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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
what if your high level platform actually worked for you
instead of against you what if every time something broke
slowed down or made zero sense
you had someone in your corner who could not only fix it
but teach you exactly how it happened
that's exactly what Tom Bristol
our founder of the Marketers Tool Kit
has built his entire career around
the Chrome extension and customization suite
that thousands of high level agencies rely on every single day
to white label automate
and scale their platform without losing their minds in the process
he is the guy behind the Quick Editor
the customizer the theme builder
the OG of building a theme on high level
the tools that make your sass look polished
run smoothly
and actually do what you promised your clients it would do
and today Tom is going behind the scenes and
and sharing what to do when high level breaks
plus brand new features that are gonna change the game for your agency
so if you run a SAS on GHL
or you wanna know what's going on
how to do better with your high level and understand it better
you're gonna Wanna take notes here
without further ado here is the interview with Tom Bristol
our founder and CEO of the Marketers Toolkit
so what happens when GHL your app
starts to slow down or break
this is what happened to mine today
and I took it to support and told them
that things were not happening the way they needed to be happening
and they told me that it was my CSS and javascript
well I took it down
I broke it apart and it was still doing it
but they still were convinced that it was the CSS and javascript
so I took this to Tom today
and we figured out that it was actually GHL
and he was able to solve the issue for me
he's done this for many many clients in the past
and so we're gonna talk today to Tom
about what his tips are
when things start slowing down and breaking in the system
because as you know
GHL is constantly updating and improving the system
and with those updates
and with those improvements comes the Bad Part 2
which is things slow down and break right right
and so we're going to talk about that
those tips today we're also going to be talking about new features
that are in your marketer's toolkit
and lastly we're going to talk about what's coming
so welcome Tom
I'm excited to have you back on the show
so tell us what your thoughts are
on the slowdowns and breakdowns in level
yeah so there's a lot of things to think with
high level is such a large app
and has so many features that their support
personnel don't even know everything about it
and I think they're like I think they're up to over 1,000 developers
right so everybody's working on all different parts of the app
they're kind of disconnected
it's great for how fast they're
they're moving and building stuff
but it creates a sort of a rocky road here
now I'll tell you a little bit of
a couple of stories here of what happened actually yesterday and today
cause there's probably four or five instances
all separate things and there's something about the
the last couple days that made it happen
it's not normally like this
but anyway so number one
what happens is the
the number one problem with high level slowing down
is they have had bad memory utilization in the past
and the quick editor you always hear clear your cash right
so clearing your cash tends to
what it does is it wipes out your user authentication system
and helps you clear out the
the memory that you've got going
so the way to do this is to go to your Chrome system settings
go to application and then clear the local storage data
and then close it and then open it again
and I'm giving this really quickly
I understand that most people won't know how to do that
if you have the Quick editor
there's a quick button
and we'll go over what the Quick editor is later
it's a Chrome extension that you get with
the toolkit that all of your users get
but there's a quick button in there that does all of this for you
and wipes it out so
but what's crazy though
is so
all of these things that happened just recently
were completely disrelated to the toolkit
uh they were completely disrelated to even
like you couldn't have done that little shortcut to
to fix it so I think what happened was there were two scripts to blame
and I don't want to call them out specifically
but one of them was a third party app that was made by a developer
he was selling it for 50 bucks
and it did did some pretty cool things
but it was vibe coded and vibe code is okay
but when you're dealing with an application like high level
that is so big and has so many pieces
it's kind of tricky to get it very right with the vibe code
and it'll work it'll work for what you're testing
but you're not gonna be thinking with like
five other areas
that it might actually mess something up or slow it down
so that's what happened with one of them
and there was another one which was from a major theme provider
I'm not gonna name names again
but it was a major it was used by a lot of people
they use the customizer and they use this system
and they either they released something
or high level changed something that
their script wasn't ready for
and basically it it overloaded people's browsers
and because it was used by so many people
it was actually being reported
like it went down the chain
so high level support had it as their standard reply
whenever they got a a bug report
they were replying and this was to
prior to excuse me
to the priority support people
like on their Slack channel
I got a couple people that messaged me and they said
high level priority support said
that this problem is coming from custom javascript
and it's coming from this theme provider
and could this have anything to do with the toolkit
