How to Build Your Business on GoHighLevel in 2026

Today we have a blast from the past. I used to work in the marketing, consulting, and agency space back when I was a teenager. And the dominant platform in that space, which is really massive in the agency space but massively underutilized for everyone else, is called GoHighLevel. And in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you my favorite workflows on GoHighLevel that will make you more money, more productive, and save you effort and time in your business. Whether it's your business, whether you work at a larger company, you can put so much infrastructure on this platform. And that's without having to use 10 different tools, without paying hundreds of dollars a month for all these disjointed platforms. And specifically, I'm going to go ahead and basically just set up every system you would need to run a business. That's going to be the video. It's going to be a great one if you want to figure out how to better set up your business, how to run sales, how to do marketing. That in mind, I appreciate all being here and let's get into the video. So first, if you've never heard of GoHighLevel, at its core, it's basically an all-in-one business platform. That means CRM, sales funnel, email marketing, SMS, phone system, calendars, automations, pipelines, invoicing, courses, and reputation management all in one dashboard and platform. So today specifically, I want to do a full build along. We're going to set up a real business system that's marketing focused, but a little bit more general than that. And we're going to do it step by step. Now, I recommend that you follow along with everything I'm about to do. That way, it saves you time. You learn as you go. And so if you want to learn better and support the channel, GoHighLevel gave my audience, so you for watching this, a 30-day free trial as opposed to the standard 14-day free trial. And you can claim that by going to this link on the screen or clicking the link in the description. So you have a full month to build out everything you're about to see completely for free. And if you just want to watch and see how it works before giving it a test drive, then that is completely fine as well. And that said, let's get into my computer. Okay. And so this is the dashboard of GoHighLevel. This is a demo account, so these are not real numbers. And we're going to walk through a six-step process here to set up all of this business infrastructure. And this will pattern the same process that you'll go through if you have a new business or offer that you want to start. And I think you'll find it really impressive or cool or just useful in the way that all of this can be done soup to nuts within this platform. Now for step one, you just have to set your account up. And then I want to take you at a high level, pun intended, through this platform. There is a bit of a learning curve. There's a lot here. And what's always a bit jarring is that each one of these normally would be like just one different page in some kind of SaaS app. Each page here is basically its own SaaS platform or something that you would normally have in a whole platform and pay $50, $100 a month for. So let's just walk through at a high level everything in here, and then we'll jump into really starting to formalize or go through that process of starting, quote unquote, our business. And the page we're on right now is the dashboard. So it's just a high-level summary, all the stats. We have the status of our opportunities. We have conversions. We have the marketing distribution. So where our leads are at, the whole funnel, to-do tasks, manual actions. There's a lot covered there. Okay. First we have conversations. This is like a meta inbox that can be used for both team or internal communications and also external with contacts or leads. For example, if I click right here, you can see, do you want to send a DM to a lead, a group message with a lot of contacts or an internal chat with team members? So basically just the communications hub for the business. Then we have calendars. This also is kind of a meta calendar that can sync different team members who are working together. So you can see all the appointments coming up and you can manage your own. Then under contacts, just think of that basically like a CRM equivalent. So we have all our different leads in here with all kinds of information. We can import, we can add contacts, we can edit contacts in bulk. We also have a to-do list right here. And then we have companies which may have multiple contacts within them. Then if we go into opportunities, this is managing the sales flow. So basically the deal flow of the company. So if you're familiar with this setup, basically you have your opportunity, your opportunity can have multiple leads or contacts or companies then assigned to it. And then these are going to move through the funnel from a new lead to the contacted, qualified, and eventually hopefully closed. Under payments on the left here, this is where you manage all of the payment infrastructure for the business. So you can send out invoices, documents, contracts, orders, subscriptions, payment links, everything payment-wise is hosted in this portal. And then we get into the really fun stuff. So we have AI agents. This is primarily focused around two kinds of agents. Number one, you have voice AI for things like managing a phone line or outbound calls with AI. And then you have a text AI, that's the conversation AI right here. So that can do things like talk to people who visit your website. Then we have marketing. And again, here's where you can start to see just how much infrastructure is in here. In the marketing