Key Takeaways
- Stop selling hours. Sell access to a named system your customers would hate to lose.
- The best buyer for a small service business is the "systems buyer": too busy for DIY software, too price sensitive for a $2,500 retainer.
- Give every customer the whole system. Price by team size and usage, not by which features they unlock.
- Mike Cooch calls $297, $497 and $697 a month the proven range for small businesses, and he says price decides retention.
- Pick one customer type, name your system, and start selling this week. You will fix the pricing with revenue coming in.
Most people who start selling AI services on HighLevel hit the same wall. The first few deals feel great. Then every new client adds more hours, more late night texts, and more custom work, and the business starts running you. On day one of HighLevel's free workshop "Start Your AI Business," Mike Cooch (host Paulson Thomas) laid out the packaging model he used to build two recurring revenue companies. We run On Point Tech Solutions out of Los Gatos as a Go High Level Bay Area consultancy, and this is the talk we would hand to anyone who wants to sell AI and automation without building themselves a second job.
Assets and Automation Over Time and Talent
Cooch has repeated one line for about 15 years: assets and automation over time and talent. Time and talent is the old agency model. You bill hours, you do custom projects, and you are only as good as your last week. Assets are the things you build once and reuse: niche landing pages, website templates, follow-up email sequences, all packaged into a snapshot. Automation is HighLevel running those assets on every account at once.
He has the receipts. His first company, Everon, sold IT support as a monthly subscription back when the industry billed by the hour. A conference host once called him out of the audience to tell him he was ruining the industry. Revenue went from $65,000 in the first full year to over half a million, then $1.5 million, then $3 million. It made the Inc. 5000 three years running and sold to a larger company. His next business, marketing services, crossed $300,000 a month in recurring revenue in its first year.
His target is customers, not clients. Clients are six or seven accounts paying real money who feel like they own you. Customers are hundreds of businesses paying a fair monthly price. Lose one and nothing changes.
The Three Buyers, and the One Worth Chasing
Cooch splits the small business market into three kinds of buyer.
- Tools buyers want software and will do the work themselves. Low prices, and you are up against venture backed companies spending a fortune on ads.
- Agency buyers want custom work and pay for your talent. Sounds great at $2,500 a month until the owner decides to hire someone full time, or the project ends and nothing replaces it for six months.
- Systems buyers are most of the market. The plumber, the chiropractor, the pizza shop. No time to learn software, no budget for a retainer. They want it done at a price that does not hurt.
HighLevel is built to serve that third group at scale. His filter for any service is four checks: high leverage (automation over manual work), recurring revenue, a low cost to acquire each customer, and at least 65% gross margin. He says HighLevel builds can hit 80 to 85%.
Sell Access to a Named System
This is the mindset shift. You are not offering to "do marketing." You built the Home Contractor Growth System, and the customer pays monthly for access to it. Cooch breaks a system into four parts: assets, automation, activities (optional manual work like a weekly newsletter) and access. Then you keep improving it for everyone, the way HighLevel ships updates to you without asking for a new sale.
Two stories from the session show how simple this can be. Paulson described Clay Lawrence, who sells review collection plus a Google Business Profile setup for just under $300 a month. Cooch described Kai Stone, who went from about $3,400 a month to over $500,000 a month with a template AI website, a follow-up campaign and review capture, later adding call tracking and voice AI. Those are their numbers, as told on the stream. The pattern is the point. Few parts, done well, sold over and over.
Cooch also covered the downsell. When a customer wants to cancel the full system, offer to keep the CRM, site and sequences running as a lower priced software only plan. That revenue is close to pure margin.
Price by Usage, Not by Features
Feature tiers ("the good stuff is in Pro") confuse buyers, slow the sale and invite comparison shopping. Cooch contrasted HubSpot's pricing page, a wall of checkmarks, with owner.com's restaurant offer: two plans, and every plan gets everything.
His version for small businesses: every customer gets the complete system. The tier changes with team size and usage. Something like $297 for one to three people, $497 for four to ten, $697 for eleven or more, with more AI credits as you go up. The sales call gets short. What does your business need, how many people do you have, here is your price, when do you want to start.
He also argued that price decides retention. A $297 system renews by habit because it is part of how the business runs, like the phone bill. A $2,500 retainer gets a performance review every month. He built the tiers around the fundamentals every business needs (he groups them as reputation, readiness, resell, remarket and reach) rather than whatever feature shipped this week, because most small businesses still have no follow-up or lead capture at all.
Why This Matters for Bay Area and San Jose Businesses on Go High Level
Around here, everything costs more, including the agency retainers local owners have already been burned by. We hear some version of it on a lot of calls in San Jose and across the South Bay: they paid thousands a month, got a pretty report, and still missed the call that came in during a job. A named system at a price they do not have to think about gets past that fast.
There is one place we build differently. Cooch's model is access: stop paying, lose the system. At On Point Tech, clients own what we build. The website, the automations and the logins are theirs. We think the packaging lessons carry over anyway. One named system, sold on outcomes, with pricing that grows with the business. Ownership just makes it easier to sell to an owner who got stuck with an agency before.
Practical Steps
- Pick one customer type, even if it is a guess. You can change it later.
- List their three most painful problems in their words, not yours.
- Match each problem to a HighLevel feature you can deliver the same way every time: website, missed call text back, review requests, follow-up, voice AI.
- Give the bundle a name. "The Roofing Growth System" beats "marketing services."
- Set one price to start. Paulson's advice for anyone under ten customers is one offer and one price.
- Start selling this week. Cooch raised his prices four times in his first year, and he did it with revenue already coming in.
Watch the Full Workshop
Day two of the workshop covers pricing mechanics, setup fees and cash flow.
Final Thoughts
Better tools will not get you off the treadmill. A better package will. Build one system, name it, price it simply, and let it run for every customer at once. If you want help mapping your offer onto HighLevel, or want the build done for you, On Point Tech Solutions is a Go High Level Bay Area consultant based in Los Gatos, working with businesses in San Jose and beyond. We build it done for you or teach your team with an SOP, and you own everything we build. Start at optechsol.llc.