207: How HighLevel Scaled to 2M+ Users Without a Sales Team with Robin Alex

Robin Alex is the co-founder of HighLevel, a marketing automation and CRM platform that has grown to more than two million users since launching in 2018. The company scaled rapidly—doubling and tripling year after year—largely through a white-label model that allows agencies and implementation partners to resell the platform under their own brand. HighLevel now operates with roughly 2,000 employees worldwide and continues to ship new features, including AI-driven tools, at an unusually fast pace.

In this conversation, Robin talks through the real reason HighLevel gained traction, how they’ve structured support to handle growth without a sales team, and why simplicity always wins.

He also shares how they prioritize product development and decide what to build, what to ignore, and how to test ideas quickly.

The episode offers a clear look into the operational principles behind HighLevel’s rapid growth, its product philosophy, and how the team continues evolving the platform for agencies, implementers, and small businesses.

Mic Drop Moments

• “We never built a sales team. We just kept asking, ‘Do you know anyone else?’ after we solved it, and here we are today.” – Robin Alex

• “Simplicity always wins.” – Robin Alex

• “If you do a good job, people want to shout through their window of like, ‘Oh, my gosh, someone solved a major problem for me.’ And just going through that, providing good value will go a long way, and it just becomes this flywheel of effect for you and your business.” – Robin Alex

• “Don’t chase complexity. Chase simplicity. And when you talk to businesses or if you’re trying to implement things for a business, complexity doesn’t win in the long term. Simplicity does.” – Robin Alex

• 00:38 What Really Drove HighLevel’s Early Growth
• 02:57 The Breakdown of HighLevel’s User Base
• 05:24 Handling Customer Support at Scale
• 07:22 Leveraging AI to Improve Customer Support
• 08:49 Growing to 2,000 Global Employees
• 10:10 The Biggest Downside of White Labeling
• 12:01 Why the Best Product Doesn’t Always Win
• 13:41 The Real Key to Faster Customer Outcomes
• 14:39 The Fastest Path to Early Agency Revenue
• 16:48 How HighLevel Decides What to Build Next
• 21:25 How HighLevel Users Are Leveraging AI Today
• 25:26 The STL Framework for Implementing Quickly
• 30:17 Why They Only Plan One Quarter at a Time
• 31:54 How the Three Founders Divide Responsibilities
• 37:47 Why They Raised Money Despite Not Needing Capital
• 42:56 The One Thing Agency Owners Need to Stop Doing

Brad Weimert: Robin, your company, HighLevel, launched in 2018, and it skyrocketed into relevance in the CRM and marketing automation place, really, really, really quickly. So, you have tens of thousands of people using the platform now, millions of users using it, and you did it essentially with no sales team. I want to dig into all sorts of stuff. Robin Alex, welcome to Beyond A Million.

Robin Alex: Thank you for having me. It’s been a fun journey, and excited to dive in.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it, man. Well, first and foremost, so the marketing automation space has thousands of platforms that fail trying to be in this space. Succinctly, what do you think it is that made HighLevel succeed at the level they did?

Robin Alex: When we started, no one was clamoring for yet another CRM. That wasn’t really what the use case that we even went out to. What we did, basically, was just look at the problem statement. So, prior to HighLevel, I was actually running a marketing agency, technology implementation firm. And really, the problem was I was taking ten different applications, trying to glue it all together with the APIs, leveraging Zapier, and all the different tools back then. And we got really good at it, but that was our whole business, and it was just really hard to scale it. And the problem that a lot of business owners and agencies had at that time was you implement all this, and it takes time because you got to wait for the business to give you their time and attention.

And they’re operating their business, right? And it takes one, two, three months before you implement it. And for many businesses, it’s if I give you $1, you’re supposed to give me $3 back.

Brad Weimert: As an agency.

Robin Alex: Well, yeah, if I’m working with an agency or just really any consultant, right? Like, the idea is I’m giving you money to either buy back my time or give me $3 back in value. And if it takes one month, two months, three months, and you’re not seeing a return, you’re going to take whatever you can, whatever assets that you can, and kind of kick the person to the curb from there. And so, that’s actually what we were trying to solve for. And so, when we built HighLevel, it was really just working with people who were doing the implementations. How do we make it easier for you? How do we let you put your own brand on it, so that it becomes your tool, so that you can’t get kicked to the curb? And really just partnering with people on what their outcomes are.

And so, when we started, it was just, “Hey, let’s bring on a few people. Let’s get them on a call. Let’s talk to them about what their problems are and help them get situated.” And we just made sure that people got to the win. And then from there, we just asked, “Do you know anyone else that would have this problem?” And so, they would just invite more people on. And from there, we just kept growing and growing. We never built a sales team. We just kept asking, “Do you know anyone else?” after we solved it, and here we are today.

Brad Weimert: Well, that sounds very simple.

