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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
if you're running a high level agency
and onboarding still feels like hurting cats
or it feels very generic because you've outsourced onboarding
and you want your process to be more helpful to your clients
stay right here this one is definitely for you
welcome back to the marketer's toolkit in the spotlight series
i'm virginia shower and today is a special one
because i'm sitting down with the man behind the marketer's toolkit
himself tom bristol
now if you were here for the last episode
i promised you this was coming
and here we are tom has been building mtk since two thousand nineteen
and if you've ever wondered
who's responsible for the og of theme builders
the goat of customizing and making your high level back end
look nothing like anything else on the market
it's him he even took home a vendor appreciation award
at high level's own event
recognizing him for better care of the mtk community
than anyone else out there
and this isn't an accident
this is just who tom is today kicks off what i'm really excited to say
is gonna be an ongoing thing
tom is going to be joining me here on the in the spotlight series
to share what's new what's being refreshed
and what's coming inside the toolkit
this is first of many and i could not be more excited about this
and for this first one
he's walking us through something brand new called agency form kit
same origin story as mtk itself
he looked around
couldn't find what agencies actually needed and built it himself
so let's dig in
alright we are here with our founder and ceo of the marketers toolkit
to bring you some new things that are happening over here
and i'm so excited this is tom bristol
he has been running the toolkit for how many years tom
uh since twenty nineteen
so it seems like uh
just yesterday but it's been
i don't know seven years now
so tell us what the marketers toolkit is and um
what problem it solves
so originally it solved the problem that vibe coding has solved now
but originally it solved the problem of
we had a whole bunch of marketers and people that were reselling
high level that were not techies
could not code and high level was amazing
but there was little things that bugged people
and everybody wanted to do something extra that high level didn't do
because they started with the skateboard model
which i'm sure you've heard them talk about a billion times
where they you know
try the minimum they release it with the minimum amount of uh
capabilities and let the users complain
and then they you know
update it and make it work and make it go
go to market really fast and uh
so that benefited us
because we were able to fill the needs ahead of high level
and it was a constant race because high level uh
you know rightly so
i'm doing a great job uh
continue to hire people and uh
so we would fix something
we would put out a little snippet or something like that
that people could use to fix it um
and then you know
six months later to a year later
high level would finally come out with their fix
so uh yeah
so the the purpose of the toolkit was to let other competitor
like let you
as the sas entrepreneur or the marketer
get an edge up on everybody else that's trying to resell high level
to be able to uh
you know have the better version of high level
absolutely and to be able to customize
i mean i came to you yeah
um
with doing custom css and everything in
in my agency and then learning that you had the best on the market uh
theme builder and i was able to transform my back in
to make it look so incredible and so good
and then on top of it having the customizer that
that was really what made the difference for me
because i could put add and subtract things
hide things add things in
and make it look completely unique for specifically
my niche and my users which isn't just a vanity metric
for me it was like functionality
intuitive functionality and that's one
thing that high level just doesn't pay attention to
because they don't need to
is intuitiveness and so i think that um
tom your toolkit has brought intuitiveness to my
to my system so thank you
thank you yeah
that's a key thing that i always think with
is how do we make it so that users don't have to go to help doc
how do we make it so they can just like
look at it and do what they want to do
um that's like my motto actually
and yeah but yeah
the customizer is the only thing like it on the market
it lets you dig in and restructure things in high level
if you haven't seen it if you don't know what the capabilities are
your mind's gonna be blown when you actually see it
like everybody's you don't expect to be able to do what you can right
you can restructure the menu
you can rebuild your own menu
it doesn't even look like high level at the end when you're done
and yeah and now the number of updates we're putting out is incredible
the number of things and the
you know upgrades that you can do with the toolkit now are
it's just continuing to go out and we're refining things
so i'm really excited for this year
cause it's gonna be a banner year for uh
high levels with ai but also for reselling high level
i think absolutely absolutely
and i have to say that when um
i go to support at high level
i cannot tell you how many times that the support is like
