GHL Keeps Breaking? Here's What's Actually Going On (+ New Tools Agencies Need) In the Spotlight | Episode with Tom Bristol of The Marketer's Toolkit

what if your high level platform actually worked for you instead of against you what if every time something broke slowed down or made zero sense you had someone in your corner who could not only fix it but teach you exactly how it happened that's exactly what Tom Bristol our founder of the Marketers Tool Kit has built his entire career around the Chrome extension and customization suite that thousands of high level agencies rely on every single day to white label automate and scale their platform without losing their minds in the process he is the guy behind the Quick Editor the customizer the theme builder the OG of building a theme on high level the tools that make your sass look polished run smoothly and actually do what you promised your clients it would do and today Tom is going behind the scenes and and sharing what to do when high level breaks plus brand new features that are gonna change the game for your agency so if you run a SAS on GHL or you wanna know what's going on how to do better with your high level and understand it better you're gonna Wanna take notes here without further ado here is the interview with Tom Bristol our founder and CEO of the Marketers Toolkit so what happens when GHL your app starts to slow down or break this is what happened to mine today and I took it to support and told them that things were not happening the way they needed to be happening and they told me that it was my CSS and javascript well I took it down I broke it apart and it was still doing it but they still were convinced that it was the CSS and javascript so I took this to Tom today and we figured out that it was actually GHL and he was able to solve the issue for me he's done this for many many clients in the past and so we're gonna talk today to Tom about what his tips are when things start slowing down and breaking in the system because as you know GHL is constantly updating and improving the system and with those updates and with those improvements comes the Bad Part 2 which is things slow down and break right right and so we're going to talk about that those tips today we're also going to be talking about new features that are in your marketer's toolkit and lastly we're going to talk about what's coming so welcome Tom I'm excited to have you back on the show so tell us what your thoughts are on the slowdowns and breakdowns in level yeah so there's a lot of things to think with high level is such a large app and has so many features that their support personnel don't even know everything about it and I think they're like I think they're up to over 1,000 developers right so everybody's working on all different parts of the app they're kind of disconnected it's great for how fast they're they're moving and building stuff but it creates a sort of a rocky road here now I'll tell you a little bit of a couple of stories here of what happened actually yesterday and today cause there's probably four or five instances all separate things and there's something about the the last couple days that made it happen it's not normally like this but anyway so number one what happens is the the number one problem with high level slowing down is they have had bad memory utilization in the past and the quick editor you always hear clear your cash right so clearing your cash tends to what it does is it wipes out your user authentication system and helps you clear out the the memory that you've got going so the way to do this is to go to your Chrome system settings go to application and then clear the local storage data and then close it and then open it again and I'm giving this really quickly I understand that most people won't know how to do that if you have the Quick editor there's a quick button and we'll go over what the Quick editor is later it's a Chrome extension that you get with the toolkit that all of your users get but there's a quick button in there that does all of this for you and wipes it out so but what's crazy though is so all of these things that happened just recently were completely disrelated to the toolkit uh they were completely disrelated to even like you couldn't have done that little shortcut to to fix it so I think what happened was there were two scripts to blame and I don't want to call them out specifically but one of them was a third party app that was made by a developer he was selling it for 50 bucks and it did did some pretty cool things but it was vibe coded and vibe code is okay but when you're dealing with an application like high level that is so big and has so many pieces it's kind of tricky to get it very right with the vibe code and it'll work it'll work for what you're testing but you're not gonna be thinking with like five other areas that it might actually mess something up or slow it down so that's what happened with one of them and there was another one which was from a major theme provider I'm not gonna name names again but it was a major it was used by a lot of people they use the customizer and they use this system and they either they released something or high level changed something that their script wasn't ready for and basically it it overloaded people's browsers and because it was used by so many people it was actually being reported like it went down the chain so high level support had it as their standard reply whenever they got a a bug report they were replying and this was to prior to excuse me to the priority support people like on their Slack channel I got a couple people that messaged me and they said high level priority support said that this problem is coming from custom javascript and it's coming from this theme provider and