EP 89: Cancel Those Subscriptions: The One Tool Replacing My Entire Tech Stack
29:57 Share

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Aquare podcast where we talk about list building and lead gen marketing, sales, scaling, tactical things. And today as your host, by the way, I'm Jenny Wright. If you don't know who I am, uh, I want to talk about how many subscriptions you're paying for right now. How many software subscriptions do you currently have that you barely use or don't use effectively or are costing you hundreds every single month to

Sometimes even more than that sometimes in like almost like two grand depending on the size of your business, right? And so today I'm breaking down how I went from software overwhelm and serious budget bloat in my opinion to being really streamlined and saving boatloads of money. I mean hundreds every single month and I couldn't be happier and

In this episode, I get to talk about how I was wrong. I have no problem admitting when I am wrong. And if you listen to episodes from Acquire way back in the day or also other podcasts that I've been on, I have talked about basically having a really robust tech stack. And I still believe in a tech stack, but I don't believe in a bloated tech stack. And I think I was so on my soapbox about, you know,

having multiple different softwares to accomplish a goal that I didn't think there was just one software that could do it all. And, you know, I had some choice things to say about Kajabi. I had choice things to say about others. And I still believe a lot of that, but I have found a solution that has really, really helped. So let me sort of paint the picture for you. When you're done listening to this episode,

You're going to know exactly how to simplify your tech, save big on subscriptions that you may or may not even need at this point, and help you work smarter, not harder. That's been my mantra this year, basically. And so I really want to get into this problem of software overwhelm.

And let me know if this sounds familiar to you in any way, shape or form that you have all of these monthly reoccurring charges for tools, potentially like Kajabi, Teachable, ActiveCampaign, Leadpages, Zapier, Canva Pro, gosh, all the different form builders. What was the one that I used?

I just used it for like a client just used it the other day. All of those different things, right? Oh, oh, proposal software, invoice software. What else? Yeah, I mean, just so many different things. Okay. Oh, social media posting software or scheduling software.

If this is at all sounding familiar, because I'm going to tell you at one point, I was paying over $700 a month USD and I'm Canadian. So it was like a grand Canadian for tools. Some of them I wasn't using effectively. Some I was only using sometimes. And I still felt like I had to have them because I would use them occasionally. Right. I want to I want to talk to you about what that feels like, because.

I have been, I mean, if you're building a business, money counts. It doesn't matter where you are, what level you are in your business, money matters. And we always want to make sure that we're trim, we're lean, and we're not using more than we need, right? And there's a lot of hidden costs in software. There's not just what you're paying per month, but there's the time spent integrating. There's time moving from one platform to another, right?

making sure that they work, connecting them with different tools if you need to, switching platforms, having some things work with some and not others, and then lack of streamlined data. So in order for me to get my monthly marketing report, so I do a monthly marketing report not only for myself, but for several of my CMO clients, clients that I'm a CMO for, to be more exact.

And when I'm working for another client or even trying to build up my own marketing report, before I was having to go into five or six different systems in order to get the information and the data that I needed in order to build that report. That's a lot. Like I got to go into ActiveCampaign, I got to go into, you know, Zap, I've got to go everywhere to get this data.

And I don't love that. I like streamlined as much as possible. Same thing for my clients. I was working with a client a couple of months ago and they use lead pages. By the way, I still have a total hate on for lead pages. I'm sorry. It's gotten better over the years, but I still don't love the conversions on those pages. And I just couldn't get the data that I needed out of it.

Well, I could, but it was just on different platforms like Leadpages. And then, you know, they're using this, they're using that. Oh, and I forgot to mention all the different, you know, if you're using HubSpot as your CRM, I have a company that I work with that's using that. And I'm just like, ah, crazy. So you get...

You get the gist. And I want to support everything I'm saying with some data itself because I prefer to rely on data as much as possible, not just my own personal experience. So the average small business spends $10,000 a year on SaaS products with only 50% of those being actively utilized. And this is from a study done by Gartner Research. And so if you think about it, you're spending...