and so I jumped in and I looked at it and he's like
cause I don't have that theme provider
and they're telling me
that my problem is coming from this theme provider
and so it has to be like they're saying it has to be custom javascript
and we looked into it
and it was one hundred percent just a native high level glitch
like something that they and
and you know they
they later like so I
I dug into his thing I spent some time on it
and then later that night he was like yeah
they came back to me and they said it was
you know it's their problem
I'm like I know it's their problem
huh hey
I'm telling you a few disjointed stories
but yeah so that theme provider fixed their thing
but what was so great is that I was able to isolate the exact problem
and we posted it for our members
so that they knew how to fix the problem from that theme provider
if they were using both of those
like our stuff and theirs
how to like
make it patch it so I actually very much welcome
if you have a slow with high level
you know message me and uh
send me you know
better yet to send it through a support ticket with a
you know a
you always recommend going through the support ticket
because then you have a linear way of being able to boom boom
boom boom
because you can't always check your messages
and so getting that linear
and also it helps you check things off
cause you can forget what's in messages
so yeah
and having it as a support ticket
I can delegate it to some of my developers so it gets done faster
yeah and also like some
a lot of the time like
I handle some things but mohimen handles other things and
and Benedict handles other types of things
and so if it's not in a support ticket
I can't give it to the right person that owns that area
right right
that totally makes sense and I want them to be able to see okay
so these are the types of things that are coming through
even if I do end up handling it
it's something that you know
they need to be aware of that this is happening
so yes
they can improve yes
and I just want to plug in here that it is made
through the years that I've been with the Marketers Toolkit
it's made such a difference for me
that The Marketers Toolkit has been there for us
and in my sass beyond what is Marketers Toolkit
thank you it
it just has been so so supportive to my business
and I just thank you so much for what you do
yeah I appreciate that
yeah like
I get the the number of like
I'm happy to help people with just general high level problems as well
right so like there
the number of times that I'll jump in and be like
they're like is this
you know this is a toolkit
like I can't get this thing to work and
and I look at them no no
that's a native thing but this is how you fix it
and it's just
such a fringe benefit of being in the marketers toolkit family or
or or
thank you you know it
it just it's so cool
so yeah
so if we're in that circumstance and you
we have something that breaks down or something
there are ways that we can go in and test it first to see if it's
if it is right happening with our
specifically in conjunction with our customizer
can you share with us how that is
so the first way of doing it is if you have the customizer running
we have this area right here called the Toolkit
Super Admin there's a lot of cool things in this uh
but the primary use of it has always been to troubleshoot
and to figure out what things
what's happening so uh
it tells you what location you're in uh
if you're connected to a SAS plan
what snapshots are on here
all sorts of good diagnostic data
um but we also have a troubleshooting area
where you can disable the customizer and remove your custom CSS
so if you're dealing with like
a visual issue where you're trying to see okay
is the customizer hiding something or um
is you know
is my custom CSS messing something up
you can actually just remove the CSS directly from this system
right here um
and then if you click the
you know the disable customizer and CSS on reload
it adds in this disable and CSS appear at the very top
which then makes it so that the customizer doesn't run
and it removes the CSS now
this does not disable other javascript
so unfortunately
it doesn't work for isolating things like other theme providers
or if you have like a uh
agency support system
contact support customer support system or anything like that
if their scripts are messing up
then it's not gonna isolate that
um
I have some proprietary you know
extensions that I've created
that help me to do this and I've not really released these yet
I might in the future but right now
they're company
proprietary company tools
but the way to really sort of isolate this for yourself
um is realize that javascript and CSS
um stay in your browser when you load it
so the way I would do this is if I was gonna try and say uh
is this custom javascript causing problem
I would open up two browsers
and I would go first I would go to the page with the problem
and I would load it up and be okay here
so this has the problem here we go
so like
we're gonna load this load this up right here
I know that this has the problem
okay good
so now I'll remove this and it's
it's sort of like a a quick
you know back and forth to just check it
so I would just remove the custom javascript
hit save and then I would go over here and I would hit refresh
and as soon as it loads I'd come back here
restore the javascript and hit save
and so now it's it's kind of like if I did that so fast
my users probably won't have like
loaded the app yes
that's smart
so yep
so yeah
so it's it is loading without the javascript in the CSS
and then I would just come in here
put these back and then your users never see it because no one it
the chances of someone loading their high level
logging in in that 10 second period is very little