unable to navigate my back end
because they're like are you sure this is high level
hahaha yeah
yeah and actually that's an interesting thing
like i was just helping someone yesterday actually
that i was vibe coding some javascript and css and stuff
to put into their high level
which is very dangerous
there is a reason we still have a job
because you can vibe code and then lock everybody out of your system
and that's what happened with this guy
so he he
he ended up like i mean
claude suggested or chat gpt
i don't know which one suggested some javascript that uh
he put into he just copied and pasted into his custom css area
our custom javascript area
and it created a a loop
so whenever anybody logged in
it just like froze and it wouldn't let them go in
and he was like you know
posting in the facebook group with like a red alarm like please
support said it was gonna take
twenty four to forty eight hours for someone to get back to me
and my users can't log into the app and i can't go in to remove it
and yeah so danger danger
but yes i mean i
i totally i totally vibe with that
because yeah um
i had css and javascript that has broken um
my system as well and to have the marketers toolkit
to have you and your team there um it
it's just such a safety it's such a safety for my system
and it makes sure i'm when everything is running um
it just makes sure everything is running smoothly
and i don't have to worry about it
and i don't have to have a team behind me either that our coders
or i don't have to worry about going to spending my hours in chat
g b t to worry about something breaking
yeah yeah
it's so true right
you know and we actually uh
one of the number one things that i really have attention on
with the toolkit is making sure that the support is there for people
and making sure that their users receive an uninterrupted experience
and don't have bugs and stuff
so uh
i always feel like we can get better at our support tickets and
and handling things but uh
i think the stability of our platform is the best out there
and uh
so much so that uh
i was so incredibly surprised at high level when we were at our booth
because we you know
we exhibit there every year and uh
josh satterly came and you know
had gotten together
and got a vendor appreciation award from the clients doctor yeah
josh satterly was like out of all of the different vendors
you're the one that takes the care of the people
the best and the customizer
there's nothing else there out there
they there's things that try to be
but they don't
focus on what is needed with what you do in the customizer
it's really cool thanks
so you have something new
it's like you had a moment or where you had a light bulb or
i had enough moment and you knew something needed to be created
so tell us what that something is and
and what yeah
brought it about yeah totally
so uh
as an intro i
the toolkit was originated because i thought
well of course there's other things out there
and then i started discovering
back in twenty nineteen i discovered
oh wait no
there isn't that out there
i should probably create it
and so this is a very similar story uh
in that there are plenty of apps out there that work for forms right
so think jotform cognitoforms
google forms and that try and handle
you know just regular forms
but the problem is that they handle all types of forms
they don't handle onboarding forms
and as an agency myself
i actually built an app like this ages ago for our agency
and so i was like i should probably bring this over to high level
because i haven't seen this out there yet
so i'll show you a little bit about it
but the it handles three things
which is number one
i don't know of
any form system that lets you save the progress as you're going along
so you get these huge onboarding forms
and the client you know
needs to take you know
over three days right
and so they don't just leave the browser open
um so this lets them save it
and then get reminders to fill it out at a later time
and then number two uh
you as the agency have already been talking to the client
you've got all sorts of data about them
and you're gonna have them put all of that data back in again
and have them answer it even though they've
you know told you over the phone or over a zoom or whatever
so how can we put all of that into the form
so it shows that you're actually paying attention
and they don't have to re duplicate their work of
you know putting it out there
um and then number three
how can we automatically do that
so rather than having you just
you know type it in
how can we pull it in all from high level
um scrape their website
you know scrape their linkedin
put it all in together and just pre fill the data
and give them a very fast
easy way of updating that form
so
yeah so let me share my screen and i'll show you here
this is agency form kit so i'm gonna sign in uh
using my personal email and fill in
your agency data here and then if you are a toolkit member
um what you can do is just fill in your data here and it'll link it
so let's just see i think it's oh
and i see you have a free version in here too
i know people are gonna be interested in that
yes exactly
so uh
we're logged in agency form kit is based around templates
and the idea is a template is a repeatable questionnaire
that you're going to be sending your clients
such as a logo questionnaire
