The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - An Insider Spills the Secrets to Starting a $1M+ SaaS Agency⏐Ep. #142

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Get a free 30 day trial of HighLevel with this link only! https://www.gohighlevel.com/chris-koernerI sat down with HighLevel co-founder Robin Alex (www.linkedin.com/in/robinalex) to talk about launching a profitable agency using their all in one platform that is perfect for white labeling, including AI tools, and is very popular with SaaSpreneurs. He explained that it is the ideal platform for anyone who has a business or wants to start an agency, and he detailed exactly how he would do it. Robin shared HighLevel's inspiring journey from solving his own agency's lead management issues to building a platform that now has 1,700 employees and supports five million users worldwide. He also talked about how some SaaSpreneurs are using HighLevel for recurring revenue and building very large companies, with some partners making eight-figure incomes.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Get a free 30 day trial of HL: https://www.gohighlevel.com/chris-koernerWatch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Introduction 01:33 Introduction to High Level and Its Mission08:35 The Journey from Marketing Agency to SaaS15:47 Innovative Features and Unique Selling Proposition22:31 Strategies for Small Business Engagement26:24 Pricing Models and Revenue Potential27:50 The Importance of Pricing Strategy31:12 Understanding Lead Generation Models34:06 Identifying High-Potential Industries37:27 The Role of AI in Customer Engagement41:13 Building a Certified Consulting Economy47:20 The Value of Predictable Sales Models50:43 Leveraging Franchise Networks for Growth

Just saying, I want to implement AI into your business, you're going to get sales right out the gate because no one else is really trying to help the small business on AI. Just leave the tools there because there's no cost to me. Walk to the next business. My hit rate was over 85, 90%, walking into a local business. How much are your biggest SaaSpreneurs making for month? Definitely high eight figures. We heard one that's getting into the nine figure range.

One big customer that could change your life. I would go find a franchisee customer that's part of a small franchisor, like 30, 40 locations. Crush it for them. and get everyone. High level comes up a lot on this podcast. And for good reason, high level has over 100,000 customers. And most of those customers,

they call SaaSpreneurs, which is basically just a guy running a marketing agency. And that marketing agency is entirely built on and powered by high level. You want to do automated text back, an automated voice answering service, cold emailing agency, website agency,

anything you want, you can build it all on top of high level. And so instead of talking to someone that's built a business on high level, I wanted to peel back the curtain and talk to the guy that built high level that sees from the inside who is having the most success on high level. And what are they building? What types of businesses should you be building on high level where you're most likely to have the most success? And so I had one of the co-founders on, Rob and Alex, and I asked them all these questions.

So whether you already own a business and want to seamlessly integrate AI or just a cheaper CRM, where you want to start a business that can charge between $500,000 and $5,000 a month to small business owners, You're going to love this episode. High Level is an all-in-one AI CRM platform and a lot beyond that. So we've basically taken everything to help grow a business from top of funnel down to lead management, down to operational things, from automations connecting to other software applications that you use for your business, down to like sending invoices and managing your finances and stuff like that. So we're trying to take over the world as far as what businesses need.

But what we're known for for many is like being the CRM. automations platform. It's a Zapier that is more fit for small businesses and or marketing agencies. That's kind of one aspect of it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the way that we started, I can't come from a marketing agency background as well as entrepreneurship and stuff. I've had many business over time. But prior to high level, I was actually running a marketing agency. And what I would do is go into small businesses and do the traditional marketing like, oh, we're coming in, we're running Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever. We're driving new leads. And the problem that I would have is after a couple of months, the business owner is like, what do I do with this?

Like, you gave me a list of names or I'm getting these emails with people interested, but they're not showing up to my door. And it was like this weird thing of like, yeah, I don't know your business on how to sell like your actual services. I know how to drive interest to it. You have to pick up the phone and call them or try to engage with them and book an appointment. And I ran into this pivotal point with my company of like, do I have to ramp up a sales team because our turn number, we're losing customers as fast as we're getting them.

So I need to ramp it up on that. outside or do I spend time and understand why my customers are leaving and really turning into more of a consulting company. And so I decided to go the route of being a consulting firm and we were actually helping businesses, you know, like how can they manage their contacts or leads and really grow their businesses from A to Z? And at that time, my team, we basically created this infrastructure. You mentioned Zapier and it was like learning APIs, coding things to connecting 15 different

applications to help the management of these businesses so that when, you know, you leads and opportunities come in, how do you reach back out to them? How do you track it? When the lead comes back in, how do you make sure that conversation is fruitful to get to an outcome? And in many cases, that outcome was like booking an appointment or getting a sale or something. What happens after that experience? You know, you've got to get reviews. So we built this creative infrastructure. And what was crazy about my journey in the agency space, I mean, we had about 25 team members, about 200 clients at its peak. I received a random phone call from one of my customers who were saying, hey, I got approached by these two guys. They're launching a new software. And they're

asking me questions. I don't know, like, how to log into things. You're my marketing guy, Robin. Can you talk to them? Got on a call with them and got them set up on what they needed and just started talking to them. And they were building reputation management application. And to that conversation, I was like, well, what does your software do? Here's what I'm doing in my business. And I remember we had a picture of the whiteboard of like this crazy schematic of what we're doing in our business. Right in there, took a picture and sent it. to them. It's like, well, what do you guys think? And I'm like, well, this is really cool. It's like, yeah, you know, just hypothetically, like, what would it take to build something?

Like, because there's nothing online that has it. You know, I have a little bit of a development background, you know, built stuff in the past. But I was just like, what do you guys think? And both Sean and Brun were like, give us a couple days. We'll call you back. And I thought they were kicking me off the phone. And, you know, you never know who you're just being nice. Yeah, yeah, they're just being nice. Just giving me, ah, this guy just won't leave us alone. And, you know, I think you're working for Megacorp, right? Like, so I don't know who these guys are. He's just a project manager.

And crazy enough, Sean called me two or three days later. And I was like, hey, do you mind getting on a Zoom call? We're going to show you something. And I remember when he called me, I was driving to the office is like 8 a.m. Here in Dallas driving to drive into my office and, yeah, give me like 20 minutes and I'll call me back. And of course, I forget to call him back and in my coffee and, you know, just get my day going.