so now you've got a browser with no javascript
and then you can go and poke around and go
oh look this is how it is without
so that's my trick for we're getting that to work there
that's really good that is so helpful
awesome awesome
so if you have issues
this is the way that you can go in and test yourself
if you're still having issues and you've gone to support
to high level and you're hitting brick walls and you have the toolkit
go to support and ask us and
and Tom and his team will help
yeah you got it
you got it awesome
so next up we wanna talk about all the new things that are happening
and there we have a list of them
so this is gonna be like a part one
part two part three of the new things that are coming out
let's talk about webhooks in the customizer
before we had where took to hook your location groups up
you would do either a s plan or location IDS
you could match up with Google Sheets
which I have done in the past and made different plans hook up
yeah yeah
so the overall idea is how do we
so the the
the background idea is the customizer and the theme builder allow you
to apply your customizations
your menu items your custom menu items
all of the things that you're hiding and renaming your buttons
you can group all of those customizations
to specific groups of locations
and so you can say
everybody that has that's in my premium SAS plan gets this menu setup
and they see the premium menu items
and everybody's in the basic plan only sees
you know conversations and social media
but you know
the premium sees the AI studio
they see all the other things
cause that's what they purchased
and so the the problem has always been
if you're not using the SAS configurator
then how do we make it so that you can do something similar to that
right so if you're on the 2 97 plan
and you don't have access to the Sass configurator
you can still use the customizer to sort of like automate some of this
um
and the way that we used to do that was we would make it so that the
you would create a Google Sheet
and high level has these actions inside of workflows
where you can update a Google Sheet with the location ID
and so when someone signed up
you could sort of update that Google Sheet with the location ID
and it worked but I was trying to build that for someone recently
and I found it was not as intuitive as you would expect
and I really wanted to restructure the back
end of the customizer for quite a while
and so I took
took that opportunity to revamp the back end of the customizer
to make it so that we could add some more functionality into it
that you could use with these automations
and so now we have the customizer is set up
and I'll show you a little preview of what it looks like here
in a second with the customizer set up
so that you can take a webhook sorry
you can take a workflow someone signs up
either they purchase you know
a new plan or they purchase a menu item
we can make it so that you
they can like
unlock a specific menu item
and then it can communicate directly to the customizer
it doesn't have to go through a Google Sheet or anything like that
and yeah
so I'm really excited about it
I haven't created a training video
that's my problem that's like my
well show us now
maybe this is the training video right
exactly so
so here let me share my screen here
this is gonna take a everything to the next level
I think because there's so many times when I want to do just like
simple add ons for clients
like maybe maybe they don't have the affiliate manager
just adding the affiliate manager to their uh
sidebar menu just adding like one little thing
and through webhooks it just seems like it will be so much easier
yeah yeah exactly
so uh
so here uh
the old view of the customizer was this and uh
this is the old view
a lot of people have gotten over how to find everything in this
and I personally don't find it very intuitive
but we have so many people using the system
they know how to use it so we've kept the old view there
this is the new view and I really like it
I've tried to make it as intuitive as possible
right
so you've got your menu items that you're adding here on the left
these are your hiding hiding and editing on the right
and things like that
the area that we're talking about is location groups
so if we go to the managed location groups
you can see what you've got for which locations are in which groups
and what those uh
how how things are grouped
basically this is the cool new area
so this is the webhook area
and what you'll do is you'll literally just copy the webhook
it looks like it's failing
probably because of the way I've got this set up
but you can always just grab it right here and
and copy it like this
and you'll use that data and give that to the high level workflow AI
because the high level workflow AI is so good these days
um this is why I need to create that video
but I this does give everything that you need
so that you can give it to the workflow AI
and it will build the right action for you
and when someone comes through that workflow
they'll just automatically get added to that location group
and we've got two things that you can do with these location groups
or with these uh
webhooks you can unlock individual menu items or you can um
put them into a overall location group that has its own um
menu items and buttons and
and things like that so uh
yeah I know I need to give a full walkthrough with like
an example of here's a workflow
and this is an example like
here's a form then there it goes into this workflow
and then we go through the thing
this is how you get the location ID
and then this is where it fires into the
the webhook and then it gets added in there and
and give you a a sort of like a
a real life example um
but this is what we're now opened up to do
and I actually built this so that um
