Register Your Interest
Retain clients for longer and make recurring profits from software branded as you
Get support in small, safe groups away from competitors copying your offers or poaching your staff
Improve your clients' sales and marketing operations and help them to succeed with technology
Clients for Life is a mentoring programme led by marketing systems specialist, Gareth Everson.
With over 10 years of experience, Gareth has helped more than 350 businesses implement software to streamline marketing, sales, and operations.
Gareth's expertise has benefited diverse businesses. He's helped founders to achieve 8-figure exits, early-stage franchisors to scale up, service businesses to expand teams, and micro-businesses to just enjoy extra holidays or take Fridays off.
Gareth created Clients for Life to empower agencies to help their clients to improve their systems and processes. It is a supportive, non-competing environment. Come for the knowledge, stay for the community.
In challenging times, every penny counts. With better systems, you and your clients can not only survive but truly thrive. Collaborate, learn, and prosper together with Clients for Life.
Connect with Gareth on LinkedIn here.
Systems are essential for businesses like yours and your clients' to achieve success.
Clients for Life supports agencies and businesses with agency-style services to increase monthly revenues by offering Sales and Marketing Software (SaaS) to your community. Examples of the types of businesses we help are:
We work with UK & Irish businesses and their in-house teams. We work with just one of the listed business types per local area or niche sector. This fosters a safe and sharing community, where you can freely exchange ideas and knowledge without worrying about direct competition stealing your best ideas or talent.
Our proprietary methodology, 'The S5 Method,' helps your business with five essential steps towards recurring revenues and profits.
Sell and implement software branded as your business, automating key marketing, sales, and operational processes for your clients.
Retain clients longer, upsell related services, and cultivate profitable long-term relationships.
Benefit from predictable recurring revenues, boosting your business valuation.Here's some stuff
Overcome software choice challenges with Clients for Life's S5 Method – combining clarity, responsive mentoring, strategy, systems, training and support.
Selecting software for your clients can feel overwhelming. From inexpensive incomplete products like Mailchimp to prohibitively costly solutions like HubSpot, there are thousands of partial solutions on the market. Yet, few generate meaningful revenue for you due to the support they require.
We recommend and support HighLevel—an all-in-one sales and marketing platform for organisations like yours and your clients, no matter their industry. It offers comprehensive functionality, great integrations, user-friendly operation, and efficient business management.
Best of all, you pay for an agency license (~£400/mo), allowing you to sell unlimited sub-account licenses to your clients with good margins. We will guide you and your staff on how to make the most of it. Click here for a demo.
And if your own business's sales and marketing processes could benefit from improvement, we can assist you in setting up HighLevel for your needs too.
Effective systemisation of your clients' communications, sales, and business processes leads to improved performance and stronger loyalty to you, your SaaS, and your services.
Just like lemonade loses its fizz when left unattended, relationships with leads and customers can suffer without proper attention. That's where our systems methodology, SystemsWise, comes in to solve the problem. It provides a systematic approach to manage the eight essential customer processes in your business consistently and automatically, scaling effortlessly as you grow. We call it the "LEMONADE Plan".
As a Clients for Life client, you'll gain licensed access to all of SystemsWise's valuable resources and ready-made HighLevel snapshots to use with your clients.
While lead generation processes receive ample attention from marketing agencies, the seven processes that follow often remain overlooked and under-monetised. We'll bridge that gap and help you understand and optimise these crucial processes.
Before Clients for Life, providing software services was often an expensive burden, with hefty licence costs and client support demands. And the monetary benefits from SaaS providers were scant – just a token affiliate payment, if anything at all.
But Clients for Life solves these problems with systems and process methodologies that deliver high value at affordable client price points (~£147-£397/mo) and consistent high margins. Let software, not people, handle the heavy lifting of managing the eight sought-after client sales and marketing processes (mentioned above) for small businesses.
With HighLevel's tech and SystemsWise's eight mapped processes, you'll build sustainable and supportable foundations that secure predictable recurring revenues and retain valuable clients for longer.
It's cost-effective and high-margin. Just four mid-tier (~£247) recurring clients could see you break even, while a mere 20 clients at £247/mo could yield annual gross profits of £49,716 (84% gross).
By incorporating SaaS into your client offering, you embrace a more scalable, profitable business model, reducing reliance on the project-based time-for-money hamster wheel. We'll guide you and your team in creating a profit-focused culture centred on recurring sales, upsells, and retention.
With HighLevel and SystemsWise, you can have meaningful discussions with your clients about wider sales and marketing process management, beyond just lead generation.
