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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
Jake Cross [00:00:00]:
.
Virginia Schauer [00:00:07]:
A marketer's toolkit special where we highlight members of the toolkit, what they're doing in their SaaS, how they're using the toolkit. You're going to get an inside look at the back end of the marketer's toolkit and at the same time get some maybe great ideas for your business as well. If you're on the fence of joining marketer's toolkit or you're in there and want to see more features, or you're just someone out there that are looking for ideas for your business, you are in the right spot. My name is Virginia Shower and I'm your host. So let's get started. If you are someone who feels like you just like stumbled across High level or someone introduced it to you to maybe just fit your own business needs, and then you're like, this would be good for some of my clients. And then from there you feel like, oh my gosh, I could really use this as residual income. Well, you are in the right place because I'm about to introduce you to Jake Cross.
Virginia Schauer [00:01:01]:
He is a real estate investor and business acquisition pro who just stumbled across High level by solving his own problems first. Jake needed a system to run deals for his real estate investments and M and A work. So he customized High Level with the marketer's toolkit to fit his businesses instead of forcing them into generic tools. So what happened next? His private system works so well that other investors and entrepreneurs asked for access. And this sparked an unexpected word of mouth. Sass? No ads, all referrals. Jake's agency has grown organically and this is proof that when you have something that is valuable, people will share it for you. And so why the marketer's toolkit? Jake did not want his SaaS to look and feel like every other high level clone.
Virginia Schauer [00:01:51]:
So he used the toolkits, theme builder, customizer and location groups to tailor it for each niche, from real estate to roofing, even to genealogy. So, so here's the deal. If you're a real estate pro, an agency owner, it doesn't matter really what niche you're in. You're just a SaaS dreamer who wants to build something that doesn't get ghosted after one month, you've got to have the marketer's toolkit and that's what we're going to dive into today. This is Jake Cross. He runs an agency serving primarily real estate investors and business acquisition professionals. But he's been branching out a little bit because just organic people are talking about his agency. And he's like, come on.
Virginia Schauer [00:02:34]:
And he'll talk a little more about that in a second, but welcome. Jake, I'm glad you're here.
Jake Cross [00:02:38]:
Thanks. I'm super excited to be here.
Virginia Schauer [00:02:40]:
Awesome. Awesome. So tell us a little more about your business and what brought you into being a SaaS owner and the marketer's toolkit.
Jake Cross [00:02:49]:
Sure. Yeah. So we were using, we were using the GoHighLevel platform for our own internal purposes for a couple years. Tried a bunch of other CRMs. Didn't really care for them quite as much because I couldn't customize it how I wanted it. So we tried, we tried to go high level. We built it up for ourselves. And then a handful of people came to us and said we like what you have just from me sharing my screen on zooms or stuff like that.
Jake Cross [00:03:11]:
And then we started getting clients unintentionally and I kept waiting for it to stop. So but it didn't. And it's kept growing and so we've built it out to be able to cater towards the main audiences. That of what I had built it for originally was for real estate investors like you said, and M and a professional. So business acquisitions. So we'd built it for those two. Cause that's what I was using it for. But over the.
Jake Cross [00:03:33]:
Just naturally with time like you talked about people buying businesses. So in the M and A stuff they've bought other businesses and then those businesses they buy, they say, can we now manage that in here as well? Cause we like how everything else is run so we keep spinning off new versions of this in other industries. So now we have, we actually have a quite a few hand cleaning companies in here. We have roofing, we have landscaping, we have genealogy of all things. We have architecture firms, we have a social media branding company. So we've got a handful of other stuff that's kind of popping up. Even though we still probably have around 60, 70% real estate investors and another 30, 40% are M& A. But we still have.
Jake Cross [00:04:12]:
I'd say we're around 15% now are some other.
Virginia Schauer [00:04:15]:
So what do you think the secret is behind people wanting to share your business, what you built? Because that, that is the dream, right, is to have word of mouth getting out there. Not a lot of ad spend. You know, what do you think it is?
