Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:43
Talk about the evolution of the team. Right. It’s the two of you to start. How did the team grow?
Shaun Clark: 14:48
Let’s see. Well, then our first official employee who’s still with us is was the head of support. I mean, we’ve always known support was integral to this. You know, the best software in the world with no support is irrelevant. And so we’ve always prided ourselves in having a really honestly, we do Zoom based support to this day.
So you can jump on a Zoom call with, with any of our support people. And we find that that makes an extraordinary difference. And so that human to human connection is important to us. So we hired Ian. So I worked with Ian because when Envoy Sherpa got bought, I, he was actually one of their, one of the employees that the acquirers hired.
And it was funny, for a very long time, I was remote at the time and they couldn’t imagine what remote, how anyone remotely could do work. So he basically was almost like my jail minder for a long time. He would sit on a Zoom call and watch me work, and to make sure that I was doing something and not just take these people’s money. Which is funny.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:48
Chaperone.
Shaun Clark: 15:48
Yeah, exactly. But anyhow, so he was our first employee, and he now runs the entire support org, which is now, gosh, 5 or 600 people deep. So it’s quite a large part of our company today.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:05
So we have the customer support department led by Ian. What other departments are.
Shaun Clark: 16:11
Oh I mean these days. Yeah. We have every department you could imagine. So, you know, marketing, affiliate management, CFO, you know, finance. I mean, we have 1,600 employees now.
So, you know, you name it, we got it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:26
I want to talk about customer support and affiliate management, because you have these evangelists, and I think you have a really innovative way of running customer support. And I don’t think you’re being modest about it right now. But, you know, it’s a very interesting model because you do like group onboarding and group almost group queue customer support. Can you talk about how that works and how you came up with it?
Shaun Clark: 16:53
Well, yeah. So it’s interesting that you kind of see it as a group model. I sort of see it as one on one, because these days, if you sign up, you can jump on a Zoom call and you get an onboarding call, one on one on Zoom with an onboarding specialist, 24/7/365. And these are all our employees, of course. And that is all they and we have three distinct teams.
So we have sort of that initial onboarding. And the goal there is to, you know, to acclimate you to get you kind of initially going and then and really try to help you achieve sort of those early sort of actions that we know sort of correspond later on down the line to success and sort of once you get through that, we have a whole team that we sort of think of as like the 90 day team, and their mission is just to kind of further go deeper into now you’re kind of really specific use cases and kind of get you going. And then we finally have the third team, which is sort of generalized support, where we feel like, okay, you’re kind of off and running and you’re doing your thing, but as you go, you’re going to run into questions or things you need help with, and then you still have them as a resource. But at each point there’s individualized support. So you drop the way.
The way it works today is you drop into a Zoom room that is that is sort of like we think of it as like a lobby and you and then and then basically somebody comes out and grabs you and you jump into a one on one Zoom room and we feel like, you know, we and we offer, you know, some people actually it’s I always find this well, maybe I shouldn’t find it too ironic these days, but some people actually don’t like that. So we definitely offer, you know, self-service and help docs and even chat support and all of that. We even have we have phone support, etc., etc. but I find that when really push comes to shove and you’ve got a real issue, being able to actually see another human being face to face and being able to share your screen like this and really walk through your issue, you know, really allows, honestly, I think both sides to win because, you know, I’ve seen a support. I’ve seen support tickets go back and forth, you know, 60, 100 times over, really around things that could have easily been resolved on a screen share session. So, you know, we really think of it as the superior model.
And, you know, honestly, I like all great ideas that I have. I tend to get them from other people. And in that case, it was really just I walked into a Verizon Wireless store, and I loved how, you know, as soon as I walked in, someone walked up and greeted me and checked me in and sort of gave me some expectation around how long it would take me to get served. And while, you know, you could sort of bemoan the fact that you know, that, you know, you don’t get instant service, you don’t get instant service anywhere, and there’s just a supply demand constraint. But I love the fact that I at least felt like I was paid attention to.
