The Most Profitable Agency Niche (With Shaun Clark, CEO of Gohighlevel.com)

[00:00:00] hey it's custom with you today the google news and joining me is one of my favorite people in the whole world sean clark uh ceo of high level did i get that right sean yeah you're not seeing you're not a title guy right like no i don't even i wouldn't i wouldn't know my own title if other people didn't tell it to me now and again so yeah i would just say co-founder because i feel like that's better yeah okay well that just means you're kind and humble and all those things because i like nothing more than titles and honoraries i enjoy yeah um all the honorifics um cool man so i'm excited to chat with you and if you're if this is the first time you're watching this for the first time you're exposed to sean sean has what i'm going to call the most disruptive software in the marketing world which is gohilevel.com we'll put a link in the description that's my affiliate link by the way but uh what's interesting about go high

[00:00:47] level is just the the features that you've been building out and adding it's got to be the most robust thing i've ever seen oh we're certainly trying that is definitely our goal yeah and you told me about a new feature google's rolling out that i imagine you all integrate with i had no idea this was dropping this is reserved with google yeah that's right well so reserve with google is pretty cool because if you haven't seen it before i'm going to try to find a really cool example here for everybody uh but basically uh because i'm not a very ah here we go this is uh this is this is a good example worked out by somebody else but this is the idea that you go on google and you'll be able to search something right like you'll be able to see your barbershop in this case and then they'll have a list of services and so and then from here you can actually book directly on google for this um and if you google

[00:01:33] reserve with google of course there's all kinds of cool uh images here where you can see that you can it was really really big in the um oh gosh what do you call this like the tour space like to see these are for tickets and things and so anyhow um ultimately and we can go to the actual google page it's an ads product so that's the coolest thing about it so here's like the here's the fancy reserve a table version and so there are very few people who have this feature out there we're going to turn it on first i think in the we got permission to do it in the services space and there's only two other software applications in the world that have this it's uh they're both service crms but this is really neat because it's it's two things it's it's a google ads products it's a local service ads products product and it also ties in with the google guaranteed so you have to be google guaranteed to use this

[00:02:23] um but all all that to say it's a really cool way in my opinion to get to a scenario where you can actually book off google directly and drive a lot of leads and a lot of results for clients directly so i love it as a feature yeah this is amazing and how does this work with high level you all are providing what like the data table on the back end that google draws against yeah exactly so um let me see if i can find an example in real life by the way so yeah so what we do is we have countering and booking in our software already and so we're able to actually push all this stuff out so if you go down here let me see if i can find anybody who's actually got it um it's it's always good to do these things while you're on a call you know um but it's mobile only sean that's why you switched over to mobile yeah yeah um i i think it's it's i can't remember to be honest i think it's more prominent mobile is why i i think i've seen it

[00:03:09] here before uh but i d and i do think there google i know for a fact is uh message message ah book there we go yep there it is right there perfect that's what i should have it all queued up but you know it's all good so yeah so you're in here you see this sky heating ac and plumbing you hit it up you hit schedule and then in here you can you can actually if they have times and availability look at that boom you can choose that now this is actually um now and then you fill this out and you literally are booking that time it's which we're going to blur this out but uh under contact info it's pretty populating your information yeah which is that's really important because it means that a you're closer to a conversion event and b you're more likely to get real information as opposed to people putting in like secondary email addresses dummy phone numbers which we know that they do in conversion forms that's right that's

[00:03:57] right and so the cool news here is what so there are a couple things i don't like about this um you know for me thinking about this as a consumer so going all the way back to this person the first thing i did is select book which is great but then the next thing is like uh i don't know i don't know what i want yeah i i mean maybe i do maybe i don't but you know it's like uh and but you know that i think the the google sort of thought line here is like well you know you're you're probably gonna have some idea so you like choose something right now what i think is writer's fault though like shouldn't the provider just say like you know introductory consultation they can't wow so google pre now now there's a i think google has the right idea here so if you think back i think the problem with google's products all the way back to is they started with this idea of optionality like oh well of course they're gonna know how to do this

[00:04:44] and of course you know we're gonna make it so easy and all this other stuff but it led to a lot of just i think wild wild west sort of you know you have to choose the keywords and figure it all out and i think that was very confusing so their goal here is to sort of standardize things right now i agree with you i think maybe the standard should have been you know book an estimate for this type of thing right but i think that the counter you know and these are the wars they have inside google right but i bet you the counterpoint was like yeah but what happens if you know that your you know your water heater went down or your heater went bust or whatever right so anyways who knows from just from my perspective knowing what i know about google google is obsessed with uh understanding intent it's the reason they have 15 different you know the the nomenclature instead of the conversion actions is so um

[00:05:27] well delineated they want to know what it is people are doing because they could put a price on that repairing a water heater and then you know water damage or whatever those are two very different totally water heaters 800 bucks water damage 15 000. and if google and start to get down to what the click