Jake Cross [00:04:29]:
I would actually maybe love to learn from. Love from. Love to learn from you guys because we have not spent any money on ad. We actually have $0 spent so far on marketing because I don't know how to run my own ads. It's funny, I've run ads for other people, but when it comes to coming up with my own brand stuff, I'm like sitting here, I'm like, I don't know, like, I feel like it's so much harder to do it for yourself than it is to do it for other people. So we're prepping a couple ad campaigns and so hopefully those will be coming out soon. I think so far for us, we TR to be extremely generous with our affiliate campaigns. So anybody who they bring in, they get a chance to make a good amount of money from that.
Jake Cross [00:05:02]:
I think that helps. And then the second part is that we just try to overdo it with support. And so our onboarding and support process so that it's. There's never an excuse for somebody to not be successful or to not feel like they have enough stuff there to support them. It means that we keep most of our customers. We don't. We don't have a whole lot that leave. And then the ones that do leave, we actually have a pretty good return rate too.
Jake Cross [00:05:24]:
So they'll come back to us usually as well, which that's been great. I'm really happy with that.
Virginia Schauer [00:05:28]:
And you're in what you've built the infrastructure of it. Do you have like a chat support? Like, do you do 24.7chat support with one of the people over that serve high level and that kind of thing?
Jake Cross [00:05:43]:
Yeah, so we do have 24.7chat support. We also host office hours at least four times a week. Sometimes we'll throw in some extra training zooms and stuff like that. But we host office hours four days a week and for an hour every day where people just hop in, ask any questions that they have. We have a phone line open that people know they can text if they just have an urgent need that they for some reason can't get a hold of. Chat. Every once in a while, chat just breaks down and doesn't work. So every once in a while they'll just text in there or call us there too.
Jake Cross [00:06:15]:
Again, we try to make ourselves overly available to maybe to a fault sometimes. Well, yeah, but it's been good. I think that's the one feedback we get is that our support is incredible and we've done a really good job of making sure they feel they have everything they need.
Virginia Schauer [00:06:32]:
Yeah, that's awesome. So when you first started transitioning over into serving clients inside of your high level system, what made you search out the toolkit? What. What was the need that it met initially?
Jake Cross [00:06:45]:
Yeah, I, I didn't want mine to look like everybody else's because there were. So the theme builder was actually the first thing that I found. So it was me trying to search on YouTube, play within the go high level world of customizing some of those elements and how to do it. I ran into a handful of YouTube videos talking about the theme builder and Tom and everything that he had built there. And that, that I think was the part that got me the most interested to start. It wasn't till later I realized there was all the customizer portions as well, which I've actually come to use those now more than I use the theme builder. But it's been great, honestly. It was just.
Jake Cross [00:07:19]:
I didn't want it to look like everybody else's and I wanted to be able to add additional functionality because anybody can just go sign up for GoHighLevel. But when you start adding these other layers of other stuff and so we bring in marketers toolkit plus we have a lot of extra code and other things that we've written on top to add additional functionality and features too.
Virginia Schauer [00:07:36]:
That's great. What kind of functionalities do you use with the toolkit?
Jake Cross [00:07:41]:
So we use theme builder. We use all that stuff for customizing the appearance and the visual appearance there. We use our location groups to be able to set up different stuff. So the, what our real estate investors care about is going to be different than even the M and A investors and our cleaning companies are going to be completely different than that. And so, so we've set up different location groups to be able to cater towards each of them and show different things that are available, even down to like for contact buttons and on the buttons themselves being able to customize those buttons for each type of build as well.
Virginia Schauer [00:08:11]:
Let's talk more about the functionality of the, the location groups themselves for those people that don't know. Can you explain the location group and maybe go into detail about one of the location groups that you've done?
Jake Cross [00:08:26]:
Yeah. So our location, our location groups are built around the different builds that we have and then we have some clients who's asked for even more custom stuff on top. So we've built them their own private location group as well. Yeah. So one of the things that we do really like in here is that it's going to go through, it's all connected through our Google sheets and then in here we've been able to go through and remove out the stuff that's not relevant. So like real estate investors are not looking to manage payments They I would not advise that any of them are collecting rents or anything by payment. That would very poor business model. And so we remove out all the payment stuff we just keep in like contracts.