SystemsWise provides the end-to-end client process framework, enabling you to select suitable processes to automate for your clients' businesses.
Automate processes like appointment management, sales handling, onboarding, referrals, and reputation management to help your clients thrive. We'll guide you in implementing these valuable processes.
Retain clients longer, open doors to upsell additional agency services – from design and copywriting to social media management or lead generation.
HighLevel offers a rich array of functional modules, including funnels, websites, landing pages, call tracking, SMS marketing, CRM, email campaigns, and more. And it's reassuring that it's provided by a billion-dollar valued company. They'll continue to be there as you grow.
As a HighLevel subscriber, you become a SaaS business in your own right, combining versatile functionality with your services to scale revenues. Monthly client payments for 'processes' lead to stickier client retention.
You strive for excellence in your client work, and as a small skilled team, you prefer to handle projects in-house, only enlisting freelancers or consultants for highly specialised tasks. Consequently, your team's time and skillset are your scarcest and most precious resources.
Clients for Life provides invaluable support and expertise to help you execute projects properly and sustainably. Our ethos is to empower your in-house team, transforming them into experts and heroes for your clients.
This cost-effective approach not only broadens your team's skills but also boosts confidence in selling and implementing. Additionally, it equips your team with better judgment when troubleshooting issues in your clients' sales and marketing activities.
We believe this is the optimal way to deliver top-notch support, ensuring the best possible sustainable and scalable results for your clients and your business.
"Gareth is the consummate professional in delivering the highest levels of service. He is more than just a systems expert. He has a great understanding of business, business processes, marketing and how to create greater success for your company.
The work he has done has had a huge impact on our business in making processes simpler, improving our profits and helping us to wow our customers.
I also recommend Gareth for going above and beyond and delivering everything in such a friendly manner."
"I originally thought that systemising was just going to be about emails. But I’ve learned that there’s so much more to it than that. It’s about emails, postcards, letters, text messaging, Facebook targeting, the whole package.
Gareth has a knack for discovering what the real process is and showing you what can be automated. He looks at all the systems and marketing in your business and helps you uncover the potential there and the extra things that you can do to increase your return on investment of your existing marketing and make more of everything that you do in your business."
"Gareth showed such patience, humility and understanding whilst advising me on CRMs. He is a professional with a wealth of technical knowledge and a great understanding of the business and marketing needs of SMEs.
It is clear to me that he takes pride in what he does and is passionate about providing successful solutions to those who have the pleasure of working with him."
"I’d tried two or three times to implement systems myself and even tried to use other people with very little success. I just gave up on it every time.
Gareth’s put years and years of development into learning systems and how they can be used in businesses so he’ll challenge what it is that you’re trying to do based on his experiences working with other businesses."
"Honest, challenging and constructive are all traits that could easily be overbearing and come across in the wrong way.
However, Gareth showed he can balance these qualities to provide great professional insights into what we needed to do as a business in a very objective way. Extremely goal orientated and outcome focused."
"Gareth has a wealth of marketing knowledge. He cuts out the jargon and simplifies concepts so you can get the most from marketing technologies.
I would highly recommend Gareth to any business looking for a professional service from an all-round nice guy."
(And some "Should Ask Questions")
It’s difficult to predict results of if this will work with your businesses without deeper knowledge of your business. But...
✅ You're a Full-Service Marketing Agency.
✅ Or, you run a business that provides 'agency-style' marketing services to your clients, members or communities, like Business Coaches, Accountants With Advisory Services, IT MSPs, Training Companies, Associations, Franchises or other client services business.
✅ You're open to the idea of adding meaningful recurring monthly revenues to your business' P&L by selling Sales & Marketing software (SaaS).
✅ You serve small businesses, clubs, groups or membership organisations.
✅ Your business is based in the UK or Ireland.
✅ Your in-house team is roughly 3-15 people on payroll, or at least 2 (a seller and an implementer).
✅ You've been in business for a few years and generate enough revenues for the director(s) to take a reasonable salary.
✅ You have clients or members on some form of monthly service retainers, and already make profits without automation or SaaS services established in the mix.
✅ You buy and use the recommended HighLevel agency license software package $497/mo (~£400/mo)
✅ You follow our implementation recommendations.
✅ You entrust your team to follow processes.
✅ You show commitment to positioning selling additional monthly services for your clients
....then your business is in good shape for achieving successful results with our support.
To ensure our community of businesses is a safe, open and sharing one, without feeling that your competition are stealing your best ideas or talent, we work with only one business-type per town / city / conurbation area territory. If we're already working with a business in your sector in your area then we will tell you, but unfortunately that will mean we will not be able to work together unless a place becomes available.
