then you can insert yourself into any of these things for them, and you're going to do very well.

Okay, so I promised I'd talk about this combo: agency plus SaaS. Obviously, very, very powerful. Affiliate plus being an ecosystem helper: You imagine the affiliate checks for a protocol extendedly every single month. Those guys are doing hundreds of thousands a month, and I know that they've referred a ton, a ton of people to HighLevel because obviously it's the perfect connection. So, if you have an add-on or other services and you can give people a discount on those if they sign up as an affiliate, or even give it for free, it's just this massive win-win where they're not paying any extra money, but you're helping them stick on the software and getting 40% of that every single month. SaaS plus affiliate: This is kind of what I'm doing right now. Part of the play with Streamline is to sign up businesses that know about HighLevel but don't want to sign up directly, but part of it is to target people who want to start an agency or a SaaS but don't want to have to worry about, "Hey, I don't know which support company to hire, and I can't afford to hire a support company right now. I can't afford to sign up for UpHacks or CloseBot right now." And so what I've done is bundle all of those together: our support company, UpHacks, CloseBot, and HighLevel, and allowed people to launch their agency for just $97 a month instead of like $1000 a month, which is what all of those tools cost together. And they get their first few accounts for just the $97, and then after that they just pay $50 per account instead of having to commit to the $1000-$1500 upfront. And then when they decide they want to do that, they're ready, their agency's big enough, there's actually an eject button inside of HighLevel, so I just hit eject and I get their affiliate commission automatically. I send all their sub-accounts to their own agency, and we're going to go—The other thing here is when people churn from being an affiliate, it didn't work out, you can invite them to your SaaS and say, "Hey, we're going to have some white-glove onboarding. We're going to help you out." Next one is being an affiliate and an agency. There's a company called ConversionLee—I don't know them, but it seems like they do—where they would refer you to HighLevel, build out your entire HighLevel with their probably, you know, 50-80% of a snapshot and then customize that for you, but they're slowly building their recurring wall, charging, you know, $25-$50k for a setup. And then the last one obviously is being an ecosystem helper and having a SaaS. Good example of this is my friend Tim Seir; he owns GoCSM, which is like an advanced analytics platform to understand what parts of your software people are using, and he's built it on top of HighLevel, so he's helping people out in the ecosystem, but he also has another SaaS that they sell directly to local businesses. Link below for GoCSM—really cool company, really cool product. So, there's obviously an infinite number of these, but just to give you an idea.

So, before we get into how to actually do this, let's talk about the millionaire math: How do we actually get to a million-dollar net worth, and why does it take like $3.5 million to do that? These first three options here to get to a million: You can save $100,000 a year for 10 years. This is assuming you're not putting it in the stock market, not putting it in real estate, etc. I know you probably are doing that, but the reality is over 10 years it's not actually making that much of a difference. I did the math, and at a 7% growth rate, you're probably still going to have to put in almost $900,000 of your own money over the first, let's say, 9 years to actually get there in 10 years. Option two: You could save $200,000 a year for 5 years. Option three: You could save $500,000 a year for 2 years, but obviously your income would have to be quite high. So, I've laid out this scenario here that I think is a little bit more realistic, and it's almost exactly how things went for me. So, to explain this chart, we've got the year here, then we have the amount that you saved that year, we have your business profit (assuming a 70% margin—for some people that may be higher, for some people that may be lower, but I think it's fairly reasonable for the space), then we've got the revenue required to get that profit, and then we have the monthly revenue generally that would have to happen that year. So, in year one, to save $25,000, we need to make $170,000 and net $120,000. That's assuming you pay tax and live on the rest, and that's about $10,000 a month. Year two, let's say we save $50,000; that means the business did $250,000, and we netted $175,000—again, taxes and living on the rest—and that's about $14,600 a month. Year three, we save $75,000, meaning we did about $340,000 in revenue and netted $240,000. That's $20,000 a month. I bet you're saying, "Keen, why are you, you know, making our income go up faster?" I think this is really reasonable for your first three years. There's a massive learning curve, especially if you don't know marketing already. If you have some sort of audience or previous experience or network, this could definitely go faster, but I think that's very reasonable for the first three years. And while my revenue was higher in these—like year two and year three were much higher—my costs went way up because I hired too many people and I wasn't charging enough, etc., and my agency, but my income as far as like profit did look something like that. All right, that brings us to year four. Let's assume there's a massive hockey stick here. We're able to save $350,000, which means we do $1.14 million in revenue and profit $800,000, which is $66,700 a month on average. And then year five, we save our final $500,000 by making $1.71 million, netting $1.2 million, and then paying taxes and living on the rest of it. And this is assuming you don't live like a pauper—like you're not just eating ramen every day of the week, which I did not do. I've lived a fairly decent life and been able to do this, so it's, it's definitely not necessary to like live in your mom's basement this entire time. And if you add all of this up, it comes out to like $3.6 million. For me, it took about $3.5 million, so that's what we're saying needs to get made, and that's probably the trajectory your business is going to look like, especially if you apply what I'm about to tell you, which is the biggest word of today, the most important word: leverage. If you do not have leverage, you will never up your income in that way. If we need that hockey stick, we have to have one, two, or three of these things, which is media, code, or people. And this comes from Devaler Avik, a billionaire investor—really smart guy. He says the three forms of leverage: media, code, and people. Archimedes said, "If you give me a lever long enough, I'll be able to lift the Earth." So, basically, you barely push down on a lever, and you can move something as big as the Earth. That's what leverage gives you: Your minimal input gives maximum output. When we put in a little bit of effort and get a massive outcome, that's an asymmetric relationship. So, let's talk about each of these in turn. The one I know the best is media. If you're non-technical like me, and you like my videos, and you're kind of like me, you'll probably like media the most. If you're very technical or you're very people-oriented, you might like these better. So, let's take a look at code and media first and see how they can help us, specifically when it comes to getting new customers, because if we're going to build to like $1.71 million in revenue in our fifth year, probably going to need a lot of customers. Lesser that guy selling HighLevel build-outs for $500k, in which case, like, please DM me because I want to talk to you.

