I run a smaller community (155 members at $100/month) and 73% of members pay for my white-labeled GHL product, which is a great low-effort revenue add — have you considered offering software like this inside your own community?
I don't really think I'm going to push software on everybody. I get the diversification logic, and maybe it's not the optimal decision, but I only have so much time in a day, and the more things I split my attention across, the less effective I am at everything — if I do 10 things instead of 3, even spending the same total time, my effectiveness on each thing drops just from the mental overhead of juggling more. That's different from me doubling down on what already works, which is creating high-quality content. So I'm going to keep doing that instead of adding a software offering.
Well, if you don't already have access to one of my communities, I'd probably shamelessly plug it. I think you'd save a lot of money joining one of those. For example, one guy just shared 250,000 free mail credits. I'm not capable of doing the math, but you get free access to a bunch of stuff just by being part of the community, which usually vastly outweighs the money you're paying. So I might check whether make moneywithmake.com or maker school makes sense. I'd also sign up for accelerators and discount aggregators like Secret. They do things like: you pay a little bit of money and then you get six months free on Notion Plus, you get ad matching on TikTok, you get 25% off your plan purchases, you can save up to $9K. You save $1,000 in free credits in Air Table. Basically, when you have a little bit of money, you can multiply that money and then get access to all these platforms and significantly reduce your software expense. And then, in terms of tools, systems, resources, I would just 10x the outreach. Honestly, whatever netted you those first few clients, you've clearly validated that works. Just scale it the hell up, man.
If your goal is to scale to seven‑ or eight‑figure monthly revenue, first consider what you're selling. Moving into enterprise with large, intimately scoped contracts often means custom software development and would require scaling the team far beyond nine people, bringing a whole different set of problems I don't enjoy. Instead, I recommend what every lean agency does at the million‑dollar‑a‑month mark: productize the hell out of your offer—think Fat Joe level productization where fulfillment cost is near zero and you charge based on outcomes like placements or deliverables. For example, an old client of mine productized SEO to the point where you just order a $7,755 campaign on their platform with zero fulfillment cost. For your specific model—$10K up front and $35K over six months (about $4‑$6K monthly plus upsells)—you could increase the monthly retainer to $5‑$8K and average $60‑$70K per client. Also, consider niching down: sell outcomes, not the systems, and use automation just to deliver those outcomes (e.g., a cold‑email agency enabled by automation). As an unofficial note, Lewin’s white‑label GHL approach is a massive revenue ad with little effort, but I prefer to focus on creating high‑quality content rather than pushing software on everyone.
You’re selling everything, so people think you sell nothing—you need a clear lane. My lane is AI automation systems (making money with them). In your case, you have a community called ‘moneymaking coffee’ with an offer to make at least $4,000 per month and have fun, plus win cool prizes, and a second claim that every member makes 10× the membership fee with a money‑back guarantee. Those statements contradict each other and make pricing confusing (why $99 instead of $400?). The contradictions come from being scatterbrained. My advice: shut down most of those offers, build a single clear offer, pick one niche (e.g., leverage your photography skills) and focus on it.
So, should I build and manage automations for clients using GHL or do it all myself? It depends. I think GoHigh Level is an awesome platform that gets you about 80% of the way there. If you're running naive offers or something like home services, you don't really need much more than 80%. You could get to 80% and then focus on getting as many leads into that pipeline as possible, say through ads. And honestly, you could crash. We have a lot of businesses that do crash. One business I worked with until recently, Dental Media Corp., ran everything 100% through Go High Level and they're making a couple hundred grand a month. They started about a year and a half ago, two years ago, and had a big run-up, working with dentists running simple offers. I've also worked with dozens of other businesses. One of my old roommates, actually one of my best friends, ran up a GHL sub-account business, which was pretty interesting. And even a big home services company I work with, doing a few million dollars a month, was on GHL until recently. So you can do really good things with GHL. However, if you're in a very high competition industry where the additional 20% is margin you can squeeze, optimizing a speed-to-lead system or adding extra functionality can be valuable. I like going above and beyond that because I think I can bridge the gap between 80% and 100% and make a bit of arbitrage, which is ultimately what business is.