7 Agency Project Management Lessons from 8 & 9 Figure Agencies

All right, welcome everyone to the first of eight presentations today. Going through everything for the, the inaugural all in Agency Summit. And yeah, we are starting today with Gray MacKenzie from Zen Pilot. I met Gray three years ish ago back when head of operations at Lean Labs and we were trying to move over to ClickUp and revolutionize our operations process. And Gray and his team ended up helping us do that and then some to the point where we took a really, the system that we were already super happy with and now leveled it up so now the entire team was able to operate more autonomously. And when you have a completely remote team, that's super valuable. Lots of, I mean you were, you presented last week at Inbound, now you're sharing the stage here. This is going to be a, it's going to be a good presentation. So I don't know if there's anything else I should highlight here about you.

No, there's not. There's not that much. It's not, not a long story.

All right, well, I am going to disappear and give you the stage.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Chris. I'm excited to be here. This is a presentation that I've been excited. I've been working on this for a while in a couple different formats and so this is actually the first time that I get to share it with everyone here today. So I'm super excited to take you through these seven project management lessons from eight and nine figure agencies. Even though I said there wasn't a whole lot to say about me, I'll give you the quick kind of intro and highlight here. So, as Chris said, my name is Greg McKenzie. I'm a co founder at Zen Pilot. And ZenPilot helps agencies build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations. Which is kind of a like easy catchphrase to throw on it. But streamlining operations can mean a lot of different things. We'll talk about the three keys to what that looks like here in just a second and I'll give you a little bit more context. But just by way of saying, like, hey, I do not know everything, but I do have some good experience in this space. I've been in the agency space for going into year 13. Right now, we at Zenpilot have helped over 2,700 agency clients and deliver a consistent five star experience across the board. That one of the coolest things. And I'll share some examples of what this looks like today, but one of the coolest things in our work is that almost everybody who works with Zenpilot specifically going through the first step of our journey, the blueprint process. Almost every agency adopts at least one process piece from what we're doing, how we're treating clients into their client onboarding experience. And that's super cool to see. And it's not because we're like the rocket scientists or the smartest people about client experience. It's because when you work with thousands of agencies, you get to see what the best of the best do. And so these seven lessons today don't come from, you know, just my own, my own brain and what's put together. But this is kind of curated from seeing what the best and the biggest agencies that we've worked with do. So I host the Agency Journey podcast. This has been one of the most fun projects that we've ever started at Zenpilot. Chris has been on it along with 300 other agency guests over the last eight years. If you're not tuned in Google Agency Journey podcast, you'll see it, Apple, Spotify, wherever you, wherever you listen and see all the recaps and show notes on the Zen pilot site. I mean, in my past life, I put on here recovering agency owner since 2011. 2011 is when I started, along with my business partner Andrew, we started an agency called Guava Box. And I wrote this note here that I think is true of a number of early stage or just a lot of agencies in general, where it can feel like we take home more awards than actual dollars. And the very first couple years of Guava Box were kind of that story where you're not a real agency if you haven't won some random award for something. So we're winning these awards. We were 2012, I think HubSpot had this agency award called the Lead Growth Champion. That was, I think, the first award that we'd won in the HubSpot ecosystem. And the reality is we were generating all kinds of traffic and leads, and we had a really hard time converting those folks into sales and dollars early on. And then hit a couple pivot points when we'll talk about some of that stuff here today that was really transformational in terms of what we've done. So that obviously I couldn't resist. In an event hosted by our fearless leader, Chris dubois, I couldn't resist putting him up on the screen here. And I'd mentioned that I'd talk about the three keys to getting agency operations correct. And these are really the three key pieces. But before we talk about those three key pieces, I think it's important to frame, like, what is the Enemy to most of our agency teams and agencies. And the enemy is chaos. The enemy is the fact that, like, hashtag agency life is synonymous with chaos. We're also used to, hey, I've got to ask this person for that. And this client now wants this, and now they change their mind about that. And, you know, this contractor is late on delivering something and someone needs to spend a late night or we've got to launch this website project. And we've, you know, we're kind of overbooked in terms of what work? Or we've said, yes, hey, we can do that. We actually don't know how. We'll go back and we'll figure it out. And there's elements of all of that that are fine and natural, but there's so much chaos that we kind of inflict upon ourselves and our teams just because we don't have the right systems and processes in place. So the solution, the antithesis of that chaos is clarity and what we're after. The goal for our organization is clarity for everyone. From the executive layer, where I need to know, you know, what's our organization's capacity and what does our utilization look like, and what service lines are profitable and not profitable, what clients and or projects are profitable or not profitable, how do we make better decisions about how we price, package, serve clients, reward our team, retain our team, all of those types of things. So from that executive level down to, hey, I'm an account manager, and I need to have clarity on how my projects are going at any given point in time, and, you know, how my clients feel about that. And then if I'm an individual contributor, I need to know what's on my plate, what's the priority order, and how exactly do I do that? And so that clarity is the goal. And that comes from the combination of these three pieces. The tools, the processes, and habits. And the tools are where a lot of our efficiency come from. The processes are where a lot of our efficacy come from. Are we doing the right things? And the habits are. How do we make sure that this stuff gets done the right and best way every single time by our team? So we'll look at all of those today. But I wanted to set the stage of we are trying to create clarity in the very best agencies. The ones that have scaled have done an excellent job of creating clarity across the organization. And it comes from these three pillars. Okay, so got any comments? Got any questions? Throw them in the chat. Let's dive in to lesson number one here. The first lesson is all about Leverage. So there's not. We are known in the agency space for. Chris mentioned this earlier. They moved on to ClickUp. We were ClickUp's very first partner where their bet we're their largest rather