So, let's talk about code. What are some examples of code that give us leverage? Sales funnels: You can build basically a salesperson that's built out of code, which is a landing page that people land on, and it sells your product for you. This is what I'm doing with Streamline right now. I'm running ads to a sales funnel. People don't talk to me; they might have a couple questions for my team, which is people, by the way, sign up, but I'm getting notifications every single day saying, "Hey, you got a new subscriber to Streamline because of a sales funnel," which is amazing. In addition to that, email sequences: Every time you set out some automated emails or you send a blast or whatever, that's code working on your behalf, sending out 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 messages, and all you had to do was write it once and click send. That is leverage. Next up, we've got cold email. Very similar to email sequences. A lot of people love this; I freaking hate it. Think it's really annoying, and it's really hard to set up, but there's a lot of people who are good at that, so you know, talk to them. But again, a system where you can write the scripts one time and send them tens of thousands of times: huge leverage. Same with cold texting. A lot of people say this is illegal; actually, the laws are getting a little bit more relaxed on it. I am not telling you to do this; I'm just telling you that there are people that do this. You can also do it with WhatsApp, you can also do it with iMessage. There's certain tools—I meant to print out a picture of his face, but my printer wasn't working—my friend Carson Fox, check out his channel, be linked below, and there's a picture here; he will tell you all about how to do this as legally as possible. I think it's still a legal gray area, but something like 96% of texts get opened within the first 5 minutes, which we all know blows email out of the water, so huge there. And then the next one is LinkedIn, Facebook Outreach, or Instagram, or whatever platform you want to DM on. There are tools that will allow you to do that at scale—again, write the message once, send it thousands and thousands of times. For Facebook Outreach, the one I like is called LeadBook; for LinkedIn, it's called WeConnect. Links for that below. And as my friend Matt Dinino says, he loves LinkedIn because it's just like a pay-to-play environment. They're like, "Hey, you want to just spam everybody? Like, just pay us like a certain amount of money, and we'll just let you do whatever you want." That's basically how LinkedIn works. And yes, they're always cracking down on spammers, but literally never happens. You can still basically do whatever you want. I, I told him you should write a comedy bit on that because it's actually really funny. So, those are examples of how you can use code. It's not a comprehensive list, but that's literally amazing. For probably less than $200 a month, you can build an insanely, insanely effective outreach system that only requires you to check on it maybe one to two hours a day to manage responses and can book you calls 24/7. That's unheard-of leverage for beginners.

