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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
Jacob Radcliffe [00:00:00]:
Foreign.
Virginia Schauer [00:00:07]:
Oh my gosh, this is a good one. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to set the stage for this conversation. So this is Jacob Radcliffe. He's the mind behind countless GHL systems that are run by some of the big powerhouses and white label brands. He's truly one of the most quietly brilliant, brilliant builders in the high level ecosystem. He's a former military serviceman turned K5 teacher turned automation engineer who's now leading development at a high end company. So let me just set the record straight. His journey is totally wild, like mine.
Virginia Schauer [00:00:45]:
He's inspiring and honestly the perfect reminder that you can build an incredible career in the space without having a traditional path. In this interview, Jacob breaks down how he got started, how he used High level to create life changing income for his family, and then how the toolkit helped him scale faster, offer deeper solutions, and land the kind of clients most people are afraid to go after. He is so generous with how he does what he does. He's honest and he just opens up his playbook. So settle in. You're about to get some big, big truths from someone who truly understands both the engineering side and the heart of this work. So let's dive in.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:01:30]:
So my name is Jacob Radcliffe. I am the owner of Curated Services, which is a consulting company primarily consulting with high level and curated apps, which is my software development side where I'm a high level developer partner been for the last three years. And that is how I came to know Tom. And his Toolkit is doing a ton of lots of small projects for lots of different agencies, some using his product, some using my products. And there's a lot of carryover crossover between the tooling sets. I'm currently the head of engineering at Scipio, where Scipio is a text messaging platform for voicemail drops and texting and that sort of thing. And so we just took that over to add voice AI services into their stack and lead their engineering teams. That's me.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:02:20]:
And yeah, so I think I've gotten a lot out of his tooling and of course I would love to be able to kind of walk through it or just kind of maybe showcase some things that I'm a big fan of. But before I do that, of course, Virginia, if you want to ask me questions or, you know, I'll let you kind of take over the lead here.
Virginia Schauer [00:02:41]:
Yeah, absolutely. What got you? Like first of all, what got you into High Level? How did you find High Level?
Jacob Radcliffe [00:02:48]:
Well, my background is kind of interesting, so I was in the military for nine years. And when I got out, I became a school teacher. So I taught K to 5 technology to little kids and it was an absolute blast. It was a ton of fun. But while I was a school teacher, I started getting more into programming because I was a tech teacher. I was potentially going to be teaching high school and potentially teach JROTC programs as well as. And my cousin had made a post one day and he was sharing High level. And I had a moment, I saw it, I'm like, I don't know what this is, but I have to do it.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:03:29]:
So I'm a big, I'm a big Christian believer. And that was, that was part of my belief set is I just felt very, very led, very led into the technology. And so at that point forward it was, it became like a, just a huge part of my life where I would do consulting work on lunch breaks, consulting work after hours. And it just got to be where, you know, getting home and doing another four hours of work every night was, was. And so eventually I had also been doing the affiliate program. So early on with High Level you could serve as sort of like an affiliate and do build. So there was so much need at the time. People just put a post out and like, who wants to set me up? I'm like, I'll do it.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:04:11]:
And so I would hop on, get the affiliate, click with somebody, go do a full custom build with them. And then it just kept stacking up and stacking up eventually to the point where I made more money as a high level affiliate than I was earning as a school teacher. And then that's what helped me to kind of take the plunge, you know, go full time being in marketing and automation space. And of course everything from there just kind of cascaded. So my software company, I had built Tooling because I was so busy and I was juggling all these different things. I built low code tooling to be able to do more work faster. So it was. I had build tools on Make, Xavier and Pably to be able to quickly build automations with High Level on those platforms.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:04:56]:
Cool. And so basically rebuilt the High Level API three times on those products which just, that just increased my knowledge, increased my need to go learn more things. So I was not a software developer before all this. I had to become one to kind of take on more project work and do more things. And so that people saw the tools that I was using just on my own, in progress and they're like, can I buy that? And I'm like sure. So I started selling it and that Was of course kind of the kickoff of having two separate companies, the consulting and a software company. And I've just had a chance to work with a ton of different verticals and industries in this timeframe. Just I think it's very interesting right now.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:05:41]:
What's funny is like the AI automation space is very popularized and three years ago, three years ago it was not, it was traditional agencies selling traditional services. AI was just starting to kind of like really help people. To me, when AI was first coming out like three to four years ago, I was using it just to teach me stuff. I was blown away how fast it could teach me things and I was like, this is the best teacher I've ever had. Like, I don't even, I don't have to go research these topics. I can just ask this here. So for, for me to have such a condensed learning time frame, it helped me to learn programming and learn other concepts faster. It helped me to iterate faster and do things.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:06:24]:
And now it's, it's funny seeing it all today, what I learned years ago about how, how significant AI is in the market and how I could really educate you quickly. And so it's nice to see that everybody else is catching up to, to that idea. But yeah, it's been a huge blessing for my family too because I've been able to be home, be home with my family and just see my kid grow up as well. Now she's back in school, so she's now in pre K, so she's full time. And I think that was pretty cool to be able to have that opportunity to be at home all those years with my wife, all the way up until she was in pre K, um, and just recently taking on a full time position with my current company. So yeah, what a huge blessing that High Level has been to me and all the people I interact with, like Tom and his tech and all these different ones that it's just been, it's been fun.
Virginia Schauer [00:07:18]:
So tell me a little bit about that. I mean it is a huge blessing to have that. And it's so cool that you were in, in the beginnings when you kind of caught the stream at the right time, wouldn't you say? Like you just caught it at the right time to build out.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:07:33]:
Affiliate marketing is complicated and High Level's not like any other product anywhere in the market. And primarily that the 40% cut is significant, especially when you do, you know, four or five builds, even if you did one custom build per month that included that, I mean that after about a year that's a, that's a serious income source. And it's, and it's nice because people don't leave the software really. Like my affiliates don't churn. In two years I think I've had maybe one or two people churn because I was part of the build, I was part of the process to get them on the platform and glue them to the platform. And so I think that's where there's so much value as to how High Levels structured it from the beginning. And that's why they kind of partnered with people like me to go out there and build, sell the system, be the champion of the system, become the expert. Other ecosystems are loaded with high dollar consultants.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:08:31]:
Your salesforces, your Zoho, these other ones, they have all these people that are selling those systems for a super high amount of money. So with High Level being able to, to package as an affiliate with like a build fee, you can change, you could be more flexible.
Virginia Schauer [00:08:48]:
Right.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:08:48]:
Because of the affiliate side.
Virginia Schauer [00:08:50]:
Right.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:08:50]:
And I think that's what gave me an edge as an individual person and you know, as a business owner, you know, I don't, I don't like to brag or boast about numbers and stuff like that. But you know, I think that a lot of businesses, they're in debt their first year or two. There is no debt with High Level other than your monthly subscription. So if you can successfully land one affiliate, your High Level subscription is paid for and then what, then what do you do next? Like how do you take that and run with it? And so never have I seen another business model where your very first sale can be turned net positive at that point. So whether it's you selling inside of your own account and you have your own subscription and you're selling your own clients within your own agency or you're setting up an agency for somebody else, the pod, the net positive is so quick. And so I think this is a huge, huge benefit to the High Level community that a lot of people are very centric around the idea of running their own company, their own agency. But I have personally found far more success going and setting up lots of different agencies, different services, direct clients doing their build outs, helping them be self sustaining. And then I leave.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:10:04]:
And I think it's of course not for everybody. Having to work for 40 or 50 different verticals has been very revealing as to who I would want to partner with, who I want to work with, the companies that I um, spend the most time with. And I think that there's so much commonality And I think you would probably have seen the same, right Virginia, like with your work with different types of companies like you, you start to find a common thread amongst all of them.