and we're their highest rated solutions partner today. That is, if you asked me for like, hey, what's the best project management tool for most agencies today, I would say ClickUp. And I'm as incentivized as anybody to be like the ClickUp fanboy and say, hey, this is the magic tool that solves everything. This is the magic pill that lets you drop 30 pounds in 30 days and have all kinds of big muscles to show off like Chris. The reality is that when you get behind the scenes at some of the largest agencies who we've had the chance to kind of get inside their operations and, and work with and I mean this is like the lessons that I'm sharing today come from folks like so a ton of agencies, obviously 27, over 2700 over the last decade, but huge firms like Omnicom or Abstract Marketing Group or Client Boost. These are all lessons that are taken from, from kind of massive agencies like that. And when you get behind the scenes, they're not all running on the same project management platform. So it's not all ClickUp across the board. It's not all Monday.com or asana or mavenlink or Cantata or Reich or you know, whatever the, whatever the platform du jour is. But what they've all figured out is they've figured out how to combine simplicity, meaning like your project management interface. And really this is like this should go for every tool. This should go for what your sales reps are doing in your CRM to what your delivery team is doing in the project management system. They figured out how to make that end user experience as stupid simple as possible while still being able to get the insights that they need back out of that tool. And so that's where so much organizational efficiency comes from. What that means is as much as possible, we want new client comes on board, we need to set up the project. It's already templated, it's already simple to go deploy end users. They have a clear methodology which we'll talk about later for how they manage projects. And so end users have tasks show up in a specific simple screen every day. Here's what we do, here's if we got a time estimate what that looks like, here's the people who are impacted, here's the information you need about the project and they're able to quickly work through that. But then using the data model on the back end, so how that's structured and architected, they're able to pull back the insights around, you know, where's our time actually going? Who's got what kind of, you know, what are we doing from a resource planning and capacity management perspective. And they're not asking people for, for all that stuff. So I'm going to show you what that looks like in a little bit and an example of that. But that's the first lesson that I take away. And it's all about the principle of leverage. How do we combine simple interfaces for the team with powerful insights for the decision makers at the organization? Lesson number two is that they build clear scorecards and the PM tooling that they implement around it is the measurables that they're producing from their project management tooling is derived from what they needed at the scorecard level. So if we look at an agency. Let me pull up an example here. So I'll flip over to my other screen and let's dig around and find an example of what this might look like. So actually let me, I'm gonna, I'm jump two different places here. Okay, I'm gonna go to what does kind of an individual user see? Where are they inputting their tasks? I'm gonna, I'm merge two different pieces here. Individual contributor has, hey, here's the stuff that's on my plate, you know, here's when it's due, what's our time estimate, what's the process for, you know, what's our checklist for how we're gonna do this? I'm inputting my work here, but we've already defined what are the important measurables that we need. And so as I work through this, as I track my time based on the kind of the metadata or the data model of how we've structured our tasks and architecture. And right now I've got ClickUp shared here that's then able to spit out kind of the key metrics that we need. So tied to that, the project management software API. We're pull back out the data and say, okay, based on where time is going or whatever, here's what our most profitable or our least profitable, we flip this service line looks like. Or here are the clients where we're making the most money and the clients where we're making the least money. We need to understand what our utilization looks like, what percentage of our total hours that we have as a team is actually going towards paid client work. And that's, you know, in the agency business model, that is one of the key metrics. But that's your utilization rate, the piece that that's balanced with. You could work a hundred percent of your hours on paid client work, but if you're priced super low or your team costs are super high, you might still be making no money. So the, the balancing metric to that is your gross margin, or some people say delivery margin, or there's a bunch of different words that we could use here, but essentially what's the, you know, what's our profit margin on the work that we're doing for clients? So the higher our gross margin is, the lower our utilization can be, and we could still wind up with the same profit at the end of the year. The inverse is also true. You know, super low gross margin means utilization has to be super high. But we have to start with what's the end in mind. What are those key metrics that we're giving our team members? And so as someone who's leading client services, I'm going to give them metrics around what that utilization rate looks like. And as someone who's in charge of sales and delivery, sales and servicing, I need to be regulating, hey, what's the margin? How are we pricing this work versus the utilization to do it? And how much money are we actually making on both of these? And it'll trickle down from there in terms of what those metrics are. If I'm an account manager somewhere. See, we'll grab a, an example here of like, you know, overview of each of our client accounts. I need to know, let's go to, you know, buy a lead. I need to know, what's the health score of your clients, the average health of your clients. So Andrew, in this case is not meeting our standard for client health. Kevin also might not be meeting it. Gray is certainly not meeting it. So what is our standard? What percentage of. You know, and we could do this in a couple different ways. We could do green, yellow, red. We could do one through five, we could do one through 10. We could do a whole bunch of different rating systems. We can talk about that if that's interesting later. But across the board, regardless of the specific software, all of the most successful firms have really clear scorecards. And the project management tooling, the way that they have it set up all is geared towards being able to produce those key measures. So really starting with the end in mind, what are the metrics I need? Okay, here's what I need to have set up then to be able to push that back to me. All right, let's go to lesson number three. It's one of the simplest ones. It's one of the ones that we stumbled upon first as a repeatable pattern, and that is make the process live where the work gets done. If any of you have had the experience like I had working in a. In a physical store, I worked in a. In a lumber yard. And you remember all those three ring binders sitting on the shelves filled with process instructions, step by step, instructions for how we do things. These are the SOPs. This is how we operate. And they all