He called me back to my hours later. He's like, hey, where are you at? You told me here to call me back. Jumped on the computer and they had built out kind of the version one of what high level is today. of what your whiteboard showed. Yeah. At that point, it was, you know, the leads coming into some sort of data bit,

kind of an initial version of CRM, you could do some basic automations and communicate back and forth from a communications perspective, the conversations aspect into it. And then we were talking about building a calendar tool at that time. And then, you know, how do we do some automation stuff there? But it was a very initial version of high level, rolled it into a couple of customers that I had internally an amazing success. And then it was like,

It's going to all my customers. And I just went back to Shauna Vruin saying, hey, this is incredible. I owe a lot to you guys. You guys solved a major problem for me. Can I get it out to other agencies kind of dealing with the same problem or other business? You wanted to resell it, basically. No, I was just like, I just, I'll refer them to you. Like I just, you guys, you were just like an evangelist.

I was just so happy that they saw something so important for my business. And I know other businesses dealing with it. So go talk to them. And then they're like, yeah, go ahead. And from that point on, you know, I just kept referring more and more people to them. and, you know, we ended up getting invited to a conference to speak. And then, like, Robin, you know, everyone knows you in that space. So why don't you come and then invite Sean.

So Sean and I flew out there in San Diego and Varroon, who's on the other shot in Qatar, couldn't make it. But we met for the first time literally on the flight there. I'm creating a landing, you know, kind of the first website, the landing page and stuff so that we can collect orders. We get there. We present what high level is and everybody in the room loved it. It was amazing.

What was this conference? It was like a small business conference about 20 people in person, 20 people virtually. It was, you know, oh, that's it. So it was really small. So we had no idea what to expect. You've never really presented it, you know, anything like that. It's a new product. It was just, we just didn't want in person.

And I remember we were trying to sit back down. People called us back up. Like, no, no, no, come back up here. We got more questions. And then, you know, people started asking us questions to do this. What about this? Where are you guys going with it? And then, you know, people are looking at the website like, okay, hey, do you guys

offer any discounts if we buy free? year or anything like that. And it's like, I remember looking at each other and then Varroons on the screen behind us on Zoom. And we're like, sure, we'll do it. And I'm like sneaking away back to the computer like adding new products. It's. You know, what's crazy, we're now seven years later.

We're about to hit 100,000 customers worldwide, about 1,700 employees representing about two and a half to three million businesses, five million users worldwide. Like the numbers are just insane, but it all came from, you know, just word of mouth because we really did true sales and marketing. It was just. provide as much good value as we can to our customers. And what happened to me in my experience of like, wow, this solved a major problem.

I want to tell other people about it. That's been our motto and our philosophy since the beginning. And that's honestly how we're here today. All right. So let me see if I can recap this. So you had a marketing agency with a couple hundred customers, presumably doing great, right? I mean, 23 employees for a marketing agency is awesome.

But you kind of became a victim of your own success because you were acquiring leads for your customers, but then they didn't know what to do with. them. So they were churning, but you were doing your job. Yeah, so you're like, okay, I don't want you to churn. So I'm going to help you figure out what to do with these leads. So that kind of pivot helped you acquire 200 customers. And then one of your random customers said, hey, these two guys, they're starting a reputation management platform. That's how they started basically with that one kind of product. Yeah, a reputation management and communication tool. Okay. So you got

on the phone with them just to connect APIs or whatever. Yeah. Right. And then you just got to talking and you're like, this is interesting. Here's my vision for your product. I think there's actually much more to it than this. And, you know, which people say all the time. And it's like, oh, cool, thanks, kid. Okay. Have a nice day. Yeah, we'll, we'll talk later. But instead, they're like, this is brilliant. Yes. And then they just built it. And then you're like, okay, this is amazing. I want to share it with the world. And you did. And then that in turn added so much value to them that they went to a conference to present. And they're like, shoot, let's get Robin over here. He knows the product better and we do. And you weren't even like a part of high level, right?

No, I mean, yeah, because I just enjoyed the journey at that point. Yeah, you know, I've always had kind of the, the mantra of you're just going to do stuff for free. And you do good stuff for free. Things will come back to hold if you provide good value. It's honestly how I started the marketing agency, right? So I was just my whole thing. Like, I don't know where this is going to go or anything, but I'm just enjoying it. And if people pay me along the way, that that's great too. We just kept going and it was like, honestly a good year and a half before we decided to actually legitimize the company of like, formalized because it was just all beta.

You know, like, just threw a product up and, wow, people are buying it. We never thought of like, let's slow down and like formalize the company. And at that point, you know, Sean and Verroon asked me to officially on paper, join the company and become a co-founder of it. So who was building out all the tech? Was it Sean and or Varroon? Both of them. They both have an engineering background as well.

Okay. And then what was the revenue model in those early days? How much were you charging? It's the same as what it is today. We have $97 a month for one location. unlimited for 297. What about it, like at that conference, what was the feature that just blew people's minds?

Like, how was it so much different from like the hub spots and the click funnels of the world? One aspect behind it was we took a lot of different tool. Like at that point, it was leads come in. And so you would have to figure out some crazy way through Zapier to like pump it to a Google sheet. And then, well, you needed to do text messaging. So you need to pump it out to another texting tool. The interesting thing about that is the cost of some of these third party. texting tools was so Twilio.

No, not actually Twilio, but like think of the software applications that set on top of it, like a Skipio or like a call rail or. Yeah. Like they charge a premium on top of Twilio. So what we said within our software is, well, we're going to hook up to Twilio because we know that's one of the largest backend providers. We'll just give it to you at cost. Like that was our whole model. It was like instead of you spending 50,000.

It's Costco. Yeah. We're just like a cost of model. We didn't give you a wholesale rate. And yeah. And actually you talk about the Costco. That is actually our business model. You know, it's you pay for high level, which is the membership fee.