10 K a year USD on products that you're not fully utilizing. You're not really using them to their full potential, but you're keeping them on the shelf for when you need them. And that was what I was doing. I was doing that with a proposal software, right? So two years ago with the amount of summit clients and marketing clients that I was working with, I needed to have a proposal software because I was sending out proposals, sometimes seven or 10 of them a month, um,

And I needed the proposal software to be able to do that. And also it connected to my FreshBooks and got me paid. When I started being a fractional CMO and I started whittling down the amount of clients that I was working with, I still do summits, but I do less of them. I just do them with bigger clients and they're bigger summits overall. I didn't need the proposal software because I wasn't sending out seven to 10 proposals a month. I was only sending out maybe

I don't know, two per month, right? And that was it because I've just changed my business model over the past two years. And paying $49 a month for proposal software just wasn't making sense. This was all the problem that I was experiencing and I didn't think it was going to change. And you might not either, but it can. And everything I'm saying to you is out of personal experience.

You can either take it at face value, which I hope you will, or you can continue to go through your own experience, or you can share with me what yours was like, because I'd love to hear that too.

The big solution for me personally, and I've also had this anecdotally with other people, one of the businesses I work in actually uses this product and it's been a game changer. I've moved clients into the product I'm going to talk to you about and it's been a game changer. And I am not affiliated with this company in terms of, you know, they don't pay me to say this stuff. I do have an affiliate link. You can use it. You don't have to. You can go straight to the website. You don't even need to check out my show notes. But I am going to tell you,

The thing that has worked for me and has been a completely winning solution so far, and I've been using this for six months, nine months, is go high level or high level, right? And high level is...

white labels itself out so you can either use it directly or you can buy it under a white label where somebody else is managing the software for you and and and you pay them to get the software right so high level has three different technically levels within it so there is the 97 month where you get three accounts so your like account for you and like two sub-accounts

You can pay $297 or you can go for the other solution, which is more, I think it's $497. The $497 one is, and I think the $297 too, are both the white label options where you can have more than three accounts and you can resell those.

And so, um, you may have heard of, you know, things like funnel gorgeous or dream builder or client connector or Panda something rather. Um, there's a lot of people who white label high level and they put their own skin on it and they make it look different and they add different things. Some people put all the options and give you all the options and some don't. Uh, and it just really, really depends. And I remember distinctly, uh,

Getting a high-level account through Funnel Gorgeous years ago when they first started it, and I was still really in my ClickFunnels era, and I wasn't ready.

I just wasn't ready. And honestly, I think high level was still adding a lot of functionality, which they have a ton of now. And I just wasn't loving the UX. There was just, just wasn't, I just wasn't ready. I still was in my ClickFunnels era. I was still living that dream. And now I laugh because for what I'm paying for high level, I've eliminated the

uh, anywhere between 400 to $700 a month in SAS bloat, which is saving me around, if not more than five grand a year, that's USD. So in CAD, I mean, come on, right? This is a lot. Um, it's, it's, it's a lot of money, right? So go high level or high level. If you don't know it and go check it out is a course hosting platform. So it replaces something like Kajabi or teachable.

It has a funnel building software, so in a landing page software, so it replaces things like click funnels or lead pages. It has a CRM and email marketing tool, so that replaces like ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, which is now called Kit, and others. It has a scheduling tool for your calendar, so it replaces Calendly or Acuity. I was using Calendly. It also has automation tools like

It's a cornucopia of automation tools. It will blow your mind and that can replace Zapier. Although transparently I still use Zapier because I still use Airtable and I need Airtable to talk to my GHL account. And that's only because GHL doesn't just have the, um, the database functionality that I need to run a podcast, a summit or other things that I run. Like sometimes I'm running an in-person event right now that I'm building in

in Airtable, right? So sponsors and speakers and all that. And so for me personally, since switching, I'm saving approximately 5K a year, which is fantastic. That 5K could, I mean, imagine what you could do if you could reinvest another $5,000 into your business. That could be Facebook ads campaign, right?

right? That could be a whole bunch of stuff. That could be a new computer. Easily, you could get a brand new Mac for that and upgrade your, you know, your, your work environment, right? There's a ton of stuff you could do with that. And I think it's really important to put numbers into perspective like that. So I'll give you an example of a current client that I went through this process with. So Sarah, one of my clients, she is a business coach and

She was paying for Kajabi at 199 a month active campaign because she ran only her course in Kajabi active campaign at 99 a month, Calendly at 15 or 19 a month. I think Zapier, which I think was a $20 or $22 a month for her. She also, for some reason still had a lead pages account because some of her high converting landing pages were in lead pages and that's 37 approximately a month. So yeah,

about 400 similar to what I was doing, right? After moving everything into a single solution, she immediately was able to cut her costs like a lot. And, and I love this because all the reasons, uh, things just work more smoothly together, which is fantastic. Right? So if you're, even if you're, you're looking at your tech stack right now and you're like, Jenny, I love my tech stack and I don't want to move. You don't have to move.