you could manage you could automate for someone
so that they could automate their themes
and so if we look at here
if we go to the theme builder
the theme builder has we've talked about this a couple of times
but the theme builder has the ability to connect to your customizer
so by connecting it to your customizer
you have all of those groups of customizations
and now you can have a different theme
for each one of your groups of locations
and so um
by doing this uh
we were setting it up so that someone could fill out a form
and select which one which group
which theme they were gonna get there so
oh that's great
that was the purpose of the webhook transition
for this particular client that we are doing
but I know that it's used by so many people
so I know that people will definitely
I appreciate this
and how you described the webhooks and the way that it works
it seems pretty straightforward
I'm excited to go in and yeah
do it myself
and I think
I think a lot of people are gonna be able to find this very
very useful yeah
I'm excited about doing a video because it's gonna be easy
I've been sort of it's
tutorial videos have been hard in the past
because when I start to do the video
I go oh wait
I have to build this first
and then I'll start to do the videos
and I'm like oh wait
I have to do this first and then it takes a day
the tutorial video but uh
things are becoming a lot more simple
and so I'm pretty excited about building this out now
cause it's gonna be a pretty simple thing
so it shouldn't take that long
awesome awesome
so you had mentioned earlier
quick editor
and some of the
you were gonna talk about some of the updates to Quick Editor
and also there's a big thing that you've added to Quick Editor
but it's like more than quick
it's really for agencies right
yeah yes
OK exactly
OK so first talk to us about Quick Editor and the updates you've made
sure let me install it real quick
might as well share my screen and show you how this works
when I install it so here we go
okay so if you've been on our homepage
uh this is the extension that we're talking about
the high level extension that you give to every user
and we walk through all the things
but we don't mention the word quick editor on the page
because this is supposed to be sort of gray
labeled to your white label
and it's kind of like the lead connector uh
name that high level has
and so we have a page dedicated to the Quick Editor
and it just says your CRM platform
and it doesn't have any purchase or anything like that in it
but it does sort of describe the features
so it does look like a professional thing
you come over here to add your extension
and then you can pin it so it does require a license key
and that license key is locked to your white label
so right here it says license software
and that's our white label here
the cool thing about the Quick Editor
what the whole purpose of it is
to give you a quick way to edit your website
or to edit the contact forms that are on the page directly
and you can actually even see things like your tracking codes
and stuff like that so it gives you a lot of tools
we recently made some changes to it
to give you tools for the new vibe code era
and things like making screenshots
this is so important when you're communicating to AI
to be able to be like you know
change this or you know
Mark it up and copy it and I personally find uh
problems with uh
the native system screenshot systems where like
your Mac doesn't do the thing
or your Windows has like
a weird delay but this quick editor is really fast
and I really encourage you to have your users
to improve their workflow
so um
you can mobile preview it
you can scan it pull it up on your phone
you can download all the images
or just what images you want from the page
so you don't have to go through and find the image
right click on it
make sure that that's the one that you wanna give to AI
as your inspiration when you're
you know copying or getting an inspiration of a website
this is the clear cash that I've been talking about
so if you're in your CRM it's slow
you wanna you know clear cash
you don't have to hunt through the settings
you just click clear cash and reload
that in itself
is a reason to tell all of your sub accounts to get the quick editor
and put it on their like
when you're troubleshooting with them
get the quick editor immediately on their browser
so that way they can clear their cash
and you don't have to go through the rigamarole
of teaching them how to clear cash
it's just right there yeah
exactly and then this is
I think a feature that people don't really
it's not been highlighted
and I haven't heard a lot of people using it yet
but I there's this thing here called Quick Forms
and what I love about this it it
this is my solution to not having um
so I'll I'll just show you what I do here
so when I go in my group I use
excuse me I used to have a Chrome extension
that would scan for the member requests
and the emails and it would then uh
copy paste and uh
it would you know
send it all the high level
and that got kind of old for me because it was so slow
it would slow it would bog things down
and I would constantly have to disable the
the solution air the Chrome extension
so what this does is it lets you basically pin any form
so you can quickly go over here and
click on your form and open it in the sidebar or in the pop up
or in a new window and so now if I go through here
I can be like I can just copy this guy's name like this
say granted and approve and then I'm done and uh
it's just this nice little boom
and so anywhere that you need to add something into high level
you just click it it opens
slides in and you fill it out
wow
I didn't I
I think you didn't even know that one right
I didn't know that one hahaha
that's so cool yeah
and you you don't have to have it open a side panel