Virginia Schauer [00:10:30]:
Absolutely. And the ones you want to work with and the ones that maybe can go and work, you know, with other people.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:10:37]:
Yeah, yeah. Some I don't want to work with.
Virginia Schauer [00:10:40]:
So tell me Jacob, how did you come across Tom in the marketer's toolkit?
Jacob Radcliffe [00:10:46]:
You know, the first one was through a very good friend of mine and of course because of the white label concept I can't reveal too much details of industries and stuff like that because sometimes it's important not to. But he was a very heavy user of the toolkit. From a styling perspective, it didn't even look like high level. Like he, he has like this, this styling where you could have like everything on the top level instead of the left sidebar. And at the time there was been so much competition in the marketplace within the SaaS world, any sort of level of differentiation where you could hide or white label high level could give you an advantage. And so now it's a little more known, it's a little more out there that this is the tech stack that people are building on. Kind of like a salesforce, like oh, we're building on top of a salesforce. So at, at the time when I was building was a lot more secretive, like it was a secret sauce idea and secret sauce thing.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:11:40]:
And I think now it's a lot less that it's more formal that this is just the stack we're building on and but yeah, I think I got introduced to it through him and learning all the intricacies of what you could build with it. And then it branched into a different industry like affiliate marketing based courseware company that I worked with for a pretty long period of time where they also heavily leveraged it. This was the first time I had seen an agency that completely stripped out the UI of the, of the high level product. Just having like one or two things shown and it was like this is cool, this is different. And so learning the psychology of it too. So like I was never into marketing and sales psychology. I was a school teacher, I was a military service member. I didn't know all these things.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:12:31]:
So it was like a front row seat into the brains of multi million dollar operations to be able to see like how they're selling their courses and how they intake people and how the funnels and flow through and then like, you know, if the toolkit is hiding all these things like this is the logic, this is the reason why we're doing it. And you know, a lot of the agencies, what they do is they, they use it to successfully, successfully people into different plan tiers because the native high level platform does not hide enough things. And so the big advertisement here on the product level for Tom's product is that you need to be able to, to hold back a lot of the features and things because the platform is too feature heavy. There's too much tools, there's too many menus, there's too many things. Just for that fact alone, literally every agency owner should be using it because it will cut down on your support, it will simplify the platform for people to be able to go find the things quickly, add custom links or custom apps and custom things. I'd probably interact with about 10 different agencies using Tom's product just through different things. One of the most popular things I think they use for it is the custom buttons in the UI where you can pop a pop up. So if you're on a contact record, it just opens a pop up and within the pop up you can put a form and he has a way to push data to the form.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:13:55]:
So these become very useful. Most of the agencies that I've worked in have some level of somebody's calling the leads, whether it's a sales rep, a virtual assistant, and whoever's calling the leads, you need to build a system for them. You need to build a way to leverage the software. And so Tom's tooling with that window to me is by far the most useful thing to be able to have that pop up, fill in some details, submit a form, and then that form can do all sorts of actions on the back end of high level whatever you can dream to your heart's content, but by having that, it lets you train your overseas staff on a more formal process and kind of like building things that you just simply couldn't do without his toolkit, without having that pop up and that ability to do that. I think like, I can't imagine all the things I couldn't have built without it. And even in my current setup that I'm working through, like with my personal agency account or other ones, we very heavily use that, especially now. I think it's even on the sales opportunity cards where you can load up like a custom iframe within it and snap forms. All very helpful, very useful things.
Virginia Schauer [00:15:05]:
Can you show us an example?
Jacob Radcliffe [00:15:08]:
Yeah, let me see if I have, I have the theme builder on this particular agency and I, I think I Just want to just like kind of walk through.