[00:05:41] is worth they're going to start to to bill you according to that click so what you just said and i think you're totally right now interestingly you can see kind of the workarounds here though so um first of all it says you know choose your appointment morning afternoon or evening notice they do eight to six so now i know what's happening under the hood here if they broke all the times out right what would invariably happen is that you know you would book a time and then they would be like oh shoot we're not gonna have a van on that side of town today right um and so what they want what they're doing here as as the company i think this is what i would recommend that they do too is hey listen get them all the way through here get them to book and then we'll call them back and actually schedule the real thing we don't mind paying google for it but what we're looking here is to get the consumer through the process and the

[00:06:25] whole breaking out the times thing i think is where you lose a lot of people um but you know conceptually i think that's the product i kind of want to fight you on that a little bit because if i saw eight to six i don't know that i'd keep going you know for me and and i bet you're the same way like my days are so regimented if i don't have at least like some sense as to when you're gonna come i don't feel like this is a booking software anymore oh don't i don't disagree with you from the consumer standpoint i totally think that's correct but i think what what this is and i see this all the time right you know when you talk to small businesses they always think about me me i i like what's my schedule what's my situation what's this what's this and of course as marketers and as as people trying to help them get more business we're saying like no no no no you you need to think about the consumer like

[00:07:07] what's the experience that's best for the consumer but i can tell you this is exactly why they did it this way because that business owner is saying i don't want to get people you know in a particular time slot but um but i will say that the fact of the matter is this is right up front in google which is amazing you don't have to leave google to get an appointment with a vendor which i think is the biggest thing and over time i'm sure they'll make this better and tweak it yeah it's going to get more elegant right now at the bottom it says in partnership with service titan that would stay in partnership with go high level uh well lead connector yeah because we always label we want to make sure that you know there are these weird situations like this where there's no way everybody can go out their own google app and everything else and get it certified it's a it's a huge process but we just

[00:07:52] throw it out as lead connectors so that way it's not showing our brand it's showing their brand man this is brilliant and then they drop into the crm and you can trigger whatever automations you want yeah so here's the yeah so here's the next part about this that i love so as part of the the real roll out here right is okay let's say you do book i don't care whether you show the times you don't show the times any of that stuff it's likely that the business owner internally is going to want to follow up in some form or fashion right like even here it says 180 to get an estimate i don't see where in this process you paid 180 bucks you know like yeah where where you know where am i oh whoops where am i gonna get the uh 180 off to go cancel that but where am i going to get billed 180 bucks right i assume what's going to happen is they're going to reach out to me and say hey time to give us your 180 bucks otherwise we're

[00:08:42] not showing up so what's great is you're going to need a lot of automation off the back of these appointments to do more than just get the bookings uh scheduled what industries are the the bookings available for oh wow let me go get that list um so we've got um uh let's see we've got a big list so there's there's the list that they're available for now and then there's the list of where they're gonna be available in the future so here is the i think the now list and it's you know and what they've tried to do right is take the service description and tie it back to the business category so they're trying to say look everything from you know g all the way down to g27 this means general contractor category right which is interesting because roofing is on here but they have handyman general contractor home inspector home theater pool cleaner oh you know what oops i may have just outed the new list oh and in

[00:09:38] fact i did whoops sorry google um so uh but anyhow so these are the new ones they're adding and then there's a huge existing list as well um mostly in our in our case we'll start with services but over time they're gonna have their that we'll be able to add restaurants we'll be able to add i mean google's idea here is really simple right how can we go into every category out there uh where someone's gonna book an appointment law is gonna be coming up all of those different categories and so we'll continue to plow in all of them so this works both with paid and organic how do you deal with attribution no no no it's just paid you can't you can't do this unless you're paying well that little search i saw you do throughout all of those resources all of those were paid ads that looked like a collection of organic listings inside of google maps so maybe i just wasn't paying attention oh no yeah see hold on slide a

[00:10:26] hand there my friend hold on yes let's back the train up so if we look at that what what this really is is this is the lsa stuff so plumber portland oregon oh this is all guaranteed that's okay it looked like a gmb you know scrolling and that's because that's what they wanted to look like that's what they're right of course yeah i mean and this is i mean i i just continue to see this dominating google's stance on things it's it's ads products first followed by google uh google maps and even here by the way even in maps ads are yeah you're going to start to see this in fact i saw someone down here it's amazing how disjointed google is i mean i suppose on one hand it makes sense just given how big they are but on the other hand um it's it's like there's a button somebody had one in here that says estimate and i notice it's a different product than um on the on the on the google guarantee side oh quote here we go so see look now

[00:11:24] you have this like what is that i wonder if that's google lead forms or something like it exactly so there's all these different ones so what we're doing on our side though is we're starting with the we we asked we actually originally what i originally wanted was if you go back to here and you go to lsa if you look under like message here look at this oh i need to message you about unclogging a drain we wanted access to these and so google gave us access first to the booking the uh the reserve with google and then over time they don't have an api for this now but because we're on their list we're on the radar when the api does come out we'll be we'll get first shot at it because again from my my perspective google one way or another is gonna drive all of this traffic as much as they can straight into your business right and so and keep it off your website if they can so that they can monetize on it and then

