Common agency project management issues: Q&A with Kevin Stevens

Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome to the Zen Pilot live show. Hello everyone and hello, Kevin. My guest for today, My guest is Kevin Stevens. Kevin, how are you doing?

I'm doing quite well, Kuba. How you doing over in Polska?

In Polska is cool, but like too cool for the current season. We've got like low temperatures, some rain, some gray skies. It's really unusual for this type. I mean, we should be sweating, it should be sweltering. It is not. So thanks for asking. How is things over on your end?

I'm doing quite well, aside from. I will say I lost a battle with nature over the weekend. I am currently struggling with a little poison ivy in multiple locations of my body. Had a couple of ticks over the weekend, which was disgusting. We have like a. We moved into a house fairly recently and we're doing a lot of renovations and it's kind of out and like there's a lot of. We have neighbors around, but there's some wilderness behind us and. Okay, I was trying to improve the view a little bit and ended up getting some scratchy and itchies afterwards. And so I've got a doctor's appointment this afternoon, trying to get that solved.

People are like, I want to live in nature and then nature lives on them.

Nature always wins that battle, especially with me. I try to take some precautions and thought I did a pretty good job of that, but evidently not so.

You know, my two year old is currently obsessed with ticks. He will pick, pick up his plushies, he will get a glove and he's just saying, I'm taking out ticks, I'm taking out ticks. It's hilarious. And anyway, dear watchers and listeners. Yeah, I don't know where he even learned about that. Anyway, let's move on. Dear watchers and listeners, welcome to the show. Let us know if you can see us and hear us. Please drop a comment that you can see us and hear us. Very important because this is being recorded and we want the recording to be good. So if anybody's got distorted audio, distorted video, let us know. Also, share your best tips on how to deal with ticks and poison ivy. Kevin needs them. Okay, we'll be looking to these comments. Looking forward to them rolling in. In the meantime, Kevin, I wanted to ask you, you know, today we'll be talking about common agency project management issues. You hear about them every day in your conversations with agency owners. So I wanted to ask you, who do you hope is tuning in? What kind of person in what kind of situation? Like who's going to benefit from listening to this conversation.

Yeah, I think first of all, my role is I get to talk to everybody who is interested in working with us, which is incredible. But I think the right person for this conversation, first of all, if you're ever considered working with us, obviously great fit here. I'm going to talk about a lot of the commonality in the conversations. What I hear often, if you're experiencing obviously pain in your agency at the user level, at the management level, ownership level, whatever that looks like, that's always a good fit. We're going to go over a lot of those common pains today and I think really mindful owners could really benefit from this today. And the fact that, you know, this is not just about ROI or what are we, like, how are we going to function as a, a business. There's also a happiness quotient to it and like a, a metric there that we, we really need to grasp onto. So I think that's, there's a good fit across the board there. And anybody who's curious about how we work with our clients, always happy to share that too. But the commonality and maybe benchmarking yourself against where you are with other agencies is always a good point for us.

Yeah, I love that, especially what you mentioned about the happiness quotient. I mean, when you think project management, I mean, a lot of people are thinking about productivity, but it's also, you know, the quality of your project management, you know, the quality of your visibility. It affects how happy people are at your company, which affects how long they're going to stay and the quality of work that they're going to do. So great thought there. Kevin is saying good afternoon from Lakeland, Florida. I've got deja vu, Kevin. I think you were watching us last time. Thank you so much for joining. Again, if you've got any questions, shoot them our way. And a LinkedIn user, this happens sometimes, is saying, I can hear you. I checked this. It's Jeff Seifer. Thank you so much for joining us, Jeff. Happy to have you. Jeff is our productivity professor. He was featured on the previous episode of this show. If you haven't seen that and just go back one episode and you'll find the episode with Jeff all about how to fix chaotic agency project management using primarily click up. Alrighty. So I'll have another question for you, Kevin, but in the meantime, to our audience, to the people joining in, you know, this session, I've got questions prepared for Kevin, but this is for you. We're doing it as A live stream so that you get to ask your questions about agency project management issues. So how about you tell us about the issues that you're facing? Kevin can tell you whether they're common or uncommon. Okay, we've got, we've got a quick tip for you here, Kevin. If it has three leaves, let it be interesting. I think that's, that's for the poison ivy thread.

Earlier on, I definitely had that perspective going in and understood that I had to attack some three leaved leaves, whether it was poison ivy or poison oak or whatever it was. But yes, thank you for the tip. I unfortunately was aware of that, but I had to, I had to get rid of them somehow. So I did make some contact, but I thought I was like cleaning up well enough, but great tip, thank you.

Okay, gotcha.

And Kevin, by the way, I've been to Lakeland many ways. Okay, cool.

Okay. Yeah, so Kevin's been to Lakeland. Awesome. What was I saying? Dear watchers and listeners, tell us about your agency project management issues and we'll prioritize those in the conversation with Kevin. So drop them in the comments in the meantime or moving on. Kevin, my question to you, something that I always like to start with before we get, I don't know, deeper into your background or anything. I want to deliver some value to our audience from the very start. So I'll ask you my traditional question. Every guest gets this. I'm sure I'm going to get it at some point as well. I did actually, from Gray on Agency Journey once. The question is this. What is your number one tip for agency operators?