All right, next up we have people. Ignore my scribbles here. You could hire cold callers. My friend Matt Coffee hired cold callers that were in prison, and he paid them $25 an hour to book appointments for him. So, stop making excuses and go hire people from prison. If you don't know why you're buying cold callers, door knockers—obviously not super common in the agency space, but very common in pest control, alarms, all that type of thing. I'd love to see someone build an agency by hiring door knockers and just hiring them to go out all over to businesses and say, "Hey, sign up for this." That gives you leverage because you're not doing it yourself. And if you build a repeatable system for that, roofing companies, alarm companies, pest control companies—all those types of businesses have built massive leverage, massive brands, huge businesses just off of this. Another example is remote closers. At my company, AI Launch, I have one of these—random—mine from high school, and he crushes. He used to work for Podium, so selling a very similar product to a very similar avatar. Instead of having to feel like a corporate drone and deal with all of the like bureaucratic BS there, he gets to take sales calls from the comfort of his own home and make a really good commission on that. And there's a whole industry like if you want to just quit this whole thing and become a remote closer, there's people making a lot of money doing that and not having to worry about marketing, payroll, operations—all the complicated things that come with starting a business or running a business. And then last one here, I said commenters and social media outreach specialists. If you need messages that are a little bit more tailored depending on what you're selling, you could hire somebody to search for the businesses that you need to reach out to, actually type the message up. It matters that whole thing kind of like a cold caller but instead a cold messenger. And then a commenter—I'll only put this in not because I'm encouraging you to hire people to comment on your behalf because I think it's disingenuous, but inside of the HighLevel Facebook group, there are hundreds of questions getting asked every single day: technical, strategy-based, and other stuff as well. And if you comment on those, there's actually massive leverage in that group, even if it's you, not someone you hire, just providing value there, and then a ton of people are going to reach out to you and say, "Hey, can you help me with X, Y, or Z?" I think this one's sort of a combo between the two, and really what I should have written on code here is groups/communities, because that's how I got my like second through fifth or sixth agency client was by posting in orthodontic Facebook groups about the success I was having with my first client and then second client, etc., and the tips that I had, and then I had people reaching out to me. Niche groups online, whether it's Reddit, Facebook groups, I mean, LinkedIn and X now have groups, and YouTube's coming out with them, school groups, whatever it is, there's people in there that need help, and if you comment on their posts or you make your own post sort of subtly showing how good you are, what you do, this is one of the most amazing free ways to get your business out there. And could you hire someone to do it? Yes, but they'll probably botch it. But if you can figure it out, then that could work for you.

All right, next up we have media. This is my favorite space to play in. The big differentiator on media is between this big red line, which is paid and organic. Paid meaning you have to pay for it; organic meaning it's free. And I don't care what model you're following; I don't care if you're a coach, I don't care if you're a SaaS, an agency, an ecosystem helper, or an affiliate; you need to understand both paid and organic media because when you combine them with code and people, the amount of leverage you can get for a tiny input, which you've spent time building an audience—I'm absolutely shocked how—about a 40,000-person YouTube channel, which is what I have right now, can make every single month just off of being consistent for like three years on YouTube. And then you combine that with paid, you combine that with email and everything else, it just becomes like game over. So, let's talk about each of these examples of people who have used them well. So, let's start with paid search. Very big, obviously, like, like Google kills multi-billion-dollar projects every year because of how much money is spent on Google Ads. There's just so much money spent there that it's not even worth it to keep a billion-dollar project. Don't quote me on that; it might be multi-million-dollar projects, but you get the idea. Obviously, being Microsoft Ads, I think that's what that is, but Google has like 95% of the market share there. How would you use this? If you're a niche agency, obviously you want to show up at the top of Google for your niche agency thing, so just buy Google Ads for that. If you're an affiliate, you could run Google Ads to a webpage that says HighLevel versus Systeme.io, or HighLevel versus Kajabi—whatever software you want to compare it to. You could also do that organically with normal blogs, but for people searching that in, and you've actually made a resource that can 100% help them with that, that's us, they're going to click on it, and hopefully they use your link. If you are a SaaS competing on Google Ads for just like a general local business type SaaS is probably going to be hella competitive unless you figure out some keywords that are very niche and don't cost you like $50-$100 a click because you're competing with massive companies like HubSpot, etc. You could do that if you're more niched down; you're still going to be competing with a lot of other people, so that totally could work for SaaS. I'm not saying it doesn't, but it's probably going to be quite expensive unless you get some really cheap keywords there. But hopefully you get the idea here: The really, really big benefit of search-based paid media is the intent. If somebody's searching for the keyword "best CRM for local businesses," "best CRM for chiropractors," whatever, you know for a fact that they're in the buying stage, whereas with disruptive media, which we're going to talk about next, you're reaching probably 97% of people that aren't in that stage and 3% of people that are ready to buy. So, let's move on to disruptive here. We've got Facebook and Instagram ads, YouTube ads, Reddit, Pinterest ads, Spotify, radio ads, billboards, and I should add here direct mail. My friends at Mailbox Power would be disappointed in me if I didn't put that in. You can watch this video to learn about Mailbox Power; they're very cool. But basically, this is just paying to get in front of your target market, and it's an amazing, amazing way to build a brand. So, when I was running my agency, which was in the orthodontic niche, we did a lot of Facebook and Instagram ads. And when I say a lot, I spent only like $400 a month, and that reached almost every single orthodontist multiple times every single month, and the people that worked for them. How do I know? I got on a sales call one day with one of the top orthodontists in like LA, and he was like, "I see your face every single day on my Facebook feed." And I was like, "All right, it's doing its job," and all I have to do is spend $400. So, if you have a really niche audience like that, just turn on $400 a month—it's probably a little bit more expensive now—literally don't look at the ROI because the ROI is in them seeing your face all the time. Yes, you should swap the creative out, etc., but just the branding that this can provide is so, so powerful. There's a lot of people that prefer YouTube over Facebook and Instagram; there's studies that show that it's a lot cheaper, especially in the online…