tab, we have a social planner for all your social media. We have emails, snippets, timers, trigger links, affiliate dashboard, brand boards, and an ad manager for all the various ad or PPC platforms. Now under automations here, if you're familiar with Zapier, make.com, this functions similarly. Basically you can engage with AI that will build automation, automated workflows for you just by chatting with AI. And this is tied into the whole GoHighLevel network. So we can merge all those things together. It can build automations for you that do really cool things. For example, long-term nurture sequences, auto replies, drip stuff. You get the idea and you can do that again by just talking to the agent. Then under sites, this is where you start to get into the deployed end of the business. So the offers that are showcased on your stores, on your website, blog, WordPress, forms, quizzes, everything visually that people see when they go to your domain. And that includes webinar, course, video, et cetera, management. And then under memberships, this is where you can create basically communities, courses, and you can manage the whole content set up for them that kind of builds on sites. Media storage is just going to be where your media assets from everywhere around your business are stored. Reputation is things like reviews, how people are feeling about your business, surveys, things like that. Then finally, reporting here is going to aggregate all these different sources, things like Google ads, a lot of your data within GoHighLevel, and then pull it into clean, for example, weekly, real-time, monthly, whatever you want reports. And then finally, we have the app marketplace. Just like any marketplace, this is a bunch of integrations that you can pull into the GoHighLevel network to do other things that are not directly already built into GoHighLevel. So there you go. You're not going to remember all of that immediately, but you'll get used to it pretty quickly. And that's step one. Just go right now to GoHighLevel, set up your account, spend a few minutes playing around with it, and then you're ready to proceed to step two. And what step two is, is setting up your website, or basically setting up the start of the funnel. So for that, we're going to jump back into sites right here. And all I assume you have at this point is an idea. You have some kind of business, something you want to sell, a product, a service, you tell me. And so for step two, we're going to start by just getting this out into the world and setting it up to, just like they say here, generate leads and appointments and receive payment. So let's start by clicking New Funnel right here. And we're going to use Funnel AI to do this. The templates are awesome. Also, just if you want to do it from scratch, that's great as well. But for sake of the demo, for sake of this channel, we're going to go ahead with the Funnel AI. I'll click Continue. And let's say you have a digital marketing consulting business under industry. I'll select Internet Marketing Service. I'll call it Law Digital Marketing. I'll name this one after myself. We'll click Next. And there's a few different ways that your sales funnel may work. Maybe you directly talk to people before they buy. So you want to convert to appointments, digital appointments, maybe in-person appointments. Maybe you want leads who come in through a form, who close automatically, or you want to directly sell your physical or digital products online. You can select any one of those here by getting people's information, like their email, their name, et cetera, on our website. And I think we want professional. We want our content to feel professional. And I'll go ahead and click Generate. And so here we go. This generated the entire website essentially for us. We can go ahead and connect a custom domain if we want to. We can get people's information through the Boost Your Practice Now, which will convert to a form. And then in the top right, people can schedule a consultation, so a call with you before they go and actually close. This is all fully customizable. Again, you can use the templates and browse those if you already want to pull from a pre-formatted look and just know what that looks like in advance. And then as far as the editing goes, you can change anything and everything right here. You can ask Claude to go add some custom CSS for you or use the drag and drop editor. If we also select add right here or add elements, we can see some of the larger pre-built elements to add things like sections, rows. We can see full on about sections, call to action, et cetera, widgets. There's a ton of stuff here. And we can start to build out forms to get information from people, to add subscribers to a newsletter, whatever you want. That's all going to be right here. And so you put more time to this, but essentially these are all the elements you need to go in, create your site, and then start to edit it. And you can do the same with specific funnel pages, like a page, which has a lot of information and then converts at the bottom to an appointment or to something that you want to convert people to. So that's step two. At this point, you've set up your GoHighLevel account. You're familiar with how at a high level it works. And then you've gone through, you've created a page so people can buy your thing or a full on website, and then you've customized it to be exactly as you like, but we still have more work to do. And that leads us into step three. So at this point, we've set up the front end of the funnel or how people can access the webpage, the sales page to go and convert, but we have to convert them to something. And for that, we need to set