Oh, number one is, man, that's a challenge. I've got a couple to throw out there. But I would say number one would be to really look at this from not as much as a cost perspective, but more of an investment perspective for the business. And like, what are we going to actually benefit from from this? What's, what's the dollar amount? What's, whatever currency you're using? Like, how is this going to impact the business? How much time and space is that going to create for us? And like, what's the value of that? Most people do not have that vision. Some people will coming in and I appreciate it when they do. But most people look at it is like, this is an upfront cost. I can afford it, but I can also afford to do other things with this money. And they're not really looking at the long term thinking about the back end and the ROI attached to it. So I would say that's really Going to be the, the first thing I would recommend think about it in terms of the impact and try to quantify that and look at that versus what the initial cost is.

Yeah, exactly. So here, by this, what I'm hearing you saying is working with Zenpilot and just making use of our services of our agency, project management consulting. Right. But here's what I would add to that. Even if you're not thinking of going with a consultant, you have to think about kind of the ROI on the effort that you invest in your processes, in rethinking your tool, in building the right habits for your project management. That might also seem like an upfront cost, at least, you know, expressed in hours and, you know, other priorities. You might have to let wait for a moment. It is still worth it though. And we talk a lot about the ROI of just focusing on making sure you're running a tight ship in terms of your agency and in terms of your project management. So can you explain a little bit?

Yeah, I was going to say just to expand on what you mentioned there, the time saved aspect. I can speak from my personal experience, so I'm a financial planner, have that type of background and I spent a lot of time and effort trying to build out platforms and click up for my previous business. And in the hindsight, I learned a ton. That's how I found Zen Pilot and a ton of the free resources. But in hindsight, I spent far too much time working on that when I could have been working on other things. So there's opportunity costs there that I can speak to personally from my experience that I can help owners and operators kind of work through as well.

Yeah, exactly. There's also an opportunity cost in figuring things out yourself versus taking something tried and true. Excellent. Very well. So thank you for this number one tip for agency operators. We'll add it to the bank, which is slowly growing here. Next up, here's an interesting thing. We had a plan going into the session today and then something transpired. You mentioned on Slack that during one of your conversations today with an interested prospect, he mentioned an anecdote that really shows the importance of having your processes locked down, having tight project management and just making sure that you're running this tight ship. I'm not giving it justice. So, you know, I know there's a story involving a prospect. That's about as much as I know. So can you tell us, Kevin, you know, what is the story? How did it go? What did you learn from it? What's the message?

Yeah, the timing was incredible. For this conversation, I think it was really cool and it was really cool and the fact that he actually mentioned it and thought that I should bring it up today. So I really appreciate that. I'm not going to mention him by name but if you're watching live or if you're going to watch the recording, I appreciate it. But it was like a perspective change from all of this. So like I mentioned, we always take an ROI based approach and we want to make sure that is there for everybody but the happiness side. And then like there's a whole other perspective to it that I got reminded of this morning from this conversation. So this gentleman, a little bit of background. We've been having conversations for a decent amount of time I think at this point, nine, 10 months and he hasn't pulled the trigger on working with us currently in ClickUp, needs to revamp that sort of stuff. So he. We've had conversations over the last few months and our recent conversation was in June. We scheduled another follow up call after that and during that time period he had a medical emergency and he's the owner of the business. They did not have, you know, clear visibility on processes, on what was going on with current projects, any of that stuff. Stuff. A lot of the processes lived in their heads and, and that sort of thing. So they unfortunately were motivated by a life event that happened. Maybe I should have done a better job of showing him that on the front end a few months prior to this happening. But it did motivate them and, and the rest of the team, they went through two weeks where they did not have their leader in place and he was, he is the head of the business. And so they didn't have direction. They had a clear need that was shown to them that they knew existed. But right then and there it happened and came into play. So it was a great conversation. It was a reminder for me that like this is about far more than roi. It's about far more than saving time and being efficient. And it's really about like lives there that are dependent upon a leader or an owner that, you know, you've got to have something in place in, in case that person steps out. So it was really interesting. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

So am I getting this right? You know, the emergency was of such a nature that he just, you know, from moment to moment had to drop off and, and hope his team is going to be able to run the business without him.

That's right. And it was unexpectedly, it was, you know, it was something where he was down. I don't know how life threatening it was, but it was something where he was down and away from the business necessarily at least one week and then it extended out another week. So it was two weeks without clarity. And you know, that, that was a perspective change for him and great reminder for me.

Okay. Yeah, I can imagine, you know, any agency owner or business owner in general just asking themselves that question, you know, what happens if I drop off for two weeks unexpectedly? And then I think instead of relying on, you know, on your brain, the owner's brain, you really have to build that second brain of your organization. And those are the processes that you have documented the workflows that are, you know, clear enough and whatever tool that somebody you know without having a conversation with, you can follow that process. Because there's recorded videos on how to do it. There's. Yeah, in ClickUp you can have a task template, deploy it, have SOPs in there, you know, all the relevant links to all the relevant resources. I can see how, you know, it's, it didn't feel as urgent and important before the emergency, whereas after, yeah, it's, it's, it just changes your perspective completely. Like you mentioned, that's where I've got.