Niches but, in my opinion, there's a really good reason why why Facebook and Instagram make so much money from local leg gen agencies for chiropractors, dentists, car repair shops, etc. All of those just stock standard local businesses can do really, really well on Facebook and Instagram, and the targeting capabilities are pretty insane. Same with online businesses like agencies, SaaS companies, etc.

And the benefit here is if you are very good at creative, you don't have to stand out against every single other company that's bidding on the same keyword for you in Google. You can disrupt with something funny, with talking about what people actually want, or just having like scroll-stopping ads in general. And you can get very, very far running ads on any of these platforms that way. But really, it all comes down to your creative. As I quoted the other day for my friend Jeff Miller, that says, "Bad creative blames bad targeting." I literally keep my targeting wide open. I don't target specific business owners. I don't try to tell Facebook where to go; Facebook knows who to show the ads to. I'm not sure about all these other platforms, but they're pretty good at this point; they've built their algorithms; large language models are at an insane point where they can target exactly who they need to. I don't target at all; I only target based on the message in the ad. So I call out who it is, and then I give them an offer they really want in a very succinct piece of media, whether that's a video or literally just text on a red background or a yellow background or something to stand out, and then I send them to a page where they can buy that thing or sign up for a call.

There's this quote—I think it's Jackie Chan or one of the other famous Kung Fu guys—and he said, "When I started out, I thought a kick was just a kick, and then I thought it was more complicated than that, and I had to do all of these other things to make the kick the right thing, and then now that I've mastered it, I know that a kick is just a kick." And that's all to say, when you get into pay media, especially, you probably have an intuitive sense of what's going to work in an ad and what you would want to see, and then you get into all of the complicated stuff like cost per click and relevancy scores and all this other irrelevant information that you're getting, and once you've waded through five plus years of that, trust me, you realize on the other end a kick is just a kick, and it's all about putting a good offer in front of the right audience. And the same exact thing goes for billboards or direct mail or some of these more traditional things; it's just about the right message in front of the right audience. It might be harder to target that audience, and it may be a higher barrier to entry—like a billboard usually costs like three plus thousand a month depending on where it is in a high-traffic area in a big metro. And the benefit of advertising digitally is you can go as low as a dollar a day, usually. But again, the same concept applies.

One thing to keep in mind about direct mail is you can target very, very granularly if you get the right data. Let's say you're servicing garage door companies; you can scrape every single address of every single garage door company in the states that you want to target, and you can literally send a letter right to their business address, which is pretty insane. And then you can run ads to them, and you can do email campaigns to them, and that's where the magic starts to happen when they've seen you in multiple places. And again, I don't care what model you're following here; you can advertise to the people that you need to advertise to on these platforms. All right, moving on to organic.

Two kinds of organic: long form and short form. Long form: we've got YouTube, pretty much the only platform for long-form video, and then we've got blogs for the written word. Short form: we've got video like TikTok, we've got written like Twitter, and then we've got a combination of those like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. So obviously, this is a very deep topic, but I think the best way to help you understand how it could apply to you is just giving you examples. So again, my orthodontic marketing agency publishes YouTube videos about orthodontic marketing of all things, and they did not have high view counts at all, but we were able to close our sales calls so much more easily because they had watched customer interviews, they had watched tips about how to market your orthodontic practice, and they knew we were real people with a real business because we spent a total of maybe 50 hours making some YouTube videos. Obviously, when it comes to affiliate marketing, YouTube is king, in my opinion; blogs maybe a close second, but almost every single one of the top high-level affiliates that promotes using organic content has a big YouTube channel or is building a YouTube channel.