Virginia Schauer [00:15:16]:
Yeah, that'd be great.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:15:17]:
One second. Let's see. Cool. So this is the inside of the. The toolkit. So the theme builder and customizer. One of the. Just, just to like, for people that watch this, like, I do hope that people watch this video and like, it really does sell them on the toolkit.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:15:34]:
One of the things that I hope people walk away from this is like, the amount of stuff that's in here. I have not even explored all of it. It's crazy how much is in here with what you get for your subscription. These are annual plans, and so you can. You could purchase these separately. And so with my current agency, I had the theme builder. And so like, with the theme builder, you can do things like change the colors, change the look and feel. You can add, of course, different menus and different things.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:16:00]:
But the customizer, but primarily it's about styling the agency. So if I wanted to change these colors up here, that's relatively easy to do. So there's 10 million different things that you can do with it. And I think that's a bit of an overwhelming thing initially. But I think what's. What's really special about this is that it's not just the initial theme. So you see like the green and you see like my curated system and like all these cool things and different icons. And that's done actually just through some of his native presets, I believe, or I customized one of the presets.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:16:34]:
So I loaded this up and then you can come in here and you can see things like these different features, like a location switcher with quick actions. I wanted to customize the color and look and feel of these things so you can, you could see kind of how they look and feel. Tons and tons and tons and tons of different things. So for someone who is a designer type person, you can actually leverage this as a consultant, as another service. So if you're like, oh, you run a franchise, cool. Let's style this to look like your franchise product. Let's change all the colors, let's change the buttons. You.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:17:10]:
You run a cleaning company, that's cool. Let's set it all up in here and, and dial it in for you, right? And so that's kind of like all these different options, what they mean in terms of like, the look and feel of the platform. And then when you scroll through further, he has some really cool stuff for like the sign in page to customize that he has the, the hide and redeem features is really where most people spend most of their time, where you're coming in here and you're actually like removing like things from the platform. So if you don't want to see these notification banners or something like that, you can just hide it and take one more thing away from your clients. Right. The biggest complaint is that something new will come out. A new banner, a new thing, a new advertisement, a new product. And Tom has always stayed on top of it.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:17:58]:
He's always been responsive. Whether I'm working with a friend's agency and he has a need or if I'm working with like six different other agencies that use his product. Like he's always responsive to add like the newest thing into the thing so that it's removed or hidden. Which is extremely important too because when we have clients, they're self serving inside the platform and we're trying to ascend them to a different plane, we don't want them to see things that we haven't put into our plan. Like maybe this new feature is worth a good bit of money and we don't want someone paying a hundred bucks a month to have that feature. And I think it takes time for the high level team to think through those things and put it in their SaaS configurator and do all these other setups. But that's where Tom and the customizer has really come into play. And it's not active in this account, but basically the customizer will allow you to set up unique, unique different configurations for each account.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:18:52]:
So let's say for example, you have a SaaS plan and you have three different tiers. So we have like a low, medium and a high plan. Right. You can set up different views of the system within each of your pricing tiers and then you can come in here and you can individually theme them. So if you wanted to have different themes, you could have totally different things hidden, totally different colors and styles within those themes. You can duplicate them. So I think that's the part of the product that people are not seeing like the value of what that means. It means that you as an individual marketing agency owner think that you may not be able to swing the bat at these big dog like huge franchises, multi location businesses.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:19:43]:
That is categorically untrue. You could easily build them a very bespoke CRM system within this, within your own agency account so you don't have to go start a new high level account for them. You can build it all in one, keep all that revenue for you and not just build it in another. High level account. So I think that's been two different strategies whether you're leveraging the toolkit for yourself and your own agency and having a multi location franchise sort of rollout or if you're going to go build it out from scratch. And I've done both and both have their pluses and minuses. And so I think this has been just a crazy amount of tools and things that you can do that have enabled me to do that. And then as well, I think some of the other highlights for me he has some interesting like little scripts and little things that just make your experience a little bit better on the platform.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:20:36]:
Just it's hard to explain but there's just so many buttons and toggles, especially in the customizer. So if you're going to go for a plan with Tom's product, do the 299, a month subscription, that's the one you want. That's going to have like both of these toggles right here so that you can have not just a single theme that runs throughout your agency which is a fantastic product in and of itself but if you really want to dial in very, very custom for each different SaaS plan different product or a specific location has its own UI that's unique and custom menus added to it. That's what this one is all about. And so hopefully that is my, that's my, that's my.
