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The Marketer’s Toolkit isn’t just a podcast—it’s a behind-the-scenes look at how top GoHighLevel (GHL) users are building smarter, scaling faster, and creating systems their clients actually use.
At the heart of it all is Tom Bristol—the brilliant mind behind The Marketer’s Toolkit. Known for his out-of-this-world support, rapid innovation, and uncanny ability to solve GHL’s most frustrating gaps, Tom has become a beloved creator in the GoHighLevel community. His Toolkit gives SaaS builders and agency owners the edge they need to rise above the noise.
In each episode, you’ll hear real stories from Toolkit users—creative founders, niche SaaS pros, and accidental agency owners who turned a system into a sustainable business. From intuitive dashboards for neurodivergent users to automated onboarding that scales with heart, these stories show what’s actually possible inside HighLevel.
🎧 Hosted by Virginia Scheuer, co-creator of the In the Spotlight YouTube series and long-time Toolkit power user.
Whether you're building a SaaS from scratch or refining your white-label GHL experience, this podcast delivers clarity, community, and copy-paste strategies you won’t find anywhere else.
Brought to you by The Marketer’s Toolkit
Charles Higgins [00:00:00]:
Foreign.
Virginia Schauer [00:00:08]:
A marketer's Toolkit series where we bring guests on that are already using the marketer's toolkit. That way you can up level your game in GHL High Level. Today we're bringing on Charles Higgins. He's no stranger to the GHL community and our marketers toolkit community. He brings over 20 years of CRM experience from the corporate automotive world where he worked with giants like Ford, Toyota, Cox Automotive. From managing Rolodexes in the early days to spearheading scalable SaaS solutions, Charles has seen the full evolution of customer relationship management. Today he helps agencies and entrepreneurs unlock the full power of High Level with the Marketers Toolkit focusing on usability, client experience and, and building true vendor partnerships that drive long term growth. So without further ado, let's welcome Charles Higgins.
Virginia Schauer [00:01:06]:
A lot of people had suggested actually you come on because you apparently know a lot about the toolkit and have been using it for a while. Tell me a little bit about your background with how you found the toolkit.
Charles Higgins [00:01:17]:
Yeah, so it's interesting. You know, I come from a long history of working in CRMs, different CRM companies, global companies, and putting them into businesses where not everybody wants the same thing and everybody's at a different use level and everybody needs different accommodations. And I stumbled upon the Marketer's Toolkit, found out about it through the high level community and I really kind of fell in love with it. Once I, you know, I dipped my toes in the water, I was like, ah, you know, I don't, I don't get into all this colorful dashboard stuff. Like I don't care about putting curtains on the window. I want the window to open and shut correctly and I'm more function over form and. But as I started to get into the Markers toolkit, I found that it did that and that's really what got me into the Markers toolkit at first was that it helped me open and shut that window that much easier.
Virginia Schauer [00:02:18]:
That's awesome. That's a great way of explaining it. It. I have never heard it in that way before. And you said before we hit the record button you said you were in corporate automotive CRM. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Charles Higgins [00:02:32]:
Yeah. So it's been 20 years in automotive. Worked for companies like Cox Automotive, which is derivative Cox Media, and then worked for Ford Direct as well as Toyota Corporate. And I was one of the, you know, when I first started in automotive, our CRMs were a wall of rolodexes. So, so I've seen CRMs come from the very beginning and evolve over the years and got to work with some great companies. CDK, Reynolds. And Reynolds just always loved CRMs and the versatility and the data management part of it and really being able to solidify what that customer journey was and be able to create a personal experience for people.
Virginia Schauer [00:03:14]:
So you found High Level. How did you find High Level?
Charles Higgins [00:03:17]:
High Level, it started circulating in the automotive industry early 2019, and I took a look at it. I'm like, this is kind of nice. I'm like, I. You know, and this was in the very early days of High Level. It was definitely not what High Level is today. It was totally different, way more difficult to use than it is now. People don't realize how good they have it now. Right?
Virginia Schauer [00:03:40]:
To say the least.