Next up, blogs. This one actually helped grow my marketing agency as well. We published on topics that we had done keyword research for that were important for orthodontists because they were searching for them; we got the data on that, and we published on how to market for your orthodontic practice, 10 to 12 holiday marketing ideas for your orthodontic practice, etc. And then they would say, "Oh, what is this company?" Click here, book a call, watch some YouTube videos, etc. Obviously, ranking at the top of Google for free is huge. If you understand SEO and how to create content on blogs, you can reach audiences you never thought you would reach in a really, really effective way because you're basically getting paid search traffic for free, and especially business owners that are a little more savvy will scroll past the paid results. If you can rank there, speaking from experience, one of the best things possible. And these are not isolated for me, by the way; I have multiple friends who have built YouTube channels for their agencies and done very well and have ranked on Google or blogs in their niche and have done well—enclosed clients from that.

The big, big benefit of long form is that you get a lot more depth with your viewer; they trust you a lot more than short form. A million followers on TikTok is not anywhere close to a million followers on YouTube; that is just a completely different set of people, first of all, but also depth of relationship and desire to buy from you. Doesn't mean you can't build a massive business off of short-form content; just means it's a little bit harder, in my opinion, to sell people when they don't have as much depth from your content, and they literally just scroll Reels or scroll TikTok at night for like 10-20 minutes, and they're not in the buying mood; they're just in the laughing mood—at least that's the way I typically consume it. That said, if you're servicing the high-level community specifically, being an affiliate ecosystem helper or a coach or something like that, getting your name out there and kind of advertising the long form with the short form is very, very effective. And obviously, we have loads and loads of examples; we've done that through video, and a lot of people have done it through written content on X and other platforms. You can also promote your SaaS agency using short-form video, and one thing I will say here is don't just like go straight into the pitch; show how the thing actually helps the person who's watching it; that's what short form is all about. People want payoff within 5 to 60 seconds, and getting them to watch 60 seconds is actually insanely hard, so figure out how to give that to them and hook them really well. The same thing goes for long form; like the most important thing is the hook, and with long form you have like thumbnails and titles as well, which adds a little bit more to the process. With short form, it's usually just the first one to two seconds of the video if we're going to decide whether to watch it.

But the biggest piece of advice I heard recently from someone that has like a million followers on Instagram, completely unrelated niche, does healthy e-commerce products like protein powders and things like that, and she said whenever anybody comes to her for social media advice, she usually looks at their page, and their page isn't so valuable that someone would just say, "Yes, I have to hit follow because I have to see what else this person is going to put out that's as helpful as this first piece of content that I saw." So again, it's about being useful outside of your products, and then people subscribe, follow for that usefulness, and then eventually they ask the question, "What is this person selling?" Unless it's an e-commerce product, which is a little bit different, but we're not talking about that today. Okay, and that's how to grow with media, both paid and organic. All right, lastly, if you're going to make $35 million from high level somehow, some way, you're going to have to retain your customer. I don't care how much you hype or overhype something and can get people to pull out their credit card and pay once; what I want is for you to have those people still paying you five or six years later, which actually, by the way, I do; my first three agency clients that weren't included in the sale are still paying me to this day, so I think I know a thing or two about this. And our retention at my agency was five times the industry average; we kept people for about 10 months; most agencies keep people for two months. So even if you do like half of this, you're probably going to be fairly sick.

With that said, retention comes down to three things. The first one is the results you're providing for them. Results can be a tricky thing, especially in the agency space; I know it well. Just when you think you have it down, you're going to be able to provide copy-paste templates, and everything's going to work perfectly for the clients; you go into some market or some client or whatever that just doesn't work the way that you wanted it to. That is the name of the game in marketing; results are variable, and that's why I hate guarantees, and I don't think anybody should use them unless your guarantee is like so, so sure it's going to happen, and it's not based on all of these stupid contingencies, then I might consider using it to sweeten the deal, not to market the deal. More on that in a minute. But when we talk about results, I have all these things written out, but I actually need to add one at the top that is the most important, and that is client selection. If you are selling, let's say, a $1,000 a month service to somebody who only makes $5,000 a month from their business, you are taking one-fifth of their income, more after taxes, and they're going to be stressed out of their mind trying to get an ROI from that. So when I say client selection, I mean it's a lot easier to help people who are already doing well do better; it's a lot easier to sell them, service them, deal with them than it is to save people that are not doing well and try to turn their business around. If their business isn't doing well, there's probably a reason; they used to feel bad about that; I don't anymore. These people have like really ingrained behavior patterns that have gotten them to where they are, and they're going to need to unlearn that before they can succeed, and likely you're not going to be the person to save them, so don't feel bad about that; just go serve the people who are doing well or on their way up or already have good mindsets and help them do better. That is huge, huge, huge, and pretty much nothing else matters here. You can do all of this other stuff, and you'll still have terrible retention if you were bringing on terrible clients in the first place.