[00:12:19] our goal is to get a hold of all of those inquiries and turn them into actual books jobs or booked customers it's interesting because google's trying to keep everybody inside the google ecosystem yeah so you know that your website your funnel you if you never send the user there and this is one of the things i want to talk to you about oddly enough so it's a good transition if you never get a user from the listing to your website you're never able to capture first party data you can't see where they go you can't see what they do you can't you don't have the ability to start seeing who they are i'm not referring to fingerprinting just as much as you know like ip address browser like stuff that we can capture and oh yeah like it's all veiled you are now 100 at the mercy of google all the time um yeah and that's i mean that's their goal isn't it right i mean that's that's where they want you to go they don't

[00:13:11] want you to be inside of your own system only to the extent that you have to be it's interesting because if i look at the future it's not going to be too distant from where we are today whether you get a lead via google or some other mechanism you have to follow up with that lead right you're going to even if someone books an appointment i'm telling you i'll guarantee you that if you don't follow up collect payment make a connection something the likelihood they're going to be there when you show up is going to be pretty low and so ultimately i think what will happen is you'll still want to and you want to follow up after the fact you know you want them to rebuy want them to do this do that so i think that at the end of the day you're going to need to have a system to do that for you because i noticed google what google wants to do is sort of like get that person to give you their info and then google wants to nothing to do

[00:13:58] with it after that that point right they want to kind of wash their hands of it but it's definitely a big part on their side of sort of owning the search owning the selection owning the lead capture all of that piece google's definitely once done here's what scares me is google is positioned i've made this point before so if you've been on the channel for a long time and you've heard this forgive me because it's redundant if you think about what google has from an information standpoint they're perfectly positioned for price setting and i mean like to the definition of the term right because they can see all the advertisers that want to bid on this inventory all the available inventory and now especially because they're delineating services what that inventory is worth and normally like in a normal organic market like go you know adam smith like real deal capitalism right you would end up with the hierarchical

[00:14:45] structure where one entity would rise to the top and you have your pareto distribution they're getting you know eighty percent of the business twenty percent of the vendors are getting eighty percent of the business and then and then we're all fighting for it at the bottom which is kind of the way that it's supposed to be because work flows to the competent what google could do and i'm not saying they are doing this but i can't i can't fathom an eventuality where they don't because this is how they maximize the value of their inventory what google could do is say okay i have all these these advertisers and all this inventory instead of allowing a natural hierarchy to exist what i'd rather do is spread the inventory out among each of the advertisers so they're making the least amount of money they need to make to stay right like they i want them one dollar above leaving because otherwise i'm

[00:15:27] actually going to lose 80 of them or so the ones that aren't that aren't able to climb the hierarchy and things like this bring them so much closer to being able to do that i mean the people already do this in some sense right like you notice that you know now think about national advertisers it's really hard to become a national advertiser because google will actually give preferential treatment to local advertisers right and the local listings and there's very that's precisely why what they don't want is they don't want the home advisors the angie's list of the world to buy out every spot because they would and then they would show up at google's door and say all right you people we you know we're spending 100 million bucks this year in ads we're gonna give us a discount right yeah google's like no thanks we'll we'll we want we want bob's towing in every little town and city and they'll say it's because they want to

[00:16:10] support bob but it has nothing to do with that it has to do with exactly what you're talking about which is they want they want the bobs of the world to overpay and in aggregate they make a lot more money doing that yeah so it's the amplification of their own inventory and then it's also making sure that they're not they're not commoditizing or being commoditized by the big players and why not and if you're if you're them why not go even further because you what you know right is that bob's towing or you know or or jim's hvac or whatever it is they don't actually want to be doing any of this marketing stuff anyways they don't want to run ads right so what if you could figure out how to capture the job for for for the hvac company and then literally just take a cut and sell it down line gym and then june literally just shows up and it's google guaranteed to get paid google says hey jim you show up whether

[00:16:56] they're there or they're not there or whatever it is if you do the job we guarantee we're gonna get you a check for a thousand bucks and we'll take care of all the nasty details of the line i didn't realize sean that google guarantee worked both ways i thought google guarantee was for the consumer it's a million dollars no no it is today i'm saying this this is where i could see the numbers oh your google would actually guarantee the job for the vendor why not because then because then it then it's like look if i can get you on the hook to pay me some amount that you would have otherwise had to pay an ad spend and then deal with it and figure it all out what if you just pay me by the job and i can figure out how to automatically get you jobs and you just show up and do your thing dude that is absolutely brilliant thank you mother my wife brought me coffee oh that was nice yeah yeah i think that will spell