If your business is slightly different but you wonder if it might work, or if you have other questions not answered here, then let's chat.
Selling SaaS to your clients using the HighLevel platform is cost-effective and high gross margin. Just 3 mid-tier (~£247) recurring clients would see you break even on software costs and our mentoring programme, and every 20 clients you add at £247/mo should deliver annual gross profits of £49,716 (84% gross) or more.
Better still, SaaS is like a utility bill for your clients. They need it so don't cancel it as readily as other services. Until now, other 3rd party software services are taking all - or almost all - of the financial rewards for your setup and 1st line customer support of their software. It makes no economic sense. You wouldn't run a one-off client project then pass all the revenues from it to a piece of software you've used doing it.
HighLevel re-draws those traditional revenue boundaries. You buy an agency master licence and you earn 100% of the revenues from client sub-accounts that you sell.
In addition, when you help your clients to systemise more of their sales, marketing and communications processes using our end-to-end customer journey framework (SystemsWise and the Lemonade Plan method, see below), you get the chance to open the door to more sales discussions than you might otherwise get the opportunity to. This deepens client relationships, improves retention, grows the lifetime value and profitability of those relationships and gives you even more ways to build healthier monthly baseline revenues.
Approx. £410-757/mo, or pay yearly and save 17%, £4100-7570/yr
...made up of:
HighLevel Software, Agency Pro (recommended) or Agency Unlimited Edition
$497/mo (~£400/mo)
The software is a full agency sales and marketing platform, including unlimited client sub-accounts and automated client re-billing for the software and any upsell services such as SMS, Email, Website or Funnel Hosting & ChatGPT credits. You pay for just one HighLevel 'Agency Pro' software license that can be branded as your business (colours, fonts, logos, training resources, login page, URL e.g. app.[yourdomain].com) but can sell it to an unlimited number of clients, so your gross margin is very high.
Note: there is also a HighLevel Agency Unlimited tier available for $297/mo (~£240/mo), but this lower cost package does not include automated re-billing or account set up automation and controls. If this is less of an issue for your business, then it's a valid option. But if you'd rather the software systemise your own business on this for you, then we recommend upgrading to the Agency Pro ($497/mo or $4970/yr) tier before you launch with your first paying client.
Email & SMS charges
£10/mo
This is a budget for your agency's usage. You will re-bill SMS charges your clients at a pass-through cost or markup.
...plus:
DIY - Do It Yourself
Free for affiliates or £200/mo or £2000/yr if bought HighLevel a different way
Affiliates who buy HighLevel Software via our affiliate link get free access to our self-access online training resources where you can see and use account set up template examples, recommended automations, and access selling and implementation video training.
As an affiliate, we earn a small monthly commission from HighLevel from your subscription that funds the development of these resources for members.
DWY [Recommended] - Done With You - Clients for Life Membership
£347/mo + vat
Membership is exceptional value for money and includes everything in the DIY package, plus:
✅ The S5 Method framework
✅ Mentoring, training and support
✅ 3 x group 'office hours' member calls per week for anyone on your in-house team
✅ Licensed usage of all Lemonade Plan system, account snapshot and training resources
✅ An online training portal for your clients on your HighLevel account including course materials and video training branded and delivered as your business
What about if you want to be your own first client and go live with your own account as your first implementation? That's a great way to get started. You can do that as part of your membership, or arrange additional assistance to do so.
Being a member is the best way to train your in-house team to recognise sales and profit opportunities from systems and SaaS, handle all client scenarios and eventualities, and to have Gareth Everson as an expert advisor to your business.
For members who'd prefer private support, private coaching or implementation assistance, this can be arranged by agreement.
DFY - Done For You: Outsource Your Client Delivery to SystemsWise.
Earn 40% commissions
What if you're still not sure that you want to develop a SaaS capability in-house or have staff trained in systems and software? You can refer your clients to SystemsWise (our HighLevel agency business) and we'll pay you 40% ongoing recurring commissions on all plan combinations.
We don't usually recommend this Done For You route, especially if you already meet the profile of businesses this works well with (see 'Will this work in my business?' above). However... Done For You does work well if you're nervous about getting started and would like to see it work first, if your business isn't quite ready to support this yet, or if you don't have in-house team members who are happy to add this to their client activities. This is a good way to get started in all those scenarios.
Good question. Well, yes, you could give it a go. But do you have a plan for marketing, selling and implementing and building a transferrable and sustainable knowledge base within your in-house team?
Clients for Life is a mentoring programme and community funded by affiliate revenues paid out by HighLevel as affiliate commissions on software subscriptions you would be spending with them directly anyway.