Jake Cross [00:09:10]:
Yeah. So we redid contracts and just added it in here again. So documents and contracts just became contracts. We dropped that in there and connect directly to it. I'm trying to think. We have our AI bot software that we've added in here. We add in contact buttons and other menu edits. This is what we already showed.
Jake Cross [00:09:32]:
But yeah, it just. It enables us to showcase a couple additional features in here that work really, really well. And I'm sure there's so many things that we are not using it for that we probably should be.
Virginia Schauer [00:09:46]:
Can you share with us what it looks like on your agency side?
Jake Cross [00:09:52]:
Yeah. So in here we have. You can see we've replaced the contracts with just loi and contracts. We've got our contacts, we've got to submit new offer settlement. In here we have our whole top bar with our support tools and stuff like that as they've been rolled out. Our community group we have little custom contact buttons. I think it still will do the. Yep.
Jake Cross [00:10:24]:
And so in here we've got some buttons up at the top we've got call status update that's going to pull up a little form when we're on a call with somebody. So it'll auto populate with all their information and then you can set a follow up. So we have a sequence in here to be able to set follow ups and tasks and stuff for individual on the team being able to turn them bots on and off. Some of the accounts have additional buttons up here to be able to do different things like sending a contract out or. And actually all of them have that. This account just doesn't look like they've set up their contract links how they want them in here yet otherwise it would show up right here. Yeah. And so it's been great.
Virginia Schauer [00:11:01]:
Sure. You've been learning a lot along the way as you've been building out. Is there any piece of advice that you would give agency owners as they're building out their agency within high level using the toolkit?
Jake Cross [00:11:14]:
That is a big question. I would still start with the theme builder because I think it's the easiest one to wrap your head around quickly and then. And then start to dive into the customizer because the customizer goes a lot deeper and gives you a lot more functionality afterwards. But it's a little bit of a rabbit hole where there's a lot to that could be done in there. So I would start with the theme builder. Get all that stuff. Because once you get the theme builder set up, you're pretty much. You don't really have to worry about it anymore.
Jake Cross [00:11:42]:
For the most part, it's kind of just set and you, for the most part, leave it. I haven't had to change much afterwards. And then the. The customizer itself, that's where we go in there and play with that. And again, I know we only use probably a very small portion of what's probably capable through it. And unfortunately, we've probably redone with custom codes some of the stuff that's available in there. I just didn't realize it was all there yet. And so we're still learning some of the stuff that's available too.
Virginia Schauer [00:12:06]:
That's great. That's great. And I would say, too, you're probably better off and you can correct me if I'm wrong and maybe support it if you. If you think so. It's easier to actually use the customizer and thing these functionalities than doing the custom code yourself because you have the support of Tom and the team versus you having to go in there and see things. If there's ever an update with High Level and code breaks because of the updates that High Level does.
Jake Cross [00:12:32]:
Yeah, yeah. So when we've built stuff in house, I mean, in High Level, which they're notorious for doing, I still change things all the time. And then all of a sudden we have to fix it, we have to go repair it. Whereas, yeah, Tom's always super responsive. You see if something doesn't seem to be working. I'll go into the Facebook group for a second and there's already a couple other people who might have posted on it. There's already usually a response, and so usually it's back up and running pretty quickly. The other cool benefit is I know that Tom also does have relationships with GoHighLevel directly.
Jake Cross [00:13:01]:
So every once in a while I know he's getting kind of teed in on changes that are happening before they get rolled out. So I know that that helps, which is great.
Virginia Schauer [00:13:09]:
Yeah, yeah. And you showed me this early on. Do you want to talk about the functionality of the home screen that you put up?
Jake Cross [00:13:18]:
Sure. Yeah. I totally took inspiration from you and I loved your little homepage. I thought this was great. So we built this out.
Virginia Schauer [00:13:26]:
Oh, my gosh, that's awesome.
Jake Cross [00:13:29]:
So it has. So we built it. So it pulls in. We built in a URL link that goes in here. It's Going to pull their name. And then it has this little gif that runs as the thumbnail on this and then right here it rotates a quote over here. That's just kind of fun for everybody.
Virginia Schauer [00:13:46]:
Yes.
Jake Cross [00:13:46]:
And then we built this little quick start training guide that then I still gotta, this is new. I still gotta populate all these videos, but then it pops up a little training video for each of these little sections.