Charles Higgins [00:03:40]:
But yeah, it, it was, it was rough. It didn't do near as much. Didn't have, you know, 25% of the tools that are in there now. But I loved that it was agnostic, that you could approach any business from any direction. And so my goal was to really build a platform or build an entryway for entrepreneurs and small businesses to have a scalable solution. Because that was always the thing I ran into in corporate, dealing with small, you know, and everybody thinks, oh, they're a car dealer, they got all the money in the world. Well, that's true for some, but not true for all. And I worked when I was with Ford.
Charles Higgins [00:04:21]:
I did mostly rural market, and so these were small mom and pop stores out the middle of nowhere. But I got involved with a lot of local businesses through those connections and really saw that it was. Not only was it a struggle in automotive, but it really transcended across so many different industries. And so High Level provided the opportunity for me to be able to bring an affordable and scalable solution to entrepreneurs and small businesses that couldn't afford bigger solutions.
Virginia Schauer [00:04:51]:
Right, right. So when you were connecting with the marketer's toolkit, it wasn't the theme, it wasn't the branding part of the platform that drew you in. What was the. Was there like one. One feature that drew you in?
Charles Higgins [00:05:09]:
You know, it's funny because I signed up and the theme builder was part of the package, and I didn't use anything out of the theme builder, didn't touch a thing in it. You know, I, I updated the Favicon and the logo and a couple of things, and that was about it. I still use the stock colors, the stock sidebar, but my thing was being able to put things in a place through header buttons or different functionality that's offered through the Markers toolkit in a place that made the most sense for my users and not only getting information in front of them, but there's a lot of capability through the marketers toolkit to be able to put autosave or that annoying. You're sending a text message and you hit return because you're on your computer, you don't think about it and it sends half your text message. Yes, you know, it's.
Virginia Schauer [00:06:02]:
I've done that.
Charles Higgins [00:06:02]:
A lot of usability things. Yeah, it was a lot of usability things that we were getting complaints from customers and you know, if it wasn't in there already, which most of it was, I could send a message to Tom and he'd say yeah, that that makes sense, let's do it. And that was one thing that I really appreciated, probably even more so than the technology is. I'm really big on the difference between a vendor and a vendor partner. Vendors, you pay em, they come and go, you know, and we know this as marketing agen, as software agencies. You can be a vendor, you can supply a service or a product or tool, but there's a difference when you become a vendor partner. And that's one thing that I've really experienced with Tom and the marketers toolkit. I've had the opportunity to meet him twice.
Charles Higgins [00:06:50]:
Met him at Level up last year in Dallas and then we met again in Saaspreneur 2025 in Dallas. And it's just been great getting to know him. And I always feel like he's as invested in my business as I am. Anything I need, if I, you know, have a problem or I'm not sure about something, I can go to him. He's approachable, he actually cares. And that to me means more than the software itself. So. But he does offer great tools.
Charles Higgins [00:07:20]:
My customers love it. They get more updates than most high levelers because of the marketers took it.
Virginia Schauer [00:07:25]:
Yeah, yeah. So when you talk about a vendor partner, you mean somebody who actually cares and is there, you feel like they're there with you?
Charles Higgins [00:07:33]:
Yeah, it's not just transactional, you know, and, and that's where you really see the difference. You know, vendors, it's just transactional. You pay them, they provide a service, that's the extent of the relationship. But when you know it's 10, 11 o' clock at night and you see that high level has changed something, that never happens. You know, Tom's all over it and he doesn't mind you reaching out and saying, hey, looks like Something broke. Can we get this fixed? He's always right there and he wants a good experience for your customers.
Virginia Schauer [00:08:04]:
Have you created something in your account with the toolkit that you can share with us?
Charles Higgins [00:08:12]:
Yeah, I can do that. So probably the one thing that I get asked about the most. And it was funny because I kept getting after Tom for enhancement on this feature he finally released and he tagged me in the post because he knew I'd been asking for it forever. So it was, it was great when he finally released it. But we'll jump into an account here real quick. But my favorite feature is actually the header buttons. It's been there a long time. He recently released header folders, which was the thing I'd been asking for because I had all these buttons up at the top.
