GoHighLevel Setup Guide: First Steps After Creating Your Account

1. Understand the agency account vs sub-account split

The agency account is the control room: billing, team members, white label settings, snapshots and the list of client sub-accounts. It is not where day-to-day work happens.

A sub-account (also called a location) is one business. It has its own contacts, pipelines, calendars, automations, phone number and email settings. Everything operational belongs here.

• Create one sub-account per client — never share a sub-account between two businesses.
• Create a dedicated internal sub-account for your own agency to test features safely.
• Never build a client's automations at agency level: they cannot be exported to other clients cleanly.

2. Fill in the business profile completely

Go to Settings › Business Profile inside the sub-account and complete every field. This is not cosmetic: compliance registration for SMS and email authentication both read from here.

1. Legal business name exactly as registered, plus the registration number for your country.
2. Physical address — required in email footers to stay compliant with anti-spam legislation.
3. Business phone and support email that a real person monitors.
4. Time zone of the client's operation, not yours. This drives every scheduled send.
5. Logo and favicon, so links and portals look like the client's brand.

3. Set up phone and email before anything else

Channels take the longest to approve, so start them on day one and configure the rest while they process.

1. Settings › Phone Numbers: buy a local number and complete the A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration if you send SMS in the US. Approval takes from a few hours to several days.
2. Settings › Email Services: connect the sending service and add a sending domain such as mail.clientdomain.com.
3. Publish the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records the platform gives you in your DNS. Without all three, your emails land in spam even though the platform reports 'sent'.
4. Send a test email to an inbox you own and inspect the headers for pass results on SPF and DKIM.
5. Set a default from-name and reply-to address so replies land somewhere a human reads.

4. Build the pipeline and calendar that match how the client sells

Do not copy a generic pipeline. Ask the client to describe the last five deals they closed and model the stages on that reality.

• Keep stages to five or fewer. Long pipelines never get updated by sales teams.
• Name stages as actions, not statuses: Contact Attempted, Meeting Booked, Proposal Sent, Won.
• In Calendars, connect each sales rep's Google or Outlook account so external events block availability.
• Set buffer time, minimum scheduling notice and daily meeting caps — this prevents the classic complaint of back-to-back bookings.
• Add the confirmation and reminder settings on the calendar itself before building any reminder workflow.

5. Publish one capture point and one automation

Resist the urge to build ten funnels. One working entry point that feeds one tested automation beats a half-finished ecosystem.

1. Build a short form: name, email, phone and one qualifying question. Every extra field costs conversions.
2. Embed it on a funnel page or the client's site and confirm a real submission arrives in Contacts.
3. Create a workflow triggered by that specific form that sends an instant SMS and email, creates an opportunity and notifies the team.
4. Test with your own contact record, read the execution logs, then publish it.

6. Save the result as a snapshot

Once the sub-account works, go to the agency account and create a snapshot from it. That snapshot becomes your onboarding template: the next client gets the same pipeline, calendar, form and automation in minutes instead of hours.