Lucinda runs Farm Gate Meat Co., a butcher shop in Boonah. She had an offer in her head for Christmas: pre-order your ham, pay a small deposit now, and pay the rest once it's been weighed. What she didn't have was a way for her customers to sign up for it.

So I built it for her in GoHighLevel. It's one page where her customers choose their ham and pay the deposit online.

I'm starting with Lucinda because that's the easiest way I know to explain what GoHighLevel is for. You have something to sell, or a way you'd like people to book you, and you need somewhere for it to happen without you doing every step by hand.

I'm Julia Mann. I run JulAi in Brisbane, and setting up GoHighLevel for business owners who aren't technical is most of what I do, for people in Brisbane, on the Gold Coast, on the Sunshine Coast and around Australia.

This is a beginner's guide. If you've never heard of GoHighLevel, if you've just signed up, or if you've had it for a while and don't know what to do with it, this is where I'd start.

What is GoHighLevel?

GoHighLevel is one piece of software that holds your customer list, your booking calendar, your emails and texts, your forms, your website and your follow-up. Most people call it HighLevel or GHL. It's all the same thing.

If today is the first time you've heard the name, think about the apps a small business usually pays for separately. There's one for email and another for bookings. There's a form builder, a website, a spreadsheet of customers, and a notebook with the people you still need to call back.

GoHighLevel puts all of that in one place, so each part knows what the others are doing. Someone fills in your form, they land in your customer list, and they get a reply without you typing it.

What can a small business do with GoHighLevel?

With GoHighLevel a small business can take bookings, collect enquiries, sell from a simple page, send emails and texts, ask for reviews and follow up with people automatically, all from one login.

Lucinda's ham page is one example. It's a page, an order form and an online deposit, and it turned an idea she'd been carrying around into something a customer can do from their phone.

For someone else it might be a booking calendar that sends its own reminders. Or a form on the website, so every enquiry gets a reply straight away and nobody is left waiting. You don't need all of it. Most people start with the one thing that's costing them the most time.

Is GoHighLevel hard to set up yourself?

The basics of GoHighLevel aren't hard, and plenty of people set them up on their own. What stops beginners is how much there is, not knowing what order to do it in, and a few small settings that break things later.

I see the same pattern in a lot of the accounts people show me. The calendar is half built, or there's a form that doesn't send the enquiry anywhere. Often the emails are going out from an address that lands in spam, and nobody has noticed yet.

None of that means the owner did something wrong. They opened it, saw a very long menu down the left side, did the parts that looked fun and stopped. I'd have done the same.

What should you set up first in GoHighLevel?

Set up one complete customer path in GoHighLevel before anything else: someone enquires, they land in your list, they can book, and they hear back from you. Six things get you there.

• Your business details and your sending address. Add your name, logo and colours, then connect your own email address so messages come from your business and don't land in spam. This is the fiddly one.
• Your customer list. Bring your contacts in from one spreadsheet. One clean list is worth more than three messy ones.
• One pipeline. A pipeline is a board that shows where each enquiry is up to, with columns like New, Quoted and Booked. Start with one.
• One calendar or one form. Pick the way people reach you most, a booking or an enquiry, and build that one properly.
• One follow-up. A message that goes out on its own when someone enquires, so nobody waits two days to hear from you.
• The phone app. Turn on the alerts, so you know the minute someone gets in touch.

Do those six and stop. Use it for a couple of weeks before you add anything else, because you'll learn more from two weeks of real enquiries than from any tutorial.

Which parts of GoHighLevel are worth getting help with?

The parts of GoHighLevel that touch your email, your domain and your money. Those are the places where a small mistake can cost you customers before you know it has happened.

Connecting your email so it stays out of spam means changing settings where your domain name lives, and that's where most people get nervous. Order forms and payments are the other one, because a setting in the wrong spot can stop a form working and nothing on the screen tells you why.

And if you want an AI chat bot answering your customers, have someone check what it's been told to say before it goes live.

Everything else you can learn by clicking around. Whoever you ask for help, me included, ask them one question first: where does my work live if I leave? It should be built in your own account, in your name, so it stays yours. That's how I set up every client.

Where should you start if you're brand new, or stuck halfway?

It depends where you're at with GoHighLevel. If you've never used it, look around on a trial before you pay anyone. If you've started and stalled, pick one customer path and finish it before you touch anything else.

If you'd never heard of it until today, you don't need to decide anything yet. Write down the apps you already pay for and what each one does. If three or more of them are on that chart above, it's worth a look.

If you've just signed up, do the six steps and ignore the rest of the menu for now.

If you've had it for a while and it's sitting there, you're in good company, because that's where most of the people I talk to are. Choose the one path that would bring in money soonest, which is usually enquiries or bookings, and get that working.

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