Robin Alex: And it’s all in hindsight, right? Like, I don’t think that it was like… That wasn’t the way that we were thinking of this is how we’re going to grow the business. It was just naturally what we were doing.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s back out, because I’ve got some other bulleted questions that I think are super relevant around the growth, et cetera. But backing out, HighLevel is unique, because your market is marketing agencies, and those marketing agencies then have the ability to use this marketing automation platform and sell it to other people as well, i.e., sell it to their clients. What percentage of your client base are marketing agencies, and what percentage are just independent users that come to HighLevel and use the platform because they want marketing automation CRM?

Robin Alex: Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. So, when we started seven years ago, we definitely started out in the true form marketing agency, really in the lead gen space. And then once we got pretty well known in that space, naturally, the echo chamber just got larger and larger. And so, from there, we’ve definitely stretched the term of what it means to be an agency, and even the idea of being an agency has shifted quite a bit. And now we’re getting into areas where it’s people who are implementation partners, technology implementers. And the idea of having an agency could either mean being an outside resource or even being an internal agency, like having your own marketing team or a marketing person who wants to implement it as a consultant for their own business.

And so, over the years, it’s just kind of expanded to where now business owners themselves are trying to figure it out for themselves, and it’s interesting. When they’re coming in, they’re figuring out for themselves, with also the intention of, “I can also implement this for my peers and my competitor,” and maybe not direct competitors, but like maybe in another market or something like that. Everyone wants to be the expert, and everyone wants to educate. And so, we’re just continuing to see this echo chamber of expanding. And I think the other angle that we like to talk about is the value of implementing tools in small businesses. I think the definition of small business has changed quite a bit.

And, Brad, I know you probably see it in your business as well, where you used to think of like brick and mortar and things like that. Now, there’s like the digital version of it, where people are representing as a small business online, with no physical assets. It’s all digital. And now, with the world really changing into like the side hustle, the side gig. Like, it’s nearly impossible for someone to not have another source of income, which is actually another business. And so, for us, we just want to make sure that we’re keeping up with the trends, keeping up with the way the world is shifting, and making sure that we’re bringing the right tools and finding the right people that can help implement it to get to success there.

Brad Weimert: So, we know at Easy Pay Direct, I have no idea how many. We have a ton of marketing agencies that we do the payments for. And then we also obviously have just tons of business owners from sub-seven figures to a lot of seven-figure, eight-figure, nine-figure brands. Many of them use HighLevel, and many of them are not reselling it. So, like, your model is to allow people to white label and resell the platform, right? But tons are using it independently. Do you have, and we kind of danced around it, but do you have an idea of what that distribution is on the platform?

Robin Alex: Yeah. I mean, just kind of the same thing in how you say it. The platform has changed so much so that it is a platform and can be used in many ways. I’d say a good portion of it are the traditional people who are agencies or people who want to resell it. Probably say over 40% to 50% of it is kind of in that lane. And then the other 50% are people who are technology implementers, but they’re not necessarily reselling it. They are setting it up for other businesses. Think of it as like a value-added software. They’re not necessarily reselling it or making monetization on it, but they’re offering professional services. Then there’s another category of people, probably closer to 10%, 20%, 30% that they’re just implementing it for their business, and they just want to leverage it there.

And the fun part, and what I mean of it being more of a platform, is we’ve built so many different products and tools that you may not use us for 100% of your business. You’re using us for certain parts of the tools. And so, one of the things I talk about is the plus one. So, you may be happy with a lot of the tools and infrastructure that you have, and you’re looking for, like, what is that next piece of the puzzle that you’re looking for? Because we built so many tools, you may just use us for that one last component, which we’re happy to do. So, we integrate as well as we can handle the full stack as well.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And I know that we have clients that will use it for some of the new AI features that you’ve rolled out. And I want to talk about some of that stuff.

Robin Alex: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: They do that because it’s sort of there are these ways to take something off the shelf, implement it really quickly, and then just integrate it to whatever other CRM or tech stack you have. We see that a lot more now than we used to. Five years ago, it was like, if you were using HighLevel, you were using HighLevel for your entire thing. So, that’s neat. I want to talk about sort of how you do that in the architecture of the company, because I know there are some unique parts of that. But before we dig in there, one of the things that struck me as I was looking for your history was, I mean, you guys are growing like 2X to 3X every year, and you’ve been doing that the entire time, which is a wild rate to be accelerating.

Some of that is kind of a product of this ability to white label and focusing on agencies, which are a lever, right, which bring out a bunch of other people. What guardrails do you have in place that prevents you from getting just destroyed from a support perspective, if you have 100 new people come on tomorrow?

Robin Alex: So, we hire quite a bit. I think by the end of the year, we’ll be around 2,000 employees around the world.

Brad Weimert: Good God.