I had some expectation of what versus I felt like other stores I’d gone into you sort of just sort of like hang around and look around the store and try to locate someone who’s open. And it’s just sort of. This weird process and there’s no. And then the other thing is the order could get out of whack. You know, maybe I, I look down at the new iPhone and I’m and I’m engaged there, and all of a sudden somebody who walked in after me gets help first and I’m like, hey, you know, you know.
So it’s like this weird, disjointed experience versus the Verizon experience. They even would get like, if you want to go like grab a Starbucks, they would give you like this little buzzer. And I just felt like that. Wow. What a nice, you know of all the experiences to have.
So I thought, well how can we replicate that for ourselves. And so that’s kind of how we got to the model we have today.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:12
Yeah. No I feel like innovation comes from outside industry. And I don’t know if Verizon came up with it, but definitely the Apple Store.
Shaun Clark: 20:18
I’m sure they didn’t either. Right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:20
The Apple Store started doing it. And yeah, when I heard that it’s like almost I guess a group Q and then they kind of but I find people are in there being helpful even in the group area.
Shaun Clark: 20:32
And so this is what I noticed too. Like, it’s funny, I’m not — I don’t count myself as a very social person, but I noticed that in the context of like the Verizon store or the Apple Store or whatever, you’re kind of chit chat your neighbour. And I thought, well, you know, even if you don’t resolve their issue, right, it’s not really designed for that. Maybe just meet somebody, make a connection. So I thought, well, that’s what a cool side, you know, side attribute of kind of that lobby experience.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:57
Totally. I’m not seeing any SaaS company do that. Right. I mean, you enter into your group queue and then you’re paid attention to right away. And it’s like obviously like 24 hours a day.
And then you get put in and getting your specific individual questions answered from a live person. And it’s like, not this faceless help desk ticket. So obviously people can, you know, email or get the help docs. But I love that really personal touch. And you could tell that HighLevel really pays a lot of attention to customer support.
Based on that, it’s really nice it’s really.
Shaun Clark: 21:31
Important to us. And, you know, I guess these days we, you know, we can start to really think about our we value community quite a bit, I would say. And so I think that’s a really great example of how we feel like we foster community even through that support process. You know, you know, having that lobby experience, you know, I think what’s always important for people to think through is like, well, you know, getting like that specific question answered is super important. Don’t get me wrong.
Oftentimes the end that that person is looking for is way more than just a like a hey, what button do I click kind of question. It’s sort of how do I get to an outcome. And, you know, while customer support will do its darndest to try to help answer that, a lot of times talking to other customers is actually a better experience because they’ve actually achieved those outcomes. And it’s amazing how people will share with each other in such a positive way if you put them in the right circumstances. And so I think that lobby experience, and we do this with our Facebook group, with our live events, all kinds of other places, but it’s amazing how people will come together to support each other to help get those outcomes.
And I think that’s what’s kind of special about it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:34
Yeah, I mean, there’s also just a social proof element like, oh, I’m in there and there’s like 100 other people who are using this in there too. So there’s that, that as well. I feel like, Shaun, I mean, you have enough to, to work on with HighLevel. I feel like companies like Zoom should literally hire you and your company to figure out how they should run their customer support, because I’m like, they’re just losing money, right? I mean, there’s times when I’m like emailing them or whatever.
I’m like, you’re just.
Shaun Clark: 23:02
Zoom, not you Zoom for support.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:04
I mean.
Shaun Clark: 23:05
I don’t know, I, I, I rarely, I rarely I mean.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:09
No.
Shaun Clark: 23:09
Yeah I try, yeah I guess I feel like every, I don’t really run into this model in other places.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:14
Like I got, you know, I was like ready to buy like more of, like many more seats. And it just wasn’t an easy experience. And how to add or talk to someone. I’m like, you just hire Shaun. Like they’ll help you, like, integrate.
Shaun Clark: 23:26
Why we all yell agent, you know, into the —
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:30
Support, support, support. Yeah. Well.
Shaun Clark: 23:32
You know, it’s funny because I really it struck me because these days. The self-service options are so good that I feel like the only time you call is where you’ve already tried, and it’s just not easy, right? So it’s almost like the ivrs have like they’ve all they were all set up ten years ago. And so they sort of try to get you to weed through all the paths. But really these days it’s just, just go right to a live agent because, you know, those call volumes have gone way down.