That said, if you're bringing on awesome clients, this is how to keep them longer from a results perspective. First of all, onboarding. When people come on board, you need to have a list of like five things that need to be completed in order for them to launch, and some of those are going to be technical and just like necessary must-dos, but some of them should be your own secret sauce onboarding that helps you collect a piece of key data or information or whatever that helps you get them better results. This process should also be as seamless and as amazing as possible so that people come on board being like, "Hey, I bought," and then the experience was exactly as I was sold it. During that process, it's also really important to get buy-in from the customer. If they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm hiring a marketing company; I'm hiring this software"—people don't say "hiring a software," but "I'm buying the software is going to do everything for me"—that's not the case, and they need to understand that this is a partnership. So getting that buy-in through the sales process and through the onboarding process is crucial, and that's where your prices come in as well. Sometimes it's not about the value you're providing; it's about making it hurt; the client actually buys in and wants it to work. And once you get them to buy in, then they will start to collaborate with you, which is huge. So I had clients that I saved in my marketing agency because they were willing to collaborate and say, "Hey, you said this in the ad; people in Austin, Texas, don't care about that as much as apparently your other clients," or we're in Nashville or Salt Lake City or whatever, and then we work together to customize the ads for their market because they understood their market much better than I did. And being willing to collaborate with them, but also having the clients willing to collaborate with you was huge to save them. If, for some reason, your stock standard whatever you give to clients at the beginning isn't working the way that you wanted to, and that goes for SaaS, by the way, even though it's, you know, supposed to be more hands-off, etc. When you're bringing people on board, you should be asking, "Hey, what's the most important feature that you need implemented today so that you can start making money?" And this is an ROI-positive relationship.

All right, next up: inch putt. This means you get everything ready for your clients; all they have to do is this easy 5-inch putt to finish whatever the onboarding is or the collaboration is or whatever. The easier you make their life, likely the longer they are going to stay. Balancing that with, "Hey, sometimes they need some buy-in; sometimes they need some collaboration." In the areas where it doesn't matter for them to buy in or collaborate, make it a 5-inch putt. And then next up, I have this, which is actually—I'm just laughing because this is my life—keep buying courses; never stop learning about marketing because that's how you get better and better results. And I thought I knew everything is when my results started to go down in my agencies; things started to stagnate, etc. This does two things: it keeps you accountable and exposes you to important new information. Also, it usually puts you in a really good environment where, hey, if the temperature is 100° in a room and you're sitting at 90, you're going to raise up to 100 because all these other people around you are more successful. So when you're looking at yourself doing 50k a month and everyone's doing 100, you're probably going to up your game just because you're around those people, and you're going to pick up some really important stuff to help your clients get better results there; that's why that matters, not because of you. And then lastly, I've put here zoom out. When I sold my agency, I was finally able to take my nose away from the grindstone and actually get this like panoramic view of what had been happening for the past four years, and some of the biggest connections that I have drawn and understandings and like leaps in knowledge about marketing and how to give results for clients came from that zoom out. And if I could go back to myself when I was in the middle of running the agency, I would just shake myself and say, "Hey, you need to be looking at the big picture of the data of how your team's doing, of how you're bringing on clients, of who these clients are, way more than you need to be in the nitty-gritty of everything." And yes, there's a time and season for everything, but if you can zoom out and look at all those connections, you're going to make leaps in the results that you're able to provide for your clients because you're aggregating data and looking at trends instead of being right in the middle of everything every day and reacting instead of being proactive about the way you're providing results.

All right, so there's a lot of people who say, "Yeah, if I've improved results, like I don't need to do anything else; people are going to stay." Absolutely not the case. There's a study they did with financial advisors, and the number one thing that people said kept them with their financial advisor was not improving results; in fact, that was number five. The number one thing was, "I feel understood by this person," and that's where customer service comes in. And here I'm actually going to start with this bullet point; these are actual words used to describe my team at my marketing agency from the five-star reviews we got on Google: responsive, professional, accessible, organized, passionate, lovely, and the other one that kept coming up that's too long to write out was "wonderful to work with." This is what you want your customer service team to be described as, and a lot of that comes down to this very first one, which is availability. I was talking to the head of support at HighLevel—imagine like the hardest job in the world, and then times it by 10; that is the head of support at HighLevel, the most complicated software in the world, built by developers, not by product people, and sometimes things don't intuitively make sense. He got his first rep under him that was just a friend of his, and he was getting on these support calls, and he had like the best customer satisfaction ratings ever, and this is when HighLevel's like brand, brand new, right? And Ian, the head of support, said he talked to this guy, and this guy really doesn't know much about HighLevel at this point, and he said, "I literally just get on the call, and I just let the person talk, and I let them go through everything that they're going through and how frustrating it is and all of that, and I just say like, 'Man, that must be really frustrating,' and then I say like, 'Let's walk through it; like show me what's wrong,'" and you know, five times out of 10 it actually fixed it, just showing what was wrong and having somebody to talk to. And those only five times they say, "Look, I'm going to ask somebody and get back to you," but just having somebody who actually really cares, listens to their problem, and is available for them got him a really, really high customer satisfaction rating, which you can take that lesson and apply it tomorrow to get similar results in your business, whatever it is.