Put simply, 'doing this on your own' means you would lose out on access to this programme that's - in effect - subsidised by money you'd spend anyway. Access to the Clients for Life resources will deliver you considerably more structure and returns than your outlay. So it's a relatively no-brainer decision to have a systems and automation expert on your team, who's worked only in this industry since 2011, has hundreds of client implementations behind him, is a specialist in CRM and marketing automation for small businesses and with lots of credibility and experience in training others on software and sales methodologies.
Let's book a call if you'd like to discuss it further.
You might be thinking that agencies, accountants, MSPs and other client services businesses have enough on their plate right now, trying to make existing business models work but faced with staffing challenges, a stuttering economy, high inflation, cost pressures squeezing or delaying client budgets, and the ongoing impacts of markets that are struggling to re-ignite post-Covid, post-Brexit and with war and uncertainty in Eastern Europe.
And, of course, you'd be right.
Making existing business models work faced with those pressures is very challenging.
But that's exactly why there's a sales imperative throughout this next economic cycle to provide lower cost, higher margin and stickier services for your clients.
Doing this via systems and relatively low-cost SaaS will keep clients engaged, stop them from churning, keep them moving forward, help them see their situation with greater clarity and more positively, and - most importantly - keep them mentally and physically aligned to you as a service provider until they are ready to invest more.
A year or so ago, such thinking would've been impossible. There'd been a tsunami wave of sales and marketing software overwhelm that had built since the early 2010s:
❎ HubSpot and Salesforce sat at the unaffordable and inaccessible premium end of the market for most of your clients.
❎ Meanwhile, at the 'cheaper' end of the market, 1000s of overlapping but more limited software products fought for existence and attention. For lower subscription costs, the downside was lots to string together, support and troubleshoot.
Thankfully, since 2019, HighLevel has been building momentum as an accessible, affordable and increasingly feature-rich and credible all-in-one sales, marketing and business automation platform for client services agencies and your clients. It is comprehensive and runs effectively when set up.
✅ It's trusted by over 60,000 agencies and used by more than 1.4 million businesses globally.
It's reached a tipping point - accessible technically and financially to agencies and clients service businesses alike, and in-turn marketable at affordable mid-market prices to your clients, giving lots of valuable systemised processes for just a few hundred pounds per month.
And with our expert guidance, mentoring and training you'll safely develop a level of expertise across multiple members of your in-house team to get the best results for your clients and profitable revenues for you.
This is a perfect time to start: either to catch up with those already doing it and protect your client base, or to more confidently take to the market and win more business by providing accessible, valuable systems support to businesses who face the same cost, staffing and market nervousness challenges as you.
Systems services delivered to your clients using our proven S5 Method have clear benefits for you, your team and your clients.
It will help you to retain clients for longer and make recurring profits from software branded as you.
It will help your team to get support in small, safe groups away from competitors copying your offers or poaching your staff. They’ll develop valuable sales and implementation experience and skills that will benefit their own careers and your business’ capabilities and resiliency.
It will help your clients' sales and marketing operations and help them to succeed with technology. In markets that are cost-squeezed and where skilled staff are rare finds, using technology to make existing members of staff and activities more productive is a fantastic way to grow. It will help you do considerably more with the end-to-end customer journey than just 'lead generation'. And if leads don't always get managed well by your clients, being involved in the whole customer journey from Leads through to Endorsements will help them to find incremental improvements at different stages of that journey, where they otherwise would not do so left to their own devices.
Lemonade Plan is our proprietary, licensable sales and marketing systems methodology. It’s the second ‘S’ - 'Systemise' - in 'The S5 Method'.
‘Lemonade’ is an acronym, making it easy to remember, easy to teach your clients, and easy to have conversations about where gaps are in processes. Are they acting like a ‘lemon’ when they should be bringing the ‘lemonade’?
LEMONADE is Leads, Education, Meetings, Offers, New Clients, Add-Ons, Delivery, Endorsements.
The more effectively you systemise your clients’ communications, sales and business processes, the better they perform, the more their businesses grow, and the greater their loyalty to you, your SaaS and your services.
Just like lemonade loses its fizz if you leave it unattended, so too do the relationships your clients have with their leads and customers.
If they’re not consistently getting reviews, or not retaining customers beyond the first sale, or not winning new business through warm word-of-mouth referrals, then it’s safe to conclude that somewhere in their sales and marketing systems (or lack of them) they are “losing fizz” with their customers along that journey.
Our systems methodology Lemonade Plan solves that problem. It gives you a system and a plan to help you manage the eight customer processes in your clients’ businesses that get them leads, meetings, sales, upsells and endorsements consistently, automatically and in a way that scales as they grow.