Robin Alex: But because we have this multi-layer platform, where an agency or technology implementer, they service 20 businesses or 30 businesses, they handle the bulk of the support. And there are two types of support. And so, this is something that we’ve learned over the years, and early on, it’s like, there’s the technical platform support of how to use, like how the tools are supposed to function. But then there’s how do you customize the tools for the outcome that’s being promised and needs to be delivered for the business. Usually, the technology implementer or the agency, they know the ladder, like they know what the outcome that is promised to the business. And like the customization, right?

Like, the nuances of how a barber shop schedules between these certain windows, and they need to charge a certain amount, and they need to do these upsells, like they understand how that works. But when you have a technology issue of, “Hey, I’m trying to send an email, and the email is not being sent,” the technology implementer reaches out to us for that. So, we only see a smaller percentage of support needs. And so, we just need to beef up and make sure that we’re ready on that front. And then backing into it, and I know we’re talking about AI, we leverage AI quite a bit in so many different areas of our product. So, one of the latest tools that we rolled out a couple of months ago is Ask AI.

And so, that gives the ability for any user, whether you’re agency or the end business or end user, to go in, and we have an AI agent that can try to assist and then even get to the point of doing things for you. So, it’s, “Hey, within the product I want to do X, Y, Z,” well, the Ask AI will actually be able to not only give you the guide on how to do it, because there are some people that want to do it themselves. It’s like the Aunt Jemima concept, right? Like, just add water, and you get to bake it. So, some people like that all the way to just do it for me. And so, we’re building the tools of functionality there. Then when you go to support, we like to do the first step back with support, with AI, and see if it can give some guidance there. And if not, it falls back to humans.

And one of the things that we are known for is going straight to Zoom. And so, we have to staff up. 24/7, we’re building teams where it’s following the sun, because we want to have the best reps at the right time in their markets all around the world, so that when you need help, there is someone on our team who can get on a Zoom call with you and look at what’s going on in your screen and try to give you that personal support there. And then, of course, you got to have the systems to be able to level people up to the next tier of support and get you to the right teams, just to make sure that we can get it solved there.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, 2,000 people across the world sounds like a nightmare to me. Did you have background with running a huge team like that before? Are you guys figuring it out as you go? Are you hiring people that know how to do it? How do you think about growing into that?

Robin Alex: Yeah. Between Shaun, Varun, and me, one, we never expected the company to grow as fast as we did. We’re definitely lucky and fortunate from that perspective, but I will say we had a lot of people that came on early with us and took a big bet with us from there. And we’ve worked with a lot of great individuals who’ve helped continue to grow the company. And so, we have great people who know how to manage, or they’re figuring it out along the way on how to handle remote teams. We’re 100% remote as a company, which is another nuanced challenge, with 2,000 people all in different geographic areas of the world.

How do you figure out staffing? How do you make sure that you’re staffing appropriately the right time zones? People take time off, holidays. All the little things, we’re figuring it out every day. So, there’s no like methodical plan of like this is what it’s going to look like. We have a lot of great people who know how to implement those plans now.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, that’s 2X to 3X a year, and that many employees is wild. Before we close the chapter on kind of the white label stuff, white labeling a product is, I think that like I think a lot of people today, when they build software platforms, see the allure to the white label side of it, because they’re like, “Hey, if I build a cool tool, why wouldn’t I just build in the functionality that somebody else could put their brand on and use it?” It opens up this other marketplace. What is the downside to white labeling for you? What have you seen as the negatives to the white label proposition?

Robin Alex: I think one of the things that I see where people go wrong is like there are a lot of tools out of the box that work really well out of the box. You feel compelled that you have to make it so unique and so special that people will buy from you. But sometimes that overcomplication of what you build is so overly complex, it’s hard to tell the story, to even sell it. And then when you do sell it, you can’t deliver the outcome because it becomes so customized, and a lot of people don’t know how to sell and scale a customized business. And so, there’s a lot of frustration that comes into that. But I think over time, people just start realizing, like, simplicity always wins.

And so, we’re having to coach and educate a lot of people of pulling people back of, “I get it, there’s some cool customizations and things that you’re trying to do, but not only the maintenance, the management of it is difficult.” The business owner who you’re trying to implement this for or even for your business, it’s not needed. That sophistication is not what’s going to make you more money or help grow your business. And so, those are kind of challenges, and one of the biggest things that I see where people go wrong there.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that’s a great takeaway. I mean, I think that that’s probably a universal truth in business at large, which is people build all these unique things, and oftentimes they’re just focused on the wrong thing, but they build all these unique things. And I think one of the things that I find most fascinating about business, and frustrating to be honest, is that so often it’s not the best product that wins, it’s the person that has the best marketing message and the ability to communicate best.