Charles Higgins [00:08:47]:
I'm like, I want to put as much information in front of my customer. Ease of access, right. But I can't keep adding buttons. Like there's things I want to put up here, but I need a folder to put them in. And so he got that taken care of for me.
Virginia Schauer [00:09:01]:
That is so awesome. What kind of buttons, like while you're pulling it up, what kind of buttons do you have up there right now?
Charles Higgins [00:09:07]:
So I've got trying to get this to.
Virginia Schauer [00:09:10]:
And take your time.
Charles Higgins [00:09:11]:
Good old Max. You got to give them system permissions.
Virginia Schauer [00:09:14]:
Oh, yes. Every time You're a Mac guy, huh? Oh yeah, me too. I'm a Mac girl.
Charles Higgins [00:09:26]:
Okay. So you should be able to see it now.
Virginia Schauer [00:09:32]:
I can see.
Charles Higgins [00:09:32]:
There we go. So I'm in a demo account, but one of the things that I love is the header button folders. And again, this is just about putting information where people can easily access it. So communities and client portals have been a big feature inside of High Level. We utilize the client portal, we have a very active community, we run an affiliate program. And High Level is kind enough to make it to where we could use magic links. And a lot of people try to put things, you know, load up the left hand menu. We try to stay away from loading up the left hand menu.
Charles Higgins [00:10:05]:
And that's where these have come in. So they can one click go into the client portal, client community, their affiliate dashboard. But then we also have guides and training. So we have our knowledge center in here. And you know, we love our little pop up iframe, which is another marketer's toolkit.
Virginia Schauer [00:10:22]:
Yes, tool.
Charles Higgins [00:10:24]:
So what's the first time I saw this? I kind of laughed because it brought me back to my early computer days when I hit the minimize and I saw it down here, I'm like, oh, this is so windows like 95. But I love it. My customers like it because it creates a great experience where they can go in, they can be looking at Helpbox and they can move it around, they can rearrange it and be looking at it right where they're looking. It's not in a separate tab or anything like that.
Virginia Schauer [00:10:53]:
Yeah.
Charles Higgins [00:10:53]:
Or they can just scoot it down out of the way. So we love this little pop up iframe and we've got our knowledge center in there, we've got our online training courses that goes to the learning section of our community. But then we also promote additional services. So we offer VA services. So we have those in here. We're going to be adding some more additional services in here over time. And then another thing that we're really known for with other agencies is our change log. So we run our own change log and we use the pop up iframe again and this way everybody in our, all our users stay up to date with all the changes that are happening in the platform.
Charles Higgins [00:11:34]:
So we build out our own white label change log and then we do the side modal for our uptime monitor so people can not, hopefully not blow up chat support when something goes down. They can see right here that okay, it's a third party service that's down. It'll be back up soon.
Virginia Schauer [00:11:53]:
Wow.
Charles Higgins [00:11:54]:
Again, this is just running. Yeah, we, we run it more like a software company than a traditional agency. That's probably one of the things that makes us quite different than most. Yeah. Is that we do take more of the software true SaaS approach. And then on the left hand side, you know, we've put in our own custom separators, labeled them, you know, we have an AI copywriter that pops up in the iframe, works great. And then we have our business operations. We segment out our AI conversation and voice and then our growth and automation and additional tools and setup.
Charles Higgins [00:12:30]:
And we don't do any custom menus or anything through high level. It's all done through the marketers toolkit. And then we're also able to run a downgrade offer or a entry level offer of the social only. And we're able to do that with the marketers toolkit. See if I can get one.
Virginia Schauer [00:12:47]:
Do you use the customizer with the Google spreadsheets too?
Charles Higgins [00:12:52]:
I don't use it with the Google spreadsheets. We base it off of our SaaS plan.
Virginia Schauer [00:12:57]:
Okay.
Charles Higgins [00:12:57]:
So we just do it off of our SAS plan and trying to Think of when they upgrade on social media. Yeah. So that way when they upgrade downgrade, we don't have to worry about it. It'll automatically update through the Markers toolkit, through the High Level customizer.