And then we're going to give you all these tools super inexpensive or cheap or free and give you the best value there. And we're just creating this massive store of different products. And so that was the initial stuff that we built. And then, you know, we quickly rolled out the opportunities board, which a lot of people were levering in Trello at the time. Like that was the hot product to put, you know, what the opportunity board was or pipe drive, which is.

Pipe drive, yeah. And then it was, instead of using Callumlee, we have it built into software. So just from those four or five tools, everyone in the room was like, you're telling me it's just one click. You set up a customer and all of this tech stack is there and I get to save money. Like that was kind of the big aha moment for everybody there. Yeah. Well, like, geez, my, I pay like 300 bucks a month for Zapier. I've used pipe drive in the past.

I've used Trello in the past. Callenly really adds up or like $18 a user. and then per team. What's crazy for me about high level that just broke my frame is my entire life. I've been saying, you know, if you're everything to everyone, then you're nobody to that one. You can't, you can't be the jack of all trades, master of none, nah, nah, yada, yeah. And like, I log in and you're doing all those things and well. Like, so how are you able to break that mold, like the stereotype?

You know, one of the things that we talk about technology, mostly in this space is becoming a commodity. It's like corn. The innovation has slowed down at such a level that it's more about the execution of it. Like there's not distribution. Yeah. And so for us, it's, you know, when a contact comes in into a CRM, it doesn't matter what CRM tool that that's out in the world. It's all doing the same thing. You can see the contact record and all the like there's, there's nothing crazy about it. You know, of course there's visual differences and things like that, but it's it's the same. And so I think, you know, no one was clamoring when we came out of yet another CRM tool. It was just the fact that we consolidated essentially all the different, you know, things at the grocery store.

We just put it all into one place. Yeah. That was kind of the unique thing. And I think just, you know, globally speaking in software 10, 15 years ago into what you're representing, it was like, you need to be the best of one thing and the one thing only and be the premier product behind it. But, you know, I think we were on the cutting edge of consolidating it. And now you see a lot of these tools that were once the best at what they are, are now starting to go back saying, we're losing.

We need to now start building these other functions and tools. So I think just as a world, we're starting to figure out how do you consolidate as much as possible, have it for an inexpensive price. And then the implementation costs, you mentioned having different team members and stuff like that. We've got six different tools. And when it doesn't work and you've got to teach them all the different tools, that's actually costly. And you just don't even realize that how much you're spending from a time perspective and focusing on that. So, you know, all those things is what makes us special.

What's the 80-20 of what you guys offer? Like, what are people using the most? I love the 80-20 rule. You know, that's what we think about from a feature set. It's everywhere. New product, right? 80% of the feature set is actually 20% of what you build out. So it works really well there.

You know, for us, it's definitely the top of funnel. So when leads come in, say, the CRM function, doing the automations and then the funnel builder, which, you know, if you think about it, you got to have a website up any way that you think about it. It needs to be able to collect data. And then from there, when you collect the data, it needs to do something. That is really the three pieces that really pivot out to everything else in the software. Okay. Is your SMS feature growing in popularity?

Oh, 100%. And so that's one of the biggest products here in the United States. Now, I will say as the larger that we've gotten, you know, we're starting to see a larger contingency internationally of small businesses getting onto the platform. And WhatsApp is the bigger player there. So we're seeing a lot of growth on that front. and SMS is getting more costly worldwide, and it's becoming very much more restrictive.

You know, unfortunately, there's two types of bad actors. You have people who are going out with good intention, but are spamming people for their product and services with massive paragraphs, which no one wants to hear. And then you have the actual bad actors, which coming up with bad intention, where they're trying to do the scans and things like that. And so all the providers are trying to figure out how to stop it.

and, you know, it's now increasing charges or just making it more challenging to do it. So WhatsApp is becoming very popular. Same with Messenger, Facebook Messenger as well. So of your 100,000 plus customers, roughly what percentage of them are our end users versus white label partners slash agencies? Yeah, so we call the white label partners and agencies, you know, put them in a bucket of being SaaSpreneurs. That's like your awards category.

Yeah. And it's basically like, you know, you're coming into our platform. It's going to be one to many. and you're trying to represent yourself as being a software provider from the outcome. So we call that SaaSpreneurs. That's probably about 60 to 65% of our customers today. It used to be a lot higher. I mean, close to 30% of our customers, if not even higher.

But it's slowly decreasing because what's happening is a lot of small businesses are coming to us, who are really taking on their own operations and marketing themselves. Or they graduated out of, you know, the SaaSpreneurs. They were introduced to high level through their agency and now they want to do it themselves. They wanted to. And what's fine. It is like, you know, I was working on this agency.

I see the value of it. I wanted the agency to do more, but they're too busy trying to acquire new customers. So I worked out of deal with them. I'm coming straight to high level. And they're trying to now leverage it. They hire someone internally and they start using it for their own business. And then over time, they're like, you know what? I love this model so much.

I now want to become a SaaSpreneuber and go tell my friend. So it's really fun to watch what that's happening. And so like more small businesses are. are coming to us kind of in this dual-fold situation. Well, as an entrepreneur myself, like, it's, it's so hard to learn a really cool piece of software and then not want to, like, build a business on that. Like, you, you learn it for your own use and then you're like, oh, man, it gets really tempting.

Like, oh, I could charge a thousand bucks a month for this. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I see the business model. And it's like, I have a little bit of extra time that I can, forgive it might want it. You know, it's a little side money. And then it just turns into a thing, right? Yeah.

It's like, I'm kind of. I think of cleaning pools all day. Like, I just hop on demos and charge a thousand bucks a month. Yeah, that's the fun part about it. It's, and that's, I think to the core of high level, it allows people to operationalize their business that they thought wasn't even possible. You know, like that pool cleaner example that you gave, it's you're, you're waking up super early and you're working the list of places you got to go to all the houses.

And then you try to hire more people and things like that and that daily grind. And you just think it's like, you know, it's just a labor rich business. and that's the business I'm in. But then when you start playing, you know, not working in the business, but working on the business and you start seeing how it can be operationalized, you realize that your life can be a lot easier. And it's like, well, I can't keep my existing business and maybe do something else here. So I think that is the fun part about, you know, operationalizing business.