But eventually you may want to move. And if you do, I want to give you the tips to make it really seamless because one of the big barriers to moving and transitioning over to new software has always been the move. It is always prevent, like there's something about it that's just incredibly difficult. And if you don't have the brain, like if you don't have the know-how or the bandwidth to do it, also really daunting. So let me kind of lay it out for you the best way possible.

and make this like a no brainer for you to be able to do. Okay. First, I want you to take a look and audit the software that you currently have. What is completely essential that you cannot live without and that your new solution, GHL as an example, will not do yet. Okay. Then I want you to think, okay, so these are all the things. And I put mine in a spreadsheet. I figured out my monthly costs. Again,

I'm a Canadian using American software all the time. All my costs are in USD, converting it to CAD. And yeah, with our exchange rate, how it's been for quite some time, it's not favorable. It's just not favorable. And we don't have the Canadian solutions here for the most part to help us, right? And if they do, like I think FreshBooks is a Canadian company and I think even they charge in...

No, I think they still charge in CAD, but there's a couple Canadian companies that actually charge in USD. It is what it is. So let's talk about planning your migration. So you've done your audit, you figured out how much you would save if you went to an all-in-one solution like GHL and just kind of got rid of that bloat. Planning your migration is where it's going to hurt the most, but it doesn't have to be that bad. Okay? It's about timing, it's about support, and it's about backups. If you are organized about this, it will go off seamlessly.

Okay. So timing, don't do it during a launch. Don't doing it during a summit. Don't do it while you're out of the country and on vacation. Don't do it during those times. But there are times that are very easy to do it. I always plan oddly. I plan my migrations and everything that I've done in the past over some sort of a holiday. It's usually, it's usually Christmas and New Year's because it's quiet and it's usually two weeks.

Right. I don't have crazy Christmases and New Years. I don't have a ton of family to go run around and see and all that kind of stuff. So it's pretty easy for me to spend those two weeks, quite a bit of my time to be able to do this. Let's talk about support. If you were a one woman shop, a one person shop, then this is going to be all you.

And if you have a support team, a VA or multiple VAs to support you, this is where those people come into play. Okay. I do recommend having some support if you're just not tech savvy and you had somebody like help set you up and you can get a VA that will help you do this. Absolutely. If you have a team,

then this is where your ops person should be taking over this project and not you as the CEO. Stay in your lane and let your ops person support you. And if you don't have an ops person, but you have an ops-oriented VA who's also tech-oriented, good, you're golden. Use that person. So the first thing you want to do after your audit, and now you know you want to move, you figured out your timing, now you got to look at, and you figured out your support. If you have any, now you got to look at backups, right? This is where...

there's a lot of copy paste about to happen. So when I had my proposal software, all of my contract templates were in the proposal software. So before I canceled, I made sure to pull everything out of there. I copy pasted all of my contract templates. I took screenshots of data and stuff like that. So that, cause some of my clients were still active with me with contracts in that, in that proposal software. And so I needed to know,

When they signed, I needed a copy of their signature on the contract, so I downloaded PDFs. Everything went into a migration folder. Everything went in there, subfoldered it by, you know, this is the contract software info. Then I went to my email. Actually, I went to my email marketing last. Then I went to the landing pages that I have. Now, at the time of my migration, I had 38 active landing pages, not including my website because I wasn't moving that.