Next one is welcome gifts. The company I mentioned earlier, Mailbox Power, they integrate with HighLevel, and you can send automated brownies, cookies, like charcuterie boards, all these random things to your clients just to say thank you, or you can do it manually; that's what I did in my agency. I just like—we bought Crumble Cookies, and we sent it to their business address like one or two days after they signed the contract and paid. And this is a great way to increase goodwill. You can also do this for anniversaries, like, "Hey, thanks for being with us for six months, for being with us for a year," or whatever. Almost all of the really big agencies I know do this, and you should definitely consider it as well. Next one is having self-served tools for every person that wants to get on a phone call and have somebody listen to their feelings and etc., like I just talked about; there's somebody who's like, "I don't want to talk to anyone; I literally just want to go read an article, and I want the article to be actually good and fix my problem." And that's why having really good self-served tools is amazing because it's less strain on your support staff or you if you are the support staff, and people can fix their problems faster without having to wait for a human to come on board. If you sign up for Extendly, GrowthB, or HoPro Tools—links below—they all have a knowledge base that's constantly updated to be accurate to what HighLevel's features actually provide, which is an amazing self-serve tool. On top of that, you should probably have onboarding videos that are flawless. There's a company called The GHL University; I've mentioned them in a few other videos; you can get 50% off using my link below, and they have a full onboarding course for people after they come on board with your software. Whatever version of this you're following, you need that type of onboarding experience so that, if heaven forbid someone has to wait a week or a few days to get on a onboarding call, they can serve themselves for the most important things. And when it comes to self-serve tools as well, don't be afraid of making your own; we live in this HighLevel world where everybody's white labeling, gray labeling, and black labeling everything; nobody wants to make their own, and you should make your own sometimes. So make your own demo video, make some good onboarding videos, actually solve people's problems, and get to the need degree. That's a lot of the reason why people like the videos on my channel talking about HighLevel is because I go into the understanding of the product that hardly anybody else talks about, and so when someone leaves the video they end up being like, "Wow, I actually understand what to do and why it matters, not just okay, this person told me to click, click, click, and I still don't have my problem solved." So if you can create that with your self-served tools, that will be amazing.

The last point here is to be time-aware. I don't care how fast someone gets back to me; if they get back to me with nothing, like nothing helpful—this happens a lot with support and software where I'll be like, "Hey, here's my question," they'll respond back to me within two minutes, and it's completely useless. So something I picked up from Outreach on this is having SMEs, which is a subject matter expert, and at Gym Launch they had all these SMEs that were like paid ad SMEs or operations SMEs or sales SMEs, right? They were trying to get their time to respond to the customer down, and while people were getting really fast response times, they ran a survey, and they found out that they'd rather wait for an SME to respond to them that actually knows what they're talking about instead of having a conversation with a virtual assistant that like is just going to say, "I'm going to escalate this anyway." And if your customers are like me, they hate that initial conversation and doing the dance of like 10-15 minutes of like, "Look, I know you're not going to be able to answer this; just escalate it." And if you can just do that right away, people are going to love you. And that brings me to the last pillar of retention, which is expectations. Even if you're doing everything else right here, this will single-handedly kill your business; you're setting your expectations way too high. Turn goes up when you make really big promises; turn goes down when you make small promises and you keep them, and you're consistent with that. And really, when I say expectations, this is referring to the sales process and your marketing because people don't get their expectations out of thin air; usually when they're starting a conversation with your company, they refer to the things that they were told in the sales process. And the first two points I have here, I just think can't be overstated: first of all, tell the forking truth, and number two, have real data. What do I mean by that? If you're on a sales call with somebody and you're cherry-picking your very best case studies, you're cherry-picking the person who you didn't actually have that much to do with their success; they were going to be successful anyway; you just happen to be the partner that they brought on at the right time, and they made you look great; you're cherry-picking those case studies, showing them to people and saying, "This is what you're going to get," instead of using the actual real median data of what results your clients are able to achieve with with...

Your software, or agency, or whatever else—I think it's super misleading. And B, your churn is going to go up because people are going to have these sky-high expectations when they're coming into it with very different initial conditions than those very, very successful clients.