To get better, Kuba. I've got to, like, I've got to get that and convey that message a little bit better on the front end to everybody I talk to. So, yeah, you know, that word gets out. But yeah, I look at that as my responsibility in that situation that I kind of failed at. He had a, you know, something that forced him to see it, so.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I love that. I love a good story. I think a good story is worth, you know, a thousand, you know, just tips. So thanks for sharing that. Just a reminder to watchers and listeners, if you have any questions whatsoever about what we're covering here, feel free to drop them. We're going to be launching into the kind of the main part of the conversation and finally talking about the issues that Kevin is seeing. So let me hit you with the first question, like I want to ask you about the common issues and the kind of less common issues, starting with the former. So tell me, Kevin, you know, in your conversations, when agency owners, or agency operators, as we like to call them, come to you, what are the most common project management issues that they come with? Of what nature are they? What, what are they?

There's a ton of them, I think, imagine in general, before we get into naming specific ones, like we always focus on three areas when we're helping clients. There's three pillars that have to be focused on and all of these pains fall into either one of these areas or multiple. And it's obviously the tool like we can, we need to get the PM tool correct, we need to get the processes side. So that's the second piece. But the third is the habit side, the behavioral side, making sure that all three of those areas are working really well. If you don't have all three of those going, it's not going to be successful long term. So that's going to be typically where the pains, I hear, fall into either one of those categories or kind of across all of those. So I think the, the most common I probably hear is a lack of visibility on different levels of the hierarchy and, and different levels of users as well. So like for your individual work, that would be a lack of having all of your work, all of your tasks in one spot, not having to go to other screens, not having to go to other systems to find your work. That would be really one of the most common at the user level. And then of course not having visibility over that with overviews of clients, deliverables, whatever projects you've got going on. And then just the business in general, management and ownership typically lack those type of views that allow us to see utilization profitability, important metrics to be able to make good business decisions. So that lack of visibility is like the number one thing I hear at one or all of those levels. And that usually exists whether you're in, you know, XPM tool or another, whatever other PM tool.

So, okay, I'm curious if this resonates with the watchers and listeners with us today. So let us know if you know what you're currently doing to have that visibility into the levels that Kevin mentioned, spanning the whole spectrum. On the one hand, what are you using for your individual contributors to know, what they have to do on a given day, in a given week, what they've committed to. Also taking into account all of the clashing projects where you talk about Project A in the morning, Project B in the afternoon, Project C later on, and then you've got all these commitments and you're not sure if you can meet them on the other end of the spectrum, I'm not doing this correctly. On the other end of the spectrum, what have you got in place when it comes to visibility into utilization profitability? You know, there's more than one way, of course, to solve this, but I'm just curious about what everybody's using. Okay, so that was within the common section. Anything else that's quite often said during these conversations.

I think in general, people often come into these surprised that what they're telling me is common. So all of these pains, and I think that's a. I think that's hopefully going to provide a level of comfort for people coming into the. Anybody that might be hesitating to come into the conversation with us. There's no embarrassment factor about how everything looks on your end whatsoever. And you would be shocked at what I hear and see more so than not. So I think that in itself is worth mentioning. But as far as other, you know, common pains that we hear, delivery failures due to either lack of client communication with the client or internal communication, a lot of handoff errors there that occur between teams and between the departments. So that is something we hear quite a bit. Like there's not a great way to have a vision of all the clients and what the health is in one spot. That's a very common issue. But really it's. There's. There's so much commonality between I. What I hear from different agencies of different sizes and different focuses and service areas. It really is shocking that most people actually don't have good visibility across the board and they don't have, you know, at each level. So I think having an idea that there is a solution out there, there is something that exists. Most people have doubted that coming into conversations and they're surprised at what, you know, what our team is able to accomplish, which is cool.

Yeah. You know, that reminds me of how I even first met Zenpilot in the first place. I was facing, you know, I had a lot of questions. I was using ClickUp. I was very excited about it. I saw a lot of the potential that was there. But I had so many questions about, you know, what should be a task, what should be a subtask, what should be a list, what should be a folder, what should be a checklist. I mean, ClickUp offers a lot of possibilities. And you're right. I also wasn't aware of this whole world of, you know, people, companies, consultants, not just us. Right. But people who have looked at us, looked at that, and who have actually found frameworks that work, that bring out the best in ClickUp. I remember my first call with Gray Mackenzie, our co founder, back when I wasn't part of Zenpilot. And he showed me a full zenpilot task template. And it was a thing of beauty, not just with dependencies between the subtasks, but what I particularly liked was I found it difficult to handle situations like I have multiple copywriters, for example, and I don't want in the task template something to be pre assigned to a copywriter, to a specific copywriter, or to all of the copywriters because then too many notifications about stuff that they don't actually need to do. And Gray showed me you can have just a custom field for these roles, right? Role copywriter, role designer. And then once you deploy the template, you can actually map it to specific people. I thought that was brilliant. Like that one conversation changed how I use ClickUp ever since, even before I joined Zenpilot.

