ZenPilot

Most agencies make a fundamental mistake with their project management that hamstrings their ability to see a holistic picture of progress, workload, and where their time goes. The mistake is the failure to document and account for internal work. It's easy to prioritize client work and push your agency's needs aside. Look at the marketing efforts of most agencies, and you'll see this first-hand. Agency owners love to quote clichés about the cobbler's children, but it's primarily an excuse for not having our act together as business owners. We need to step up and do better. This applies to your operations as well. Plan, manage, and track your internal and client work in the same unified system. Your job in all three business areas should reflect in your PM tool. Let's look at the best way to do this. We break every agency business down into 3 areas: 📈 Growth - Marketing, Sales, Partnerships 🚚 Delivery - Client Services, Project & Account Management ⚙ Operations - People, Culture HR, Finance, Legal  In summary, Growth is where you make your promise, Delivery is where you keep your commitment, and Operations is an essential junk drawer in the world – how you keep the lights on, invest in the team and yourself, and protect your downside. The business model is simple, not easy. Here is a quick guide on how to structure ClickUp for your agency. #ClickUp #ClickUpForAgencies #CFA #ZenPilot #projectmanagement

Over half of the teams who reach out to us mention resource management as one of their top issues to solve. They're trying to balance demand (client needs and budget) with supply (employee and contractor skill sets, availability, and costs). And most turn to technology as the key component to solve this challenge. "As long as I have a modern-day project management system with a workload view, I'll be all set, right?... RIGHT?" At ZenPilot, we blend a mix of top-down and bottom-up resourcing. Bottom-up helps with the short term, and top-down helps with the long term. Regardless of the approach, your project management system needs to be your single source of truth and ultimate data collector to help you. Here are a few steps you need to take to start building out a more accurate workload view in ClickUp. 1️⃣ Document your agency's processes step-by-step as ClickUp templates. If you build process templates for everything that you do, and they leverage time estimates, due dates, and assignees, you'll get much more accurate tasks in your system to actually populate your workload view. 2️⃣ Each task should only have ONE assignee "Multiple assignees on a task = no assignees" 3️⃣ Your due dates should be the DO dates Due dates are our core prioritization method. Due dates are not just suggestions; they're when a task needs to be completed. We take it a step further and voice that the due date should also be the DO date—when the task needs to be started and completed. 4️⃣ Get rid of start dates Start dates just split up time estimates evenly across days, which isn't always realistic. 5️⃣ Remap overdue tasks If your team has a bunch of overdue tasks that still need to be done, these won't reflect accurately on the workload view if their due dates are in the past. 6️⃣ Optimize your process templates monthly Create a time estimate vs. actual dashboard to help you compare time tracked to time estimates. You want to use data to get your time estimates as accurate as possible. 7️⃣ Out of office time matters Time blocks can also be used to populate the workload view. You should be creating tasks in your project management system that fill up someone's workload when they are out of the office and can't take on any work. 8️⃣ Live by the rule of "if it's not in your project management system, it doesn't exist" Every task needs to be in your project management system to make your workload view accurate. This includes meetings, professional development, etc. 9️⃣ Create a QA view at the everything level (or a dashboard) to audit your workspace. Every task must have an assignee, due date, and time estimate to populate your workload view, but how do you make sure every task has the appropriate data? Build a QA view that only shows tasks that don't have one of those three ingredients. 👉 I've got a full training and PDF guide on this. You can find it here: https://lnkd.in/eu92NTSi

ZenPilot's hiring framework. An excerpt from our latest Agency Journey episode with Gray MacKenzie: Crafting a Winning Hiring Process for Your Agency. Watch the full interview: https://lnkd.in/e9hFZ-Sm #agencyjourney #agencylife #podcast

That horrifying realization when you're putting together slides for a presentation... ...and you look through slides from your previous presentations... ...and you realize that for a year+ you've had this beautiful goblin in your "about the company" slide. Must've used this for two dozen webinars and streams with ZenPilot to date, at least. Lucky that I caught it in time though, and it will finally be fixed for next week's All-In Agency Summit hosted by Chris DuBois. Hooray! And that's not the only way my presentation on Wednesday will be better than ever, so don't hesitate to sign up and attend. I'll be joined by 14 other speakers, all agency experts, including Ryan Watson, Lashay Lewis, Leslie Venetz, Logan Lyles, Marcel Petitpas, Ben Catley-Richardson, Corey Quinn 🎯 and more. Anyway, y'all have ✨ more a productive ✨ upcoming week, everyone!