Robin Alex: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a balance of not only the communication of it, but it’s also delivering the easiest path to the outcome that’s being promised, right? Like, if you needed your house to get painted, you can have a person who’s going to come in and explain to you all the cool brushes that they’re going to have and the special paint that they’re going to bring and how they’re going to tape it down, then go on and on and on and on, but if they don’t deliver on it, that’s a problem too, right? And at the end of the day, all that you want to do is just pay someone some money and do a good job and deliver. What you need is a freshly painted house, right? So, I think it’s making sure that you have that full package.

And from a very simplistic method, that, to me, is what wins at scale. Now, there are, of course, these niche markets where someone is paying attention to the details and finer things, but I think that’s also harder to find and harder to scale up.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that one of the things that seems to be a persistent truth is reducing friction kind of goes hand in hand with the simple message and how do you deliver the product without overdoing it. Reducing friction seems to be just the trend across the board, right? One way to disrupt an industry is to think about how to get to the product faster, or how to give somebody the result faster. What are the things that you’ve done in the last couple of years, with or without AI, that have allowed you to deliver the outcome for an agency quicker?

Robin Alex: You know what’s funny about when you talk about reducing friction? I think that, as people are implementing technology, there are two ways to think about it. One is let’s reduce friction for everybody, or let’s pass the buck of friction to somebody else to deal with, right? So, it’s almost like, Brad, I’m going to make your life easy, but I need to make my life hard so that you don’t see what’s going on over here. And those people typically become the ones that get frustrated and kind of ultimately fail, unfortunately. Then you have the other one who’s like, “We just need to reduce friction for everybody. How do we make this super simple and just make life easier?” And this is where putting AI in place and just being able to have an easy implementation, those are the ones that, to me, always win.

Brad Weimert: So, if you have a brand new agency on the platform, what are the easiest things for them to implement, to ramp up the platform quickly in 90 days? And let’s say take the agency to $25,000 a month.

Robin Alex: Well, there are two ways to think about it. As someone who’s new, if you don’t have any customers or anything like that, I would recommend just walking out of your house, walking into a business, and just asking, “What can I do to make your life easier? Like, what’s your biggest pain point?” And then you can offer them ideas, right? And some of the ideas that I like to put out there is the missed call text back or the missed call AI voice receptionist. Those are easy to implement, because every business misses phone calls. Implementing two-way texting and setting up texting campaigns where you can message out saying, “Hey, we’re doing a special. Can I get you booked in for an appointment or come in for an offer?” or something like that, putting a chat widget on a website, because there’s a lot of missed opportunity there, creating a website for a business or landing pages for an offer.

Those are kind of the simple things that I think that anyone can go out and do for small businesses, and then just the way that I started my business and help other people do the same thing is just walk into a business and say, “How can I make your life easier? I’m going to do it for free,” and it sounds weird, but once you implement it for free, you just ask, “Hey, I got this. Are you happy with it?” If they say yes, just say, “Hey, I was thinking about charging X amount of dollars. What do you think I should charge?” And they will tell you not only the price, in many times they’ll end up paying you that discounted price, and that gives you your first customer very quickly. And then from there, they’re going to be able to give you more referrals as well.

Because if you do a good job, people want to shout through their window of like, “Oh, my gosh, someone solved a major problem for me.” And just going through that, providing good value will go a long way, and it just becomes this flywheel of effect for you and your business.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. All right. I want to talk about kind of the implementation of AI inside your org, because you’ve got this, at this point, you’ve got something like 2 million businesses that are using the platform for running their entire world, right? And you are 2,000 employees. Last I heard, you had a huge chunk of those employees solely focused on product and building the product. And you have a reputation for rolling out new features very, very quickly. Let’s start with how do you decide what features you’re going to roll out in this era of AI moving a million miles an hour?

Robin Alex: Yeah. So, we definitely listen to our community. We have an ideas board, we have a Facebook group, we do a lot of product town halls, where we invite our customers to come in and just jam out on what they see within our existing products, and where do they see around the corner of new tools and new features? Because we’re working with a lot of technology implementers, they’re boots on the ground. They’re talking to what business owners are seeing and leveraging and wanting to help grow businesses. So, we’re just being eyes wide open. And then from there, we look at where do we see the volume of interest and where do we see the trends or the themes throughout everything that we built. And then we kind of back into saying, “Okay, let’s build it. How do we build it?”

For most things, 80% of the usage comes from 20% of the product features. And the way that technology actually works for small businesses is that the innovation curve has actually plateaued. There’s not really new innovation. I mean, every business, it generally runs the same. You need to have some sort of marketing exposure. The marketing exposure needs to drive, essentially, to some sort of website or landing page or some sort of action online, and then from there you need to collect the details. So, it needs to come to some sort of collection form that needs to be put into a database of some sort, like a CRM. You need to be able to communicate with that business. And then from there, you need to get them to some sort of engagement point, whether that’s an appointment or a payment, or a contract. And then from there, you need to deliver on services. And then after that, you need to evangelize them to getting a review or getting them to repurchase again, right? So, it’s the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, and then you just kind of recycle that.