[00:17:39] do i mean i do think that i mean do you think sort of moves like this move them closer and closer to litigation and also probably regulation oh dude there's an anti-trust student coming like oh yeah how could there not be but to their credit there's been two congressional hearings on facebook there have been zero on google like somehow and google's so much bigger and captures so much more data but they've they haven't zuckerberg did some stupid things he tipped his hat the interest-based segmentation available on facebook was stupid like don't let people know what you know i mean man i don't know if you ran facebook ads back in the dayshon but it got so granular and and like so we were obviously breaching people's privacy it was a joke you know we had buddies like i had a buddy who was targeting his roommate with with ads and you know what i mean like just stuff that we shouldn't have been allowed to do and i think but

[00:18:27] i think that's it right i think that that's the that's the scenario that happened there which is that they they had a lot of they had a lot more data than google did right i mean they knew it where you would do that what you ate and your friends were they knew a lot of more interconnectedness google just kind of knows what you look for all the time and oh so google is google has the facebook's data and this is my soapbox so forgive me here google had the the data that facebook has thing google is google analytics google's on 99 of all front-facing websites google knows who's hiv positive who's narcotics anonymous who's cheating on their spouse who's about to get a divorce who's declaring bankruptcy think about everything you've ever done on every website ever all of that google has that information but what they didn't do is they didn't let any of us use it they never said it yeah yeah they just used it they kept it

[00:19:11] exactly they kept the code yeah so nobody's afraid of google because we're like oh yeah google's just a search engine no google is the most prolific thing on the internet that's true google has 70 million 72 72 million demographic and psychographic profiling factors facebook has 55 000. so google

[00:19:26] is like many times the size of facebook both in terms of uses bandwidth exposure that's true that i would agree with they're masked yeah but facebook like let everybody know what was up which is why they're the ones that are you know the big bad whatever privacy infringers um which is why we lost third party cookies you know i mean the ios 14 update which gosh that has to be one of the best things that ever happened to y'all right i mean i mean everybody has i don't know i mean i don't know it's it uh i mean it certainly made the game bit more difficult for people um it gave us an opportunity i think to standardize things and simplify things for people because it is now just like copy and paste your api token over versus before people would try to cut and paste javascript and mess it up left and right um you know that kind of thing but you know it's interesting because i think that that whole thing though is just as

[00:20:15] self-serving as anyone right it's just that oh dude apple does not care about your privacy yeah no not at all but it's brilliant it's brilliant they cut the i mean facebook off with the knees with that's right competition yeah right and then they just stopped doing what open tracking on emails and stuff i mean this is just more and more and more it's ironic because of course you know if you open an email in their mail client do you think they don't know about that i mean i would imagine that they made that point too if you open up an apple app they never ask if you want to opt out of traffic on apple's database yeah exactly and i'm certain i am certain they know a lot more than they let on i had a question for you because i have an idea for fixing email tracking and i'm going to float it past you okay i can't wait to hear it yeah and if it works i want like a gift basket or something okay gift basket

[00:20:58] ahoy yeah so apple is withholding and maybe this is already the way that it works shawn and if that's the case i'm cutting this out so i don't look so stupid apple is is withholding open and click through data why couldn't we send unique urls and and you know i mean utme type urls or whatever so that when a user clicks we can do basically what the facebook conversion api does and capture that data post click so you can at least come back and know that people that have clicked i know i know who those people are well first of all are they killing click tracking because that's i don't know how you even do that right because once i click i land so is that because they're pulling off query parameters on the clicks i don't know that i i don't know a lot about this stuff oh and if they pull the query parameter you're right then my idea doesn't well no because then this is where your this unique concept works right because then

[00:21:47] the link becomes unique right so you put you just embed the code in the link right so smart engineers would be like all right well it's going to be some random code.mydomain.com and we just you know you make it a subdomain because i was thinking about making it utm parameters but if you make a subdomain that's actually hard-coded so so think about the lo okay so the open tracking too let's go back to that so how i'm just sort of thinking as an engineer myself like how would i kill that right so most of the time it's like okay take that one by one pixel that's clear and like kill that bad boy right that's probably pretty simple to do yeah but what about all the other images that are in uh well they're using proxied emails so when you go to opt into something instead of like you know sean clark gmail.com or whatever it says do you want us to use and then it's like apple's weird and i don't know exactly

[00:22:36] how it works but it's basically proxy email that they provide just for you i think just for that subscribe yeah and then that proxy the email i think that what they can do is literally it's almost what google does with amp pages where they strip everything they don't want ah okay deliver what they do and so it's like a proxy host yeah but so but let's say but let's say you have a real image in there you have a picture of a puppy dog right yeah like does that that image has to get loaded from some place i wonder if what it does is because it's proxied yeah does it does the proxy always open you know always render the image and so it looks like basically make your open tracking 100 open right side yeah exactly yeah that's i think so i think the only thing there is you're going to get the click i i don't know how you get the open uh with the proxy i'm still veiling click and maybe i just made that up in my head