As a Clients for Life client, you'll have licensed access to all of Lemonade Plan's resources and ready-made Lemonade Plan HighLevel account templates (known as ‘snapshots’) to use with your clients.
Lead generation processes are well-served by marketing agencies. But the 7 processes that follow it (the 'EMONADE' in 'LEMONADE') are less well served and monetised. We'll help you to understand them and do that.
You'll get access to our Lemonade Plan training with your membership (any tier, including free tier). For paid members, we’ll also licence and brand these training resources as your business for use with your clients and load them into a training / membership portal for them to access from your own HighLevel agency account.
Automation is about striking a balance. Full automation feels mechanical and impersonal for your clients’ leads and customers. But doing nothing can feel like they’re being forgotten or that your client doesn’t care.
You don't have to automate everything. Perhaps pick 4 or 5 really valuable processes that are meaningful to your clients to save them time, get more leads or move more leads to being sales-ready. If there’s a cross-over for their leads or customers finding value, then so much the better.
Below are seven simple ideas. They can be set up in HighLevel with very little effort or configuration using our system templates. Check the blog or connect with, or follow Gareth on social media as well for other ideas:
1️⃣ For conversations from Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, their email and SMS messages, consolidate your clients’ communications for them into one centralised inbox that they can access online or on the mobile app and stay on top of all discussions.
2️⃣ For any missed calls, have the software text callers back and automate interactions to handle enquiries. Small businesses fail to answer 62% of inbound calls and yet 80% of callers sent to voicemail do not leave a message. The software can provision call-tracking numbers for your clients so you and they can have full visibility of all the metrics of calls that are answered, unanswered but followed up by text automatically, and - ultimately - precisely which calls lead to qualified leads and sales.
3️⃣ When enquiries are received via the web or social media DMs, automated email or SMS interactions can be sent that intelligently qualify the lead. If it is a qualified lead, then an auto-dial facility can automatically phone your client contact and asks if they’d like to connect immediately with the lead as an outbound call. Without distracting them for every enquiry received, they can be on the phone with pre-qualified leads within minutes of an enquiry without wasting time on time-wasters. Sales Research by MIT has shown that once 5 minutes has passed after an enquiry, the odds of connecting with- and qualifying a lead drop 80% and responding to leads within the first minute increases conversion rates by 391%. So speed is critical.
4️⃣ Create a simple visual sales dashboard that automatically collects and shows sales enquiries and the stages they’ve reached to keep sales momentum and not let opportunities fall between the cracks.
5️⃣ Set up a sales appointment, a class or group booking facility (with payment options, if desired) and use simple email and SMS reminders for meetings or appointments coming up to reduce the number of no-shows and maximise the number of sales discussions.
6️⃣ When a project or purchase is completed, ask for reviews using email, text or direct mail, then display Google reviews on their website. Automate how the system responds to those reviews on your client’s behalf if it’s positive or negative.
7️⃣ Trigger direct mail communications to send offer postcards for follow-up jobs, or greetings cards to just say ‘thank you for your business’.
All of these processes can be set up to run on auto-pilot in your clients’ HighLevel accounts without further add-on services. There are hundreds of other possibilities, but simplicity scales better. They’re all high value, save time and help your clients to not lose leads or miss out on sales, reviews or referrals. They’re often the bridges between one ‘day-to-day doing’ activity and another, but when left to be managed manually often get forgotten.
If you’re tempted to do more, then you can go to town with email follow-up and nurturing, websites, landing pages and funnels, or track Facebook, AdWords or phone calls into the system. By way of example, in our agency business we offer a number of valuable, but profitable upsell services, but only those that can be highly systemised.
If you’re offering different service tiers, HighLevel lets you set up 3 x different pricing tiers for your software packages and will automatically manage account functionality and set up depending on which tier your clients buy.
We get it. Providing software in your service can feel expensive in both licences and time, often requiring you to act as strategist, planner, implementer and trainer. Your clients also come to you for first line support, not the software provider.
Until now, those software providers have provided little by way of direct support or training, or anything financial, perhaps just a token affiliate payment, or nothing at all.
But for all you help them, your client’s subscriptions with these faceless 3rd party mega corps last long after their project relationships end with you.
As for the software:
❎ High-price platforms like HubSpot feel out of reach on cost, complexity and value to most small businesses.
❎ Mid-price software like ActiveCampaign or Keap squeezes agency margins with low commissions and lots of bespoke setup, support and expensive paid add-ons.