38 active landing pages in ClickFunnels because that's where I was playing. That's where I was working in it. Out of those 38 landing pages, I had about eight or nine that were high converting that were really active. The rest were active sometimes and taking in leads not all the time. And so what I did with those is that with ClickFunnels and GHL,

You can actually import funnels from ClickFunnels right into GHL and it will recreate it. It will need a little bit of judging and fixing like menus and imagery, spacing and fonts, but it gets you 80 to 85% of the way there. Like really brings everything over. And so I did that with all of my pages and it took a while. I created, create a spreadsheet guys, just create a spreadsheet, log all your pages on one side,

all the links to those pages because that's what GHL needs to move them over and then done completed column. Okay. And I just one by one did this. Now my team also supported me in doing this for some of the pages. And then I had a team member who's really good at just making pages look good. I just had them fix the images, fix the fonts, fix the font sizes, fix the mobile look and do that. Okay.

I'm still not live with this by the way, but everything is getting pulled over. Then I made sure that I had the right domains in GHL or wherever you want to go, but for me GHL, I made sure that I had the right domains. I set up my email domain. I set up my subdomains for my landing pages. This way I could still use the landing page on ClickFunnels because it was using the main domain for that. I think it was like summitsmadesimple.com/speakerbundle as an example.

And I didn't want to pull that domain over right away because it was still getting traffic and I still had bundles I was in. So I think I made a subdomain for a time period of like tools.summitsmadesimple.com forward slash. And that was my subdomain for a while. So I did that as well.

Then you're going to look at all the other things that you need to pull over, which is your email list. Okay. Uh, which is any form builder you use that you currently use in your business. So I was using type form and I was using the paid version and I needed all of the information out of that. Also all the data, right? So again, another folder, another download. Okay. Okay.

And then I moved over to using GHL forms and I just needed all those forms recreated. My team helped me with that. And then we tested it. It worked fine. Then things are a little sticky when it comes to your website. If you're like me and you put links to things and all your blogs, because that's what you do, please make a spreadsheet, go through that, find all the links and then find the appropriate links that everything's going to get changed to when you move over.

And so on. So you can see, yes, it is not easy necessarily, but it is not hard. Totally. It just takes time, support and backups. If you plan it out properly. I mean, my migration over from all the different softwares into GHL all told took about, I think it was about 10 days from start to finish spreadsheet creation. Everything's over and workable.

And I think the last thing I did was my email list. I had ActiveCampaign. I took a CSV of my entire ActiveCampaign account and pulled things out and then loaded. Now, the free, this is how I ran it. The free trial with GHL was, I think, 11 to 14 days. And I knew I was going to be paying for these other pieces of software because they all had different dates they renewed.

And so again, I made a list of like on my list of what they cost and everything. I also put the renewal date and I knew that some of them would have, I'd have to renew for another month in order to still access my data. I was also really scared about not being able to access my previous data. So for a couple of things, I did like pay an extra month. And I even, I think I even put

My proposal software, they have a hibernation mode on it and you pay like something really small, like six bucks a month for it. And I did do that until I felt comfortable with all of my proposals in GHL.

because there was a little bit of fear there for me because of contracts and things. I just didn't, I just wasn't 100% sure. So I paid this like hibernation fee on my account, just so I could access it when I needed to. And, and I ended up doing that once or twice, maybe three times, and then I cancelled it. So the cancellation of all your different softwares that you're going to get rid of, by the way, is super satisfying.

It's a pain in the butt sometimes because they hide how to cancel your account, but super satisfying. Loved it. All of a sudden I was like, oh my God, I just saved 60 bucks a month. Oh my gosh, I just saved 199 a month. Oh my gosh. Until I was seeing 400 and change USD per month. Freaking fantastic. Made me feel amazing. So my tips for easy transition and migration is make your lists, figure out your timing, figure out your support, get your backups, and

Rebuild high performing funnels one at a time, but get those ones done quickly and then just keep going. Don't draw it out because now you're paying for, you know, you don't want to pay for these softwares for a long time. Okay. A couple of advanced tips and hacks that I would kind of give you when you're looking at GHL and you want to save this kind of money anywhere that you are. I want you to, I want you to compare apples to apples. Okay.

It doesn't have to be GHL. It could be another all-in-one solution or something, but I promise you, you've got some ability to regroup your processes in your business, okay?