or a web design rebrief or things like that
and i
they're simply you know
forms that you can drag and drop
or you can create them and import them from google forms
import a high level form or even build it with ai
so say you don't even know what it is that you wanna do yet
you can give it a overall idea and it'll build your form for you
which is pretty awesome or just
you know reference someone else's form already
oh my gosh this is so cool
yeah right
you know people always say
can you just you're
people are getting lazy so let's make it easy for them to be lazy
exactly oh
i love it yeah
so uh yeah
so that's how you create your templates
once you have a template i you have a whole bunch of abilities here
i you can once you're
you know connecting to high level is really easy
um all you have to do is
you know
create your private integration key and put it into our system here
but once you have that connected um
you have some great capabilities here with the high level integration
and this looks like a lot
but it's actually really simple
all you have to do is copy this one link right here
and if you take a look at it up here at the top
you'll see all we're doing is
we're just grabbing that contact id and passing it along here
so when you do that
it's going to do what i'm gonna show you manually here in a second
so when you have a template
that's a reusable uh form that we've got here
so then you've got clients
and a client is you know
a contact and so if you uh
you can start from form requests or a client
but say if you say you're gonna create a new form request um
say we'll do like a
the basic information cause that'll give us enough information here
um you can search high level
so i made a fake contact called reginald who has all the data
i gave a ai told ai
go in and make a fake contact for me
and it made a beautiful contact and decided to name him reginald
so so um
there you go so anyway
we got reginald here
and you now have the option to prefill it from high level
and this is going to do two things
it's gonna grab the data from the contact
the notes the opportunities
and then if you have this checked
it'll also even scrape the guy's website up to ten pages
put it all together and give that as context to the ai
that's gonna then refill the form for you ahead of time
so that the contact just sees that you've put in the work
to actually put in all the data
so they remember that you remember everything that you talked about
so i'm gonna uncheck this
because thunderbottom dot biz is not a real website
so here we go
and so anyway so the idea here is
it's now pulled in all the data that is in high level
um and now you can say
you know we don't know their industry
year of establishment or company size
so i'm gonna create the form and get the link
and now this is the link that you would email to the client
and so when they open it up
it looks like this and so nice
now look at this
and they can just simply answer the few things that they need to
and now they're all complete
and they can hit submit um
if it's like a huge form and they want to come back later
they can always hit save and come back at another time
and they can copy the link
or they can put in their email address
and the date and time they want to be reminded
and then they'll get an email saying
hey come back
this is the link to do that
so all pretty awesome when you hit submit
it says it's submitted and it's all done
and you've got all sorts of possible integrations
that you can do to notify yourself
so i if they have filled it out
you can of course
fire off a webhook notify yourself with an email
add a row to google sheets
upload the data and files to google drive
wow
you can do multiple of these as well
and click up so um
you can simply add a task
oh my gosh
with your field mappings
all the things wow
it's a full thing i can assign it to you
and so when someone fills it out
it automatically kicks off all the things
which is great um
inside of high level
you have the option of even adding a tag to their contact
when the form is completed
so it can trigger off a workflow or whatever is like okay
they're done bring you off to the next thing
and of course you have a whole bunch of other complicated options
that you can do with the workflows and webhooks and things like that
but that's the easiest that you can do right here
um yeah
so oh
and then another cool thing is if you import like
check this out so say we take a high level form
like uh
the free marketing consult
and we wanna make this one of our forms right
oh so
oh that's great
yeah yeah
so i've just imported this directly from my account
and because it came from high level
when it gets updated here
it will automatically update the high level contact field
because it's linked to that
so here um
each one of these is a high level contact field
you can see that right here
so um
all of these anyway so
that makes it incredibly easy
for you to just move a high level form over
and it just it's like a two way sync
yes in addition to all the goodness absolutely
so
would you recommend using this if you wanted custom fields updated to
like create the form first over in high level and then bring it like
bring it back in or yeah
it would make it easier i think
because that would that would give you a better uh
workflow
because high level is gonna have the list of all your custom fields