gathered dust. And once a year, however long, however frequently the mandatory training was, that's when they got pulled out and dusted off and then never cracked open again. You know, those things were essentially never used. And the reason that they weren't used is because the process didn't live where the work gets done. We're creating friction, and friction's the enemy to any type of compliance. So when you create friction in a layer between. Here's the process. Way over here that you have to go hunt for, Google Drive is the new shelf where those three ring binders are. And when you create that friction, and you've got to go over here and hunt and search and try and find the process for how we, you know, onboard this client, or how we design this website page, or how we write this blog post, or how we promote this thing on social or whatever. When you separate the process from where the work's actually happening, it is really hard to get compliance from team members, Folks who are brand new to the team. They'll probably look at it, someone doing something for the first time in a while, maybe they'll take the time to go do it. But most of the time, those processes will not actually get followed. And if anyone's read the checklist manifesto or any books like that, you understand what happens when people don't actually have the checklist in front of them. In general, somebody knows what they're doing. They follow 80% of the steps. You know, hey, for the most part, I got it right. But those key pieces are what separate the teams that scale from the teams who tend to stay small and have higher client turnover. So what does it look like to make the process live, where the work gets done as close as possible? And so I pulled up an example here we are going to go to client onboarding, and I'm just going to show you, just because this is a common example that everyone can relate to. So we'll grab this and we'll just expand this client onboarding process. So client coming on board. What am I looking for? Think of that as the milestone or the deliverable. Once we wrap up onboarding, hey, we're in a good place now. We're able to move on to the next things that we're doing. In fact, some of this might even overlap and we might be doing it together at the same point in time. So let's, let's pull this up and just walk through what that looks like first. Every individually owned piece of the process is separated out as a separate in ClickUp vernacular here. And I think in most tools you're going to have tasks and subtasks. You think Asana Monday, teamwork.com, all the main agency project management tools, click up, they're going to have some sort of nesting task subtask. And I like to actually think of this parent task is more of the deliverable or the milestone. And then beneath that, each of the tasks are the individually owned pieces. And so our rule here is, you know, one assignee, there's a due date. And if we're trying to use time to create workload insights, we're going to use time estimates there as well. So every single piece here, as you know, every, every step in the process, from getting the deal, the actual financials and the legal side closed out, to updating the CRM, to introducing the client, replying to the email, setting up internal Slack stuff, adding to whatever platforms we have, getting login credentials, running the kickoff call, all that's part of onboarding and that should all be built out and templatized. And then when I say make the process live, where the work gets done, when I'm the strategist on the account and I have gotten added in, I need to reply to a welcome email. The sales rep has given me an intro to the client. I need to reply, what's the process for how we do that? You know, I want to empower my team with, hey, here's the email template that we use. If you're using HubSpot or any CRM, you know, bonus points even if you're using ClickUp and you want to have them send it out of, out of email, inside ClickUp. Bonus points if you've got this template out where they don't have to copy and paste it as well. But I want to give them, here's what this should look like. Here's the intake form that we're going to use. Here's the step by step checklist hey, you're going to hit reply, you're going to make sure you include the sales rep as the cc and we're giving them extremely granular details. And I underrated this the very first time kind of going through and building this stuff out. I figured hey, how much can that, can that possibly really matter? And the reality is if you're listening to this and you are, you know, you're with us and you're running an eight person team or a 10 person team, the issues that come from not being explicit in processes are just smaller. You have your process has a higher ROI for every repetition that it goes through, every time you run it, that process becomes a little more valuable. It takes the same amount of work maybe to build, but more reps equals more value on the return of that process. So a super small team taking the time to build these kinds of processes and checklists, you're going to have the payback period to make back your money on the time that went into building. That is going to take longer. But when we talk about scaling teams like this is how they get there and how they continue to scale is by being super explicit and by making that process live directly where the work gets done. So this is going to get assigned to me once a new client comes on board, you know, the template gets deployed live and we use automations to say, hey, you know this is going to the strategist for this account automatically assign it to gray. Now this shows up in my day to day work and I'm following the process right where the work gets done. Okay, hopefully that makes sense. Happy to go deeper on that one. But that is lesson number three that has really been driven home to me is make the process live where the work gets done. Lesson number four, this one I think will surprise you. Lead with explicit expectations. I don't think that's that surprising. Scale with detail and if you were inside the walls of Zenpilot were remote. So a whole bunch of different walls. But if you were on our 17 person team today, somewhere, you're in slack with us, you're in ClickUp with us. You're going to hear the phrase clarity is kindness probably 50 times a week. I think so much of life's success and success define how you want, but I think it is, you know, getting what you want from life, achieving your objectives boils down to knowing what we really want and then being able to articulate that clearly. So what do I really want in a relationship? What do I want from this talk today? What do I want from me on the other end as I'm watching this talk, what do I want to take away from this and how can I be clear about those expectations? The same thing applies to these teams, and this is one that Scott Scully at Abstract has really influenced my mind on their $70 million plus agency this year. And he is so explicit, his organization is so explicit around where your time should go. What, what does a day look like? Here's the order of operations in a day. You know, it's not just, hey, you've got these seven tasks, but there's actually an order of, hey, I think you need to work through things this way. And an example of that that he inspired me on, and I'm going to actually show you a real life example of what this looks like is we're not just giving people, here's the roles. Hey, you're a content marketing manager, so I expect you to, you know, produce X many of these and X many of that. But