Virginia Schauer [00:21:15]:
Like I love that, I love that. And you know, Tom just added, this is all so good by the way. Tom just added a light, a customizer light basically. And what that means is, is just that you can't have multiple location groups, just one location group, but you get all the pieces of the puzzle of the customizer with it. So that's really cool. But what you're talking about and I think is so key is you don't have to have a one size fits all for all of your sub accounts. You can have, you can really tier, have this tiered experience for your users and then also you could have completely, if you wanted to, a plumbing business and a, and a maybe a design firm. It would have a completely different experience for the whatever niche user you're, you're targeting.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:22:14]:
For sure, for sure. And I, and I think the challenge is especially people that want to have like a single menu on the left. Like I only get to see contacts, I only get to see X the social planner, the system. Like there's no other real way to do it without Tom's product. Like you can try to hack your way to Victory With AI and Vibe code the thing. But I can tell you with 100% certainty that's a recipe for failure. And my gosh, for folks style of this and I'm going to just help the audience understand this too because the first thing they're like oh, this is just css. I'm going to just go use a chrome extension.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:22:48]:
I'm going to go and believe me, I'm a tinkerer, I know how to do all these things too. Right. And, and first of all, the UI changes so often in this product. This is high level as a product is a full stack application built with Vue Vue is the, the technology stack. What that means is things are constantly changing. They're constantly changing out their components that render within there. And it's a full time job. It is a full time job to build tooling like this and manage it that stays consistent and actually works.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:23:21]:
And I respect that. I respect the time and my time is more valuable doing other things if I'm sitting here hacking up. And this is an important thing for agency owners, right? Your time is more valuable than the cost of the subscription of this product. If your client is going to go pay you $1,000 a month because you presented them a custom system. When Zoho is $2,000 a month, when Salesforce is quitter than 3 or 4,000, this subscription pays for itself very quickly. This and it's hard for people to picture this until they see enough systems and enough demonstrations of what it does. But I think that's where like consultants that are that are coming maybe new to the space that are coming from these like higher end systems. This is going to enable you to use a very inexpensive product with high level at 497amonth.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:24:13]:
The subscription to this product like 300 bucks a month. So for 700 bucks a month you have a system that can go and build fully clonable systems for franchises. You can build it for lots of different business types and models. And there's less of an issue with the styling of the platform getting in the way of onboarding people because it is very difficult to onboard everything unlocked. I've done hundreds of onboardings and I can tell you that if you only see three or four menus, much better, much easier life to just say go here instead of like 20 different things on the left side panel that you. They're going to weasel their way into every one of them and then you're not going to get the tasks done that you need. So if that helps your retention if that helps you to get more clients, then it's worth it. And I think that that's where folks right now that are, that are more concerned with like, you need to get started, you need to get established.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:25:06]:
I think that's what, that's cool to hear that the light product is, is, is getting released soon. I think that's a great move. But I, I consider this essential tooling for, for numerous agencies that I work with.
Virginia Schauer [00:25:18]:
I was hearing when we were at Level Up, I was hearing, well, let me, let me just get started in my agency and when I'm more established, I'll get the marketer's toolkit. And I said, well, you need this to build your foundation. Would you agree with that?