Are you seeing business owners that do that, just abandon their actual, their original business altogether and just being agency owners? Yeah. I mean, it definitely happens. I haven't seen a lot where they just end up giving up their business. I think they kind of look at it as I've brought. operationalize my business. I have now a new team member who is now going to own kind of the operational side of it. But now I want to be a little bit of an evangelist of what I built. So video is cool,

but you know what's better? Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter. TKO pod.com. Go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast, three episodes a week, stuff like this. You're going to love it. All free. No sleazy sales bitch. TKO pod.com. So now it's, I want to be more like a business consultant or implement this for other businesses because, you know, I've seen a model and I know that it's possible there. And so we are seeing a lot of that, which is really fun to see. So if someone approaches you and says, Robin, I want to start an agency on a high level. I'm sold.

Tell me what to do. Like what product do I offer to what market? Like am I doing SMS automation to HVAC guys or what's like the least path of resistance to starting an agency on high level. Yeah. So prior to this year, what I would tell people is walk out of your house, go to any small business that you can just walk into, Main Street, USA, and just say, I want to put a chat widget on your website and put a form on your website.

There are two things that I can collect leads on very quickly. For free? Like, I would, I mean, I've always been the person of lead for free. And what I would always do is like, give you a little taste of it. And then I come back and be like, hey, you know, I've been doing this. free what you think and if you like it. I'm thinking about charging X amount of dollars, but I'll, you know, what would you pay me? And that's actually how I do market research on figuring out, like, what my vision of the price, but what you're willing to pay. You know, some of the people,

oh, you're going to church 500 bucks. I mean, you started for free and I know you're starting out. I'll pay you 200 bucks. Like, perfect. You know, I would collect that revenue. And now I kind of knew like what the market would bear, right? I do the same thing. It's like, I want you to tell me an answer. I will not hold this against you. I promise. I'm going to charge you $100 a month for this, which is like below my cost. Like it's unsustainable, but like I'm learning. Be honest. Based on the value you've seen me at, what would you pay? And I'm going to use that to charge other people. You know, so it's like, wink, wink, I'm not going to charge you. But what is it worth genuinely? And I will charge you 100 bucks. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then, you know, what I would do is I've always had this thing of like, I want to almost make you feel guilty of me doing. hard work on your back. And so that in that same situation. They're indebted. Yeah. And they've already told me what they're willing to pay. So they're almost like, fine, Robin. Here's the $200 that I told you I'd pay. Like you killed it. So keep going. And then I would just take that as a reference to go to

you know, go to the next business and say, I'm working with the street and Sally over here is also using me and they're paying this much. You can call them if you like. You would like to get my services. So that's what I would do to scale it. But in the business today, I think one of the big things, big things is doing missed call AI. So when somebody calls a business after hours, it is very costly because there are very important leads that come through after hours and no one's answering it. So you're missing the opportunities there. And if you were to hire a company, you know, the call centers and stuff like that become very costly as well. Well, with high level,

we actually built a lot of AI tools. And so, you know, there's this concept of miscall text back. So someone called and you could text them back saying, hey, sorry, we're after hours. How can I help you. And at least you're keeping that lead active. But now if someone's making an actual call with AI and sophistication that it's there, you can actually have a full on conversation and drive that person to the outcome that you would ultimately have to do via text or whatever. And we're actually seeing a significant response rate into it, mostly with the outcome, like booking an appointment or, you know, getting it to a salesperson or whatever. But I think it's so cutting edge. And, you know, just when you use that term AI, walking out to that business,

and just saying, I want to implement AI into your business and it's something tangible that they understand, you're going to get sales right out the gate because no one else is really trying to help the small business on AI. It's always about the big companies and enterprises that I think most business owners are seeing. So before this AI answering service, you would have said form and a chat bot on the website. Can I get your foot in. And then, sorry, the third one was the miscall text back. Sorry. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Very like tactically speaking, how should someone approach that business owner? Is it literally walking into a business? Is it a cold call, a text? What have you seen be the most effective? Not just for you, but for your customers.

All tactics work. I think that's something that's important for everyone listening. You'll hear people like they'll give you strategies on how to do cold calling and how to talk to businesses or email. You know, like you could send cold emails out to people or Instagram DMs. Like all those things work, but it is a little bit of hard. I mean, it is hard work because you're going to get a lot of knows before you get the yes. Now, for me, it's always been, you know, I love looking people in the eyes. I love, you know, when I have a one-on-one conversation, I want you to feel my passion because that's the passion I'm going to put in my delivery. So for me, it was literally just walk out to businesses that I either knew or had a small

relationship or I knew the owner or something like that. So then once I expanded that network, it's, well, there's a random, you know, clothing store down the street. Let me just walk in and see who I can get a hold of and just can I talk to you about your business. I looked on your website, you know, on my phone, you're missing these things. Can I do it for free? And if I get results, you know, then we'll talk. Yeah, then we'll talk. And, you know, that's where I get into that pitch of like, you know, hypothetically,

if I were to charge for this service, what would you pay? And I'm thinking about this and, you know, kind of working out that way. But more is just how do you get the conversation? And, you know, for me, I remember at that time starting the agency, it was I had to kind of build the strength to kind of say, I needed to go chase more nose. And, you know, it was like, I'm expecting a no here. but I tried. And so I got those cycles in.

And then over time, you just build that comment as I'm like, I got it, yes, what do I say there? How do I do this again, right? And then you start chasing that. The dog that caught the car. Exactly. Chase more knows. I like that phrase that.

I need to buy that domain name. So let's say, what if they have a website that just doesn't get much traffic and you install the widget and the chat bot and nothing happens? Or the second question is what then? You install it and then they do get traffic. They do get leads. What's the next step? In my experience, with mostly long.

businesses that's been around, you know, in local towns and things like that. Anytime that I put the chat widget and, you know, all the tools on the website and the miscall text back, they actually got a decent amount of traffic that they just didn't even know. Like a lot of people are Googling for this business and trying to go to their website to find them the funer, like the local plumber or the pizza shop or whatever. People are always looking out for them because they just have that local authority. I'm not saying to go to the big, you know, franchisees, like the local of the localist businesses. They've been around for a while. People know them. and they're just trying to figure out how to get in contact.