And the reason why is because you’ve already been trained, like go to the mobile app first or go to the website first. Try to do it yourself first. But then when that particular combination of the thing isn’t there, you’re going to call. So they should just let you through because that’s kind of where we’re all at. But of course they you know, of course they’ll probably never do that.
But that’s the problem. It creates friction. People don’t like it. It’s a terrible experience and you never know who’s calling in. But most of the time it’s people who pay you money or want to pay you money. So they’re pretty important folks. So you kind of want to pick up.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:30
So they should hire you for a lot of money and help revamp the customer.
Shaun Clark: 24:34
Oh, no thanks.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:34
That’s my plug. About evangelist for a second. I mean, you have if I, if I put something. Hey, what do you think of HighLevel on Facebook? I’ll get like 57 people responding, you know, and it’s pretty amazing.
I don’t know if you want to start off and talk about Clay for a second, if that makes sense.
Shaun Clark: 24:57
Yeah. He’s a good example. Clay Lawrence. So I don’t know where he started his journey, to be honest, but I know where he is today. So he’s an agency owner.
He does an amazing job. He’s a fun guy because he sort of is the guy who takes my advice of, hey, just, you know, you can run an entire business off one feature. He’s made all of his money off of reputation management. So despite the fact that HighLevel has 10,000 features, he is quite happy to have one and do well with it. And I am, and I applaud him for it.
But he’s obviously he’s, he’s, he’s then since graduated and you know, become sort of an influencer. And I think his, you know, mission is to talk about his journey. and he does a really good job trying to help teach other people kind of how to do what he does. And I think it’s cool because he’s willing to see the world as, you know, a very big place. And he’s not, you know, and he doesn’t think he’s minting competitors.
He thinks that, you know, there’s just so much business out there for everybody. But he’s a great example of somebody who, you know, who speaks highly not of not just, you know, teaches a business model. It helps you learn it, but also helps you understand how HighLevel can kind of connect with that business model and enable it. And so he’s a great example of someone who I’ve seen go from, you know, agency owner to SaaS Preneur and now to kind of influencer and coach. And so I think he’s a pretty cool guy that way.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:13
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that you do, I mean, you have this really robust community that helps people implement it also helps you with customer support because they’re going to their employment agency.
Shaun Clark: 26:25
They help us with everything. I would say they are. They are easily 50% of, you know what makes our company great. So our community is everything to us. You know, again, kind of like, you know, these days I, you know, I said earlier, you know, without great customer service, the best software in the world doesn’t matter.
But I would start to say that also, without a great, robust community, you know, the best support and the best software don’t matter. It’s really, you know, part and parcel of it. You have to have a great community, you know, and for us, it’s awesome because selfishly, our community, our customers, and they really tell us, you know, everything they want in the software, how they want it. And, you know, we really we listen to that community. In fact, we don’t we don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about what we’re going to build next.
We really just ask the community to do it, to tell us we have a really cool voting system where people can just vote up the ideas that they like, and we literally take those votes based on total number, you know, whatever has the highest votes. We walk it down and every quarter we pull those ideas off and build them. That’s kind of how we operate the entire business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:24
Yeah, I’m going to pull that up right here. Anyone could go to ideas that gohighlevel.com. So if you have an idea you can add it. But you could also vote on ideas. And this is where they’re pulling from.
And it’s, you know, community based. And it kind of goes back into, you know, how you kind of figured out this model, which is just listening to the clients and customers like Robin, who was like, hey, this is I mean, not just from a features perspective, but from a influencer, you know, affiliate perspective as well. So check this out. And, you know.
Shaun Clark: 27:56
It’s pretty cool. And, you know, and again, you know, I think the position we’ve always tried to take everywhere we go is that we’re not the experts, that there are smarter people out there that know the domain of what we’re trying to, what we’re trying to achieve best. You know, I always call it strengths and weaknesses. You know, we know our strength is engineering and product. But we know that our customer strength is sales, marketing and CRM and product project management and many other things.