Smart founder-led growth (shouldn't last forever). An excerpt from our recent Agency Journey episode with Zach Boyette. Watch the full interview: https://lnkd.in/eWy5BT5J #agencyjourney #agencylife #podcast

I just wrote the world’s most helpful, end-to-end, 81-page guide to implementing and using ClickUp for Agencies. 🚨Update, get the ClickUp for Agencies guide here: https://lnkd.in/e9GRmaed Yes, I've written ClickUp guides before, but this is my most detailed and thorough guide to date. It has literally everything you need to build your entire agency operating system inside of ClickUp (packed with step-by-step instructions, video tutorials, and checklists). This guide gives you: → Our proven ClickUp implementation formula (used by 3,000+ agencies) → How to set up your hierarchy of spaces, folders, lists, tasks, and subtasks → The best ways to structure work inside of ClickUp to improve visibility and team collaboration → Guidance on the key views your team needs → A framework for custom fields and how they play into your data schema and reporting → Step-by-step instructions on how to turn your processes into ClickUp templates you’ll actually use → Strategies for ensuring adoption and accountability so your ClickUp workspace truly contains all of your work → Step-by-step instructions on how to build a client health tracker in ClickUp → A system for assessing your processes (going way beyond ClickUp) so you can start improving your operations as a whole This guide is the result of 6+ years of in-the-trenches ClickUp experience and helping over 3,000 different teams get their operations in order, increase efficiency, and grow profits. This guide will be going on sale in October, but if you want free early access to the guide, all you gotta do is: → Like this post → Comment "ClickUp" → Send me a connection request if we’re not connected already And I'll shoot you over the link. (Remember to connect with me so I can DM you.)

This is the biggest mistake teams make when it comes to structuring tasks in ClickUp... They create one task and assign it to multiple assignees. When a new request comes in, it's common to create a single parent task and assign it to everyone involved. Don't do this. When you create one task and assign it to multiple people: ➝ No one understands exactly who is responsible for what. ➝ Each assignee assumes someone else will take charge, so things fall through the cracks. ➝ It becomes super difficult to track progress unless your project manager is "annoying" and checks in every hour 🙂 ➝ And then deadlines get missed because it's unclear who owns what. But to solve this, most teams are still creating one task, assigning it to one person, but then relying on statuses to automate assignment changes. Don't do this either... ➝ You'll make reporting impossible. ➝ Your workload view won't tell you anything. ➝ Your team won't know what work is on their plate until it randomly pops up on their plate the day of. ➝ You can't plan work at all, and your timeline will be non-existent. ➝ Meeting deadlines will be difficult. ✅ This is how you need to structure tasks in ClickUp: ⚙️ Break down work into subtasks - Don't use single parent tasks. Separate into subtasks for each step and owner. ⚙️ Avoid shared assignments - Only assign each task to one person. Never assign subtasks to multiple people. ⚙️ See the workflow end-to-end - Create subtasks for every step in the workflow. Ex: Write the blog post, review the blog post, send the blog post to the client, receive feedback from the client and make edits, etc. ⚙️ Build a process library - And to save yourself a ton of time and headaches, build out all your workflows, save them as templates, and deploy them over and over again. ✋ I just recorded a full training on the best way to structure tasks in ClickUp. You can get access to that here ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/e34JBcxi

How to bring up money when networking. An excerpt from our recent Agency Journey episode with Kurt Schmidt. Watch the full interview: https://lnkd.in/gYUsRWzM #agencyjourney #agencylife #podcast #networking

There are so many agencies out there that can’t properly spread their wings and grow to their full potential. And here’s 10 reasons why they’re stuck. 1. They don’t have a standardized system for measuring workload, managing resources, and forecasting staffing needs. 2. They don’t have a documented process for delivering client work—or, if a process exists, they don’t hold each other accountable to it. 3. They don’t have accurate reports that show profitability by client, service, department, and individual team member—and/or they don’t review these reports at a consistent cadence (monthly or quarterly). 4. They don’t know their client retention, churn reasons, and LTV metrics. (Ideally this data should then be segmented based on service, sales rep, and account team.) 5. They don’t know the key metrics required to measure the quality, efficiency, and profitability of their team—and/or they don’t know how to use this data to make better decisions while scaling. 6. They don’t have utilization targets for each team member and/or department, evaluating utilization on a consistent basis. 7. They don’t have a transparent, standardized process for adding and scheduling tasks in their project management platform—whether that’s ClickUp or anything else. (👆This is the #1 reason for work slipping through the cracks, BTW.) 8. They don’t have a well-defined, smooth and seamless client onboarding process—that bad first impression is hard to recover from. 9. They don’t have a system for measuring client satisfaction—so client issues often don’t get spotted until they become major fires. 10. There’s no system to make it crystal clear and granular for team members what work they should complete each day. Until you have these elements in place, you’re leaving your growth to luck. When you have them, you’ll be able to deliver the best work your agency has ever done.

🚀 Missed our August webinar? Here’s a recap! We partnered with Jakub Grajcar from ZenPilot to help digital agencies like yours take project management from chaos to cosmos! 🌀 If outdated tools and poor habits are slowing your team down, it’s time to rethink your approach. In the webinar, Jakub covered: ✅ The 1-3-5 Formula for clarity ✅ Choosing the best project management tools ✅ Time management tips for your team ✅ Creating a process-driven workflow for long-term success Don’t let disorganisation hold you back. Catch up on what you missed and perfect your processes with Globital! Watch the full recap here: https://lnkd.in/dMBYFmNC