Anyway, I got into one important note on that too. When roles change within the team, it's very easy. You don't have to go back and change those templates up. You know, you can just make the, the proper assignment instead of a lot of people use assignees within those templates and have those pre built in. And when that occurs, obviously you have to go back and change all of those. Long term when people change roles or have new employees, that sort of stuff.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's fairly simple to build a system that works, but most of the DIY systems that I see, they're like very fragile to change. And that's where the difficulty lies. When things change, how does the system still keep running? I wanted to also ask you, I don't know if you mentioned that already, but I also want to ask you about the issue of internal collaboration. For example, meetings. Does that ever come up, that there's sync meetings, meetings about tasks. I feel like that saps the life out of people when it comes to internal project management. Does that come up in your conversations all the time?

Yeah, that's very common. And people spend far too much time trying to figure out like not only what we're going to do, but where are we with current people. So that is, there's far too much conversation in meetings in Slack. So many different channels going on there and a lot of wasted time that I hear quite a bit. So that is, I mean, you hit on one of the most common there for sure.

Okay, gotcha. All right, so I think I am almost ready to go into the kind of less common, more uncommon issues, but within the common ones. Did you have, you know, any more to add that? Like, I mean, I'm hearing there's like a breadth and variety of these issues that come in. Was there anything else?

I think it's kind of cool to bring up another recent conversation that I had. Yeah, this is really like there were, you know, four team members on the call, one owner and three people on the day to day. And there was a little bit of a disconnect there between perspectives. Ownership was basically, they're in a situation where they told me they were unable to bring on new clients because they couldn't handle it. The infrastructure of the system, it would be a mess. They've had delivery failures. So bringing anybody new on is just going to add to the pile. So they need to obviously get a solution in place. But this, there was a little bit of a detachment from ownership to the people working day to day. And I actually, it was interesting. They expressed a lot of the pains and it was, it was pretty severe, to be honest. But you know, the owner's perspective, he was really looking at it from just an upfront cost, not thinking about like the happiness side of it as well. But they were, they were not able to bring on specific clients. And like, what's the, what's the value of that? Take your average client on a monthly basis and apply that across the next 12 months or however long your, your typical relationships last. That is a very easy way to, to gauge a simple measure of what you're missing out on. And that, you know, that question in particular, I did not ask that. That's a question I ask a lot. But one of their team members actually asked that to the owner and basically said, look, what would it be worth to you if you. He was more sales focused. And she said, you know, what would it be worth to you if you were able to bring on, you know, X client, Y client and all of these different people that they had lined up in the pipeline that they were not able to bring on. So it's a really quick and easy way to think about like in dollar terms, what the value might be. But I hear that quite a bit from teams and I thought that was a good example from a conversation I've had.

Wow, that's amazing. I would say, you know, from what I've heard of the stories at Zenpilot, like, it is, it's not always so clear cut, but in this case, I mean, if efficiency is the thing, or like project management is the thing that stands between you and taking on new clients and whatever that client is worth or these clients are worth, that stands kind of directly opposite to the cost of actually getting some help with project management. And you can just make a positive ROI here. So awesome. See, I knew it would be a good idea to get you on the show with all these stories that you've got.

We've still got time Left. We'll see.

Yeah, of course. But we do. We do. And I just. One more reminder for the watchers and listeners here. If you've got questions, lay them on us and Kevin will be happy to assist. By the way, I just remembered something that I wanted to mention a few minutes ago. You mentioned kind of visibility into tracking clients client health having a single source of truth. I mean I faced this problem as well and tried to solve it in ClickUp, but not necessarily successful. That's because I didn't have the agency Client Health tracker. So this is something that you can actually grab from our site right now. If you go to zenpilot.com in the resources section, the agency Client Health Tracker is there. And that's like a plug and play ClickUp template that gives you one single source of truth where you can track a variety of information about your clients. Who's the point of contact on your side, on their side? What are their goals? What are their numbers? What are the services that you're providing there? It gives you a taste of what it looks like when you have a ClickUp solution from people who've done it for like almost 3,000 agencies. I'm just a tad self promotional today, but you can grab that for free. Zenpilot.com agency client health tracker and there's a bunch of other downloads there as well, so I remembered to throw that in. Okay.

Can I add one thing there?

Kua I guess. Yeah, go ahead.

Very quickly. It'll be very quick. But one of the important aspects of that the client Health tracker, like we use NPS NET Promoter score and that is excellent to get feedback from clients and understand like where your client health lives. But the problem with that is that it's a lagging indicator. It's always looking backwards and you don't always have a current grasp on what's going on with each client. So the. That's a great use for the health tracker gives you a proactive way to prevent churn.

Yeah, exactly. The way I usually talk about it is that it allows you to see where the client fires are in advance, early enough to react. And on the other side of the spectrum, if you see there's a high NPS and there's positive comments from your account manager about a given client, maybe it's time to reach out to them for a case study. I know from experience that window sometimes opens and closes and you'll either grab that case study or you won't. I've dealt with that a lot, as in my previous kind of Content role. Yeah, thank you for adding that in that. That was actually something that I wanted to mention there as well. So, look, Kev, I think we got through a lot of the common issues. Shall we go into the less common ones? What do you say?