up a calendar. That's going to be step number three in our end to end set up here. So to do that, we're going to head into calendars and then we'll go to calendar settings and then we'll click create calendar. So if you remember the consultation or appointment button on the website, that is what is going to convert into this. So if people want to buy something, they'll go, they'll book in a meeting with you, and then you go ahead and close them on the call. So that's the last actual stage of selling the product or service. So let's go ahead and click on personal booking. We will call it meeting with John. For team member, we have no data here. That means we need to add someone. So I'm going to open the my staff page. Then I clicked add user, and I'm going to fill out this information and click next. I will give full admin permissions. This is basically just a profile for me. And then now under new calendar, we can go ahead, select myself, my name, and then consultation. Let's say this was some kind of consulting offer. And then here I can customize the availability. So I'll click on advanced settings. And then under availability, I can go ahead and alter this also for my profile. So for example, we can say I want to take calls. So these are for people to book into every day from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. I would go ahead and customize that. And now we've done that for three days. And let's say I only want to take those meetings every Monday through Wednesday. I'll click save. Calendar name will be 30 minute consultation with John. And then we'll click save changes. Okay, so our calendar has been created. Now let's head back then to the website. I'm going to click on what we created. And then in this portal, we can see the schedule consultation button. And then we'll scroll down. We'll go under button actions and link to. And then for this website URL, let's head back to the calendar page. And then you can see in this share calendar link, we have a scheduling link. So let's open a new tab and we can see exactly what this looks like. So this is what we just created with Monday through Wednesday, 8 a.m. through 1 p.m. with 30 minute slots. And so then that means whenever someone is driven from an ad or social media to our website and they go through the sales funnel or the page or they read through it and they click schedule consultation, then they'll come to this page. And then from here, they will go ahead. They're going to click. They're going to go ahead and book in. And then I'm going to close them on the call. So that is the complete first kind of set up infrastructure step for the funnel. But the thing is, we can't treat everyone who we've been on a consultation with or who books in at this stage the same. Some people might have been sent a contract already. We're just waiting for the money or for them to sign. Other people might have missed three meetings in a row and we're just trying to figure out if they booked it by mistake. So that leads us into the next step of the setup here. So we're going to head back into the main go high level dashboard and we're going to go under opportunities right here and we're going to go into pipelines. And so an individual opportunity is just what it sounds like. Someone booked in and you have an opportunity to close them. They are a lead. But then for this pipeline stage, this is kind of the CRM or the management system that we use to track all of those opportunities and the different stages or categories that they fall into. So I'll give you an example of what that'll look like. Let's go ahead and click create pipeline. And then this right here is a pretty standard process. So a new lead could be someone who just booked in to your calendar. Then let's say after that 30 minute meeting you have, if it goes well, you send them a thorough proposal and you book in for a second meeting. And for that second meeting, let's call it second meeting lead. And then we have closed one. If that goes well, they actually signed the contract live on the second call, or maybe it's closed, lost at any point throughout here. They said, Hey, I don't want this. And they dropped out. So you can get an idea. This is just a different kind of stage that each person could be at so that you can track where they are. And that ties into all this follow-up, the sales tracking, this outbound, the communications workflow that all comes later. But for now, you just want to set up this pipeline for your business. And this will look a little bit different depending on what kind of business specifically you run, but you do have a structure, I promise you. And even if it feels more ambiguous or it's kind of all over the place, if you just sit down, you set it up once, you're going to be so much better off having something like this that you can use to track your leads. So let's go ahead and click create. And now we have our pipeline. So let's jump back into opportunities. And then right here, this was the demo pipeline. Let's click on this one. We can see we have no leads here, but since this is all in the GoHighLevel ecosystem, if someone books in, they will automatically be routed through to your pipeline. If for any reason you ever want to add or edit a contact manually for your opportunities, you can click add opportunity. You can select the contact associated with that opportunity. So basically who you went ahead and sold or who you could sell, whether a business or an individual. You fill out some information. You have the opportunity value as well. So here's an example. I'll go ahead and click create. And then now we have them classified as a new lead. And we can say, hey, we won the deal. It went