there's a lot of granularity. Every single role at Abstract has a breakdown of how you should spend your time. Kind of, what does an ideal calendar, what does an ideal week look like in your calendar? And so I'm going to share an example. This is a real life example from. Let me flip over and see if I can find this here. A real life example of, like, what does being explicit look like? So this is for somebody who's in marketing, and this is a breakdown and overview of, hey, it's not just that I want you to be a great teammate and do analysis and strategy and produce content and promote content, but it's an explicit breakdown of, hey, here's how I want you to spend your time. Roughly, you know, this may change a little bit week to week, but we're going to use time tracking and we're going to go back and we're going to look at this together and see, you know, where is your energy actually going and is it going towards the stuff that we think and believe is most important to the organization? And this has been such a helpful tool for onboarding new team members to not give them, hey, here's a, you know, assortment of stuff to go do and a general focus, but to give them real specifics around what expectations look like. So in this case, hey, I think your week should look like 20% of your time goes into being a great teammate, 10% of your time goes into analysis and strategy, 35%. And then, you know, the rest of the other 70% of your time is split between production and Promotion. And so what does that actually look like? 8 hours a week of your time means meetings, you know, communication tools and project management tools. What we're using for employee engagement, what does reporting look like? And then depending on what else pops up, there's gotta be some margin somewhere. This is a relatively small or low margin number. And for some roles that make sense, you think of an organization and the types of people in an organization and you get folks who are the bricks, super clearly defined what their role is. They kind of fit in a box. You get people who are the glue and they hold things together and they're floating between areas. And people who are the glue people, they need more margin time built in. People who are the bricks need less margin time built in for stuff that, oh, this was kind of unforeseen and popped up or this is an important piece. So hey, I want you to intentionally time box how much time goes into analysis, strategy, learning and planning. Because this is the piece that tends to expand the most. I want you to intentionally push your time towards production. And here's specifically what that looks like. And you know, I specifically want you to work on promotion. And here's exactly what, what this looks like. So this is just one of the examples of the pieces. So this is kind of the starting point written out from the manager. They're going to detail here's what I think this role needs to look like or here's what this has looked like previously. The next iteration of this is after some dialogue and back and forth, go build out an ideal week. In we use Google Toronto. So in Google Calendar, you're going to add a new calendar. It's called your ideal week. And here's what that time is going to look like. And we know that production specifically this is best done first thing in the day. So I'm going to encourage you to take the first 14 hours a week is what this looks like. I want you as much as possible to take at least the first two hours and ideally the first three hours of your day every day or batch it and have specific days that are, that are done differently. I want those to go towards your production time and you're being a great teammate and your analysis. You know, there's specific times of the week where that probably works better for you as well. And this, this can vary a little bit based on how people are wired. Someone's a morning person, someone's an afternoon person, but for the most part it's pretty universal from the work that we've done that most people get their best focused, creative work done if they can do it first thing before they have a chance to dig into email or Slack or ClickUp or whatever else is, is on their plate, you know, before they're going and kind of perusing all the things from the day to get distracted by the next step then. And we'll talk about this with one of the lessons a little bit later on. But the next step then is coaching people and holding them accountable. And it's not holding them accountable to hey, this ha. This week has to be exactly 14 hours. This week has to be exactly 14 hours. It's hey, let's look at the time, look at where things are going and let's bump stuff around as needed to give you the highest chance of success in this role. So this is one that kind of surprised me. This is not something, you know, I thought as an entrepreneur, everyone's going to want the same level of autonomy that I want and being told how to spend their week is not going to actually, you know, that's, that's going to demotivate people. And actually it's been the opposite where everyone's looking for that kind of leadership and guidance. Who's been on the team and from so many clients and I would say this is the vast minority of clients get this that I've worked with, get this detailed and explicit about expectations. But all the folks who've scaled have taken that approach. Okay, so it's leading with explicit expectations and detail scales. This is going to be one that I'm curious if anybody disagrees with me on this one. But the, the lesson is define your methodology of PM project management and understand and solve for the gaps. So any methodology that you build, and that's the first key is we're going to have a methodology. About 90% of Zen pilot clients use a due date driven methodology. That means inside click up in this example that every task for a client. So let's just expand this, you know, deliveries where all of our client services happen and we've got folders for each client and inside those folders we've got what work is happening. That every single task and subtask here will wind up with an assignee and a due date. And because we want to have the ability to do workload, it'll have a time estimate tied to it as well. And that's going to power things like this. My task view, what's my work grouped by what's farthest in the past to what's due today. Let's just take an example and bump it up to today so it'll break out and we'll grab another one and we'll bump it to yesterday. So you can see how this will wind up working out. We'll go ahead and bump that whole thing back a little bit. So what that gives us then is a view. It basically what we're taking is we're taking due dates and we're saying that's our priority prioritization matrix. That's how we decide what matters and what doesn't. The first layer of it is due dates. The second layer will usually use priority field as well. But that's our methodology. We got other folks who are running agile shops and their prioritization matrix looks a little different. But every methodology has a weak point. So the example in this case is kind of twofold. So one is that everybody is working out of this methodology. From this simple my task view, here's what's on my plate from what's due furthest in the past to what's due today to what's due coming up in the future. And if I'm doing a good job managing that, which is part of building a culture of accountability, my work is getting completed day by day. If I don't get it done, I'm updating it and I'm leaving a comment to everyone impacted. And that's part of our