❎ Lower-price products, limited in function, like Mailchimp and others, loosely strung together with a CRM or other add-ons, feel incomplete for clients’ wider needs and abilities to systemise and you earn almost nothing from them.
The 1000s of dizzying combinations of alternatives draw concerns that they’re prohibitively time-consuming and risky.
💣 It’s been an operational cluster bomb.
But now, using all-in-one sales and marketing platform HighLevel aligned with Clients for Life's support for you solves these problems:
✅ Joined-up systems and process methodologies deliver high value at affordable ‘utility bill’ price points that you charge your clients (~£147-£397/mo).
✅ Your business pays one monthly agency subscription fee that covers all your clients. When you create a proactive sales culture and build it into your client processes, this pay-once-sell-to-many model rewards you with high margins and lower support complexity. Just 3 mid-tier clients would see you break even, and as few as 20 clients at £247/mo could deliver £49,716 of gross profit (84% gross).
✅ And best of all, software - not people - does the heavy lifting of managing the 8 valuable ‘Lemonade Plan’ sales and marketing processes that deliver immense value to small businesses. Once set up, these client systems and the processes your clients can now manage more efficiently themselves (with the help of tech) run without much management or support on your part, other than occasional reviews or tweaks.
✅ As a platform, HighLevel is designed to be packageable by feature, so whether your clients are service, consumer, e-commerce or 3rd sector businesses, there will be a solution that you can create that only includes features of value to that client. You can add or switch off features by package sold or by sub-account. And if you serve a particular niche or niches, there's excellent opportunity to make sales at scale and to standardise onboarding and support even more.
✅ Having a SaaS service line in your business is a more scalable, profitable business model and avoids only ever working on the time-for-money project hamster wheel.
✅ Your HighLevel agency tier app is also brandable as your own business e.g. app.[youragencyname].com, so your clients will associate and feel a direct connection between your brand and the results you deliver as they log in to it every day, not some 3rd party service.
So why is HighLevel better? This more scalable service meets 5 criteria:
1️⃣ It has high technology leverage (SaaS);
2️⃣ One platform’s easier to support, train on, manage and keep control over;
3️⃣ It’s high margin;
4️⃣ There’s strong demand for systems and software, and;
5️⃣ It delivers longer term recurring revenues.
Here are some feature highlights of HighLevel and the types of business they provide benefits to.
Common features included in HighLevel that can apply to all businesses are:
✅ Website chat widgets
✅ Missed call SMS follow-up
✅ Website forms for lead capture
✅ Social media scheduling
✅ Ad conversion tracking
✅ Email marketing
✅ 2-way SMS and email
✅ Reputation management - get, track and show reviews
✅ Facebook Messenger integration
✅ Google My Business messaging and Google My Business call tracking
✅ Business telephone numbers
✅ Ad conversion tracking
✅ CRM and;
✅ Integrations using Zapier or in- and outbound webhooks.
Common features on HighLevel that work well for service businesses are:
✅ A visual sales pipeline, with opportunity cards and stage move automations.
✅ Appointment booker that is like Calendly with more automations, and where micro-automation email and SMS sequences can be sent before or after the meeting booking, in the run up to the meeting or after the meeting.
✅ Capture leads using landing pages, surveys, forms, calendars, inbound phone calls and Zapier connectors.
✅ Do inbound phone call tracking so clients can track calls answered, or follow up automatically with those missed.
✅ Do call management better without staff having to use their own mobiles.
✅ Make outbound calls from the app and/or leave automated voicemails.
✅ Manage hierarchies of relationships between company and contact records.
Common features on HighLevel that apply to e-commerce businesses are:
✅ A native Shopify integration does abandoned cart, order placed and order fulfilled automations, and can trigger product up- or cross-sells.
✅ Connect with BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce and many other carts who have webhooks enabled or automated connectors like Zapier.
✅ If Mailchimp’s email-only solution doesn’t go far enough, or if Klaviyo isn’t a fit for non-ecommerce clients, HighLevel is great to standardise around.
Some other valuable HighLevel features:
✅ Connect to Craft CMS or Wordpress or its plug-ins like Gravity Forms via webhooks.
✅ Use built in tools to collect payments (Stripe / PayPal) and track analytics.
✅ Manage landing pages and funnel automations, very similar to ClickFunnels.
✅ Create course pages and manage memberships, very similar to Kajabi.
✅ Upload fully custom-built HTML emails designed for clients, if desired.
✅ Run a basic customer support system with trackable ticket numbers.
Also included in the HighLevel agency licence are services with even more revenue and service upsell potential:
✅ A website CMS builder;
✅ Social post scheduler;
✅ Call tracking, and;
✅ Options to resell Wordpress hosting.