So, a couple of examples of how I did this in my businesses, in the marketing agencies. I was able to take the data that we collected from spending $250,000 on Facebook ads over a year, and like I think it was 40 or 50 niche markets for orthodontic, and say, "Hey, this is the average result from these $250,000 of ad spend." And it turns out that the average result is actually only one or two out of 10 leads turns into a customer. Imagine how different the sales conversation goes when somebody comes on board and you're like—you're not saying, "Oh yeah, we're going to send you 70 to 100 new patient opportunities every single month." Like, nobody cares what a new patient opportunity is. Only people who are brand new and haven't seen the before think that's awesome. The sophisticated buyers that you want to be working with want to hear is like, "Hey, we're probably going to generate like 70 to 100 leads every month, depending on how much we spend on ads and how expensive your market is. But of those, depending on your sales process, the market—there's a lot of other things out of our control—on average our clients only convert one to two out of every 10 leads. So if we generate 70 leads for you, we're going to have 7 to 14 new patients for you in a given month. And if, for some reason, it's super expensive and your leads are, you know, $50 to $100 instead of $25 to $50, we're probably going to generate even less than that. Is that okay with you?" You cut through all the noise, you cut through all the—just by saying, "Hey, we took the time to collect real data, and I'm not going to sit here on this call and just like spew nonsense at you for an hour. Instead, I'm going to get to the point and tell you the truth."

And when you go middle-of-the-road like that for expectations, you can also tell people, "Look, like half of our clients fall beneath this; you may well be the person that falls beneath that median result. And if that is you, there are things you can do to improve that. We've got some like Google review campaigns we can start doing for you; we can do some other things to help hopefully improve your reputation in the local area. We're going to start taking those steps towards getting you to that median number, or hopefully higher than that." So you're planting seeds, hinting for some biant, some collaboration after the invoice is actually paid.

And I'm going to tell you one more quick story about this that I think is actually super poignant. I had one of my very good friends from high school, his dad was an orthodontist, and he reached out and he said, "Hey, you know, we're wanting to run some ads, and we wanted to talk to you about it." And this is a relationship I do not want to botch; I'm not willing to say anything that may be hyperbole. And I was very new at this point, but I knew deep, deep down that I did not want to say anything that wasn't true to this man. So he got on the call; I really didn't have a full understanding of how marketing worked or why it would work or didn't work. I'd been doing it for about a year at this point, and I just looked at him point-blank and I said, "Look, sometimes it works really well; sometimes it doesn't work at all. I'm willing to test it out with you; I want you to be successful. This is how much it costs; I'm going to do everything I can to make it successful, but I can tell you right now I've had clients that it hasn't worked for. Are you willing to try that?" And if you don't have all the data, you don't have all the fancy numbers, that type of approach can be very, very effective. I kept that client for almost two years, and I think a big part of it was that conversation where I didn't hype anything up and I just said, "Look, this is the reality of the situation; do you want to try?"

Obviously, most of those examples are in the agency realm. If you're doing one of the other models we talked about, I promise the supplies in every single client-to-client relationship. And then this last bullet point I have is "under promise and over deliver," and I have them in quotation marks for a very important reason. Agencies, in particular, people using high-level custom-build people—when they hear the word "over deliver," they think they have to sacrifice at their own expense to deliver something that's like one, two, three times as good as what they promised the client. That's not what I'm talking about here. My friend Mike Schmidt talked about this in a podcast we did together, and he said it's equivalent of a painter coming to you and saying, "I'm going to repaint your entire house; we're going to do two coats of paint." And then he comes through, and you see him, and he's doing a third coat, he's doing a fourth coat, and then he does a fifth coat, and you're like, "Wait, this is overkill; like you told me you were going to do two coats." Why not just do two coats? At the end of the day, your clients aren't expecting you to do this massive thing; they're probably not going to stay that much longer if you keep doing all this extra stuff that doesn't actually contribute to the initial expectation that they had. So when I say "over deliver," I mean to delight them in ways they weren't expecting, but don't do it at your own expense and the expense of the profitability of your company. And when I say "under promise," I mean just literally tell the truth. Like, you don't have to say, "Oh, I think we're going to only be able to do this," and fudge your numbers and bring them down so you look way better when the numbers are way better than that. Just tell the truth, and don't claim that you're going to be able to get that very, very top level of results when you probably won't be able to, and it's just a few select clients that are able to do that well. And I promise if you do all of this, your retention is going to go through the roof; your business is going to be a lot more fun to run because you're not going to be constantly retraining clients. And hopefully, in a few years, you're sending me a DM about how you made $3.5 million and now you're a millionaire. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, check out this one. See you next time.