Jacob Radcliffe [00:25:33]:
Well, it's, there's a lot of things happening to become a business owner, right? I think you know this because it is a business. There is metrics, there's things, there's cost. How much do you sell it for? Are you going to get an ROI? If you have $800 worth of software, do you have a thousand dollars worth of clients and do you have another thousand or three thousand dollars with clients to then fund all these things? So I view it as a cascade effect. With High Level, you start at like a $97 account. They give you a pretty good grace period. I think it's Most trials are 30 days. You can beg for another 30. Don't tell anybody I said that, but you can go beg support for another 30 days.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:26:15]:
With high level, you have 60 days to make money, right? And if you struggle to make money in 60 days with the product, then like, there's a huge community of people that want to do nothing but help with High Level. I think that's the beauty of it is like tools and to kind of get wrapped back around into, like when, when's the right time to purchase the right tool for the thing? It's important to be educated on what these things can do. Because if you don't dream big and you don't go after the bigger clients and you don't know the tools that are in the toolbox to do that, then you will always be fearful of landing the bigger clients. Like when I first started, I would go like to like a martial arts studio or I would go to like a few small people. And then like the never next person I had was a giant real estate like brokerage with I think like 50 different agents or something like that. And I was just overwhelmed. I didn't even know how to begin to tackle something like that. And I think that that's where, if I had presented this is a bespoke CRM that they could give to all their different agents and like you have all this tooling, do a demo for them, maybe sign up for the white plan that you guys are coming up and then have like a way to like showcase that, like, I could have gone after that.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:27:31]:
I really could have swung a bat at that, but I was scared of that. I was fearful at the time. I didn't end up landing any deals with them. So I think part of it is learning enough about the system and then, you know, there's still, there's a lot to learn with high level, There's a lot to learn with a tool like this. But knowing that this is out there and what it can leverage and do preps people to want to use it. And I'm excited to hear that you guys are doing that to get it more accessible, more in the hands of people.
Virginia Schauer [00:27:57]:
Absolutely. I mean, the theme builder alone is only $97 a month. And so like you can come in to the theme builder and start working with that. I'm thinking of like when I came on I have Soul software, which is dedicated to heart centered entrepreneurs who are coaches, teachers, all of that. So I knew when I came in certain aspects of high weren't going to work for me. Certain, the look and feel of it, the sidebar menu needed to be more intuitive. I wanted the whole experience to be much more intuitive. And at first I didn't have the toolkit.
Virginia Schauer [00:28:36]:
And so I just tried my best to find like developers or somebody to like come around and do that for me. And then once I found the toolkit and I started, I did the diy, like I basically went in and just started learning it and it created the whole foundation for me. And then selling it was just so much easier. And I think about it and I'm like, if I had had this like six months ago, you know, earlier, you know, I would have been in a much better place. I think it, it just depends on the, you know, do you know what you want? I guess, you know, do you know what you want to build out is what you're saying.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:29:14]:
Like, yeah. And I've seen some really cool, just some really cool customizations like how people use it. And I think that is like, it's like the dilemma. It's like, when do you make the choice to like add more software into your offer? And I think it really boils down to if you've picked an industry, you picked a niche you have a, you know how you want to onboard. You feel like the platform is holding you back from onboarding faster, more efficiently. You feel like these are things that are going to delay your ability to scale. This is the, that's the perfect time to jump in with it. If the people that you're targeting, like if it helps you present the product in a personalized way, like you're saying like making it your own.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:29:58]:
Like I think some people, they don't learn the high level product and then they're like not just addicted to it but like really addicted to it. Like they're in it every day and like this is my like perfect thing. Like it's my baby, right?
Virginia Schauer [00:30:13]:
Yes.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:30:13]:
And I don't think you can make high level vanilla your baby. It's just, it's just a software product. But when you use things like this and you really do that, I do feel like people want to invest more in it. So I totally, I totally sympathize with that too. I think the, on the, on the flip side of that, if I was to encourage people with a, the path or with like a certain thing, it's like you start with 97 account. You land at least one client at 300 bucks a month, pay your high level account, then you can get the 297 account. Right now you have unlimited accounts from there. Then it's like let me go land at least one more client at 300amonth to now afford a 497 account with a little bit of change leftover or something like toolkit.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:31:01]:
And then we can kind of start layering on. Now we have.