There are two answers to this question. Which type of business are you, (1) or (2)?
(1.) If you're a business that puts a priority on its own marketing activities and processes, then implementing HighLevel in your own business can be quite a good way to start. It's. a great practice experience for you and your staff to do so through this programme, or you can do so as a private client of mine at my other service Lemonade Plan.
(2.) If - be honest (!) - you're a business that doesn't prioritise its own marketing activities and processes at the same level of priority as your client activities, then you need to address the risk that you would not start on client implementations until you've finished your own. And if you don't actually prioritise your own marketing then - realistically - you never will get onto those client sales and implementations.
If you are more like answer (1) then 'yes', great plan. If you're more like answer (2), then the guidance is 'no': do it for clients first, and steal borrow the best bits for your your own business as an internal project once you've got a few clients live and it's making good profits.
To dig a little deeper into what HighLevel does, you can watch a HighLevel 'demo on demand' here.
You may have seen by now that HighLevel positions itself as an 'all-in-one sales and marketing platform for agency businesses' and the vast majority of HighLevel's 'Agency Pro' users are digital marketing agencies, whether local- or niche-focused.
But don't let that put you off if you run a different client services business. If your business serves clients or members with similar needs, then the main value to you of HighLevel may not necessarily be marketing or sales functionality, but its capability to quickly and consistently roll out standardised, pre-configured client sub-accounts that cover your clients' or members' basic needs. If you know a few processes that would add value to your clients' or members' businesses that systems software might help, then HighLevel probably has great value to them and you.
Simplicity scales better.
For example, just 62 of your clients on a very basic software and systems plan that we'll help you to create, that you charge £147/mo for, would make £109,000 in revenues per year, and £100,000 gross profit after the costs of the software and this mentoring and support programme. Your clients log in daily and use an app that's branded as you, looks like it's on your domain, has training resources associated with it that are prepared by us but branded as you, and where they are using your "[Your Business Name] Systems Method" or even our "Lemonade Plan Powered By [Your Business Name]" method to get meaningful and profitable activities done in their business.
So even if nobody in your business is a design or copywriting guru (spoiler alert: many digital marketing agencies outsource copywriting too 😉), just configure client accounts to exclude websites or web funnels, and focus your offering around CRM, pipelines, ways of managing client communications and processes, and basic business automations.
And if your clients then want to learn how to add images to emails, launch a landing page, or run a marketing campaign, then have them follow 'your' (aka 'our') training in your built in membership platform, which you also get with your Clients for Life membership.
If your business serves clients or members with similar needs, we will confidently serve and support your businesses, including:
✅ Full-Service Marketing Agencies
✅ Accountants with Advisory Services
✅ IT MSPs
✅ Training Companies
✅ Business Coaches
✅ Associations
✅ Franchises, and;
✅ Other Client Services Businesses.
If your business is slightly different but you wonder if it might work, or if you have other questions not answered here, then let's chat.
From founder Gareth Everson:
"I hold a strong belief that businesses are better when you build the skills in-house. I have done with all of my clients.
But I'm also a firm believer in partnerships. Almost two-thirds of my client implementations have come via partner introductions.
If you'd rather partner with me and refer clients to have this managed as a trusted 3rd party service, then our affiliate programme for Lemonade Plan might be a better option for you. Lemonade Plan is my own systems agency and where I look after my own private clients. We pay out 40% recurring commissions for warm referrals leading to subscription sales and treat your clients with respect and integrity, involving you in any key decisions.
The implementation model for Lemonade Plan is the systemisation method I teach you and your staff in Step 2 of the S5 Method, 'Systemise'. To arrange a discussion about a referral relationship instead, please get in touch."
There are risks to any business venture, but we make two firm recommendations:
(1.) Don't undertake this if you do not believe you have at least 3 or more clients who would value this service and would be reasonably happy to make a decision to proceed within a few months. 3 clients would cover all costs of this programme and the HighLevel software. After breaking-even, there are lots of sales opportunities to generate excellent revenue and profit opportunities for you and to help your clients and members improve the way they run their business operations.
(2.) This is not a 'set and forget' magic bullet. Even established client processes need occasional review. Your recurring SaaS services do have the potential to be relatively high margin revenue streams, but will need time upfront to implement and train client staff, occasional support to troubleshoot any issues and reviews to identify improvements that might be made.
It’s difficult to predict results without deep knowledge of the agency business that Clients for Life is partnering with and we cannot and do not make financial guarantees or promises. However, see the above FAQ ‘Will this work in my business?’ as a guide and if your business meets the criteria it is probably a good fit for Clients for Life.