Virginia Schauer [00:13:59]:
Oh my gosh, this is incredible. Jake.
Jake Cross [00:14:02]:
Thanks. Yeah, we got a community that we just launched as well. We've made a lot of changes on the back end because we used to be more of just we have office hours and we have chat support and stuff like that. We've tried to do a lot more around building a community with it too. So we have our office hours that run. They can hop in here. And then we took some fun ideas of adding in some extra little fun elements in here so that people could sign up for too, which is kind of cool. So.
Virginia Schauer [00:14:25]:
Oh my gosh, this looks so good.
Jake Cross [00:14:28]:
Thanks. Yeah, so we've had a lot of fun. I mean you could see we use the theme builder and lots of stuff to build some fun things out. So we've got some cool ideas. I've seen some other really cool stuff from other people that it's getting my, my ideas flowing a little bit.
Virginia Schauer [00:14:42]:
So this is the feature in the marketer's toolkit.
Jake Cross [00:14:47]:
Yeah, so this is actually getting launched to our company this upcoming week. But two. So yeah, lots of, lots of really cool stuff.
Virginia Schauer [00:14:58]:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that the marketer's toolkit allows you to do things like this, like direct people to where you want them to go, you know, instead of where high, high level may want them to go. And this brings up the. Do you use the hide feature where you can hide the top bar of like, you know, if, if there's for instance, there's been this summer of AI thing that has really gotten into. I mean I love high level, I love you, but all of the intrusive pop ups and pop ins and all of the stuff is a lot and so it's nice to have the toolkit. Do you do any of that?
Jake Cross [00:15:42]:
Yeah, yeah. So we've hit all those, that stuff because for, for half of our clients it's not relevant and for the other ones that it might even be relevant on, I mean they've already, they already know about it. Right. And so seeing the same thing 15, 20, 30 times in a day sometimes is just a lot. Yeah, we hide, we hide all those little pop ups and all the other little junk, trying to make it more streamlined so that people can focus on their business.
Virginia Schauer [00:16:10]:
Yeah, totally. Is there anything that you're looking forward to using in the toolkit that you haven't yet?
Jake Cross [00:16:17]:
I am looking forward to lear all the things that I don't know are there. I am sure there are a ton of features that, like I said, I know we probably just scratched the surface on a lot of it.
Virginia Schauer [00:16:30]:
We've just got to get you back on an optimization call again. Now that I know all the things, I could go do a little research and then book a call and we'll get you in so we can get you on more things.
Jake Cross [00:16:44]:
I'm quickly like scrolling through the list on the customizer and I know there's. Because it gives you the little green dot on like what's being used. And I've only got. I've only got four green dots on all the top stuff.
Virginia Schauer [00:16:55]:
Share that because that's a really good thing for people to see.
Jake Cross [00:16:58]:
There you go. So, yeah, I've only got five green dots, which means that all of the. None of this stuff is even being utilized.
Virginia Schauer [00:17:07]:
And underneath of that features on your left is the default dashboard. And so that's where. That's where Jake is going to change the default dashboard to the home screen and you can target it or link it.
Jake Cross [00:17:21]:
Yeah, so we're really excited about that. So that'll be. There's. Like I said, I know that there are all sorts of stuff that could be done in here. We just haven't had a chance to do them or figure them out. So we'll figure it out.
Virginia Schauer [00:17:32]:
But totally, totally. Well, thank you so much for being on. Is there any last words of advice that you would give any of the listeners?
Jake Cross [00:17:41]:
I think the only piece of advice I would give is just really don't get overwhelmed. There's so many things in here. Just find the stuff that's going to make the biggest impact for you. And then what we're trying to do is when we somehow find extra time to discover additional features and stuff to plug in there, then we circle back and we try to add those. There are thousands of options and I. It took me a while to just figure out where to put time and attention first. Just figure it out. Hop on the office hours.
Jake Cross [00:18:03]:
I know Mike's awesome. He's always in there. I bug him a lot. So. Yeah.
Virginia Schauer [00:18:07]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Jake.
Jake Cross [00:18:09]:
Sure. Awesome.