So I've always had success on that front. Now, for the few that don't have enough traffic or whatever, that's where, you know, just come into that business and saying, look, you're not getting a lot of traffic. That's why there's not anything going on. But are you,

would you allow me to actually run some traffic for you? And this is where I would, you know, try to partner with somebody and resell their services or trying to figure out how to compensate another person who's an expert in driving traffic, whether it's Google ads or things of that nature. Now, if you don't have that relationship,

it's okay. Just say, I tried. Right. And then I would just leave the tools there because there's no cost to me. Walk to the next business. But like I said, my hit rate was over 85, 90 percent walking into a local business, the local furniture store that's been there for 10 years, they just get traffic. And they just don't realize that the traffic exists.

And you know, you got to kind of coach them through like, hey, you got to lead in there, call them. Yeah. People just be so fascinated and surprised by it. So are you saying your hit rate 85? That was like your close rate when cold contacting in person or that was the percentage of people that had traffic to their site? That was my success rate of them having traffic on their site. My close rate was probably, you know, one out of every 25, you know, mostly when I was starting and like one out of 25 customers who'd be willing to give me a shot.

But that progressively got better. You know, once you have more testimonials and be like, I talk to Bob. I talk to Sally and all that. And then over time, you kind of, there's levels to it, right? After you walk out to a couple of businesses, people start telling you like, hey, I see what you're doing. and you should go talk to the Chamber of Commerce and then you start getting in front of that network and then somebody in there will invite you to something else, right? But it's just a lot of it is just getting the cycles in, just keep trying to talk, trying

to talk to more people and have those conversations. What kind of price point could you be able to charge for this? Like not to start, but like to finish at. The crazy part about it is I know customers that are selling it for tens of thousands of dollars a month. What? Yeah, mostly when you get into businesses, that have just high revenue.

Like you've got to put in perspective of one lead that you're able to provide to this company could be massive. So like in the pool space, right, if you're able to take a lead and they're able to convert on a pool, that whole project could be anywhere from 50 to 100,000, maybe even half a million dollars. So, you know,

being able to say, oh, I'm only charging $50 a month, right? That balance doesn't really jive over time. Now, when you're starting out initially, yes,

I mean, you're just trying to figure out pricing models. But once you build that confidence, it's like, I'm going to go to every pool company and show them the model that here's the reason I'm charging $3,000 a month or $5,000 or $10,000 a month. Because I know that the average pool company, when I put this widget on or miss calls or whatever, 20 calls in a month. Close five of them. Yeah.

Like you just run the math of it. And just that's why I charge this much because my value is so important to your business that you were missing out on this whole time. Well, people don't realize how undercharging can. do them more harm than good because of the perceived lack of value in the price. So we're both on the same page. You start cheap, dirt cheap, embarrassingly cheap, but don't finish there, right? Yeah.

Do not finish there. Feel comfortable to incrementally go up. And, you know, it is a slow approach and there's a little bit of internal conflict that you're probably dealing with of like, will people pay for this? I like this guy. Yeah. I don't want to offend him. Yeah.

I mean, these are the mental battles that every entrepreneur deals with. But you need to figure out ways. to continue charging more. And the fun thing about high level that is, you know, it's very similar to the Costco model of you come in and you can charge your customers a platform fee. But on the other side of it is we give you access to companies to resell as well. So think of like the text messaging and the emailing things like that.

You as the person who is a high level offering each other businesses, you have a little slider that says, I want to charge my customer, maybe 4X the cost of this product. So like texting is like 0.006.75 cents per message, you know, fractions of a penny. And so being able to say like half a penny, you know, you get to win on that delta. And so every time that the customer spends $20, you can make $5 off of it without having to change your base fee. And so all in all, you may end up making the three to four or $5,000 a month. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, how do you continue to figure out expanding your

customer's wallet, making sure that they make money and you should be able to. money on the back end as well. What about a pay per lead model? Do you, do you have guys successful with that? We definitely have guys that are successful with it. I think the challenge with paper lead is that I've seen businesses tend to turn it on and then turn it off, right? Like for whatever reason, they just don't consistently buy the leads over and over again. You say your customers, like in your platform, that's what you're seeing? Or no, sorry, like as an agency, if you're selling the paper lead model to the small business on the street, you know, usually people are like, I have this fixed budget.

I've done the math. So that equals about, you know, 45 leads. And then once they hit that point, they typically stop because they're like, well, I pay for this or I mentally prepay for it, whether it's upfront or just in my mind. And then it's like, well, I've already made an X amount of investment. Let me see if I can work these leads. And the problem is, like I go a good job and working it and all that. And so it's more about the outcome for me, not so much of just the lead and then good luck.

It's no different than Facebook or Google ads. Like, you know, I'll run a campaign 100 a day, a thousand a day. And then it's like, okay, this is working, but I need to let's catch up. Let me slow to pause it. Right. And then a lot of times I never restart it because something happens, right? Yep. So, so you're saying like, you know, there are exceptions to everything,

but on the whole flat fee per month is the way to go. And I think just as, you know, think about life in general, right? Like, since you like to have just your Netflix bill, like you like to have it just nine bucks a month. And then when they try to do the price increase, it hurts a little bit, but you end up sucking it up because it's, I know for the next 12 months, it's going to be this fixed rate. When you have something that's utilization based, you need to make sure that it is being used for a positive outcome. If it's just used for something that is unknown on how well it's going to do, then it feels like a tax versus investment, right? And so that's kind of the tradeoff

that you got to think there. Okay, I just had this idea. Like, you don't know what I would give Robin to export all your customers. You're like having anxiety, just me even saying that. Export all your customers or your customers' customers and run a pivot table of all the industries that your agency or your SaaSpreneurs have customers in and then scrape every single small business in America, 30 million of them and look at the percentages, right? Like, wow, okay. You know, HFAC is the most popular home service, but that's only the 17th most popular home service that are sasspreneurs have or you know what I'm saying I would love to see those inefficiencies because that's going to tell me I need a launch of marketing agency and I'm randomly making this up concrete ceiling

because there's a thousand concrete ceiling companies in the United States and 400 of them are on high level you know what I'm saying yeah so we definitely look at that data and I'll kind of tell you kind of the highlights of what you're saying like the number one types of businesses that come into high level from a volume perspective or percentage are the independent business owners. So think of like insurance agents, real estate agents, mortgage, you know, where they're solopreneurs in many ways. Pro sumers. Right.