Virginia Schauer [00:31:03]:
That's so smart. That is really smart.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:31:05]:
You're to have a very clear like articulable path, like two $300 a month clients, which is not hard to do in terms of software and what people's expectations for a price point are. And then now you have a 497 account paid for it. You have a base plan with something like Toolkit. You have a way of really like owning your, yourself as a marketing agency or whatever your specialty may be. And then like the customizer comes into play like when you need to scale out what you're doing for 50 or 100 accounts. Right? Because when I previously used it in a life and health insurance agency, we heavily used it. But different insurance types, tons of different options there, tons of different like forms to fill in. Tons of different stuff.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:31:54]:
Like those industries like desperately need this product. They just don't even know it's out there. And I think that that's where I think initially like marketing agencies are fearful of targeting these companies. Like they don't know their industry, they don't know their systems, they don't know how to build for them. If they realize that this is extremely like we can do that, we can go, I can go help a mortgage or a banker or an insurance guy and I've helped them all and every one of them somehow made a use case for this product especially. But it's all really, the customizer is really where all that magic happens. And I think that's where when you want to land higher ticket clients that have more CRM needs than what the layer, the base tier CRM can offer, that's when you really need to choose that as an upgrade.
Virginia Schauer [00:32:44]:
I love it. I love it. Well, thank you for that. That is so smart. And what did so you, when you were started building out, how far into building out were you doing before you found the marketers toolk it?
Jacob Radcliffe [00:32:57]:
Well I found it through an agency that I was just working in because I was like how like I was like what is this like and, and this is from me being in the community for about six months hearing of the tooling but at the time like I said there was. Everybody was so, so hyper secretive of like their operations and how they did things. Like nobody knew like how all these things worked and like and I think that's where I've been in some of the largest white labels, some of the highest of high tier with the you know, 10, you know, 5,000 sub accounts. 10,000 sub accounts.
Virginia Schauer [00:33:32]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:33:33]:
And almost every one of them are using the toolkit and there's a reason and like I'm like okay, what's the reason? And, and I think what's interesting is like the website doesn't do it justice and I think you probably would agree with me like yes, the customizer itself. Let's, let's, let's go to the this page together. Let's see if I can open it up in a tab and just try to help people understand that maybe finishing up this, this chat and this might log me in. So when we're looking at this page and you're looking at like what, what would I want to get out of this? Some of the things that are, that are being shown like the menus. I cannot stress how, how helpful this one thing is.
Virginia Schauer [00:34:18]:
Like the drop down and the fly out menu.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:34:21]:
Yes, just the one, just this one feature set has just been extremely helpful because I'll give you an example with Insurance companies, they have like maybe 15 different carriers. So we would do, we would spend time on an onboarding. We will say, hey, what's the most, what's your favorite hyperlinks that you access all the time? Let me go make a menu link for you. Let me go make a custom menu link. And we would do that for people and we would go, it's better to put in these flyout menus so that it doesn't have like 15 different ones.
Virginia Schauer [00:34:54]:
Right.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:34:55]:
So we love doing that. And then I think that this is where like the customizer, the other thing.
Virginia Schauer [00:35:03]:
It just came to the next like the fly out, the help and support. So that's really cool because you know, High level has that, where it has the push out support menu but we don't have that natively to, for our people. And so the customizer has that ability to do the fly out.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:35:23]:
Exactly. And like these little menus that they're kind of showcasing right here, these are like the flyout menus within the different, different tabs of the software. And I think that's, that's what I was trying to say. Like I didn't have a visual for it because I still have it hooked up in this particular agency account. But I think that's, that's something that when you're looking at like what this product can do, we need it, we definitely want to, I want to work with Tom to like get some really good content put together for the customizer and like all these different crazy use cases of it.
Virginia Schauer [00:35:54]:
Yes, that would be amazing.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:35:56]:
I think this is something that we, we should work together on to help illustrate what this would be so that you get a good, a good preview here about all the things that it can do. I was blown away when I saw his help docs. I'm like, like what do you mean it does that? Like, like this is over the course of years of like being on the product, like yeah. Learning all the crazy stuff that it does.
