What is your opinion on GoHighLevel (GHL) as an all‑in‑one CRM, and would you recommend diving into it?
I’d dip my toe in GoHighLevel by watching a 30‑minute tutorial and setting up a test environment (which costs about $297 for agency access). I’d spend only a couple hours experimenting—maybe building a simple automation—until someone actually asks me to build a GHL solution. That’s my general approach to new platforms: learn just enough to deliver value when a client needs it, rather than trying to master every feature upfront. Let clients guide what you learn based on the opportunities and money they present.
I understand the concern about friction, but GHL isn’t as cumbersome as it seems. The onboarding process is relatively straightforward, and once a client adopts the platform they’ll stay with it for a while, leading to recurring revenue. However, I believe there’s more opportunity in building a general‑purpose automation platform rather than white‑labeling an out‑of‑the‑box CRM. That’s why I suggested focusing on broader solutions.
I usually build mine out in ClickUp — pretty simple: intake, meeting booked, proposal sent, closed-won or closed-lost, sometimes with a couple of intermediate stages. GHL is great as the 80/20 option for beginners — if you've never run a CRM before, it gets you 80% of the way there quickly, but it gets tough once you want to go deeper. That said, at your current stage — just getting the agency up and running without much revenue yet — GHL might genuinely be enough for now.
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.
Yeah, plenty of experience. My SaaS, Clarvo, is actually built similarly to GHL — a lot of our clients were using GHL, which is part of why we thought we could do better and turned it into a call-specific speed-to-lead solution instead. My old roommate also tried running a GHL white-label startup for a year, so I watched him work in GHL daily — he actually learned to code by customizing it. So yeah, you can definitely figure GHL out.