well. We had the second meeting with them. We sent them a proposal, whatever stage they're at. We can just drag and drop here if it's not done automatically. Okay. So that covers the entirety of the sales infrastructure. So people come to your funnel, to your website, and then all the way through to you won them, you closed them, you tracked it, you had the meeting through the calendar, but then you actually have to accept money. And that is going to be our second to last infrastructure step. Let's go ahead and click on payments. And the absolute first step here is just to connect the payment provider. So you're going to click right here in the top right and then connect now. Now either Stripe or PayPal, if you're in the U.S., are going to be the two best options for you. All you do right here, you click connect. This will bring you to Stripe. You will need an Asalvo Stripe account. That takes 15, 20 minutes to set up. You come back here, you click this button and you're done and payments are live. And everything from invoices, estimation, your contracts, and payment links are really important, is all going to be housed once your payment provider is connected right in this portal. Now that in mind, this next step is why GoHighLevel is as popular as it is. And that is, this is a lot we've set up and there's a lot more to do. And if you have to do all of that manually, that really does not scale well. You, at the end of the day, have to be sitting there managing everything yourself or your employees have to. That's costing you a lot of money and time. But because GoHighLevel pulls this all together into one system, what they are known for in the industry are their automations or their workflows. And so under workflows and automations right here, we can see what these look like. Let me click view all templates. Again, there is a lot here and that covers basically automation of all the workflows, the things you would otherwise do manually in your business. And I'll give you an example here. Let's say you want an appointment confirmation workflow. So what this does right here to trigger it is when a appointment is booked. So through this calendar that we set up, then that's going to start or trigger the workflow. And what's going to happen after that is a confirmation email will automatically be sent and then we can customize exactly what that looks like. We can use fields inside of the email so it's customized. So that's sent immediately when the workflow is triggered. So someone books in and they get an email saying, hey, you're booked in, you're meeting us for this time. That's great. But then we can customize exactly what we want to happen after that for all the other reminders. So what this says is, hey, we're going to wait then this workflow is going to pause and still 24 hours before the appointment. Then another reminder email and an SMS text will be sent. And then the same process will happen one hour before the appointment. So we have this extremely granular, customized control. We can drag and drop everything. This is a full-on workflow automation editor to basically optimize over time exactly what that appointment confirmation workflow looks like. And you can see what happens here, right? This is going to wait until an hour after the meeting. It's going to send an internal notification to the team. And then it's going to go ahead and detail for our records what exactly happened with the meeting and send a survey. And that's just one of a lot of workflows here. Now, I'm not going to go too deep into this now because we're going to do a follow-up video, which is basically 10 of the top workflows on the platform. So if you're seeing this within the first week of this video being out, it won't be out yet. You'll have to just come back to the channel at some point. Otherwise, you can go ahead and just watch that video now. And again, there is a lot that you can dive into here once you have these other components posted within GoHighLevel. Now, also that review request that we looked at right here ties into the reputation portal. And if you set up some workflows that connect here, so that's the things like your Google business profile. And this is amazing if you're an in-person business, like, I don't know, restaurants, you walk dogs, right? Whatever that looks like, where you can start to really get those reviews on autopilot, which is really important for ranking and search and how most of those types of businesses get a substantial portion of their So that'll be the last step. You want to connect your profiles within the reputation portal, and then you set up the automations, which again, will be in a different video to start to automatically get those reviews, those five stars on all of your profiles. So all in all, what we've done here, we've built a landing page, a booking calendar, a sales pipeline, payment collection, automated payments, nurturing, and finally reputation management. So we've done all of that, and that's without working or integrating different platforms. We're all within this portal. That is the power of GoHighLevel. So there you go. That is the full end-to-end system. There is a lot more to cover here. And so I'm doing a three-part mini series on the GoHighLevel platform. So there's plenty more coming. If you're watching this video later, you can see those on the channel. And again, because you're watching this, you are going to get a 30-day completely free trial. So if you're at all interested, you can go, you can set it up, you can feel it out and see how it works, and you support the channel while doing that. And regardless, I appreciate your time and being here, and I will see you in the next one. Cheers.