methodology for how we work through tasks. So where do things fall through the. Fall through the cracks. Then as soon as I take this and I delete that due date, that's now gone and it's somewhere in the project management ether. And so there's a gap in any system that you design. So anything that, oh, Kevin was on this now Kevin's not on this now that's going to disappear from his view. So this would normally be filtered down to just what specifically is on my plate. And Kevin would see what's on his plate and Maggie would see what's on her plate and so on and so forth. So what all of the scaled agencies have done is they've figured out where things likely to fall through the cracks. That's a super common example of how teams try to implement project management with a due date driven methodology. And then stuff falls through the cracks and someone goes back and realizes, and you're probably smiling right now realizing, oh, this has happened to our team as well. Like hey, somebody made a silly mistake, they accidentally clicked something or they intentionally clicked it, not knowing what it would do and all of a sudden it was gone forever. And then we realized that six months later when the client turned and we tried to figure out why we didn't do something. And they finally tell us that we didn't give them that thing that we talked about six months ago because somebody checked off or accidentally removed themselves from a task and nobody caught it. So what all the skilled agencies have done is they've figured out what methodology works best. I'd say for most of you listening, a due date driven methodology makes the most sense. And then on the back side of that, they figured out how do we fill the holes in. So that means we need a view for anytime there's no assignee and there's one person specifically responsible for going in and saying, oh, you know, we've got this filter, let's delete this. We get this filter for anytime an assignee is not set and we're looking through what is happening here, obviously we'd filter this down so we'd exclude templates or whatever. It's kind of hard in a dummy portal, but there should be a pretty short list. Hey, we need a way to see what tasks don't have a due date. We need to see what tasks don't have a time estimate. If we're trying to use this workload feature, whatever you're trying to use, there's some gap somewhere and somebody. When we're working with a team, we call them the click up champion and it's the person who's appointed internally and they've got clear dashboards and clear rhythm to go through how they're going to manage it. But they need to be able to fill those gaps. So that is not the, the sexiest of the lessons for, for sure. But this is a recurring theme that plagues early stage agencies. Folks who don't have a clear methodology or they have a methodology, but there's no accountability to it. And that just does not exist in agencies that scale. All right, we're gonna move on to number six here, cultivating a culture of accountability and coaching. I think if we could all see each other, if we were in a room and said, hey, who here wants to have a culture of accountability? Every single arm goes up. It's not even just agency owners, it's not just agency operators and leaders. Individual contributors in pretty much every agency want more accountability than exists currently. You know, the person who's willing to say yes commonly gets overloaded because other people don't say yes. And there's no standard for what capacity looks like or how do I know who to load up with what it's just kind of, hey, you're more skilled or you're more eager to say yes, so you get more work versus someone who's more comfortable with the awkwardness of not raising their hand when they get asked who can volunteer and help out. So there's a handful of things that go into this cultures of accountability. And it all starts with what I mentioned earlier, really clear expectation setting. Here are the rules of engagement that we're going to have when we train teams. Specifically just project management. We'll see if this pops up for us. We'll walk through, hey, Here are the 10 very explicit rules around what project management looks like. Here is explicitly what your morning routine is going to look like inside the platform. Here's what happens when you're tracking time, or here's how you're going to, you know, communicate and what needs to happen. And so that's just on a smaller scale, like what are the explicit instructions that we're giving people? But that doesn't create accountability. That's just a prerequisite for accountability. Accountability on the back end is holding people accountable to those, to those rules that we've set for them. So what that looks like. I wanted to take you through four different practices, four habits that I think we should all be employing right now, whatever your project management system is. So it may, it'll look a little bit different. But talking about taking care of your client services team, your delivery team, in our vernacular, I think there should be a daily spot check, there should be a weekly roundup, there should be a monthly review, and there should be a quarterly analysis. And each one of these has a different purpose. Daily spot check is critical for making sure that nothing's falling through the cracks and spotting bad habits early. And a daily spot check looks like looking at, hey, what's overdue? What did we not get to? What's not updated in the system that was meant to be updated today? Those things like, hey, where did an assignee accidentally got pushed off of something, the due date got removed or got rescheduled here accidentally. And so we'll build simple dashboards for how that should get set up for that internal ClickUp Champion, if they're in ClickUp or whatever platform they're in. So they'll have their own dashboard that they're working through to, you know, spot any issues and, and then go address those. And this is the big thing is this is not a, let me slap your wrist and say, hey, bad job. Most of the time when people are making mistakes, it's an innocent. I accidentally clicked that, you know, I was in a hurry and I forgot to stop my timer there. So that's why it ran for eight hours when it really took me 14 minutes. It's almost all innocent stuff like that. It's great, good intention. People made a simple mistake. And so we're using that as an opportunity to coach and improve people's performance and help them build healthier habits. That's the daily spot check. The weekly roundup looks at a couple extra things, but it's really just a summary of, hey, here are the key metrics from this week delivered to agency leadership. And so this report should not be run by an agency owner for sure. One, they just won't do it. They'll get distracted, other things. Two, it's not the best use of their time. This is not the highest value tasks that they can be doing. But on a weekly basis, this roundup report goes to the leadership team and then the direct manager of anyone who's a recurring issue. So, hey, Chris never tracks his time, even though we all agreed this is going to be the standard or he tracks, you know, he tracked 19 hours this week. It was a full work week for him. So somehow there's, you know, 20 something hours that, that are left untracked or he's not doing anything. I need to go to Chris's boss and say, hey, here's the issue. I've mentioned this a couple times. I'm getting rude responses or no responses back. We've got to address this and solve it. So both the daily spot check and the weekly roundup are really