[00:23:25] but i thought ios 15 kills click well i wouldn't be surprised if they don't try but that's one where i feel like at some point you're coming to me buddy so kind of where you came from then i should be able to i should be able to get you and again subdomaining it something unless of course apple says aha i know what we'll do we'll just click on every stupid link in the email but the problem there is you might hit an unsubscriber or something right so that won't work so i don't know the click is the harder one the open i see how they do it though which is you know crappy but again all self-serving right there's no there's no data protection that's just how can we cut out google how can we cut out facebook um well what it does is it forces marketers to go back to a content first paradigm like everybody's been pushing out crappy content for so long we actually have to have good content now because you don't know who's opening

[00:24:12] who's cooking you need to rely on the fact that you're putting things in front of people that are of value that's true and again you know i still i still keep thinking okay why does all this matter because yeah i mean first of all should you ever be putting out bad i don't know like does sending out a bad email really works so well that's that's what's funny is if you can target it does and i don't mean a bad email but a c minus email if i know for a fact you need a new roof and i'm a roofer yeah all of a sudden i can just send you like needing a roof need a new roof you know what i mean like but if i've got this full-on list and i don't know who's who i don't know who's tracking who's engaging and if you need a new roof and you've opened and you clicked now i'm going to carpet bomb you or i'm going to call you or you know what i mean like so even though that's something i still think you get the click though and so

[00:24:52] that's maybe the other thing it's just you know and maybe and maybe let's just pretend for a minute you don't get the click like you don't know you got the click you just you get a click it wherever you're landing me if it's if if at any level you have a good offer there you should get the opt-in and you should be able to offer presupposes good content right because a good offer is something that has articulated the value well enough and i don't think we've been doing that as marketers i think we just were like you want my thing you know like people haven't haven't really spent time thinking about their avatar uh empathy um value propositions and i guess that's that's a different conversation coming back to the the um the veiled data we are losing more information than we've ever lost in the history of digital marketing right like this is the first time it's ever gone this direction it's always been like you have more you

[00:25:36] have more you have more and then all of a sudden it was like skinnying up and so my new favorite uh soapbox and it's not a service that i provide to clients and i would refuse to do so because it's just it's too client specific but what i think every individual business needs to do is focus on first party data acquisition and capturing as much as they possibly can you know both cookied so that before somebody converts you have you know as much as you can attached to that and then post conversion uh i know high level helps with this and i know that because we used high level for ourselves and my cto trapped up your guys and kind of showed y'all how we did what we did because i think you're building something native aren't you yeah so i mean we're we're we're continuing to i mean we we already do a lot of this right so we already know we we already know if you send us utm parameters which no one does

[00:26:23] unfortunately but if you if you do what you're supposed to do there like we will capture the utms and we'll automatically add those to any of the contact information we capture if you don't we'll try to figure it out based on kind of where they're coming from and gcle ids being in the urls and all that stuff but um from there of course the idea is that we need a capture event or um you know if you don't capture off the first time we'll cook yum and all that good stuff so yeah so we'll definitely take all that stuff first party and you know the thing i continue to think about is i feel like a lot of this lends itself more and more and more to an inbound world right i you have to give me a sufficient reason to engage with you versus you being able to just carpet bomb me you know outbound and hope it all works out and honestly i think the wall's closing everywhere on outbound like stir shaken for the for the phone

[00:27:10] call thing that's like you can't just rotate numbers all the time and keep out bounding i don't know yeah so that's it yes it's after james bond of course but it's a new phone regulation so that like we've all gotten these you know phone calls right like hey your car warranty's up and you're like what and then you call back to like yell at the person and you get some poor person whose number got sort of like you know ghosted or whatever um and they're like i didn't call you and you're like oh crap stir shaking stops that problem and and it makes so it makes it so you have to be the person the person who is calling from that number has to map to that business and then if you hit spam on your phone all of those reports are now making it all the way back to the carriers and they're writing it down and they're saying your business is spammy not this number is spammy so if you just try to rotate numbers

[00:27:58] that your reputation will not follow you is just federal legislation yeah yeah yeah yeah wow and there's another one called a2p10dlc which is the same gosh darn thing as implemented by the carriers uh for texting and it is all out and what they're doing is they're racing ahead of congress to try to get ahead of them doing the same thing in the texting well yeah you'd rather regulate yourselves than have a regulatory body tell you how to do things yes i remember when and you know way more about this than i do but i remember um encryption i had a friend who was he was a world authority in encryption like banks would hire him to come in and secure their their programs and he said what the federal legislation required actually made things less secure because it's written and then you know it's there a bunch of geriatric morons that don't know what they're talking about and then b it's never updated so yeah

[00:28:45] he's like we're 10 years behind the times because these idiots force us to encrypt this way and we should be encrypting in these new you know i mean i would not at all i doubt that i think that i think in this case you know what's really interesting right is if you think about spammy text you can think about in the context of spammy email right and with google and and microsoft to dominate most email you know they sort of have their spam algorithms behind the scenes they don't say anything about it the way that the carriers have done in this case is they actually created a third party sort of regulatory body or scoring entity and this sort of entity holds on to the score of your business and they map it to either an ein or an ssn so that if you try to like swap carriers and move around you're that score will follow you and it's a trust score and they and it's very they sort of they map out you know