And so, that concept generally holds true for every small business. And so, for us to figure out the usage, we just need to figure out, like, what is that 20% usage there? Let’s roll that out. So, what we typically do is we hire a new team dedicated to that new initiative, and they basically are starting out their own business. First, build that 20%. We have a lot of customers that will find interest into it, and then they just continue to build on the rest of the features with those customers who want to be the early adopters on the bleeding edge, and we just evolve from there. And that’s how we’ve built a lot of our products. And so, we started at the front of the house, and now we’re definitely working back of the office of different tools and different functionality.

Brad Weimert: So, one of the things that I heard and got from that is you talk about just sort of like the standardized flow that every business goes through with their client experience. And what I see happen, both in Easy Pay Direct and my company and my staff, and in like, basically everybody’s business is they get the basics done, and then they want to do all this fun, shiny sh*t on the outside, right? They’re like, “Let me try this new, advanced thing.” And what you just highlighted is, or maybe you look at the core thing you’re doing and try to improve the core thing more, because those core things are ultimately what make the business run. Was that a fair summary?

Robin Alex: 100%. I will say entrepreneurs, we’re a glutton for punishment. We love trying to find the new, flashy thing that’s supposed to change the dynamics of business. And I’m not going to say that it doesn’t happen, but probably 7, 8, 9 out of 10 times, your point is really the best way to grow. It’s just do more of the same stuff that’s been working, the core things, and you’re going to do just fine and move at a lot faster of a pace, right? It’s just like working out. There’s not really a lot of magic to it. You just have to have the consistency and just doing the same things harder every single day, and you’ll get healthier. You can try to change your diet. You can try to do something new, but very rarely does that change consistently.

Brad Weimert: Radically.

Robin Alex: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, to that end, you implement all these new features all the time inside of HighLevel. What is one of the AI features that you’ve implemented that seems to get the most use and the most adoption, consistently across the platform?

Robin Alex: Today, I think the biggest one is the conversation AI, just because that is the easiest lift of a business, right? Like, there are messages coming in and going out. People want to communicate with the business, and it’s hard to just be in front of your computer or in front of your phone to communicate all the time. So, having that backstop is an easy lift for a lot of businesses, and you just need to train the AI agent on the industry as a whole, and then the nuances and the specificity of the business that you’re operating, right? So, it’s very easy for transactional messaging, then you have a fallback saying, if the agent doesn’t know, don’t worry. We’re going to book an appointment or we’ll call you back and we can get a human in place. That’s actually the easiest lift.

Now, where we’re seeing a lot of opportunity is on two different areas. One is on the voice side of things, being able to call coming into your business, and in some cases, even doing an outbound call with an AI, but the language of it is getting so good. You don’t have the delays anymore. The inflections in the voice is getting very humanistic. You can even do accents and things like that. So, that’s progressing in a really fast way.

I think where people are at is, or as businesses, it’s the comfortability on, are you ready to let an AI agent go out and start emulating a human? And then just like anything else, it’s also the fear of, I always look at it as 1% ruins it for everybody. That 1% is going to use it in a malicious manner. It’s going to tighten. How do we properly and effectively use this? And then also, just from a human perspective, no one likes to get spam calls and no one likes to get telemarketing calls. So, how do we find that balance there? So, I think where that’s one area that I see a lot of potential that’s happening very quickly.

And the other side is just leveraging AI tools to help build things. Back to the shiny object kind of thing, it’s like, we start out quite a bit in the plus one. You have a lot of core features and maybe you think you need to add one more core feature. So, you come to HighLevel. Well, implementing it, integrating it, and things like that can be a challenge. And so, with AI, we’re looking at how can we help do that last mile work? And like I said and in some cases, just add water. You just enter in a couple of features and it does it for you. And you can say, I built this myself, all the way to, can we just automate it, one click, and it’s launched, ready to go for you.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that sort of no code, do it yourself, build something proposition is certainly, you can go down that rabbit hole and have it be a huge distraction. But I think also one of the neat things about it is the ability to scratch the itch of the shiny object really quickly and you can say, hey, let me try this. You can get to proof of concept and you can disregard it if you’re like, this isn’t getting us where we need to go instead of spending four months developing something and then being like, oh, sh*t.

Robin Alex: Yeah, it’s funny, and I’m sure you’ve seen this online of someone is talking about something that they built in a no-code platform and it’s like this crazy screenshot of all these branches and all these legs and it’s basically an art masterpiece. Now, the question is how many people have effectively implemented this and they’re operating their business on it, and who’s actually done it at scale, right, like, with many different businesses, many different operations. So, to your point, I think it’s a compelling idea and a compelling concept. I just don’t know if it’s something that the world is absolutely ready for at that complexity at scale. I do think it’s like, what is that? The easy button that, yes, I can no code deliver or build something and then deliver it and have it running and operating a business successfully.