Yeah. You call them. You know, think of you as an agency or someone who wants to start a SaaS company or whatever. It's very easy to have a conversation with that person. And it's like, well, let me see if I can help you grow your business. Now, the step above that after you get into those independent things is actually fitness. Fitness is actually pretty popular.

You know, and sorry, coming back to the individual side, you know, you have real estate as number one mortgage. Like, so you have those categories. Then you get into fitness and then home services is a great one as well. And the fun thing about home services, you do have kind of the independent owners, but they scale up so quickly because they end up having to create a network, right? Like, plumber who's coming in and they pick up a big job, they might be an independent owner, but they need to partner with the sheetrock guy or the, you know, the other. framing, you know, woman who's the expert in that and then designers and stuff like that. So they have kind of access to build a big team, but they're still an independent owner of themselves. So you can have that conversation, but know that, you know, the revenue that they're

able to bring in is actually significant enough. And I talked with the kind of smaller, the real estate agent and things like that, you know, just as a whole, I think there's a lot of potential for real estate agents, but not every real estate, you know, a lot of people get it as a side gig or, you know, they don't have a budget. I think the statistic for a lot of real estate agents is that they will do a half transaction in their whole time of doing a real estate deal. And it's only because it was like a referral of their own property that they were outside of that.

They really don't pursue it. It's a great idea. It's just a lot of work. And then they're coming off as a secondary part-time job, not as a full-time. So there's different levels on that. Why not basically going to Zillow to all of their real estate agents and scrape the ones by number of reviews, right? And just presume whoever has a lot of reviews, they're a high volume agent.

I'm going to only target them. Yeah. Those are the ones that, you know, typically have a team themselves. They're willing to spend a little bit more. They understand the value of leads. They understand the value in what you're trying to do. And so I think that's a great. I never thought of, you know, scraping things to kind of support by rank that way.

Now, what about on a percentage basis? Because there are two million real estate agents, you know, hundreds of thousands of mortgage brokers or attorneys or insurance agents, is there any kind of random home service niche or local business, you know, gymnastics studios, art like whatever, that you just kind of keep seeing anecdotally. You're like, man, those people are really willing to pay for agency services. You know, definitely in the home services space roofers are a big one. I think they've got a budget for it. Yeah, solar's another one. They have a budget. And it's kind of what we were talking about earlier, right? Like, it's they're willing to pay knowing that the

outcome is significant, right? And so, you know, roofing, it's average ticket size is what I'm sure, like, 15,000 to 15,000, you know, construction remodels is a popular one. And then, yeah, in the homeservice, pool companies, plumbers, like whole home services do extremely well because, you know, while they do some small jobs here and there, like the AC repair person is probably doing small jobs, but what they're really looking for is when someone needs a replacement, $100 service job to now $10,000 project. And so the opportunities just get bigger over time. So high ticket, definitely the way to go. Yeah. Finding businesses who have a high ticket and need a lot of production to make it meaningful. And you can kind of see that they're doing a lot of production would be the best way for me to,

is this a business that I want to work with? Okay. So that was the idea for a year or so ago. Widget, a form, the AI answering service. What about today? Is that changed? The only thing that I would change is just instead of the miscall text back, changing. Okay. Yeah. It's called AI. And I like that angle a lot better. One is, you know, I think it solves a better use case than just doing a miscall text back. Because what happens is in the miss call text back world, someone calls the business, the business doesn't answer. And as a consumer, when you're searching for a business, you go down the Google listings, right? The top three businesses. And the first person to answer is when I stop. When I do the miscall text back, the premise there and what made it so great is,

somebody calls the business, no one answers, the person hangs up and they're starting to look at the next result to call them, but all of a sudden you get the pattern interrupt, you get a text message saying, hey, sorry, what you should call? How can I help you? Now the problem there is the person responds back saying, hey, my toilet is overflowing or whatever it is. No one is there to then keep the conversation going as a small business, you're doing a good job. Now on the voice side, remember, they picked up the phone and called. So now if you have an AI bought and it's a a really good AI bought. I mean, a lot of the new AI stuff that we're rolling out feels like a human. I mean, it's just really incredible. Yeah. And it's, oh, yeah, okay. So let me go ahead and collect your address. Let me go ahead and get all the details. So it's a little bit more in, you know, the intent is so strong. And then you actually get the outcome, right, which is booking the appointment or saying that I got your address. We're not someone call you back immediately. Basically doing that next leg of the sales flow. And so that's what makes the AI part so, you know, so big. And like I said, it's also sexy.

right now. Have you heard of any of your of your SaaSpreneurs launching like a high level implementation agency where like let's say a medium size company is spending four grand a month on HubSpot and they kind of move in there, transfer everything over, train the team. Is that a thing? That is a massive thing. And actually internally with my my team, we're talking about like what are the different paths of using high level and you know kind of in our whole ecosystem. And that is actually one of those budding economies that we have where it's like third-party consulting companies where their whole job, you know, they're specialized in migrating things over, creating custom development, like really shaping up the automations and how you're using the tool.

You know, we've been talking a lot about like, you know, the top of funnel, right? Helping people take leads and how do you get them to book an appointment? But like what these companies are doing is taking once it gets to a certain stage, we needed to send out an invoice and send out a PDF. And once they sign the PDF, we needed to put it into our other system to model out what it needs to do from a costing perspective. And then we need to send it back to high level so you can see, you know, kind of produce estimate, like just doing all sorts of crazy operational things.