Sure, let's do it. Okay, so I think, yeah, roll it.

The uncommon ones, then. That's like, that's. That's the question.

I think some of the more uncommon, I guess it depends on, you know, situation. So if you're on a larger team, bigger team size, a lot of the things that I'll hear, not quite as commonly, but like the, the communication between the handoffs, the communication between those, those roles, and making sure that obviously clients are taken care of from one department to the next or one team to the next. So I think that's definitely one of the things that I hear. A little bit less common because it varies based on team size. But also if we talk about like, integrations and getting other software built into the system to communicate whatever we need to do there, I think that ends up being, you know, sometimes we'll have an odd request, but most of those are going to be, you know, very common that we've worked with and created those solutions quite a bit. So the integrations, I would say are a little bit less common, but that's definitely a pain. And then also those communications between teams, departments and the handoffs, that's interesting.

So about the integrations, can you drop some examples of what kind of integrations you get asked about?

Definitely. So native integrations within the PM tool with ClickUp, if we're talking about Slack or if we're talking about Google Anything and putting docs and sheets, all that good stuff. Also any accounting software that needs to come into play. So, you know, some of the more popular ones obviously are QuickBooks, Xero, and then CRMs tend to be something that we need to get communicating. HubSpot is obviously something that we're using ourselves on the front end for the sales side. And then it pushes into ClickUp and lives in ClickUp from that point on. When somebody becomes a client, that's an integration I get asked about quite a bit. One of the more popular integrations obviously, that we've built out, And I know ClickUp has improved that relationship with them too. So the accounting software, CRMs, usually invoicing any type of billing software that'll come into play, those are the most common.

Yeah, and I've, from what I've seen, we've got, you know, solutions for that as well. Invoicing contract management. I mean, not to drill too, you know, too deep into the nitty gritty of like, particular solutions, but I know that there's stuff in our arsenal for that. I love seeing our HubSpot integration in particular. I mean, I'm in marketing, you're in, you know, you might say sales. And you know, we obviously love to see deals closed, but it's not that. Not just that, you know, when the deal gets closed, we get a notification about that on Slack, but also like ClickUp tasks automatically get created in our system so we can jump on the delivery straight away. You know, the promise makers have done their job, the promise keepers are coming in straight and it's, it's, it's beautiful to behold. Honestly, I love it.

Yeah. I will say one, one more thing. On top of that, when I moved, like, I thought the system I created in the past was pretty good. I thought it was like I had done a better job. I was an advanced user and I came over here and I saw everything that our team does and it's like, this is how the pros do it. I had no idea.

Yes. Yeah, that's a lot of people have that feeling, I think, coming in. Alrighty. So the next question I wanted to ask you is about. It relates to the three pillars that you already mentioned. I have a feeling and a suspicion I should be asking that everybody, like on the Zen pilot live show, I should be asking like, what is your favorite pillar? My favorite pillar, the three pillars, in case we need to repeat them, are tools, processes and habits. Right. A lot of people focus just on the tool. My favorite pillar, when I'm thinking about where things actually go wrong in project management are the habits. Again, I've seen it happen, I can admit failed at this. For example, didn't have much of a ClickUp champion in my previous experience. I was trying to be the ClickUp champion, not always rising to the challenge. So we say that to fix chaotic agency project management, you need to configure your tool well, set up your processes, but also build the right habits. I wanted to ask you, and again, my particular favorite are the habits. I wanted to ask you though, within the three pillars, the issues that you see. Am I on the right track saying that a lot of them are habits based or is it more complicated than that? Which of these three pillars do the issues map to? Most commonly?

My favorite is also habits. And I think I agree that most of them will map to the habit side, like the tool and the processes. We can get those laid out Perfect, like you can, you can knock those out. But if everybody doesn't know how to use them properly, where to go in the system to find certain things, like if there's not consistency and there's not that, that leader who on the team, who we refer to as the champion, to hold people accountable to long term use, it's not going to work. So the tool and the processes are incredibly important, but without the third piece that is by far in a way the most important to me. And it's not just training, it's not just the ClickUp champion, it's involvement. And like that's the first piece to any change management. And like we've got to get people early involvement in the process. And I love the fact that like on our onboarding it's step two to be able to get feedback from the entire team and use that in the design process. But I love that we put such an emphasis on attacking that early on in focusing on the habits and trying to get feedback from what people are currently experiencing. But also like just getting their involvement and getting them excited about something is really important. And the fact that we focus and put so much of a tendency to focus on that is really important to me and it makes me obviously believe in what I'm helping people do with their business.

Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, a lot of people see it as a, as a change in workflow, as a change in tool, but it's also a culture change. And at the same time I have a feeling that sometimes kind of the habits piece is not there, but people blame the tool. And that's why we've got agencies tool hopping every 18 months, every two years, thinking, okay, fresh slate now it's going to be better what I usually say, or like the new house. But if you're a messy person, you'll make it messy again and it won't be a good place to live in. So you have to change those habits first. But that's just the analogy that I used to. I know you moved to a new house.