you can have it be in the
in the pop up as well so it could be like this
but for my workflow here uh
it's nicer to have it slide in from the
yeah totally
so it's on the same screen
yep not clicking in and out
mm hmm yeah
and then the last thing on the Quick Editor is just that um
you keep seeing this default to this search bar
and I'll show you what that is
you can change where it goes
by the way you don't have to default to search
um but the search bar is so great because it shows you your open tabs
that's the first thing so you can see
I have all these tabs open for
that are high levels and so I can switch to them
um I can also uh
switch to
well this is an unlocked version that normally
it's locked to your white label
yes but mine is
mine is special haha
because it's unlocked to all these other things
but the way it would normally work is you would uh
it would be locked to this
you wouldn't see that
and then you can then select the location that you're going towards
and it suggests where you wanna go
so you can say like I wanna go to the the phone settings
and it'll tell you okay
so this is where you wanna go
and you can open it in a new tab or go to the right place
does this replace the the search that's in our search
the search that the agencies have had for their search
it's a dupe it's
it's so
what's smart about it is
it actually uses your browser's history to find the suggestions
got you so what's great about that is it
it respects what the user has permissions to
cause it's only gonna surface things that they actually have access to
okay so that's great
and if they have never searched
if they've never gone there
like in their GHL and they're like
looking for maybe communities or something
but they've never clicked on it
would it find that or is it's only going to what's in the history
only going to what's in the history
okay okay
um uh it it's
this is sort of like
how can a Chrome extension figure out what to expose and not expose
because you don't want people
you know going
what's this AI studio and they know they don't have access to it
and they yeah
and sometimes hiding it then like
you can get to places in high level um
because they're just hiding the
the link right
so yeah yeah
so so one last question for you before you run
I know you have another another meeting to get to
yeah is what is coming soon with the editor
that is for agencies editor for agency
the quick editor is now going there's
so yeah
you got it uh huh
where we're going with this
so
I've always had the vision of having an offshoot of the quick editor
and uh you'll see I kind of packed everything that like
I personally like to use into this quick editor
like the screenshots and the QR code
and I'm literally using the quick editor every day in my vibe code uh
workflow
and I'd love to get into my vibe code workflow at another time
with you yes yes
yeah but um
but yeah so I'm
I'm using it every day with
with my workflow and I'm starting to pack everything into it
but I was like some of the things that I'm trying to
that I that I wanna use aren't necessarily appropriate for white label
high level users right
that you're giving to all of your users
and they're more appropriate for power
high level users and so
I'm building a new Chrome extension
as an offshoot of the Quick Editor
it gets everything that has
that the Quick Editor has and more
and it's more targeted for people that are in high level
working with high level every day and uh
are like power users
and so I'm calling it the Account Toolkit
and it's gonna have everything that you
might need uh
to document to uh
yeah to be able to debug things
and so the first things that I have
and I'm not gonna necessarily demo some of this stuff
but the quick editor has a workflow analyzer
and what this lets you do is
it lets you download the data from your workflow
and bring it into chat GPT or Claude wow
or another AI and document it for your internal documentation um
and we have prompts that help
you know get you started on it um
but internal documentation or sending
you know
a summary to a client as to what you built and things like that
or you know
like I use it myself when I'm trying to figure out some
some contractors have built out these massive workflows
I'm like okay
read through this give it to AI and figure it out
um but when this was first
you know being promoted
people were saying how can you just
how can I have AI change it and then reupload it
yeah and so that's what the account toolkit is gonna let you do
so it's gonna let you download it as well as upload it back and uh
do that we also have the ability to clone forms and surveys
and actually even clone uh
websites and funnels and so all of that is coming to it
and more importantly we actually even have inspector tools
so you're gonna be able to pull up any high level page
and use the account toolkit to inspect
to see how they built it wow
so you don't need to your system
but you can at least use it to
to go through it as if you're in the page builder
and look at the pieces of their funnel to see how
how they built it and things like that
so um
it's basically gonna be all these sort of like
cool tools
that people that are pros would actually find useful and amazing
that's what I'm excited about on that
I am sure there are so many agency owners
where their mind are just spinning with ideas about this
and I can't wait for it to come out
for you to share all the details with us
so thank you so much for coming on
so next week we'll have more
because there's so much more that you haven't shown us
yeah we have this huge list of things that we wanted to talk
about and couldn't get to it like
so I'll put the link in this one
yeah yeah yeah
so thank you so much and we will see you guys next time
awesome see you guys