And so this is a crazy market. And so what we've been supported is actually we created a certified directory. So created a certified program. That was my next question. Yeah. So you have to get to do something like that. Yeah. So I mean, it's been taken off and it's doing incredibly well where you need to sign up to it.

We want one to have the barrier of entry of like someone who's going to take it seriously. It's low cost. It's 100 bucks a month. And it's about 30. to 40 hours of content that you go through to get trained, you take a test. And if you pass that first test, you then have to take a second test that's actually being proctored by someone at high level. So we're actually watching you on Zoom. We give you a case study and we want to see you build it because we don't want people to just blow through it and get a fake and walk around on Main Street.

If we're going to put our name behind you, we're going to make sure that you're legit. And then from there, we actually put you on a public directory. And it actually- You give them customers. We get them leads. We give them customers. And the certification is so real that it expires. And so if you're out in the world saying that I'm certified, well, that employer can look it up saying, oh, yeah, you were certified years ago. You're not certified now. So you don't know the newest latest, increasing.

So it gives it a lot of validation. And so people really like it. And, yeah, that directory is starting to generate leads of businesses. You know, my vision has always been Salesforce has grown to this massive level and done incredibly well. Just going to talk about that. certified, you know, Salesforce developers and it's now an economy. So my goal is how do I turn our certification program so that when I go to Indeed or jobs. com, people are asking for I need someone certified in high level.

And that's a, you know, creating massive salary opportunities and things like that. And so that's where we're really trying to take it. But right now, the consulting companies is kind of the first level into it. We're trying to support them with the certified program. People don't realize there are eight, nine plus figure companies out there that just implement Salesforce or Cisco or NetSuite or you're saying like you're getting to that point where you're starting your own marketplace for that, right? 100%.

The world exists that, you know, that piece of our economy exists today. The amount that they're commanding and the amount that they're supporting is just getting larger and larger that, you know, these groups, these individuals are starting to make significant amount of salaries and jobs as well as creating massive agencies in this development and implementation world. But then the businesses that they're supporting, it's not. you know, sure, there's the local businesses that they're supporting and stuff like that, but now they're getting into mid-market businesses, you know, the $100 million companies,

the $500 million billion companies are also looking for, you know, these resources and, you know, the power of high level plus the consulting group. People don't care about what the technology is underlying. It's about the outcome. So if you can get to the outcome, they're willing to pay for it. They don't care what it's going to take. So it's in the early days of this directory. Would you say, as of today, is there more demand or more supply?

Like, is there more supply of these high-level certified guys or more demand from companies looking for guys like that? Right now, we're at the perfect balance where there's a good amount of supply and we're matching up the demand. Right now, one of the challenges on our side is we didn't realize how fast it was going to take off. And one of the biggest constraints that we have is the live proctoring. So being able to make sure that we can keep up with that volume, it's just one of the challenges that we're working through. We'll solve it the next month or two. But I think the second half of this year, that's going to be one of our big pushes, is really making the certified program a real thing, you know, from a public perspective.

And there's going to be two. One is you can actually get certified and be in the marketplace so that you can receive leads and opportunities. And we want to help you get jobs and opportunities, create businesses that way. But then also it's having the certified program where, you know, Chris, maybe for one of your businesses, you hire some money. You want them to just learn the platform. They can go to the certified program.

And maybe they don't need to get tech. and all that. You just want to make sure that they get the right training. They go there to learn. Exactly. And so now it's how do we evangelize high level for all the end users? And so that that's really where I want to kind of take the next stage of that certified program. So if there's someone out there wanting to already start a marketing agency on high level, is it fair to say that they could kind of hedge their bets and potentially get leads from two different places if they got certified through you and listed on your directory? Like they could do that, maybe get a lead or two every now and then while they go try to find their own customers at the

same time? Yeah, definitely. The only caveat that I will say is it's one thing to get the leads. There is the fear of execution that kind of stop a lot of new entrepreneurs. Close it. To some, they might close it, but then they get into analysis paralysis to making sure that they set up this perfect thing. And so my thing, you know, if I was going to advise anyone is like, yes, you have that as your, maybe your next phase of going to the certified program and getting leads that way. But just go find the easy layups and progressively work your way up because remember it's about the outcome, not about how you build it, but I feel like when you go to the program, you get in your own head. The expectations are so high on execution

because of complex needs and stuff like that. Do you have any SaaSpreneurs using paid ads to just crank through new customers if they don't want to go door to door? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the challenge is, you know, when you're starting up, it's the capital to put up ads. But once you have revenue and you know it, we see it quite a bit with a lot of people who come from traditional marketing agencies who know how to run Facebook ads. So the CPLs, the, you know, the cat caused how much to reinvest back in. But yeah, there's a ton of people who focus on that. And what they do is they're not trying to sell the product to anybody and everybody.

They try to get hyper focused with us, with an angle, right? Like I'm taking what I built within high level. I'm going to specialize it for dentists. So now you're just running ads to go find more dentists or plumbers or whatever industry. I did a video on you guys on. I went to your Sasppreneur award site and I just started reverse engineering, these guys making a hundred grand a month, a million dollars a month. And one of them was like chiropractic leads for Spanish speaking chiropractors making like

130 grand a month. Massive. What? Yeah. And it's kind of the same thing, right? Like you actually don't need a lot of customers to make that revenue. You know, you do that with 20, 30 customers because such a specialized market and, you know, in the chiropractic space very similar.