could this have anything to do with the toolkit and so I jumped in and I looked at it and he's like cause I don't have that theme provider and they're telling me that my problem is coming from this theme provider and so it has to be like they're saying it has to be custom javascript and we looked into it and it was one hundred percent just a native high level glitch like something that they and and you know they they later like so I I dug into his thing I spent some time on it and then later that night he was like yeah they came back to me and they said it was you know it's their problem I'm like I know it's their problem huh hey I'm telling you a few disjointed stories but yeah so that theme provider fixed their thing but what was so great is that I was able to isolate the exact problem and we posted it for our members so that they knew how to fix the problem from that theme provider if they were using both of those like our stuff and theirs how to like make it patch it so I actually very much welcome if you have a slow with high level you know message me and uh send me you know better yet to send it through a support ticket with a you know a you always recommend going through the support ticket because then you have a linear way of being able to boom boom boom boom because you can't always check your messages and so getting that linear and also it helps you check things off cause you can forget what's in messages so yeah and having it as a support ticket I can delegate it to some of my developers so it gets done faster yeah and also like some a lot of the time like I handle some things but mohimen handles other things and and Benedict handles other types of things and so if it's not in a support ticket I can't give it to the right person that owns that area right right that totally makes sense and I want them to be able to see okay so these are the types of things that are coming through even if I do end up handling it it's something that you know they need to be aware of that this is happening so yes they can improve yes and I just want to plug in here that it is made through the years that I've been with the Marketers Toolkit it's made such a difference for me that The Marketers Toolkit has been there for us and in my sass beyond what is Marketers Toolkit thank you it it just has been so so supportive to my business and I just thank you so much for what you do yeah I appreciate that yeah like I get the the number of like I'm happy to help people with just general high level problems as well right so like there the number of times that I'll jump in and be like they're like is this you know this is a toolkit like I can't get this thing to work and and I look at them no no that's a native thing but this is how you fix it and it's just such a fringe benefit of being in the marketers toolkit family or or or thank you you know it it just it's so cool so yeah so if we're in that circumstance and you we have something that breaks down or something there are ways that we can go in and test it first to see if it's if it is right happening with our specifically in conjunction with our customizer can you share with us how that is so the first way of doing it is if you have the customizer running we have this area right here called the Toolkit Super Admin there's a lot of cool things in this uh but the primary use of it has always been to troubleshoot and to figure out what things what's happening so uh it tells you what location you're in uh if you're connected to a SAS plan what snapshots are on here all sorts of good diagnostic data um but we also have a troubleshooting area where you can disable the customizer and remove your custom CSS so if you're dealing with like a visual issue where you're trying to see okay is the customizer hiding something or um is you know is my custom CSS messing something up you can actually just remove the CSS directly from this system right here um and then if you click the you know the disable customizer and CSS on reload it adds in this disable and CSS appear at the very top which then makes it so that the customizer doesn't run and it removes the CSS now this does not disable other javascript so unfortunately it doesn't work for isolating things like other theme providers or if you have like a uh agency support system contact support customer support system or anything like that if their scripts are messing up then it's not gonna isolate that um I have some proprietary you know extensions that I've created that help me to do this and I've not really released these yet I might in the future but right now they're company proprietary company tools but the way to really sort of isolate this for yourself um is realize that javascript and CSS um stay in your browser when you load it so the way I would do this is if I was gonna try and say uh is this custom javascript causing problem I would open up two browsers and I would go first I would go to the page with the problem and I would load it up and be okay here so this has the problem here we go so like we're gonna load this load this up right here I know that this has the problem okay good so now I'll remove this and it's it's sort of like a a quick you know back and forth to just check it so I would just remove the custom javascript hit save and then I would go over here and I would hit refresh and as soon as it loads I'd come back here restore the javascript and hit save and so now it's it's kind of like if I did that so fast my users probably won't have like loaded the app yes that's smart so yep so yeah so it's it is loading without the javascript in the CSS and then I would just come in here put these back and then your users never see it because no one it the chances of someone loading their high level logging in in that 10 second period is very