And so, you know, if you just play your position and stay in your lane and, and listen to your customer, they will guide you where they want, you know, where you should be going. I think where most people get into trouble is they have this sort of like ethos around, you know, they have to be the end all, be all solution for their customer and that they know it all. And the reality is they don’t. And I think they try to hire for it and bring in talent about it and this and that. But there is nothing like having somebody who is actually out in the real world every day making money, doing something, tell you how to do it. And if you just listen and you park your ego, amazing things can happen.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:59
Yeah. So we’re looking here. You can check it out to ideas that gohighlevel.com and see if.
Shaun Clark: 29:03
You click like if you click on any of those just click on any of those categories.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:06
We’ll click on. Since we talked about voice AI for example you know I know.
Shaun Clark: 29:10
And then zero says showing trending posts just hit trending and do top. And you’ll see exactly. This is exactly what our product managers do. So the next feature up will be enable appointment booking for voice AI agents. And as you can see it’s in progress now and then.
Ability to train voice AI agents with URLs. That’ll be that’s planned for Q2 and down and down and down it’ll go nice.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:31
Yeah. And if you look at the other one, I guess in the roadmap you can go down and see what’s planned in progress complete. So there’s a lot of transparency on what is being worked on. So I love this model as well. I want to talk about you know with Clay I love how he just really focused in on one feature.
Yeah. But talk about the affiliate program. I mean, you had to build this and figure out kind of the pricing and the model, what makes sense for you and also for the partner. Talk about what you did here.
Shaun Clark: 30:01
Proud of. I’m super proud of the affiliate program. So we give away 40% recurring for life of any sale somebody brings in. And actually we need to update that number. It’s now over 100 million.
And what I why I think this is super important is because when you have people going out and, you know, first and foremost the best affiliates for us are customers. They have to use the product. They have to like the product We don’t do. We don’t do well and never have and never will with people who don’t, who aren’t our customers. But once they’re our customer, you know, if they’re willing to go out and it doesn’t matter whether they’re big or small.
So this is something that’s really important. You know, all of us know somebody who we will evangelize a product to. We all do this all day long, every day. But the reality is, is, is when you are willing to go out and use your reputation. And in some cases, these people have some very big podiums to speak from, to talk about our product.
You know, the last thing we’re going to do is take any advantage of that and not recognize the value that they bring us. And so this program really is just incentivize word of mouth at the end of the day, I’m proud to say, I think, you know, 99% of these people would talk about us irregardless. But I refuse to not recognize the value of what they bring, whether it’s one friend who they know that they bring to the platform or thousands of people that they bring to the platform. And so this really is just a way to say thank you to all of those people who are willing to put their reputation out there in the world on our behalf.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:39
Yeah. I do want to talk about the summit for a second. Before we get to that, you know, just to take a look at gohighlevel.com and look at just some of the features that they have here. And it’s I love how you have this documented on here’s the feature. Here’s what it replaces.
And then here’s the monthly fee or monthly cost of that those other tools. And so people can check that out on the homepage. But I do want to talk about, you know, from a thought leadership perspective and content perspective. You’re always out there talking and your team is. Talk about the decision to have a summit, right. Because it is a big decision. It’s a lot of time, energy and money.
Shaun Clark: 32:22
I recall I recall the very first time we did it. I mean, I was as frightened as it gets. And I will say every, every year I peek out from behind the curtain and I hope there’s somebody out there, you know, in those seats. But, you know, it’s a it. You know, once we realize that we had to come up with a model that could help people, not just not just use software, right.
So I guess this is what really did it for me was, you know, most summits or annual events are all about, hey, check us out. We’re amazing. Look at all these new features. Look at how to use them. This and that.
But what we did is we found a model that helped people make a lot more money. And once we realized that we were doing that in earnest and we were doing that at a very big level, we really wanted to make sure that we could share that with people. And so we started off with some smaller events, and those were really successful. And we watched a lot of people come out away, away from those, you know, there’s a guy named Andy. And I remember I sat down with him and his wife at one of these events and, you know, he said, okay, we’ve come here to really change our world and adopt this new SaaSpreneur model and learn about this.