[00:29:31] here's how you get it here's what they'll even tell you here's what your score is imagine google saying here's your spam score right oh god incredible um and so anyways but i think the nice part about this is it doesn't it doesn't really negatively impact an inbound world in my opinion it in fact if anything it makes inbound marketing easier because if i've opted into your offer and you're reaching out to me you're reaching out through a world that now has this negative uh consequence of sending crappy stuff so if you're sending good stuff to the right people your your likelihood of getting through and getting a response and getting a result should go up sure i totally agree it sucks for the paid ad guys though because we're i don't know the paid ad guys are great because that should be inbound right that's still that is inbound in my opinion right yeah the issue though is you and you need to cut outbound in order to

[00:30:20] identify the people that will ultimately like you can pivot uh outbound to inbound and generate interest and and you know i mean most of my business 90 of my business bottom of the funnel anyway which is entirely inbound but i do worry because i have i have clients that rely so heavily on on outbound mechanisms and they're good folks they're good i mean you know you can't have a three thousand percent roads unless you're selling a good product in good ways to good totally yeah yeah yeah but but some of these new updates are like they're biting them right in the house yeah yeah i mean outbound is not evil just because you do outbound doesn't make you a bad person but we are we're now in a world where outbound has been so abused by the wrong people i just think the the days on outbound are numbered um so you know i think we will move to a world where you need to generate some form of inbound interest and this is by the way

[00:31:05] where automation and lead nurturing and these sorts of unsexy topics will only continue to become more important as time goes on because every single lead is going to account for a lot more because you're going to have paid for it and you're not gonna have a strategy like you said that can go out and suck in a lot more leads than than you you're gonna pay for all of them now well so i have a theory on this and i think this might tie into high level in various ways um i think that this is going to give rise to the lead farms because if you take like you know we just put hvac guys or painters or whatever those folks are not going to be and this isn't meant to be pejorative but they're not going to be sophisticated enough to be able to compete on a grander scale especially if you're a solo you know solo shop sure so what ends up happening is there's an intermediary right like like all of a sudden there's somebody who's capturing

[00:31:54] all these hvac leads yeah and then and and this was a really big industry for a long time and then it kind of cut down when the small business owner was able to um and i think a lot of that honestly stemmed from the the efficacy of facebook and google the small business owner was able to subvert the lead farm well now we just the lead farms are now kind of in a better position because of everything we're talking about the ability to follow up automation visibility uh catalyzing inbound interest like that's a hard thing for a small business to do and then also run their business so i wouldn't be surprised if we see more and more you know and i dude i've done it i had a real estate investment lead uh agency we had it for seven eight years it was insane what people were willing to pay for leads i mean to the tune of thousands of dollars for a lead so yeah well i mean if the roi is there and it's

[00:32:39] right i mean and i and i think this actually again i don't think this this this hurts marketers as much as maybe people talk about i think this actually really just helps hone what a marketer is going to be and how they're going to operate and what they're going to look like whereas you know you could have gone a lot of different ways in the past is there a lot of people that were like cold email experts and there's still lots of people running around i just think there's a lot more gates and fences designed to knock back that type of outbound outreach and i think those things will only get worse yeah but marketers love playing chicken little so that's you know our favorite past time it's just oh my god everything's coming to an end um what's next for high level what do you have on the pipeline what can you share just world domination uh pretty much no i mean we're uh you know are you already

[00:33:21] there like haven't you destroyed like every other there's not a competitive tool that can stand to you right like is there anybody i mean i would say yeah in aggregate absolutely not but well but what i you know honestly you know we okay so this last year we really came out with this concept of sas and um it and it was it really was it was not my idea for the record it was the it was a crazy idea that i stole from like 50 of our best customers and but that's how everybody who's using high level was already using it that way right everybody who's using it effectively no i i disagree i think it was all over the place that's what it really was right but what i saw was call it 50 really sophisticated operators at all sizes and scale too by the way but just people who had picked up on this idea like hey you know what i i need to be technology and service and so i i looked at that and i'm like that is

[00:34:11] absolutely the right answer to to really solving the problem because i'd already been down this road of like well you know i talked to bigger marketing agencies and i'd be like hey how do you get such low churn and you know they would say things like well we offer every service known to person kind and then you know the i would say i would say the next agency i talked to saying oh i have a bad turn problem well why don't you just do it all and you know they'd be like well because i don't have a white label provider for that so then we started one and then we're like here you go and then sure enough you're like yeah but i don't want to sell it and i don't want to support it i was like ah it was so i went through all of that only to find at the end of the day that it was way more effort than i ever anticipated and even for the people who tried it they would often fail because they just couldn't

[00:34:52] just like the small businesses they served they couldn't learn 10 new tricks right so what i what we harmonized on was let's teach them one trick let's teach them sas right and so we rolled this out last year and i i and and i was a really big bet on my on my part but i've i've seen just huge momentum huge momentum now it's not 50 customers it's thousands right and it just makes sense every single business that marketers interact with need technology are confused by it have 100 choices in it um it almost always aligns with the service that the market is providing like it's just now to me stupidly obvious but i've seen it really take root and really see people advance so for us it's about making sure that we continue down that road and you know for the this quarter it's gonna be social media posting is gonna be a big new feature for us and i'm excited about that like a sweet replacement yeah like a