activity driven, activity focused kind of habits Here. The next two pieces that go into cultivating that culture of accountability are the monthly review, the quarterly analysis, and so on a monthly basis. Now I'm going to go look at metrics like, like these metrics and I'm going to go back through and see, you know, how are we doing from a utilization perspective, how are we doing from a margin perspective. And depending on your team size, this may be more or less frequent where you're digging into these numbers. But we're understanding, hey, what, what projects are going off the rails and where are we just absolutely making no money or you know, from a labor perspective, who's severely overloaded and who's not and how do we make those adjustments. And then on a quarterly basis we're going the next layer deep. So hey, we've already identified that paid search is consistently a problem for us. We make $137 an hour when we're doing that when we do consulting or we do HubSpot work or whatever else, you know, we're making significantly more. It's our worst service line that we provide in terms of profitability. So our significantly more. It's our worst service line that we provide in terms of profitability. So our decision then this is where we put more work into is hey, are we delivering it wrong and do we just need to get more efficient at what we're doing? So now I'm digging into processes that I'm finding out what's consistently taking too long and then where do we need to go make those fixes? Or is it not at all a delivery issue, it's a packaging issue and a pricing issue and we need to go charge more for it. Or in the most drastic scenarios, you know, hey, should we just cut this all together, outsource it, come up with another solution? So that is. Those are the four kind of consistent habits that I think every team should have that are part of creating a culture of accountability and coaching. Those are the four that are most directly related to project management. There's a bunch of other ones we could talk about in terms of people management as well. But your daily spot check, your weekly roundup, your monthly reviewing, your quarterly analysis are the four main habits here. Okay, who's ready for number seven? Number seven is the tail end of what we just talked about, which is the habitually practice decision making based on accurate data. So not scattered data where people are half heartedly time tracking and then we're looking at that and saying, oh yeah, here's, you know, here's how we should quote up the next project. It looks like these projects take us, you know, 80 hours on, on average when that data is not actually correct. Most of early stage agency decision making is gut feel and I think that's totally fine. There's not that much good data to rely on when you're super early stage. The farther along you get. If you've actually given people clear expectations and held them accountable to that and built that culture of accountability, the better your data set gets and the more you built, you should be building that muscle of making decisions off of it. A ton of teams stall out in the 20 to 30 person range. The number of most, I guess, I guess you could look at this and say, hey, there's just an ongoing diminishing number of agencies that continue to grow. But a ton of folks first stall out at five to 10 people. You get beyond what one person can manage. Fewer folks stall out in the teens, but that happens as well. But a ton of agencies go to die in the 20 to 30% range. And that's because you need to get the next layer of management built up at that team size. You know, that's, you don't just have a couple other managers now, but you've got kind of an element now of needing to manage those managers and do that well to continue growing. And the other thing that happens is you start to transition from, you know, it's a different skill set to make good kind of gut feel decisions earlier on to, hey, we've got better data now we can start making decisions off of that. And it's not just that we can do that, but we'll actually make better decisions if we do. And so teams that continue to scale, you think about it, at 30 people, you're much farther removed from the day to day. And that's, you know, doubly true at 60 people. But what the end user, end client experience starts to look like. And so the data becomes your best friend and super important. So when you're looking at your dashboards and you're figuring out, hey, what are the issues that are happening here? What's happening? You know, our utilization looks healthy, our gross margin looks relatively healthy. But we're having this issue with these clients. What needs to change. This is the skill set that's constantly true of the teams who have scaled the best is that they make that transition from being a gut, feel driven, decision making team to one who reviews the data and makes decision around how they're going to expand products and services or contract products and services, make investments in the team or in marketing based on data and not just based on how they're feeling about specific things. So we are tight on time. We can go deeper into a couple of those. Like what are the types of dashboards or the types of insights that they're looking at? I'd say the other. The. One of the big things that I'd throw in quickly here as we are wrapping up is capacity, planning and workload. You know, up to 10 people, it's really not that big of an issue. Just ask people, hey, can you take this on? Can you not take this on? And the farther that you scale, the more that becomes an issue. You have to have, you know, a clear, fair way of allocating workload and knowing when to hire, where we need to change, you know, improve capacity or where we need it, where we're overstaffed and where we need to shrink down. Okay, so there's A lot to cover, but those are the seven project management lessons that I've taken away from working with eight and nine figure agencies. Again, create leverage by using tools that combine simplicity and powerful insights. Build clear scorecards and make your project management feed the outcomes, the numbers that you need to see. Make sure that the process lives where the work gets done. Be extremely explicit with your expectations. You'll scale the detail. Define your methodology of project management and make sure that you're solving for the gaps. Every methodology has some gap somewhere, some, some place things go to hide. So solve for that. Cultivate a culture of accountability and coaching that means help people perform. It's not just a, hey, you didn't hit this standard, but it's coaching. How can I come alongside you and help you hit that standard and then make better decisions by relying on accurate data? All right, if you would like to check out what your project Management Health at your agency looks like today, go take the agency Project management health benchmark. Tools.senpilot.com PM-benchmark is the link. 20 questions. You get the score right from the end. You can put in your email and you can get kind of the full benchmark data. So you get your score right away and the benchmark. Throw in your email and you'll get the full kind of data set from the Project Management Health benchmark. And then once you have that, if you'd like to walk through that with me and my team and build out what your agency operator scorecard should look like, go to zenpilot.com call book a call with our team and we'd love to help you improve your operations. All right, Chris, that's a lot to run through, but that is seven lessons in 45 minutes.