It's like somebody coming in. the treatment lifetime value of it, the thousands, right? So if I can help you get one, mostly in a specialized market, and you become the authority into it, you could do incredibly well. And yeah,

I mean, it is so surprising for me. And like I, when I started the company with Sean and Vero, like, we had no idea what we were holding it like from the outcomes. So hearing stories like that, like,

it's just mind boggling to me. And it's like, it lights me up when I hear more of these stories and how we're creating these new economies. How much are like your biggest, partners making per month or year top line definitely eight figures I mean I heard one who actually sold which is awesome in the high eight figures I we heard one that's getting into the nine figure range from an exit perspective from a valuation perspective I should say I think for

even you know you do a lot of investing you know it used to be about so focused on what are the tools that you're using do you own it in the IP behind it and stuff I think now you know investors are looking at does it have a predictable sales model it's cool you're using these tools we understand you know the relationships that you have to build it and you know and how you're accomplishing it but really it's we want to buy the sales model i'm going to put my gas into it to sell it so the valuations is more about that not so much about the underlying tech anymore and so that's why the opportunity is so right for people to grow it to a decent size and flip it to the next person actually one example that i got individual going after dentist and selling it for the dental practices

and he actually approached one dental practice that was a part of a network of 30 like a DSO yeah exactly and it was i think one of the dentists or a group of dentists turned in essentially a private equity firm and he just picked up one dentist two dentists three dentists four dentists and started making really good money and then finally you know upper management you know the organization was like what is this you guys are we see the numbers you guys have gone what you guys do oh we're partnered with this guy well they approached them saying we want to buy you out. And then, you know, now it's, they thought, you know, their thesis was we can buy that marketing agency, that SaaS brand new or software implemented to all 30. And our business with 10x

fold and we don't have to pay their fee. And so he got a massive exit out of it. You know, I think it was like a $6 million exit. And he only had the business for 18 months. And it just walk away. And that private equity company will pay more than anyone else because of the value it is to them. They saw it. Right. Like they saw it in. And so. And I think it was like, like $6 million and then you need to stay on for another 12 months to help us implement it to all three. And he backfilled it so that they were able to bring it house. But they were like, the way that he was explaining to me, it was like, they think that they can make $30 million by implementing it in all their locations. Plus they're planning on acquiring more.

This is just an investment, right? It's a no-brainer. Yeah. It's like buying one more dental clinic. That's the crazy part about, you know, how interesting the dynamics of business is changing and the opportunities that that's coming up now. I mean, I love talking about the concept of finding a white whale, right? One big customer that could change your life. And so if I were launching this today, I would probably, like, people don't know there are

thousands of franchisors out there, thousands of franchisors and millions of franchisees, right? McDonald's alone, there's 30,000, right? I would go fine. And most franchisors, most people have never heard of, right? Like a random mosquito control franchisor in the northwest with 24 locations. You know, there's so many out there like that. I would go find a franchisee customer that's part of a small franchisor, like 10 to 30, 40 locations, crush it for them, crush it.

Like the word spreads in the franchise, crush it for someone else, and then get everyone. Like, why would the franchisor not want to force, like literally force all his franchisees to take them on if it's making all of them more money, therefore making the franchisee or more money? Now you have 30 customers from one customer, right? Sell the one to sell the 30. I love that model. And, you know, one caveat that I would say is the larger franchises actually are easier to find a local person who owns a local franchise. You'll hear the objections of like, oh, you can't go to a franchise network because the

franchisor restricts using third party companies and things like that. But when you just have an entrepreneur who's a part of the franchise, they're not hitting the numbers or whatever, you know, they're scrappy. They're like, I don't care. I got to make my business work and I'm not getting the support or it's not working. You're able to get into that conversation. Everything else just starts hitting and you actually, that white whale component, right? Sure you have that 40, but if it's a 200%, I've seen a couple of stories like in the fitness space where someone approached one.

And it was like, you know, just a random location that wasn't doing well. And then that person had a little bit of a support group of other people kind of in that same thing. Overall, the franchise network is great, but the small network of the small ones, that individual picked up two. 200 locations out of a thousand. Wow. And then he got a call from corporate saying, we need to talk in a positive way. And the fun thing is, you know, from a leverage perspective, if the top franchisor says, you're out, we're taking over.

They're pissing off all the locations, right? Making their life miserable. Yeah. And so they're basically saying we need a partner with you because we see the positivity. And so 100% agree with your approach. I didn't just like pull that out of thin air. I was, that was just one of the many examples I found reverse engineering or sasspreneurs.

I found, I don't even remember the company. And if I did, I probably wouldn't say them. But it was just some guy that had like an eight month old high level agency. And he was just bragging on LinkedIn to everyone. Like, hey, we just got our hundredth customer, our 500th customer. And I'm like, what the heck? And then I saw they just had this partnership with one franchisor. And they're an eight figure company.

And the fun thing about it, it's like, oh, like what I was saying earlier about the local businesses. Now it's like almost close to heart where it's like, oh, I'm working with Chris who owns this fitness group, which happens to be your fitness group. I got success for him. So that authority level just goes up even higher. So then you just start picking them off one by one. And the fun thing about growing it from a scalability perspective just becomes turnkey. You're just doing the same thing over and over again.

The only thing that you're doing is adjusting it for that new address. Yeah. Everything else stays the same. Oh, man. That's so beautiful. Well, we're out of time. He probably need to drive home to your family at this point. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Lost track of time. It's a great conversation. Yeah. This was awesome. Thank you for your time, Robin. Obviously, we know where to find you. Go high level. com.

When are you going to get the high level.com domain name? Like, surely you've been trying. You know, what's funny is we got go high level. com when we started because, you know, throw in a lot of money. I reached out periodically throughout the years. Actually, earlier this year, I reached out, you know, all right, it sucks. I don't want to have to do this, but I'll wind all for us. Yeah.

No response. And so, you know, we're now leaning into the go high. level side of things that people just kind of know us that way even though the official company's high level it's officially high level but you know we're testing it around actually on the website right now we're split testing like if we change it to go high level and we have a different version of it with a piece of tape okay it's like handwritten go on it yeah yeah listening out to see if it's gonna help us from a slit testing perspective but yeah you know at the other day it's not about us here at high level it's about your brand i want to see that you know

the crs corner CRM platform and you yeah yeah support you with your brand so call us whatever you want it really doesn't hurt us at the end of the day. I just love it when I call you high level because if you know you know, high level when people correct me. They're like, it's go high level. I'm like, no, shut up. They just wanted to pay $10 for a domain name, not 10 million. Exactly. But you know, like I said, it's fine. We go by anything. You can just say, hey, we love you. That work. You don't need to call you my name. Gotcha. Okay. Well, thank you, Robin. This was awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for having me on. All right. What did you think? Please share it with a friend. And we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.