How to launch Construction Snapshot for GHL in 24 hours

Most general contractors lose the first week of a new operating system to small, avoidable mistakes — DNS that wasn’t pointed, an A2P 10DLC application sitting in draft, a payment processor that wasn’t connected before the first deposit invoice fired. This guide eliminates those small mistakes. If you follow the steps in order and start before 9am, you will be live and accepting homeowner leads by the same time tomorrow.

Construction Snapshot for GHL installs twelve workflows, four pipelines, a sub roster, a homeowner intake, a change-order engine, and the document templates that wrap every job. None of that matters if your sending infrastructure isn’t warm, your subcontractor list isn’t loaded, or your photo capture isn’t wired to the right project record. The order below is deliberate — DNS and A2P go first because they have built-in carrier wait times, then data, then process, then go-live.

Read the whole guide before you start. Several steps depend on records or approvals you can submit during step one and check on later, so a single linear pass is slower than a parallelized one.

Step 1 — Provision GHL Pro and snapshot delivery

Construction Snapshot only deploys cleanly into a GoHighLevel Agency Pro sub-account because it depends on the API access, custom-object support, and workflow capacity that the Starter tier doesn’t expose. If you’re still on Starter, upgrade before you touch anything else — the snapshot transfer will succeed on Starter but several workflows will fail silently the first time they fire.

Once Pro is confirmed, accept the snapshot transfer email from our delivery account. The transfer takes 4–8 minutes to materialize. When it’s done, open the sub-account and confirm all twelve workflows are present (Homeowner Intake, Estimator Routing, Bid Follow-Up, Contract Sent, Deposit Reminder, Change Order Initiated, Change Order Signed, Sub Dispatch, Photo Capture Nudge, Punch List, Final Invoice, Review Request). If any are missing, do not proceed — open a ticket immediately so we can re-push.

Step 2 — Wire DNS and domain authentication

You need two subdomains pointed before your sending warmup can start. Use book.yourdomain.com for the homeowner-facing scheduler and leads.yourdomain.com for forms and funnels. Both are CNAMEs to the value GHL gives you under Settings > Domains. Add them in your DNS host (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Squarespace, wherever the zone lives) and wait for propagation, which is usually under 15 minutes but can stretch to two hours.

While DNS propagates, publish the three email authentication records the snapshot’s email workflows depend on: SPF (v=spf1 include:mailgun.org ~all with whatever other senders you already have), DKIM (paste the public key GHL provides), and DMARC (v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com). If you skip DMARC, Gmail will silently throttle you within 48 hours of going live.

Step 3 — Register A2P 10DLC for your construction brand

Carriers (T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon) now require every 10-digit long code to be tied to a registered brand and campaign before it can send any SMS at scale. The snapshot ships with the campaign templates pre-filled, but the submission has to come from you because it’s linked to your EIN. Submit on day zero — carrier approval averages 1–3 business days and sometimes stretches to a week.

You’ll need: legal entity name as it appears on your EIN letter, EIN itself, registered business address, website URL, and an “opt-in flow” description. For Construction Snapshot, the opt-in description should reference your homeowner intake form, your subcontractor onboarding form, and the verbal-then-written consent path for past clients. Use Campaign Use Case “Mixed” with sample messages drawn from the snapshot’s Estimator Follow-Up and Punch List templates.

Step 4 — Import contacts and tag homeowners vs. subs

Before the snapshot can route anything intelligently, it needs to know who it’s talking to. Export from your current CRM (or spreadsheet) and split into three CSVs:

• Past clients — every homeowner you’ve completed a job for in the last 36 months. Tag homeowner and past-client.
• Active projects — homeowners in any active stage from estimate to punch list. Tag homeowner and active.
• Subcontractors — your dispatch roster. Tag sub plus the trade tag (framing, electrical, plumbing, hvac, drywall, etc.).

Import in that order. The snapshot’s outbound workflows check the sub vs homeowner tag on every send to enforce different consent and cadence rules — if you skip the tagging, subs will receive homeowner nurture messages and the suppression list won’t protect you.

Step 5 — Configure project pipelines and calendars

Open the four pipelines that landed with the snapshot: Estimating, Active Build, Change Order, and Punch & Close. The stages are templated against a remodel/light-commercial workflow. Drag stages around to match your actual operation, but resist the urge to add more than two custom stages — every extra stage you add is another place a job can sit and rot. The snapshot’s automations are tuned to the default stage count.

Then connect your team calendars. Every estimator needs a calendar wired to the “Estimator Routing” workflow so homeowner intake can drop appointments directly onto the right person’s schedule. Set buffer time to 30 minutes between site visits (drive time), max two estimates per day per estimator, and a 48-hour booking window so homeowners can’t claim a slot for tomorrow morning and leave you scrambling.

Step 6 — Connect payment processor and financing partners

Attach Stripe under Settings > Payments. Authorize.net works too if you already have a merchant relationship, but Stripe deploys in under five minutes and the snapshot’s deposit-collection workflow assumes Stripe webhooks by default. Once attached, run a $1 test charge from the snapshot’s “Deposit Test” template to confirm the webhook fires the “Deposit Received” automation.

Then connect your financing partner. Construction Snapshot supports Hearth and Acorn out of the box. Drop in your partner ID and the homeowner intake workflow will offer a financing check as a soft step inside the nurture — homeowners who clear that check convert at 2–3x the rate of homeowners who don’t, because they show up to the estimate with budget certainty.