All right. And almost to the, to the exact time. So we are on, I think a pretty substantial delay for. So right now, everyone like you're probably catching up to these final slides. Send questions in. If you got any questions for gray right now, send them in. I'm actually going to open up with a couple questions questions. If you want to take some.

Yeah, that'd be awesome. Let's do it.

The first one, where are you? Where do you see chaos the most within an agency's operations that you can address immediately.

So I talked about this last week at Inbound. Are you familiar with the Eliminate automate delegate framework? Yeah, I'm sure a million people have said it. Tim Ferriss was like the first time I remember reading this. But anywhere that you can cut out variables like it's almost always on the services side of an agency. And it's usually drawn, everything's tied together. So I think it usually stems from kind of a scarcity mindset from the owner and a lack of focus. So we create so many different variables by taking on so many different types of work. This is like my story verbatim. For the first year of running, an agency was like digital. Yes. Men. Sure. You need a Facebook page figured out, we got to create a Wikipedia entry. Why not? We'll figure that out on the back end and just inflicting chaos on your team when you do that. So the more you can eliminate variables in what the client work coming in looks like, the easier that it gets on the back end. But most of it stems from saying yes to too much. The phrase more businesses die from indigestion than from starvation is extremely true. So I think that's the first piece that I look at is, hey, where can we start eliminating some variables? And then part of those variables happen. You have to do some work and there's going to be some variability in your work. So a lot of those variables happen in project management. Everyone's allowed to use a different system or a different methodology and that creates so much chaos for teams. Cheers.