And then I’m telling them all about it and how to do it. And right in the middle of it, he’s like, oh, you know what? I’m sorry to stop you. My biggest client, they pay me $50,000 a month. They’ve got a big problem.
I got to step away. And so his wife sitting there at the table, and I look at her and I say, look, this is exactly your problem. You pay to come to this event. You’re here right now. I am, I am giving you the best I got, and yet you are so stuck in this old model that you have to.
You just lost half of your crew to a phone call, and you’re missing out on all of this. This. The whole point of being here is you need a new business model. And when you came back, of course, I said the same thing. And to his credit, he went out, adopted the model of being a SaaSpreneur dropped his $50,000 client, which was a big deal to him.
But now I am proud to say he has scaled measurably. Now he has hundreds of customers paying him every month, and none of them will be able to get him to leave a meeting like that ever again, because none of them pay him $50 grand a month. He’s not. He’s not a slave to those people anymore. And yet all his customers still love him.
He still providing amazing value. And he’s a much more scalable business. He goes on vacation now, whereas he did not before. And he is off to amazing things. And now I’ve seen this happen in more than just Andy.
I’ve seen it happen to hundreds and hundreds of people. And so that is exactly what this event is all about. It’s really about bringing people together to teach them that model to help them grow in their business. In fact, Andy’s actually right in the middle there. You just scroll down a little bit.
He’s in the middle column one, two, three. There he is with his wife right there. That’s Andy. So yeah. So that, you know, they’ve gone on to do just amazing things.
And we’ve seen this now with lots of other people. And we want to bring people together and celebrate it. Plus, one of the things I’m most proud of is we bring together a who’s who of speakers in the marketing business. And the coolest part about them is, yeah, they get up on stage and they talk and they’re awesome, but they also hang around after the show because they this this we keep the size of this thing such that they actually want to stick around and hang out. So if you want to meet any of these people, they’ll be at the bar afterwards, they’ll be at the after party and you can actually meet them and talk to them.
So it’s a pretty cool event that way.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:46
I know we’re right at time here, Shaun, but could you tell me a few of the fan favorite speakers that we’re looking at? Obviously 2024, there’s three.
Shaun Clark: 35:54
I mean, I love Billie Jean. I mean, so here’s what’s fun about this, right? I mean, everybody is different. I love Billie Jean personally. I think he’s a fan favorite.
He also has wicked humor. He can offend the heck out of people. I don’t get offended very easily. So I love that. But you know.
But then there are also some really classic people like Ryan Deiss, you know, he started Digital Marketer, he started traffic conversions. I mean, he’s really influential and he’s amazing. But this is the fun part. Again, we try to bring together such a great collection of people and that fundamentally, there’s somebody here I was thinking about. I always tell people, look, even if you hate HighLevel, you don’t want to ever use us.
You think we’re terrible people. We want this event to be so good and have such great people coming there that you would come just to see those people. And that’s really what we strive for. And, you know, I also think unlike a lot of other people, in at least in particular in our industry, these events, there’s nothing for sale at these events. We make no money.
We lose money on these events, but we do so proudly because we’re there really to celebrate our customers and to make sure that we, you know, we show them a good time and we get good reviews on our events. I mean, we feed our people good food. We and our annual event in October is big. I mean, we’ll have 2,000 people there. So it’s funny.
We could put 5,000 people in that room. But I like to cap it because I feel like you get much beyond 2,000 and things get lost in the weeds. You don’t make great connections. It becomes kind of like a big, you know, kind of run of the mill event. It’s sort of not our — it’s not who we are as people. so we really enjoy the way we do it. It’s a lot more fun.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:28
Shaun, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey. Everyone can check out gohighlevel.com to learn more. You can check out their YouTube channel.
They have a lot of content as well. And check out the Summit page that we talked about. Summit that gohighlevel.com for their next up and coming conference. Whenever you’re listening to this because they do attract some, you know, amazing attendees and speakers as well. So there’s a lot to learn just by observing what Shaun and his team do.
And obviously there’s a lot of cool features within gohighlevel. So. Shaun, thanks so much.
Shaun Clark: 38:04
Hey, thanks for having me.