Brad Weimert: So, you mentioned, you used the phrase the 1% ruin it for everybody. When I think about some of the reasons people aren’t implementing AI, you have a lot of insight and data around this. How do you internally measure things like hallucination and the downsides to AI implementation inside your own business when you know it’s going to impact 2 million businesses downstream?

Robin Alex: A lot of it is having dedicated people just having eyes on it. And one is just understanding where the data comes in and the sentiment behind the data. And what I mean by that is it’s one thing to have just basic data on thumbs up, thumbs down, did the message respond correctly? But then you have to have kind of another layer to review, like why was it a thumbs down? Was it because it was a bad answer? Or was it because it sent it out with the wrong tonality or the wrong phrasing behind it? Or was it just straight up hallucinating? So, you have to have someone who can parse out the difference there, and then backing in and creating the reactive measures to prevent it from happening like that again.

And so, what we’ve done is basically spun up dedicated AI teams within all the different teams of the organization that we have, and their sole job is to monitor and maintain it. And the way that we back into it of making sure that these teams are effective is whatever they build, we need to track our customer satisfaction score. And if it’s not at a 90% or higher, either we need to take the product offline or you need to kick it back into gear and we got to solve for it. But 90% is our benchmark for any new tool and anything that we have in the AI world. and then it’s how quick can we get it up to 95% and then to 98%, 99% from there.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. So, I think that that’s a really good point of reflection for anybody that’s concerned about quick implementation and you can tell me the parameters for this, but having some sort of timeframe by which you can say, if we don’t hit these benchmarks within that timeframe, we need to correct course. And I think so many people roll out a new feature, a new product, or just like a new way of doing something inside their business, a new customer service experience or client experience through the whole journey. and then there’s no measurement. And there’s no concrete timeframe around it.

Robin Alex: It’s the STL, right? What is the size of the test that you need to win on? What is the timeframe that you need to win on? And what is the level that you need to win on, right? And so, size could be like, hey, we want to do this for 1 customer, 5 customers, 10 customers. Time is, we’re going to run this for a month or a week or a day. And then the limit is whatever score that you’re trying to gauge it at. And so, as you roll out these things for, even if you’re a small business or the local pizza shop and you want to test out, can it handle incoming calls? Because then we get so many calls in a day, it’s how do we try to maintain it? Maybe it’s, we want to do it for 10 customers and see how we gauge it out too. We want to do this for one hour, right? We just want to let it run for an hour and we need to get a 95% success rate or we’re not ready to increase how much longer or how large of an audience that we want to have to test it out. So, that’s really the idea and the method that we follow internally.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s awesome. I think that that’s an awesome framework for small businesses because I think I was going to ask you the specifics around yours, but I don’t think it’s actually relevant for everybody else. I think having that tool to take away of size, time limit, and what was the L?

Robin Alex: Level. Yeah, like what is the measurement, the C stat score and your whatever.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s awesome. I love having the conversations like this where it results in framework because one of the most difficult things I think to do with a complex system is articulate it cleanly. And I think through attempting to articulate cleanly, operations-minded people end up with a framework. Lots of entrepreneurs end up just running with it and think like, that works. I’m going to keep going.

Robin Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s the balance of leading to the outcome or starting with the outcome, but then how do you get there and how do you measure it? Like, that’s throwing spaghetti on a wall and hoping something sticks, and look, there’s times where that’s important and that’s how you should roll out, but it does come down to mindset and how you operate because like for me, I do love throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what works, but I do think in frameworks, so as I’m throwing it, I’m trying to gauge of like, okay, I’m only going to throw a small amount on the wall and I need to see if it can stick for X amount of time. So, it definitely is a balance and it does come down to the personality of the person who’s trying to implement it.

Brad Weimert: Well, so to that end, Episode 81 of Beyond a Million was with your partner Shaun Clark. And Shaun told me when I asked him what his road map was, he says, I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something along the lines of we don’t have a f*cking road map. We plan for a quarter and nothing further than a quarter, and we just respond to our customers, build for the quarter, and then make a new choice. You have three partners in the business, do you all share that view? Obviously, the business is run that way. Do you all share that view and how do you distribute your responsibilities there or strong points and weaknesses?

Robin Alex: Well, kind of split into two different points. So, yes, we all three are kind of in the same motion of we don’t want to put something on pen on paper and saying, this is our road map and it is flexible, it cannot change, and things like that. We do put things on a wishlist of when we want to do it, but one, we’ve grown to such a certain size that every team is operating at different levels of what their priority lists are and things like that. We also are very big on living in the moment, meaning if there’s a problem or if there’s a trend or a change or something like that, we should make the changes as quickly as we can. So, let’s try to build of what we see that’s right in front of us. A lot of the future casting and things like that, I mean, obviously, there’s ideas. It’s just a matter of when do we build it? I mean, there’s so many great ideas, but we’re not going to just say, this is coming out in Q3 and Q3 only, and that’s what happens. We try to pencil it in.