Virginia Schauer [00:13:19]:
Nice.
Charles Higgins [00:13:20]:
So. And that's nice. It's just, you know, again, we're more about usability. So a lot of the features that we have turned on are in. I have to go into this and you get this nice privacy mode, which is nice. So, you know, we use the collapsible columns, which we have clients that absolutely love this because maybe there's a process that they need. They don't need to look at everybody in that stage so they can just collapse it down, make it easy for them to view.
Virginia Schauer [00:13:55]:
And then also that drag and drop.
Charles Higgins [00:13:58]:
Yep. So we, we really try to keep it minimal because, you know, the thing that is when you're, when you're doing this, you've also got to think that High Level is also changing things constantly. Now, that's one of the great things about the Markers toolkit is that this is all he does. This is what he lives, this is what he breathes. And people have asked me, they're like, you know, well, anytime I've tried to do Custom CSS or JavaScript, high level changes something, it breaks. It takes forever. I'm like, that's the great thing. There's thousands of users, thousands of agencies that are using the Marketer toolkit.
Charles Higgins [00:14:33]:
Trust me, one of us will let Tom know, if he doesn't know it already. And this is all he does. His focus isn't anywhere else, so he's able to get it fixed a lot faster than anybody else out there that's maybe offering a theme customizer as a secondary product or as a freebie or whatever it may be. And this is all he does. And so, you know, you're going to get the best result, you're going to get quick fixes. I know this last weekend, High Level dropped a huge update, basically redid all the structure in the back end. And Tom probably didn't get much sleep this last weekend, but, you know, come Monday morning, everything was like 95% there. And, you know, it was great.
Charles Higgins [00:15:18]:
And he's been super active and responding to everybody. And, you know, that's, that's a big part of what you're paying for. It's not just the capabilities of the customizer, it's that level of service and support that you get as well.
Virginia Schauer [00:15:31]:
Absolutely. It's having a development team right there in your back pocket for whenever you need it. And I think you nailed it when you said that there are also thousands of users that are, are constantly using the toolkit as well. And so things that maybe your users might not pick up on as fast, we are picking up on and already telling Tom about and he's getting on it. Whereas if you just have an in house developer that has developed this code, you may not find it in time and it might be sitting there broken for a long time and then, you know, one or two people not saying something can turn into a problem in the end.
Charles Higgins [00:16:11]:
Yeah. And there's also a lot of times, you know, we run our own NPS surveys. You know, like I said, we, we operate like a software company. Yes, I love that we run our own NPS surveys. We have our own feature request channel where our customers can request features and there's been features that have been requested that I'm like, this can be a nightmare to get High Level to do this. But a lot of it we've been able to get done with Tom, you know, we let him know, hey, our customers are really asking for this. Can we get this button? Can we add a checkbox? Can we create this, you know, situation for our users to make their experience a little bit better? And a lot of times he's able to deliver on it before High Level gets to it. And so sometimes it's just that bridge through the gap because we know High Level is doing a ton of stuff.
Charles Higgins [00:16:57]:
They're always releasing a ton of updates. Sometimes they miss the little things. And you know, Tom really does a great deal of work trying to cover up those gaps through the marketers toolkit.
Virginia Schauer [00:17:10]:
I completely agree. Is there a new feature that you are excited about? Maybe the new announcements feature or the workflows that he's come out with recently?
Charles Higgins [00:17:22]:
I definitely like the new announcements feature. We actually use that recently when Texas came out with their new mini TCPA laws, we made sure that it was in front of all our clients. And then we're actually going to be using it again for kind of the same thing. Because High Level just pushed an update for the Texas law. So we're going to notify everybody. Hey, go here to change this. So that notifications is, is great. It's a great way to be able to just put something right in front of your customer where they're already at, provide them additional information when you need to.
Virginia Schauer [00:17:53]:
Awesome, awesome. And is there if somebody was coming into the toolkit as a newbie, do you have any advice for them coming in?