Yeah, it's all coming together here. Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. And for most teams, like if you don't have that in place, you might be successful for a month or two. But when you get beyond that, you, you lose focus of like how you're supposed to be doing things, where you're supposed to be communicating, like at what level and all of those clear directions that we give teams, without that down the road, it's, you're going to have users like me, who are guilty of having overdue tasks and you know, the champ has to reach out to. And luckily we have an awesome champ that does that. But like, that's. That's going to happen unless you know, you have the weekly, monthly, quarterly recurring task to. To maintain the system.

Shout out to our ClickUp champion. That's. That's Gene currently. Right? Shout out to Gene. You're doing great.

Gene is so awesome.

I love getting DMS from Gene. Hi, Kuma, how are you doing? I'm like, I know I have overdos. I'm working on it. It was a time zone.

I know where this is going.

It was a time zone issue, I swear. Okay. All right, Kevin. So that's a good feel. Like we explored pain.

You just brought up Kuba. That's a good pain. You just brought up time zones, remote teams. Yes. I didn't really give that much thought, but I do hear that quite a bit. And obviously a lot of agencies have team members all over the world and we do as well. And that has to be like you. You've got to have all of that figured out with out of office, obviously, communication around time zones, timing for any type of meetings or anything. So that is definitely a big pain that comes into play that I failed to mention.

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of out of office, you. Thanks. You gave me a perfect excuse to talk about the live stream we're going to have a week from now. This one is far from done, but one week from now, actually, next Wednesday, we're going to be talking with Alex Rosaya, our solutions team lead. And for example, if you were ever curious about whether you can run an out of office management system in ClickUp, yes, you can. Alex can tell you about how to do that. Can you run EOS within ClickUp without a specialized tool? Yes, you can. Alex can tell you about that. And there's a bunch of other use cases, like advanced ClickUp use cases, stuff that makes you think, can ClickUp do that? It can join our livestream next Wednesday. I'll drop a link in the comments later on, but you can find it also on our YouTube right now on the ZenPilot LinkedIn. You'll find it very well. So we went quite deep into the issues. I feel like I even learned quite a bit for my own use. Lots of content ideas and ideas for other live streams, webinars, blogs, etc. Thanks for that. I love to have good inspiration for content. Now, I wanted to shift gears just a little bit and, well, we talked about the questions that you get the problems that get brought to you and even before you pass people on to the solutions team, if people decide to go that route with Zenpilot, I know you have some, like, some advice of your own to share even on the call that you have, this initial, you know, this, this first call that you have. So I wanted to ask you, what advice do you commonly give agencies? You know, you find yourself giving that type of advice the most when it comes to fixing their PM problems?

I think there's a couple of things. Obviously what we just talked about with the three pillars is always coming into play. Like you have to solve the problem based on those three issues. Like you've got to attack it from those perspectives. So that is, is always going to be a big piece of it. I would say the other thing is like just in general, if is it working for you right now, what does it feel like? How does the team feel? Is there frustration? What's the mood like? Take action. You need to do something. Whether it's what is working now is not working. So like reach out to us, get a blueprint at least or you know, some sort of advice. Whether it's us or anybody, take action. It's, it's not going to change, it's only going to grow. And I hear that all of the time tons of rapid growth stories that we go through in our conversations and agencies just aren't able to handle it. So I would say try to get some sort of solution going, whether it's with us, whether it's somebody else. But a change has to be made and you need to realize that so.

Yeah, exactly. And it needs to be comprehensive, it needs to cover all three of these areas. So you mentioned the blueprint and I'm taking into account a lot of the people on the call might have the context of what the zenpilot blueprint is. But for some of the people who may not have the context. Could you do like a, like an elevator pitch of what zenpilot blueprint is?

Yeah, it's, it's the engagement that we start with, with every one of our clients. So when they come in we want to figure out obviously like some teams are coming from different platforms, some teams are in the current platform. So it's going to be an audit of how you're currently doing business and how you prefer to work with your clients. We need to, it's really our discovery and strategy for what a proper implementation would do. So we take typically three calls to focus on that, sometimes more. We're always outcome based we will add call additional calls in if we need to get some clarity. But the whole idea behind it is like, we've got a design for those three areas. The tool processes, behavioral side, that habit side, designed for the training, designed for, like, what level of membership we need, all of that stuff. And that first engagement, we do that in typically six to eight hours or so with participation from our clients. And obviously we're going to have some homework in between that. We're going to really information gather with and then we're going to use the time together in our calls as the most valuable time. So, like, that blueprint is how we figure out, like, what do you need to track? What do you need to see what's the end result? And we basically take that end result design back from that and put it together on a blueprint. We also look at, you know, KPIs that you want to track, give you that path to be able to do so in the future, and then at the end of it, really is a success plan.

Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. One element of the blueprint that I particularly like is the agency operator scorecard. When I saw that for the first time, I was blown away. You punch in your numbers and you know that that happens throughout the. The calls. Punch in your numbers of where your utilization is right now, where you want it to be, where your profit per FTE is right now, where you want it to be. And you can see kind of, you know, in dollars, the gains you can have and how much healthier your bottom line can be when you make these efficiency gains. And one other thing I wanted to add about the blueprint, I've heard it described a few different colorful ways. So some people said that working with Derek, who handles the blueprint process for us, Derek Harvey. I should have him on the show. I'll have him next, or maybe into three weeks, that it's that this process is like project management therapy. You know, people lay it all out of what's bothering them. The way I think about it, the analogy I came up with is like, it's. It's like when you go to the doctor and you get like a proper diagnosis of what's happening and, you know, and a good diagnosis that actually identifies the root causes of what ails you, that's worth its weight in gold. And this is what the blueprint process is all about. At least that's how I explain it to myself and occasionally two people on live streams. All right, so quite often these days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, I love live streaming. Gotcha. So I wanted to ask you, we talked about, you know, kind of the advice that you find yourself giving agencies and of course you have to look at the problem comprehensively, etc. I think some people would like something a little bit more concrete. Could you share a couple quick wins that agencies can already implement to start getting project management under control? Even if this is kind of the last you're going to see of Zenpilot, something that they can latch onto and just make their project management 1%, 5% better.

I think you can be successful in a lot of tools. I think you like one actionable item you can take away from this and have a really big, big impact with no matter what the tool is, is like what processes do you have that exist, how updated are they? What do you have that does not exist? Like what are your needs there? Wherever those live, compile them in whatever. However those look, I hear, you know from those live in docs, those live in notion, those living all over the place all the way up to we have actual templates that we roll out with clients. So whatever those look like for you, gather them in one spot and then anything that doesn't exist, go ahead and start taking note of those. And if you do something more than once, go ahead and start jotting that down or taking note of it. And just each step in the process you only have to do it once. And then from that point on it's far easier to, you know, template that and just roll it out, make adjustments, that sort of stuff. So I would say like first things first, get thinking about the processes you need to tackle, go ahead and gather those. And I know we have free resources that are helpful with that too. I'm sure you can point people to the right direction there. But yeah, I would say that's like the most actionable step you can take.

Yeah, that's a basic step. Write down your processes and also categorize them. You know, how frequently do you use them, how documented are they right now, how critical they are, how critical it is to get them done right. Probably the client facing processes are the ones that's going to going that are going to be the most important. For example, in our marketing team we're doing that for all of our marketing deliverables. You know, do we have a process for live streams? I'm fleshing it out more and more for the Zenpilot live show, for this type of live stream and you know, et cetera for blog posts, social media posts, you know, you could Even see Kevin kind of with your own eyes. I was assigning you tasks. Here's the guest checklist and here's what you need to review.

I was just getting ready to compliment your preparedness for this. It was incredible. Kuba had everything lined up for, for me. I really didn't have to do a whole lot to be here. So I appreciate that.

That's what it looks like. That's what it looks like. But what I wanted to kind of impress on the watchers and listeners here is that it's like Rome is not built in a day. And a basic template or a basic process or even just a checklist is a great start. As you run this process over and over, you'll flesh it out. Like, what I love about this kind of process driven approach is that it feels like I've not done much coding in my life, but it almost feels like coding. Like there's this thing that you can run and every time you run it you can improve it bit by bit. But at least it gives you this sense of stability that there is some sort of code for this kind of function of your business. If you don't have processes, it's almost as if you don't have code and you're just manually moving data from one point to the other. Full of analogies today. Anyway, free resources you mentioned. Let me just get through that because some people are like, let him get to the resources already we've got. What have you got? On Zenpilot.com under resources you can find the AI process builder. I mean, in the age of AI, this gets even easier. If you are drawing a blank on how to plan out processes or you want to start delivering completely new service lines for your agency, you can grab that and AI can write your processes for you. At least give you just an excellent 80% done starting point. For your processes under resources, go to AI Process Builder. And if you ever have questions about AI Process Builder, Jeff Seifer, our productivity professor, is the creator of it. So you can message him, follow him on LinkedIn. He's a great follow. Other than that, we've got the Process prioritization worksheet, which is fairly simple, but it's still very useful and gives you a template on how to think about that. I just checked our site and I don't have a link like a direct link for you on our site. But you know what, just message me at. I'm going to use a banner for this. Leave me an email at this address. Jakubenpilot.com Process Prioritization Worksheet. Just mention it and I'll send it your way. Okay. Maybe some other bonuses if you're curious about anything else. So Jacob, zenpilot.com I'll send you the process prioritization worksheet. No problemo. Very well. So we're almost to the end of our time here. If anybody here has got questions or comments or concerns or anything else, now would be a great time because we'll be closing shop here soon. Ish. In the meantime, a couple more questions for you, Kevin. So let's call it what it is. There's basically two routes to think about agency project management issues. You know, I mean you can DIY it, you can solve it yourself. Many agencies have had success with that. You know, when they have the time, when people are engaged enough, and when there's the free space to think about it, that's possible. And then other agencies go the consulting route, they grab an expert, whether that's us or somebody else. In your mind, when agencies decide to work with Zenpilot or a consulting company in general you know, to resolve their issues in your view, like why do they decide to go this route instead of the DIY route?

