SaaS Dads S3 - E5: He Lost His Job With a Baby to Support, Then Everything Changed
What do you do when the income you were relying on suddenly disappears? In this episode of SaaS Dads, Gary sits down with Jonah Cockshaw from myGHLcoach. On July 2nd, 2025, Jonah learned that his role at Extendly was no longer needed as part of a company restructuring. The timing couldn’t have been much more difficult. Jonah and his now-wife had recently finished renovating their home, paid the deposit for their wedding, had a one-year-old son, and had decided that his income would support the family while his wife stayed home with their child. Then that income disappeared. Jonah shares exactly what happened next. Rather than immediately jumping into another full-time job, he gave himself a short window to see if he could generate enough income to cover the family’s bills. His first move wasn’t building an offer, choosing an ICP or creating the perfect agency. He reached out to people and companies in the HighLevel ecosystem and offered to help however he could. That meant taking flexible contracting work for between $20 and $40 an hour and working as many paid hours as possible. For several months, that meant 10, 12 and sometimes 14-hour days. But at the same time, Jonah was also: 👉 Answering questions inside HighLevel communities 👉 Commenting on posts 👉 Recording helpful videos 👉 Jumping onto Zoom calls to help people 👉 Building visibility around his HighLevel knowledge 👉 Growing HighLevel affiliate income When his affiliate dashboard reached around $900, Jonah realized that money effectively bought back roughly 45 hours of his own time the following month. That became an important turning point. He started saying no to some lower-paid contracting work and investing that time into building his own community, creating resources and running daily group coaching calls. The first daily call happened on November 6th, 2025 — and Jonah says they’ve continued running calls Monday through Friday since then. In this conversation, Gary and Jonah discuss: 👉 Losing his job while supporting a young family 👉 Nearly having to cancel his wedding 👉 Working 10–14 hour days to keep the bills paid 👉 The pressure that put on family life 👉 How he transitioned away from hourly contracting 👉 Using HighLevel affiliate income to buy back his own time 👉 Building a private community that was approaching 600 members at the time of recording 👉 Why he chose to put himself out there constantly instead of waiting for people to discover him 👉 Why Jonah doesn’t use AI to create his personal social media content 👉 The importance of authentic, human content 👉 Building daily coaching calls into his business 👉 Growing a team of seven, including Jonah 👉 Removing himself from much of the day-to-day client fulfillment 👉 How the business reached around $20K–$25K per month for the few months leading up to the interview 👉 Why approximately $5K of that was coming from HighLevel affiliate income 👉 Getting more time back with his wife and son 👉 His advice for anyone trying to establish themselves in a competitive market One of Jonah’s biggest lessons from the journey: “You first need to know your thing, but then other people need to know that you know the thing.” Knowing your craft isn’t enough if nobody knows who you are. You still have to put yourself out there. Connect with Jonah: myGHLcoach: https://myghlcoach.com/ Subscribe to Jonah: https://jonah.openinapp.co/subscribe HighLevel Checklist: https://succeedwithhighlevel.com/checklist 🔥 Jonah will also be attending and speaking at Level Up in Dallas. 👉 This is where it starts. Join our community: Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mycrmsim myCRMSIM Community: https://portal.mycrmsim.com/communities/groups Explore more: Turn contacts into conversations with myCRMSIM. https://mycrmsim.com/ Get Your Free Trial of HighLevel: https://mycrmsim.com/get-high-level