Step 7 — Configure photo storage and progress capture

Jobsite photos are the single most fought-over artifact in a construction business — they live on PM phones, in three different Google Drives, in text threads, and in nobody’s CRM. The snapshot ships with CompanyCam integration as the default. Connect it under Integrations, then map each photo project to the corresponding GHL project record using the project address as the key.

If you don’t use CompanyCam, you can fall back to a Google Drive folder structure with one folder per project, named <job-number>-<homeowner-last-name>. The snapshot’s “Photo Capture Nudge” workflow will text PMs every Friday at 4pm reminding them to upload that week’s photos. This is the workflow that does the most to protect you in a change-order dispute, so do not skip it.

Step 8 — Sync Houzz, Angi, and Google Business Profile

Every directory lead has to land in the same intake queue or estimating will spend 20% of its time hunting across tabs. Connect Houzz Pro via API, Angi via the lead-export webhook (Angi doesn’t expose a clean API but its webhook works), and Google Business Profile via the GMB integration GHL ships natively. Then point all three integrations at the “Homeowner Intake” workflow.

Run one test from each source. Submit a fake inquiry on your own Houzz profile, your own Angi listing, and a GMB message — confirm all three create a contact, fire the routing logic, and end up on an estimator’s calendar with the source tagged. Source tagging is what lets you compute true cost-per-job by channel three months from now.

Step 9 — Warm email and SMS sending infrastructure

Enable the snapshot’s “Warmup” workflow. It sends a controlled volume of low-stakes messages (review requests, satisfaction check-ins) to your past-client list over 12 hours, starting at 20 messages per hour and ramping to 150. This builds sender reputation with Gmail, Outlook, and the carriers before you start blasting net-new homeowner leads.

Do not skip warmup even if your domain has sent transactional email before. The snapshot is going to triple or quadruple your outbound volume in week one, and inbox providers measure relative change, not absolute volume. A domain that sent 50 emails a day for two years and suddenly sends 400 looks identical to spammers to Gmail’s filter.

Step 10 — Run the end-to-end test job

Create a fake homeowner contact named “Test Test” with your own phone number and email. Submit them through the homeowner intake form on leads.yourdomain.com. Watch the full sequence fire: intake confirmation SMS, estimator routing, calendar invite, pre-estimate reminder, estimate-day arrival SMS, post-estimate bid email, deposit invoice, contract signature request, and project kickoff.

You’re looking for three failure modes: merge fields that show \{\{first_name\}\} instead of “Test,” timing windows that fire outside business hours, and broken links in any document. Fix all three before any real homeowner sees the system. Then run the same end-to-end test for the subcontractor side — submit a fake sub through the sub onboarding form and confirm dispatch SMS routes to the right trade tag.

Step 11 — Brief your estimating and PM team

The snapshot will fail without team adoption. Schedule a 45-minute call with every estimator, PM, and admin who will touch the system. Cover four things: where leads live now (the Estimating pipeline), how to move a job through stages (drag in pipeline view), what the SMS reply hours are (8am-7pm local, after-hours auto-reply on), and where the change-order button lives on the project record.

Pin a one-page reference in your team Slack or Teams. Explicitly tell PMs not to bypass the system by texting homeowners from their personal phones — every off-platform text breaks the audit trail and exposes you in a change-order or TCPA dispute. The snapshot routes all PM-to-homeowner SMS through their assigned GHL number.

Step 12 — Flip the live switch and monitor 48 hours

Enable every inbound channel — Houzz, Angi, GMB, your website forms, your phone-tracking number — and watch the first ten leads land in real time. Sit with your lead estimator for the first day so you can spot routing issues immediately. Common day-one issues are timezone misconfiguration on calendars (jobs landing at 3am for the homeowner), missing trade tags on subs causing dispatch to no-op, and review-request SMS firing on past clients who don’t remember you.

Lean on the 15-day support window included with every snapshot. Log every weird thing you see in a single shared doc and we’ll batch-fix during the daily check-ins. By hour 48 the system will feel boring — which is exactly what you want from your operating layer.

Common pitfalls

• Skipping A2P 10DLC submission on day zero. Carriers can take a week to approve. If you submit on go-live day, you have a system that can’t send SMS for a week — which means no homeowner confirmations, no PM dispatch, no deposit reminders.
• Importing contacts without trade tags or homeowner/sub tags. Untagged contacts get the wrong nurture and you can’t unsend an SMS once it goes out.
• Leaving the test contact named “Test Test” in the production pipeline. It will show up in your reports forever. Delete it after step ten.
• Connecting Stripe but never running the $1 webhook test. The first real deposit failure happens at 6pm on a Friday. Find webhook issues in the test, not in production.
• Going live without DMARC. Your domain reputation will erode invisibly for two weeks and then you’ll wonder why open rates collapsed.

What to do next

Once the snapshot is live, the next two priorities are change-order discipline and TCPA-clean SMS — both have dedicated guides in this library. Read the change-order workflow guide before your first signed contract enters production, and read the TCPA-compliant SMS guide before your first batch of homeowner outreach goes out.

If you want a second pair of eyes on the deployment, the 15-day support window covers screenshare reviews of pipelines, workflows, and document templates. Book during the included support time rather than waiting until something breaks.