and you can drag them in there and you'll know
oh wait no
i need to create another one
and it'll it'll make it easier for you to build out
and then you can just import them uh
like that yeah
that's great that's great yeah
so um
as far as like the templates go in here
where does this information reside
like where
so it would be i guess it would be put into like
a google form or click up or something like that
the um
these fields so they
that's where they live
you mean where does like
where do you get to see this data
at a later date yes
so i we have some cool things
let me i was gonna
yeah we have some cool things
so here you've got your form request
so you can see if you click into it
you can see the form data that they
nice filled out right here
um you can also see the form activity
so you can see um
who updated the fields
so you can see the agency updated these fields here
because it tracks the ip address
so got it
you can tell who's been updating the data
so you can actually when you look at this
you can see okay
so this was all pre filled
but this other data was updated by the client
so you can see what they've done and what they haven't done
so smart
thank you so uh
what i was gonna show is we have the option of doing a wizard
and the wizard is basically like the slide
so you can still do the um
like a survey
the slide yeah
it's like a survey it's like a high level survey yeah
see you got a couple options there
that's great
yeah and this is a work in progress
of course so if there's
as soon as we released it
i got a bunch of things from people saying hey
it would be more intuitive if you did it this way
and things like that and
but yeah
a lot of work and attention has gone into this
to make it as simple and easy for people as possible
it looks like you can just jump right in and yeah
get right to work with it
and it's easy to navigate
really simple and clean ui here
it looks really really good
it's free to toolkit members
which is very cool okay yes
so it's free to toolkit members
and that's what i was gonna ask you actually
what is the difference between
if somebody were to like
just want this
what is the difference between the free version and the paid version
that's a good one so i
the free version gives you integrations
so it doesn't have um
it just has basic email notifications
um and it doesn't have a lot of the white label stuff
with the pro version you can actually put it on your own domain and um
we haven't released it yet
but you'll be able to you know
add your own email authentication
so you can send it from your own email and things like that
to further make it your own agency as opposed to agency form kit
so free version
like most of these free versions uh
let you use it but add their own branding to it
awesome awesome
and so last question what do you want agencies to walk away with
believing that's possible with the form kit
simplify their onboarding uh
and stop having to deal with huge amounts of google forms
and just have things flawlessly go from
you know
one thing to high level to click up to whatever their native stack is
just have it be an entryway into it
you know you have had onboarding
form capability inside of the toolkit for a while
and i have interviewed some high level power users that have
you know a hundred plus
a thousand plus users in their system
where they've been using the toolkit for their onboarding
but they've had a lot they
you had to have like
a lot of development understanding behind the scenes
and this it simplifies things so much for um
the agency and it's something
i mean to me
every agency should have
some sort of onboarding process for high level
it's incredible mature yeah
it's very very important
and if you combine this with our agency workflow app
that gives you the ability to update custom values
and things like that that's gonna like
take it to the next level exactly
well thank you so much tom
for coming on and sharing this with us
i know a lot of people are going to jump in
and for those of you that have any questions
feel free to reach out to us
we're here for it and um
we'll see you next time beautiful
thanks for having me
of course the pleasure is so mine
we want him more on right
hahaha
ugh
you guys tom is building behind the scenes for all of us
and i feel so lucky to bring conversations like this one to you
being his community and client optimization advocate has honestly
been one of my favorite things
it's totally my jam and i can't thank him enough for the opportunity
to serve fellow ghl agencies and be a part of this amazing ride
and take it to the next level
is exactly how he left it
which feels just right you know
what struck me most in this conversation
is how much of the heavy lifting the agency form kit does
before our client even sees the form
it already pulls their data
pre fills what it knows and sets them up to just confirm and move on
so if you wanna try it go head over to agency form kit dot com
there's a free version and if you're already in the toolkit
why not you're in
it's free it's included in your plan
so questions
come find us inside the marketers tool kit for go
high level facebook group
chris hosts live q and a calls every friday at noon central
and the zoom link is right there in the group
thanks for being here and we'll see you on the next one