Yeah, I think I've seen that with plenty of teams. So a couple of the other things you brought up. One, expectation management. That is one of the key reasons that agencies fail. You are like poor management of expectations with your clients, with your team, which anyone you get, that scope creep, you know, comes in, you're starting to waste your budget, waste your time, and it's all because of that. And so I think being able to build the dashboards and have that visibility with everything you just showed, it's like, is critical to being able to get hyper clear on what you need to do as an agency to be successful.

Yeah.

So what a big takeaway for me.

I think it's so funny that, like we get caught up in, hey, I want to exceed expectations over and over. And actually like the key to every relationship is just set clear expectations and all. You don't have to go above them. If you just meet them consistently, you're in the top, like 2% of, you know, people in the world, hey, I said I would do that. And you didn't have to think about it because I have a reputation for consistently getting it done. If you go above and beyond, that's awesome. But it's not at all required to be exceptional at what you do. It's just be really honest about what you're going to do and then do it consistently.

Yeah, that reliability goes a long way. Yeah. Um, but okay, I think we got no questions coming in. So everyone's still digesting and then doing or doing the assessment right now to be able to send you a scorecard.

Awesome.

Uh, but all right, great. Thanks for. Thanks for joining. There's going to be a replay available for this for anyone who did miss it. They can check it out as long as you've registered for the event and everything which if you're listening to this, you obviously have been and connect with Gray throughout the day. We get. You can use little chat features within the tool.

Right.

It's not just the main stage. There's networking stuff built in. You can leave a testimonial about how you think the presentations are going, do specific call outs for lessons learned, takeaways. It's awesome. But we will kick off the next presentation in 10 minutes with Alex Glenn. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Chris.