On the other side of having us three and where we kind of sit, we definitely operate the business more as like a founder’s office, which is really fun. We’ve grown and we’ve built up a really great executive team running so many different departments. And so, the way that Shaun, Varun, and I kind of sit is, whatever landmine or whatever issue that’s happening, who’s ever the one that’s most available to help in solving that or who has the most bandwidth and availability to solve it, can you jump on that?

And the analogy that I love to give people about that is the businesses that I see that struggle is where the owners or the executive team has very defined boxes of their roles and responsibilities, and it works great in theory. The problem is businesses are not cleanly run that way. Problems always exist when it fits right in between where the two boxes start and end. And the question is who’s supposed to pick that up? And so, what’s been very organic and natural for us three is, if there are no boxes, it’s just whoever’s available to solve it or whoever’s passionate to solve it, jump on it.

And look, there’s disagreements and there’s times where we might not think it’s the best strategy, but at the end of the day, it’s the person that’s taken on the responsibility. It’s their job to get it to the finish line, right or wrong. And the other two who doesn’t have the time, we have to support the other person. And we all want the same outcome. We all want it to be done correctly. We all want to do it with good intention. And so, that’s how we operate the business. And then, that translates into the road map. We’re all hoping that we’re all making the right decisions and we’re figuring it out as we go along.

Brad Weimert: Got it. I have so many questions about that. So, the traditional approach to having a founder in business or having multiple people that are on the cap table and the operation of the business is that they should have different skill sets because they complement each other in their skill sets. And that seems to fly in the face of what you just said, which is like anybody available, if you’re passionate about it and you are available, get after it. Of the three, do you feel like you have overlapping skill sets or do you think that there are certain things that some of you are well suited to do and not others? How do you have an approach of not dividing roles and responsibilities, but you’re different humans?

Robin Alex: Yeah, I mean, coming back to that first statement of what you’re passionate about and things like that, I mean, we definitely have our strengths and skill sets. All of us are builders. All of us are implementers. All of us love technology. We all have engineering background. Shaun and Varun are way better than me on the engineering and development side of things. And so, there’s different levels into that. Varun, he’s really operating the engineering team, so the team really looks up to him. But the thing there is, it doesn’t prevent us to go in and talk to the engineering team, make decisions, and help push things forward. But Varun has his eyes specifically on that.

Shaun and me kind of on the other side of things, when we talk about, how do we help with support, how do we help position the company, how do we push things forward within the organization from a business perspective, it’s kind of the same thing. Like, we just kind of naturally land over there, but that doesn’t prevent Varun from having decisions and jumping in. And mostly, there’s always things that we just don’t see that’s in front of us. So, it’s who’s watching your six all the time. And so, that’s been what I mean of like, while I’m passionate on one thing, I don’t have the time and bandwidth to pick it up and maybe, somebody else does, and so they can come in and help on that front there.

Brad Weimert: Inside of my core company, which is Easy Pay Direct, I have a general operating philosophy that is we have a set of values that the company operates by. I have zero desire to try to get people to adopt our values. I have a lot of desire to find people that already share the values that will operate well inside the company. When you talk about not having sort of a concrete road map past quarter inside the business. Do you in your personal life have a longer-term plan and a longer-term arc that you’re following? Is this contrary to that and sort of like a silo that you operate in? Like you as three people, do you have different personal worlds that seem to have a larger, more concrete path? Or are you kind of the, I don’t want to put you in the ADD entrepreneur bucket, but like, by the seat of your pants, run really quickly in all areas of life, or is this a unique experience within HighLevel?

Robin Alex: No, I think we all three of us operate our lives very, very much the same of we all independently say we can’t predict the future, nor do we want to predict the future. So, let’s make the best of what’s happening right now and what we see right in front of us. Now, I think there’s different levels of how we attack the moment or when we see problems and things like that. But that’s why it’s so great having two. For me, I have two amazing partners who, there’s different points in life where you might be more anxious or more stressed about situations that’s happening right in front of you, and having two advocates and two people by your side who can help give different perspective and help make the right answers, not only in the business side, but on the personal side, it just makes your overall world so much easier because everyone’s experiencing it in the same way and everyone’s thinking about it in the same way. But no, I mean, for us, it’s all fused as kind of the way that we think in business translates to how we think in life. And very similar to you, we just want to continue bringing in more people with that same mindset.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. There are so many different ways to run business. I find it endlessly fascinating to dig into the nuances of that specific thing. So, one of the things that I found fascinating about HighLevel or I find fascinating in general is the mentality behind bootstrapping things versus raising money, and also, the practical reasons people do it, which by the way, I see tons of companies raise money when they probably shouldn’t and raise money because they think it’s what they’re supposed to do. And then there are all these different frameworks that play into it. You were growing 2x, 3x a year, and in ‘21, I think you guys took in your first chunk of cash, which was $60 million, publicly announced. And then ’24, you brought on more money. What was the thought process of bringing on money at both of those points in time? Why did you bring on money if you were growing at that clip with a profitable business? And did round one versus round two have a different intention?