Virginia Schauer [00:36:18]:
But yeah, it's like the, the toolkit, it really allows you to truly customize high level the way that you want to. When you have the first understanding that you can white label. Like when you first get the understanding that you can white label high level, you're like, oh cool, I can make this my own. But then you're gonna, where you get kind of stuck because it doesn't do all the things and then you go to the toolkit and it truly does allow you to make it into whatever you want it to be. And yeah, like specifically for the niches that you want it to be because of the functionality that it's thought of.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:37:00]:
And like for me too, like I'll, I'll embed other applications. So like I actually use his toolkit to pop open my own custom apps. Yes. From the developer standpoint I don't have to go build custom buttons, I don't have to put the thing that displays the thing. I'll just put my app within his app. And now I get to sell Tom's product and I get to put my custom built product that's within the contact window. And this is the important part is we get, we can pull, pull a lot of things into those windows and just in the right spot that people are in the UI and I think there's, it saves a ton of development time. Where I don't have to like if somebody's asked of a client is I need to see this on the contact screen.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:37:43]:
Like okay, like well now I gotta go like figure out how to do that with code. Like I don't want to figure that out. I'm just gonna go put together something quickly, get him a subscription to Tom's product, put it in the window, call it a day. And that's been my pattern that I have followed to make so much money in this space. As a small business owner, there truly is six figure potential to be a marketing automations consultant in the space. I am living proof of it. I would not have given up my full time positions and did other things. If you do it, you can absolutely still do that.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:38:16]:
I think for people getting started. If you want to be a consultant, a marketing automations consultant, that's different than being a automations agency or being a marketing agency. Two different people, different sets, still the same, same skillset. But I don't have clients. There's a big difference. Like I am in, I'm in, I'm out, I build and I leave. I still make the same amount of money but I don't have this giant set of clients. I don't have you know, seventy or a hundred clients sitting there hitting up my support tickets every day.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:38:51]:
So I think there's a, there's a different path for people who want to go down this and knowing what tools are out there enables you to go do these things and have the flexibility to a marketing automations consultant, which is what, what I do.
Virginia Schauer [00:39:04]:
So that is amazing. I think you've really probably opened the eyes of some people watching about a different way to approach high level, to make it scale. You don't just have to find your niche and go in it and get all these clients or just put your mar affiliate marketing link out to the wind and hope people sign up. There's a very clear path in what you're talking about, right?
Jacob Radcliffe [00:39:30]:
Yeah, you, you think of High Level where like you think of it as a technology stack, just like a salesforce, just like a HubSpot that I can then turn around and build it out. I get the affiliate as part of the build out and then when I'm done, who, who manages support High Level does because I am in and I'm out and I've learned this from other people. Like it typically was like, what do you mean? You just go use your affiliate and you sign them up and then you leave? I'm like, yeah, they could submit support tickets to High Level. I'm like, okay, so what's the point of running an agency? Because then you get this high ticket build, you get a low ticket affiliate coming in every single month. Ta da. Like I'm done. Like that was the model that made sense to me. And you know, I think over time like people that have run High Level agencies have also come to a similar conclusion because it does take time and a lot of money to support people and hire people and onboard people and do all these things that are involved with it.
Jacob Radcliffe [00:40:28]:
And the initial design is a lot like building a website. Like I'm going to go put together a landing page and some automations and some emails and stuff like that for High Level. And so I think these are great icing on the cake things as a consultant to be able to really add to a higher ticket build out for a marketing agency that wants to build on this product. And it's just, I don't think people see it in that way. Virginia I think most people are like agency signing for the product but it's like I'm going to lead them to the water and they're going to drink the water. So here's the water that's come. This is good, we need this. And like so I would find existing agencies or brand new ones to put on the product.
Virginia Schauer [00:41:07]:
So that's amazing. I love that. Well, thank you so much Jacob for coming on and sharing your experience with High Level with the marketers and toolkit. Congratulations on all of your success and thank you again for coming today.