little so now you've got a browser with no javascript and then you can go and poke around and go oh look this is how it is without so that's my trick for we're getting that to work there that's really good that is so helpful awesome awesome so if you have issues this is the way that you can go in and test yourself if you're still having issues and you've gone to support to high level and you're hitting brick walls and you have the toolkit go to support and ask us and and Tom and his team will help yeah you got it you got it awesome so next up we wanna talk about all the new things that are happening and there we have a list of them so this is gonna be like a part one part two part three of the new things that are coming out let's talk about webhooks in the customizer before we had where took to hook your location groups up you would do either a s plan or location IDS you could match up with Google Sheets which I have done in the past and made different plans hook up yeah yeah so the overall idea is how do we so the the the background idea is the customizer and the theme builder allow you to apply your customizations your menu items your custom menu items all of the things that you're hiding and renaming your buttons you can group all of those customizations to specific groups of locations and so you can say everybody that has that's in my premium SAS plan gets this menu setup and they see the premium menu items and everybody's in the basic plan only sees you know conversations and social media but you know the premium sees the AI studio they see all the other things cause that's what they purchased and so the the problem has always been if you're not using the SAS configurator then how do we make it so that you can do something similar to that right so if you're on the 2 97 plan and you don't have access to the Sass configurator you can still use the customizer to sort of like automate some of this um and the way that we used to do that was we would make it so that the you would create a Google Sheet and high level has these actions inside of workflows where you can update a Google Sheet with the location ID and so when someone signed up you could sort of update that Google Sheet with the location ID and it worked but I was trying to build that for someone recently and I found it was not as intuitive as you would expect and I really wanted to restructure the back end of the customizer for quite a while and so I took took that opportunity to revamp the back end of the customizer to make it so that we could add some more functionality into it that you could use with these automations and so now we have the customizer is set up and I'll show you a little preview of what it looks like here in a second with the customizer set up so that you can take a webhook sorry you can take a workflow someone signs up either they purchase you know a new plan or they purchase a menu item we can make it so that you they can like unlock a specific menu item and then it can communicate directly to the customizer it doesn't have to go through a Google Sheet or anything like that and yeah so I'm really excited about it I haven't created a training video that's my problem that's like my well show us now maybe this is the training video right exactly so so here let me share my screen here this is gonna take a everything to the next level I think because there's so many times when I want to do just like simple add ons for clients like maybe maybe they don't have the affiliate manager just adding the affiliate manager to their uh sidebar menu just adding like one little thing and through webhooks it just seems like it will be so much easier yeah yeah exactly so uh so here uh the old view of the customizer was this and uh this is the old view a lot of people have gotten over how to find everything in this and I personally don't find it very intuitive but we have so many people using the system they know how to use it so we've kept the old view there this is the new view and I really like it I've tried to make it as intuitive as possible right so you've got your menu items that you're adding here on the left these are your hiding hiding and editing on the right and things like that the area that we're talking about is location groups so if we go to the managed location groups you can see what you've got for which locations are in which groups and what those uh how how things are grouped basically this is the cool new area so this is the webhook area and what you'll do is you'll literally just copy the webhook it looks like it's failing probably because of the way I've got this set up but you can always just grab it right here and and copy it like this and you'll use that data and give that to the high level workflow AI because the high level workflow AI is so good these days um this is why I need to create that video but I this does give everything that you need so that you can give it to the workflow AI and it will build the right action for you and when someone comes through that workflow they'll just automatically get added to that location group and we've got two things that you can do with these location groups or with these uh webhooks you can unlock individual menu items or you can um put them into a overall location group that has its own um menu items and buttons and and things like that so uh yeah I know I need to give a full walkthrough with like an example of here's a workflow and this is an example like here's a form then there it goes into this workflow and then we go through the thing this is how you get the location ID and then this is where it fires into the the webhook and then it gets added in there and and give you a a sort of like a a real life example um but this is what we're now opened up to do and I actually built this so