[00:35:42] hootsuite placement and again nothing you haven't seen before and that's actually the that's that's the fun of high level it's not about seeing things you've never seen before it's about bringing them all together in one spot and making them resaleable you know that kind of thing those those are the ways that we're providing value for our customer because we again i don't care go find me the best social media platform posting platform ever and you're going to find a tool you know you know just like you go to home depot today you can find a really fancy table saw but again all i would ever do is probably cut my finger off whereas you know somebody else is going to figure out how to make a house out of the dark thing and i think that's the difference we see marketers as those professionals who need the tools and need to kind of bring their clients along with them in using the tools and so it's this cooperative kind of

[00:36:25] environment so that's what's different about us and and that's really where we're pushing but it's also about making sure there's a revenue stream for the agency that's software based so you get out of sort of the up and down of all the services clients coming in and out all the time what's nuts about y'all though sean and i'm gonna pander a little bit but this is maybe more for our listener than anyone is you've left all the monetization opportunity on the table for the agent you don't charge any more money for uh users contacts additional features which is i mean i'm i was a hubspot certified partner we just canceled hubspot because it was every seven seconds it was like oh you have to pay me oh this is more i love top spot it was a joy to work with sure but what you all have done it feels like it almost feels irresponsible like i want to pull you off to the side and be like dude this is great you know we just we went

[00:37:12] through a big fun uh a fundraising thing recently he pissed me off by the way i tried oh yeah i'm sure well don't worry you're not fully cut out don't worry we can talk about that later but um you know at the end of the day what was great about it is we had this insane amount of inbound interest but what was awesome is but we we would weed people out really quickly because we would explain them the business model and they would say wait hold on what are you doing yeah like and we're like can we explain it they're like that's that doesn't make any sense we're like yeah but we make money how many of your how many of the investments you make you know you've made make money and they're like well almost none of them but you know but if you draw the line out 20 years to the right they eventually do you know and we're like yeah but we're here today we make money today and they're like they just couldn't get it and so it was funny

[00:37:55] because really at the end of the day there were probably two people standing one um who who were who were serious serious contenders one of them wanted a wholesale acquire us and then just basically destroy our customer base and so i said no thanks and then the other people really believe in what we're doing and so that's why we took them on and they're minority so they can't control us anyways but at the end of the day um what i learned is that people thought we were we're crazy and i love that because it tells me we're onto something because that's how that's how great things always start who who thought you know electric cars or you know privatizing space or you know sending out you know satellite something to this guy to do internet like these things all sound crazy right and they probably were initially but they're starting to become like of course you're of course you would do that right yeah

[00:38:42] yeah well dude i'd call you all the robin hoods of the sas space like you're not not to be overly dramatic but you're literally like robbing from these great big leviathan sas and then you're giving to the small agency and for 500 a month an agency can have their own their own sas product it's insane yeah well it's funny because you know like there's a there's there's somebody who has some of our features that literally just filed their s1 and they went ipo right and they do 70 million in revenue they burn through it then they need another 40 million to keep the lights on right so they're 40 million so imagine like and they were they're ipo they're like they're they're publicly traded now they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars supposedly i don't know you can value a business that loses money personally but it just shows that the model is broken all over the place and this is what i

[00:39:32] love about what we're doing marketing agencies and marketers are absolutely this sort of like super secret sauce i keep saying it so everybody probably knows it by now but they are like the key to success for these small businesses and so i just no no one has figured this out and i hope they just continue to be dumb about it but i really really believe in marketing agencies is this huge win for for customers and for small business yeah so if a small business wants to use high level because that's i bet you half of my subscribers if not more they're not agencies sure do you have like like and i know you've talked about this in the past but like where's the directory where do they go to find the high level agency that can give them the software so they don't have to try to sneak in you know i uh here's actually how i would do this i don't think that's i mean i love i i i would love them all to

[00:40:15] use an agency that uses thailand but i think that if i was being really truthful and honest with somebody um i would say look the first thing you need to do is just find an agency that can get you great results right and that can come in lots of different ways interestingly one of the it's funny i one of the most sustainable agency models i've seen is the local digital agency because it's funny because i go online and it's all about niche niche niche and pick an edge pick this pick that and yet the people who have the lowest churn they're they're the unniche the local guys because they have so much trust with their customer base yeah they're down the street they you know you've had coffee together you've had lunch and you get mad they're gonna swing by right and man i'll tell you and i don't know that they get less superior results than people who are niche but what i would just say to any small