By way of guarantees, in return for you following those processes listed, we will work with you to achieve your business goals with this programme and software.
But if for any reason you do not wish to continue, there are no ongoing monthly commitments beyond your month-to-month or year-to-year subscription with us. You are free to cancel at any time before your monthly or annual renewal.
There are three considerations when you cancel your paid membership with Clients for Life:
1️⃣ Your HighLevel account stays licensed to you and you continue to run your client operations around it. You own the commercial relationship with HighLevel so never lose that whilst ever you keep your accounts active with them.
2️⃣ You’ll continue to have access to our Do It Yourself (DIY) resources if you purchased HighLevel via a referral / as an affiliate of Clients for Life.
This means you'll keep:
✅ access to our self-access online training resources that train people in your business;
✅ account set up template examples and recommended automations, and;
✅ access to selling and implementation video training.
3️⃣ But, you’ll lose access to:
❎ mentoring;
❎ live training sessions;
❎ the 3 x group 'office hours' member support calls per week for anyone on your in-house team;
❎ permission to use licensed materials from the Lemonade Plan system and training;
❎ permission to use account snapshot and training resources in any new sales with your clients, and;
❎ our online training portal resources for your clients, including the course materials and video training branded and delivered as your business that we created for you.
From founder Gareth Everson:
"Fair question. It would be disappointing if you didn't ask or challenge. I did.
Some background: I've sold, implemented and supported CRM and automation software as an independent consultant / systems agency since 2011. It’s all I’ve done in my career since then.
On different occasions, and on behalf of clients, I've had the chance to work with vendors like HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, Capsule and Mailchimp.
And to this day, I’m still a paid-up Keap Certified Partner (previously Infusionsoft), with over 200 client implementations and a string of personal and client awards and endorsements in that community, plus development successes with integrations that save lots of users time, money and hassle with processes around that product.
I even funded and developed my own SaaS product during this time, a CRM for Xero users, which was functionally good but never really got product-market fit; traction of hundreds, not thousands, sadly.
Across all these platforms, I’ve delivered over 350 client implementations in small businesses: service-based, physical products, and e-commerce.
As a consulting agency free to make choices, my clients and I value that independence highly.
I now sell, implement and mentor on HighLevel’s suite because I firmly believe it’s the most exciting mid-price platform on the market and will be for many years to come.
HighLevel’s been going since 2019, has fantastic traction (60,000+ agencies and 1.4m businesses using it), is well-funded, well-staffed and profitable, has a global- not US-centric outlook, and has more product development momentum than anyone else, hands-down.
Look at the alternatives: product- and experience-wise, in core functions they’re still pretty much the same as they were 7 or 8 years ago, aren’t they? Most are sales-led, not product- or user-driven. It makes a substantial difference.
With HighLevel, the reverse seems true. Everything they do is geared toward serving their ‘Agency Pro’ app customers.
Their commercial model suits perfectly the client services business dream sales scenario (easy, high margin sales with longevity), churn is very low and so the vast majority of their organisation is entirely aligned around making the product great.
Is the product perfect? Of course not. But it’s already better than every multi-feature platform that’s affordable (HubSpot isn’t) and the pace of improvement in all areas is rapid.
HighLevel’s excellence is why I closed my own SaaS business (I couldn’t keep up!) and why I recommend them wholeheartedly for Clients for Life clients. Yes, I receive affiliate commissions as a thank you (which go into making this service better), but those commissions wouldn’t last very long if those who bought on my endorsement cancelled a few months later.
You don’t have to blindly trust my endorsement, but stay connected to see where HighLevel and this service goes as you decide. You can sign-up for updates here or connect with Gareth here.(put 'learning more about Clients for Life' in the connection request).
And if you are ready, then let’s arrange a time to speak.”
Hey, nobody's perfect. But of course - yes you can do this. This works well if you're not getting the results with HighLevel for your clients and your business that you'd like to.
Your membership wouldn't be subsidised by HighLevel's affiliate payment to us, but you'll pay £200/mo or £2000/yr (17% discount) for everything available in the DIY tier (see 'What does the service and software cost?' above), and the DWY 'Done With You' community membership tier is the same £347/mo or £3470/yr in addition.
So total cost to be a 'Done With You' community member is £547/mo or £5470/yr. This is not quite as cost-effective as it would be if you'd purchased HighLevel as a referral in the first place, but is a considerably better option and better value than not making the returns you'd like to on your HighLevel investment!
Please request a call back if you have other questions.
© Clients for Life (Connectably Ltd), 2024