that um you could manage you could automate for someone so that they could automate their themes and so if we look at here if we go to the theme builder the theme builder has we've talked about this a couple of times but the theme builder has the ability to connect to your customizer so by connecting it to your customizer you have all of those groups of customizations and now you can have a different theme for each one of your groups of locations and so um by doing this uh we were setting it up so that someone could fill out a form and select which one which group which theme they were gonna get there so oh that's great that was the purpose of the webhook transition for this particular client that we are doing but I know that it's used by so many people so I know that people will definitely I appreciate this and how you described the webhooks and the way that it works it seems pretty straightforward I'm excited to go in and yeah do it myself and I think I think a lot of people are gonna be able to find this very very useful yeah I'm excited about doing a video because it's gonna be easy I've been sort of it's tutorial videos have been hard in the past because when I start to do the video I go oh wait I have to build this first and then I'll start to do the videos and I'm like oh wait I have to do this first and then it takes a day the tutorial video but uh things are becoming a lot more simple and so I'm pretty excited about building this out now cause it's gonna be a pretty simple thing so it shouldn't take that long awesome awesome so you had mentioned earlier quick editor and some of the you were gonna talk about some of the updates to Quick Editor and also there's a big thing that you've added to Quick Editor but it's like more than quick it's really for agencies right yeah yes OK exactly OK so first talk to us about Quick Editor and the updates you've made sure let me install it real quick might as well share my screen and show you how this works when I install it so here we go okay so if you've been on our homepage uh this is the extension that we're talking about the high level extension that you give to every user and we walk through all the things but we don't mention the word quick editor on the page because this is supposed to be sort of gray labeled to your white label and it's kind of like the lead connector uh name that high level has and so we have a page dedicated to the Quick Editor and it just says your CRM platform and it doesn't have any purchase or anything like that in it but it does sort of describe the features so it does look like a professional thing you come over here to add your extension and then you can pin it so it does require a license key and that license key is locked to your white label so right here it says license software and that's our white label here the cool thing about the Quick Editor what the whole purpose of it is to give you a quick way to edit your website or to edit the contact forms that are on the page directly and you can actually even see things like your tracking codes and stuff like that so it gives you a lot of tools we recently made some changes to it to give you tools for the new vibe code era and things like making screenshots this is so important when you're communicating to AI to be able to be like you know change this or you know Mark it up and copy it and I personally find uh problems with uh the native system screenshot systems where like your Mac doesn't do the thing or your Windows has like a weird delay but this quick editor is really fast and I really encourage you to have your users to improve their workflow so um you can mobile preview it you can scan it pull it up on your phone you can download all the images or just what images you want from the page so you don't have to go through and find the image right click on it make sure that that's the one that you wanna give to AI as your inspiration when you're you know copying or getting an inspiration of a website this is the clear cash that I've been talking about so if you're in your CRM it's slow you wanna you know clear cash you don't have to hunt through the settings you just click clear cash and reload that in itself is a reason to tell all of your sub accounts to get the quick editor and put it on their like when you're troubleshooting with them get the quick editor immediately on their browser so that way they can clear their cash and you don't have to go through the rigamarole of teaching them how to clear cash it's just right there yeah exactly and then this is I think a feature that people don't really it's not been highlighted and I haven't heard a lot of people using it yet but I there's this thing here called Quick Forms and what I love about this it it this is my solution to not having um so I'll I'll just show you what I do here so when I go in my group I use excuse me I used to have a Chrome extension that would scan for the member requests and the emails and it would then uh copy paste and uh it would you know send it all the high level and that got kind of old for me because it was so slow it would slow it would bog things down and I would constantly have to disable the the solution air the Chrome extension so what this does is it lets you basically pin any form so you can quickly go over here and click on your form and open it in the sidebar or in the pop up or in a new window and so now if I go through here I can be like I can just copy this guy's name like this say granted and approve and then I'm done and uh it's just this nice little boom and so anywhere that you need to add something into high level you just click it it opens slides in and you fill it out wow I didn't I I think you didn't even know that one right I didn't know that one hahaha that's so cool yeah and you you don't