[00:40:58] business is look find a competent agency find them in your niche that's great find them locally that's great but the number one thing you should do and no one seems to do this ask for references and call them because fundamentally what i find is everyone's going to make good promises right oh yeah i'll get to the top of google or this the other thing and some of them can no doubt i have no idea but at the end of the day i think it's less than i mean i think it's like this if you said sean you need to go hire someone in a vocation you have no understanding or experience in i i could do that without with a lot of confidence not by really understanding how well that vendor can do for me but by calling and talking to three other people like me and saying hey you don't know anything either great you've been working with it for a year awesome how's it going and if you can find three people that'll say i've been paying

[00:41:46] somebody for a year to do something you know and i'm very happy with the outcome it's a decent bet that you're probably in the right spot so for me that's what i would tell every small business to do how can we help you all how do we help high level just being here is great you know if you're an agency or marketer jump on take a look spread the word um that's that's what matters to me um i really just want to find a way to get more agencies well first i want to get most more small businesses to use agencies because i think that that's actually who i started this business to help is a small business and i just i will tell you if your small business listening to this every small business i know that is uber successful just has an agency some in some capacity helping them because you just have to admit at some point you're really good at something but hopefully that something is not marketing hopefully

[00:42:35] that something is dentistry or hvac or whatever right marketing is a is a moving target like every vocation is i expect 10 years from now that the business of dentistry is different than it is today or hvac is different than it is today i mean i'm a electric car nerd and um solar power guy and i know that 10 years from now there's going to be more talk about hyper efficient heat heat pumps that are that work well with solar systems because and that will be something a lot of us will transition to can you have a pepper no no no god no okay um no i i just wanna oh you're in your bunker right now um yeah that's exactly right i'm underground i uh no but i you know i really you know i i continue to believe that we're gonna you know most people are gonna have batteries and solar panels and it just that's gonna be a more sustainable way to consume energy and lower fossil fuel emissions just that's how it's going to

[00:43:29] be plus if you've ever driven an electric car i mean i care what you if you like electric cars you don't but i'll tell you that torque and that power blows away the gas car i've ever seen so you know um you'll just enjoy it for that um but it doesn't matter the point is that's where we go but if you're an hvac person you know you're going to start thinking more about that i had an electrician come by recently and he's starting to think more about okay how do electric car chargers you know factor into a home so these are things that are learning opportunities for uh for these people and so as a result ultimately i think that um this is where they're still gonna have to market they're still gonna have to sell so ultimately how do they do that they've gotta they've gotta continue to focus on their skill set and they should be hiring an agency to help with the skill sets they don't have i've said this to some of my students um

[00:44:19] if a meteor hit my business today and put me under and i had to start over i would just go roll up high level i would choose one little you know specific whatever industry locally go after them knock them all down and then move on to the next one i think it's the biggest opportunity facing agencies today uh last question sean and then and then i know we got to jump ship yeah the shopify stuff roll out you know what okay so gosh how honest should i be um so we got into this weird situation and we're working on uh they're working on an exemption but they have this thing you remember apple just recently got sued by this company called epic no epic games yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know those guys who make fortnite yeah yeah apple kicked them out of their ecosystem right yeah yeah because they would you remember why yeah the monetization they were monitoring right okay yeah yeah absolutely they sued them

[00:45:11] in one you know that right oh i didn't know that yeah yeah oh yeah and so and then apple appealed they lost the appeal and december 9th they're going um the the law stands that you as an app creator should be able to use any form of payment or payment provider you want right so thinking about shopify we got into this weird situation where they said yeah we can't turn your app on yet because you don't have the billing api implemented and we're like what's that and they're like well if you're charging people for your shopify app you know you have to pay us 15 or whatever it is and we're like yeah but we're not charging anything they're like oh well if you charge anything at all for your app you have to then move over all the charges and all this stuff and we're like what no yeah yeah exactly exactly so anyways so we reached out we're they're working on a billing exemption because we're like

[00:45:58] how does zapier zapier you know whatever anyways so um but then and then there's and then in the background we found some other apps that sort of have a workaround so we're working on the workaround all that to say i suspect you'll hear an announcement this week um on that um one way or another um but that is exactly what the hold up was so it is coming out this week that's nuts man y'all are blazing a trail that's fun to watch i appreciate you coming on yeah man thanks for having me yeah and if you're listening go check out high level click on the link in the description i am an affiliate i think i'm still one of the top affiliates aren't i oh yes absolutely okay yeah um but but i was a user before i was an affiliate i'm a big strong believer and if you don't want to click on my link go check them out anyway because they're awesome sean as you can tell is a good dude sean i see you inside the facebook group still

[00:46:42] answering like random ass support tickets stop doing that dude that is so far below your problem yeah that's the first step yeah you obviously love people man you love your customers you're doing really good work so this has been awesome and uh if you're watching this like comment subscribe i shoot a video every day and i'll see you tomorrow bye everybody thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed the video please give us a thumbs up that lets youtube know we actually know what we're doing we shoot a video every single day so if you want to be notified hit that subscribe button and if you have any input don't hesitate to hit us up in the comments we'd love to hear from you we get very little human reaction thanks for supporting our channel and hopefully i'll see you tomorrow