I think number one is like, well, there's a lot of reasons, but number one is time. That's the biggest factor, accountability to getting it done. There's always going to be other work to do and like some teams do come through and they want to self implement and they go take that route and nothing gets done. So it's a revisit. We need to get an, you know, updated information and get them going back through with us. So that's, I think like the biggest challenge is going to be like the time side of it. It's going to be the commitment level and being able to put the effort towards it instead of, you know, taking people off of client delivery or just creating the spirit time and space to focus on it. So I think those are really going to be the two biggest factors. Yeah, I'll leave it at that.

Yeah, I mean way I usually talk about this, I'm using this phrase a lot today, but the way to look at it is companies like ours or like consultants, they've done a lot of the guesswork for you. You know, I think that that's again, as somebody who has been in that seat of actually doing the guesswork, figuring things out myself, it takes a lot of time, takes a lot of doing. It sometimes distracts you from your core work. If I'm honest, it's very Useful when it's built. While it's being built, it's messy, it can confuse people. You show them something half baked, it doesn't work for certain edge cases or even just less common cases, and you start losing their trust. There's only so many times that you can say to your team, hey, we'll be reinventing project management at this agency before there's just built in resistance. And they say, okay, another one, you know, so it's. It pays off to do it once and to do it right and to stop hopping between project management tools and frameworks and systems every 18 months or every two years is the what I would add on top of that. Alrighty, so we're nearing the end of our time here. I'm going to ask my insurance question and we'll probably wrap up after that unless we get a question coming in in the comments. You know, my insurance question. Here it goes. Is there anything, Kevin, that you wanted to mention on this live stream that I failed to ask about? Anything important that you wanted to convey to our audience today before we wrap up?

Yeah, I would say if you are curious about this whatsoever, if you're feeling the pain out there, anything that you likely are feeling, I've more than likely heard. So sometimes our conversations are even therapeutic, like just to get it off of your chest. I've heard that many times from people, which is really cool. But I think, you know, having a conversation about it, figuring out like where you stand, what the possibilities are for you and then we can help determine what the impact will be. But I just, I appreciate when people have a vision to, and a little bit of foresight to go ahead and plan for the growth that is coming. And a lot of people just wait until they feel the pain and they're not able to handle the growth. So try to, try to have a little vision, get, get a solution of some sorts in place. And I would highly encourage you obviously to get that solution with us.

Yeah, that's great. You know, if you want your project management woes, you want to get them off your chest, grab a therapy session with Kevin. I'm going to change all the CTAs on the site now. You know, PM therapy call. I wonder how that's going to increase our conversion rate.

It's probably going to blow up.

Yeah. Why haven't we done that? Exactly, exactly. And here's the thing, like, the way I look at this is it's the fastest way to find out if you've ever thought about getting consulting for your project. Management, it's the fastest way to find out if it's for you. We don't start partnerships where we don't see a path towards great results. For you, a big ROI, 10 out of 10 NPS for us, I mean it works out for everyone. If it's a bad fit, it just won't work out and everybody's left frustrated. We don't want to be left frustrated and you don't either. So if we don't see that, you know, within a year of starting working with us, you get to at least like a 4x ROI on the project. You know, I'm not just talking about getting your money back, but like getting to like 4x ROI or more. Then we just don't engage in this kind of partnership because it's just not a productive use of your very precious time. So in order to find out if you can actually get on that path, grab a call with Kevin senpilot.com call or just go to zenpilot.com I mean I hope I put the book a call CTA in enough places there. It's everywhere that you'll find it and you'll get to talk with Kevin.

Yeah. And we can run through the scorecard, just a preliminary look at utilization with estimates and that gives a really good vision of whether it's a. A good path for you or not.

Yeah. So the scorecard I was excited about, you will get to see that on the call with Kevin to ask him about it. Cool. Well, that will be it for today's episode of the Zen pilot live show. Maybe I'll have a name for it soon, but for now we're calling it that. Kevin, you were an amazing guest, so articulate and like, so many good insights today. So thank you so much for finding the time watchers and listeners. Follow Kevin, Follow me, Follow Zenpilot. Of course, subscribe to first class operations. That's also in the resources section where I report on everything that's happening at Zenpilot. But more importantly, I just bring you the best content about how to be a better agency operator and improve your project management at your agency. And that's enough CTAs for today. There's been a bunch. Thank you so much for your time. Whether you're watching live or watching the recording, we appreciate you all the same. Have a great day, evening slash night and we'll see you next time. Next time is Wednesday. Okay, if you're watching live, next time is Wednesday. Alex Rosaya will be talking about what's possible and ClickUp See you then. And I'll be clicking and broadcast now.

Bye.

Bye, everyone. Is the what I would add on top of that. Alrighty. So we're nearing the end of our time here. I'm going to ask my insurance question and we'll probably wrap up after that. Unless we get a question coming in in the comments. You know, my insurance question. Here it goes. Is there anything, Kevin, that you wanted to mention on this live stream that I failed to ask about? Anything important that you wanted to convey to our audience today before we wrap up?

Yeah. I would say if you are curious about this whatsoever, if you're feeling the pain out there, anything that you likely are feeling, I've more than likely heard. So sometimes our conversations.