Robin Alex: So, yeah, I mean, from the beginning we’ve been profitable. And so, we never really needed outside capital to help push the company forward from a financial perspective. That was what we were not chasing. What we were really looking for is how do we continue to build this business that we can provide more security and stability for our team members. At the end of day, we are still a startup and people join the company with kind of the vision or the perception of what it means to be in a startup. And so, in 2021, you know, it was the height of the market, and we were receiving a lot of inbound inquiries at that time of people just wanting to invest and things like that.

And when Shaun and Varun and I were talking about it, it was just, well, let’s just take these calls and just hear people out. And through that process, we realized that, hey, this is actually free consulting. People are telling us what we’re doing wrong, what we’re doing right, and where we need to improve. And so, after the first couple of calls, we said, “Hey, you know what? Let’s go through a formal process just to see what we could actually learn when people look under the hood of the business.” And we were not asking for money or anything like that, people were just, this is what we think that your company’s valued at, and here’s what we would love to do to help you. And through that, we learned what we didn’t like and what we liked.

And what we didn’t like was majority of the world saying that we’re running our business wrong. It’s not sustainable, it’s not going to work. But here’s the weird thing. They still want to invest into us. And it’s like, we love you so much, Brad, but you’re doing it wrong, but we’re going to give you money to change your business. Like, that makes no sense. And so, we actually ended the year, bringing on PeakEquity, who they were one of the few people, if not the only person that we actually trusted that said, “Hey, you guys are doing something so unique. We don’t want to change the business. We just want to support you and we want a small percentage of the company just so that we can help, one, be a part of the ride, but then two, give you a lot of support on the areas that you guys are not good at,” which is like, at that time, our finance team needed to be rebuilt, as we were growing so fast, we never really operated the business at that size and scale at that time.

So, when you talk about the finance team, the HR team, those sort of things that we were scaling so big, they had skill sets into that. And so, they helped us walk around the corner and build into that. Since 2021, we basically 4x or 5x the company in such a dramatic way. It’s what do we need to do to help grow beyond where we’re at today. Like what sort of partner can help us on that front? And then also, we had a lot of people that started early with us, they took that with us. They could have gotten higher paying jobs somewhere else. And so, how do we bring someone on who could help provide a little bit of liquidity to our team members? Because they’ve been writing for six, seven years with us. And like I said, it’s the story of being a part of a startup. Like, when does that big moment happen? So, we want to make sure that we can bring someone on to help on that front.

But then also, very similarly, the game changes at different levels, right? Like the conversations that we’re having. When we talk about going global, when we talk about legal side of things, when we talk about the complexity of how you have financials and different entities around the world and things like that, like you need to have the right people in your corner to help guide the things that we don’t know. I know how to operate the business from a day-to-day perspective of what are the tools that we need? What’s happening in the market when you’re talking about operational side, just at a different scale? So, we were looking for a partner who can help us on that without changing the fundamental business. And so, very similarly, we brought General Atlantic on as a minority investor. And it’s been great. Shaun, Varun, and I and the team won majority of the company and we have two investors who are really kind of giving us all the insights on the things that we’re not paying attention to, to help continue doing what we’re doing at a grander scale.

Brad Weimert: I know that you’re pressed for time here. Last question I have for you is what do you wish every agency owner would stop doing?

Robin Alex: There’s a lot. I’d probably first say, what we were talking about earlier, it’s don’t chase complexity. Chase simplicity. And when you talk to businesses or if you’re trying to implement things for a business, complexity doesn’t win in the long term. Simplicity does. So, I’d say that is one thing. The other thing that I would say is stop feeling like you’re always in a red ocean. The market is saturated, or the market is hard to find customers or to grow your business. You just need to take a beat, zoom out, and just look at how the world is shaping up.

Every single day, there are new businesses starting up. There are people who are starting up all the way from they have a full-time business and they’re starting a side hustle to starting a new startup, to evolving it to a small business and then growing it from there. And there’s so many businesses that may have different partners, different tools, and different things going on, but everyone is always looking for what is that next thing that they don’t have and you need to find where those people exist. And so, there’s so many opportunities. Get out of the bubble that you’re in. If you’re in the online space, sometimes you’re just seeing the same content being fed to you over and over and over again, and you feel like the market has ended. You just got to get out of that bubble and go look in other markets and there’s so much opportunity that’s out there.

Brad Weimert: Robin Alex, thank you so much for your time, man. It’s always great to see you, and hopefully, we’ll get some face time soon.

Robin Alex: Likewise. Thank you for having me on. It’s been great.

Brad Weimert: Thanks, man.