I want you to look at how to leverage automations inside these all-in-one tools for better ROI. I don't have people going all through all these different things like type form to, or no, quiz software to this and type form to ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels to Calendly and

Calendly with ActiveCampaign, which by the way, that tool never worked really well together for me for some reason. That integration and automation just was never functioning well. And I was in love with ActiveCampaign and their automations are pretty cool, but I'm just served better with the automations that I have now. And I'm building smarter funnels and I have less things that break. And I'm also able to

scale more quickly, quite honestly, because everything's in one spot. Just one login for the team, which is great. Oh, and I love, there's this thing in GHL that has audit logs. I can see if I want to what the team has been up to, what pages have been played with, what things have been done, what tags have been added, all this kind of stuff in these audit logs. Phenomenal feature, by the way. And I'm going to answer, I can hear you. I can hear you in my head asking me,

will my deliverability suffer? Is it risky putting all my eggs in one basket? How much support will I get when I switch over? I will also tell you right now that I was in awe when I opened up my GHL account because they have a button saying, click here to jump on a Zoom. And I'm like, really? Clicked it, jumped on a Zoom. There was literally a GHL employee there who helped answer some of my questions, which was great.

A lot of the people who white label JHL will absolutely move you over and they will potentially move you over as part of a deal or you pay them a monthly and they'll pull you in, which is great. That'll help a lot. So there's services like that that'll happen. I just did that for a client of mine. Phenomenal. They just got everything in there and then I just went and audited it to make sure it was okay. Perfect. Deliverability. Let's tackle that one.

I don't see where deliverability suffers if you create everything, document your process and just make sure you do it really, really well. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it from my clients. I moved another one of my clients into GHL in February. Actually, we're seeing better deliverability. It's great. But you do need to warm up your email list again in this client. So make sure in the software. So make sure you do that. Is it risky putting all your eggs in one basket? No.

Ask me five years ago, I would have said yes. Now, not so much. I really think it's pretty reliable at this point. It's been around for a while. It has very little downtime, which is great. ClickFunnels used to go down all the freaking time. And when they upgraded their software to like their 2.0 and I was on the 1.0, support for that was really poopy after a while. So because they want everybody to go to 2.0 and I didn't want to write.

And that's part of, that's one of the reasons why I moved by the way, is just, that was just something that was eking at me a bit. And so when we're looking at trying to save money, this is just one way that I want you to look at. This is just one thing that I can facilitate telling you about, which should help, right? Really give you,

some support so that you can break up with these softwares that just aren't working for you anymore and move on to a better life where something can work for you and help you scale and save you money and not have you in six or seven or eight different platforms or more. And that's what worked for me. I canceled all those subscriptions. I use one tool and it replaced my entire tech stack and I'm a happy camper.

So I wanted to share that with you in case it helps any of you to sort of figure that out. Okay. And so just to kind of recap, I want to make sure that

I've been super clear. And if you have questions about my experience or what it could look like or anything, I don't move people from whatever you're in into GHL. That's not my niche, but I'm happy if you want to contact me and ask me how it went or ask me any more questions, I'll be happy to talk about it. But my company doesn't offer that service. There are lots of companies that do, and there are really talented people that do it. I did it myself with my team because I have the tech know-how.

And I kind of honestly wanted to do it myself and figure it out. That's how I learned. But there are a lot of people out there who can do it for you, right? If you want to check out GHL, you can go straight to the website or you can check out the link in the show notes or you can go to JennyWright.com forward slash GHL and that'll be an affiliate link. I do get a commission if you do register for GHL and you stay past the free trial and you go into a paid level, okay?

And that's up to you. When you're looking at sort of how this can change your life, I know it's daunting, but I really know that it can change your business. And for me, it was really a bit of a game changer in my lifestyle for my business, which I really, really appreciate. So if you, and also I just wanted to relay one last thing. If you want to reference a little bit more context about what I'm talking about,

go ahead and check out episode 21 that's the tech stack you need to know about and have and it's just really i think it's a good episode that relates to this and then episode 35

is crafting irresistible lead magnets insider tips for building trust and i think this is relevant about new funnels and simplification in your platforms so go check out those two episodes let me know what you think and you've been listening this far thank you so so much for being here so many good episodes coming up would love to hear from you please make sure you're following acquire on any platform that you're listening on let me know what you think and leave me a review thank you so much for listening we'll talk to y'all soon take care