Charles Higgins [00:18:02]:
Yeah, I mean you know, like I said, Tom, Tom does a great job. He's on top of it all the time. I always tell people, you know, don't worry about colors. Quite honestly, people could care less. We care more about it as the company from a vanity metric than anything else. Worry about the functionality side. Worry about making sure that certain people can see things. Now there are some options in the theme builder that aren't available in the customizer like hiding certain menus or items based on user role.
Charles Higgins [00:18:36]:
And we do leverage those, especially when it comes to like upgrading or downgrading plans, signing up for WordPress or maybe the social media planner. Because we have a company that's like, hey, we only want our management to be able to add social media networks. But we do all that through the theme builder. We just don't apply any of the visual except for a login screen. That's the only thing that's customized. But it's pretty static, it doesn't change. High level dashboard changes all the time, so we stay away from it. But look at the functionality, especially in the GHL customizer.
Charles Higgins [00:19:09]:
There are a ton of just little checkboxes that it may not seem like a big deal, but at the end of the day if your customer can click one less time or you can eliminate a frustration like that, you know, half written SMS that you hit return on your keyboard.
Virginia Schauer [00:19:28]:
Right.
Charles Higgins [00:19:28]:
Or being able to search notes and things like that, you know, it's those things that make a huge difference in your user's experience and that's ultimately what's going to keep them on board and keep them paying you every month.
Virginia Schauer [00:19:41]:
Yes, those features that you're speaking of, that's a lot of those are in the contact, just in the contact section in the conversations. Like I can also think of the little area where you can click on the maps. Like I think they even, they have a Google Map. Zillow I think is on there too. Is it?
Charles Higgins [00:20:02]:
Yeah, there's a satellite Google Map and Zillow.
Virginia Schauer [00:20:05]:
Yeah. And you can just click on those and, and go. I, I just blows my mind how many little buttons there are to click.
Charles Higgins [00:20:13]:
Yeah, well and that's, you know you talk about the contact field, so you think about website address. You think about what if you're having them upload a to a form and it happens to be a Google Doc or a link to a Google Doc or a Google Sheet. You know, there's a simple checkbox that you can turn on in the customizer that just simply puts a open a new tab. It seems Simple. But guess what? Every other high level user is having to sit there and copy and paste it into a new tab. My users can just click a button and there's the customer's website. It seems silly, but those little things add up to making a big difference in that user's experience of using the platform. And that's why I focus more on the usability side and the functionality side of what the toolkit offers, more so than the visual.
Charles Higgins [00:21:03]:
You know, it's just like if you're watching a YouTube video. If the video is a little grainy but you can hear it, okay, you'll still listen to it. However, if the audio is horrible and it's painful to listen to, you could have the best video in the world. Guess what? Nobody's gonna watch it. It's the same way with software. It can look pretty all day long, but if you can't use it, if you can't function in it, if it feels like it's holding you back that those pretty colors aren't going to save a customer, they're not going to care. So that's why we just focus on the functionality that we're able to get out of the toolkit through all the customizations.
Virginia Schauer [00:21:43]:
Well said. Well said. Thank you so much for coming on today.
Charles Higgins [00:21:48]:
Yeah.
Virginia Schauer [00:21:48]:
Do you have anything to add? Like, do. Can you think of anything else that you would like to say?
Charles Higgins [00:21:54]:
I mean, the only thing I can say is, you know, not only are you getting a great team behind the toolkit, but you are getting an amazing community. I know, myself and several others of us that have been with High level for a number of years, been with a Markers toolkit for a number of years. We're always jumping in there, answering questions, helping people out. We love the marketers toolkit community. And so you're not alone if you run into a situation and there's a lot of power users in there that it may not do it. Exactly. But here's how you can use the marketers toolkit to kind of get around it, make that experience that much better for your customer. Contact buttons to header buttons, whatever you need.
Charles Higgins [00:22:32]:
Not only do you have a great team, but you've got a great community backing you up. So let's go sign up.
Virginia Schauer [00:22:37]:
Yeah, let's do it. Get him in there.
Charles Higgins [00:22:39]:
Just do it. Yeah.
Virginia Schauer [00:22:41]:
Thank you.