have to have it open a side panel you can have it be in the in the pop up as well so it could be like this but for my workflow here uh it's nicer to have it slide in from the yeah totally so it's on the same screen yep not clicking in and out mm hmm yeah and then the last thing on the Quick Editor is just that um you keep seeing this default to this search bar and I'll show you what that is you can change where it goes by the way you don't have to default to search um but the search bar is so great because it shows you your open tabs that's the first thing so you can see I have all these tabs open for that are high levels and so I can switch to them um I can also uh switch to well this is an unlocked version that normally it's locked to your white label yes but mine is mine is special haha because it's unlocked to all these other things but the way it would normally work is you would uh it would be locked to this you wouldn't see that and then you can then select the location that you're going towards and it suggests where you wanna go so you can say like I wanna go to the the phone settings and it'll tell you okay so this is where you wanna go and you can open it in a new tab or go to the right place does this replace the the search that's in our search the search that the agencies have had for their search it's a dupe it's it's so what's smart about it is it actually uses your browser's history to find the suggestions got you so what's great about that is it it respects what the user has permissions to cause it's only gonna surface things that they actually have access to okay so that's great and if they have never searched if they've never gone there like in their GHL and they're like looking for maybe communities or something but they've never clicked on it would it find that or is it's only going to what's in the history only going to what's in the history okay okay um uh it it's this is sort of like how can a Chrome extension figure out what to expose and not expose because you don't want people you know going what's this AI studio and they know they don't have access to it and they yeah and sometimes hiding it then like you can get to places in high level um because they're just hiding the the link right so yeah yeah so so one last question for you before you run I know you have another another meeting to get to yeah is what is coming soon with the editor that is for agencies editor for agency the quick editor is now going there's so yeah you got it uh huh where we're going with this so I've always had the vision of having an offshoot of the quick editor and uh you'll see I kind of packed everything that like I personally like to use into this quick editor like the screenshots and the QR code and I'm literally using the quick editor every day in my vibe code uh workflow and I'd love to get into my vibe code workflow at another time with you yes yes yeah but um but yeah so I'm I'm using it every day with with my workflow and I'm starting to pack everything into it but I was like some of the things that I'm trying to that I that I wanna use aren't necessarily appropriate for white label high level users right that you're giving to all of your users and they're more appropriate for power high level users and so I'm building a new Chrome extension as an offshoot of the Quick Editor it gets everything that has that the Quick Editor has and more and it's more targeted for people that are in high level working with high level every day and uh are like power users and so I'm calling it the Account Toolkit and it's gonna have everything that you might need uh to document to uh yeah to be able to debug things and so the first things that I have and I'm not gonna necessarily demo some of this stuff but the quick editor has a workflow analyzer and what this lets you do is it lets you download the data from your workflow and bring it into chat GPT or Claude wow or another AI and document it for your internal documentation um and we have prompts that help you know get you started on it um but internal documentation or sending you know a summary to a client as to what you built and things like that or you know like I use it myself when I'm trying to figure out some some contractors have built out these massive workflows I'm like okay read through this give it to AI and figure it out um but when this was first you know being promoted people were saying how can you just how can I have AI change it and then reupload it yeah and so that's what the account toolkit is gonna let you do so it's gonna let you download it as well as upload it back and uh do that we also have the ability to clone forms and surveys and actually even clone uh websites and funnels and so all of that is coming to it and more importantly we actually even have inspector tools so you're gonna be able to pull up any high level page and use the account toolkit to inspect to see how they built it wow so you don't need to your system but you can at least use it to to go through it as if you're in the page builder and look at the pieces of their funnel to see how how they built it and things like that so um it's basically gonna be all these sort of like cool tools that people that are pros would actually find useful and amazing that's what I'm excited about on that I am sure there are so many agency owners where their mind are just spinning with ideas about this and I can't wait for it to come out for you to share all the details with us so thank you so much for coming on so next week we'll have more because there's so much more that you haven't shown us yeah we have this huge list of things that we wanted to talk about and couldn't get to it like so I'll put the link in this one yeah yeah yeah so thank you so much and we will see you guys next time awesome see you guys