How Agencies Scope Profitable Projects With ClickUp

Awesome. Welcome everybody to today's webinar on how world class agencies scope profitable projects. We're going to be talking about how to scope smarter to deliver better client results while earning more profit. But before we get started, let's go through some of the housekeeping here for today. And the first thing is, if you haven't been on the On24 platform before, you get all this cool customization to move things around. If you want to minimize my video, probably probably a good choice. Bump up the content, move things around, find the Q and A widget. Just get comfortable with the different features of the platform here. Super customizable, fun to use. Go ahead and use that Q and A widget to ask any questions that pop up. Andrew, who's on with me and I'll introduce him in just a second. I'll have some time at the end of today's presentation to answer any questions that you have and we'll make sure that whatever those questions are, they'll either get answered live here today for as many as we have time for or via email after the webinar. And as always, the event is recorded. We'll share the recording with you within the next two days. And so with that, let's introduce ourselves here real quickly. We are your new best friends. I'm Gray, this is Andrew Demski, who's my co founder at Zenpilot. Andrew, I'll let you introduce yourself in just a second, but super quickly. We empower agencies to build more productive, profitable and healthy teams. We've had the pleasure of working with over 2,700 teams. We've built a playbook on ClickUp for agencies specifically. So I've been living where Andrew and I started our first agency together way back in 2011. So we've been in this ecosystem for quite a while and had a chance to learn from a lot of super cool teams. Andrew, I'll let you introduce yourself and if you just want to share how we split up, kind of leading the team at Zenpilot, that might be helpful context for folks to know the different perspectives that we're moving through today.

Yeah, absolutely. Good to see you all welcome here. Excited to go through this stuff with you on the ZenPilot team. I oversee our delivery team. So these are the folks that are kind of working through our process, helping to break down what are the core challenges that agencies are facing. Understanding the project management, pain points, mapping the solutions there, how are things going to flow into ClickUp? What's the order and structure to keep everything in line? We've got another team that leads implementations, so building out processes, finding the process experts internally, getting everything configured the way that you want to. And then we've got a third team that oversees activation and supporting teams who are trying to stop the project management jumping game kind of going from one tool to the other. So at the end of the day, we want to help you establish a system that you can scale with and get habits ingrained in your team so that it's not something that you use for a season and then roll to the next cool tool that catches your eye. So that's me on the. I lead that team. On the delivery side of things, Gray oversees our growth side. So anything you see out there on the Zen pilot marketing and training side of things, Gray takes point on on that team and the click up for agencies guide that he mentioned, fantastic resource. We'll throw that into the resource area here. You can go to zenpilot.com ClickUp if you want to grab that, that full guide there and get a good overview of kind of the structures that we see make sense there. That rolls out of the gross side of the business that Gray overseas right now and excited to walk through this stuff with you today, Greg, as we're leading clients through our process, like the scoping of work comes up all of the time. So we'll be able to dig into some really cool stuff and hopefully you get some nice actionable takeaways here today.

Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks, Andrew. All right, let's dive in. Talk about scoping. We're going to start with what are the challenges that you're probably facing if you are struggling with scoping right now. We're going to talk about the pros of scoping. Well, maturity. We'll move through all that as we go through. We get some fun gifts. We've got some gifts for you as well. As we move through today. The first piece and you can just imagine this. Even though it's a screenshot, you can imagine this as a live gif. I'm sure you've seen it before. And, and if you're in Team gif, you're with where I was two years ago and you can join me on form of me or you can just give in to the crowd and peer pressure and say GIF today. But the challenges with scoping projects, I mean, so much of your ability to earn money or take home money as an agency leader boils down to how effectively you can scope projects, charge for them and deliver within that scope. So when scoping is not working well. It leads to really inconsistent or spiky profitability. And we owe significantly underscoped that project or over scoped it. That'll impact your bottom line obviously as a firm. But it's not just the profitability. It creates a lot of chaos and friction in a relationship when there are constant scope changes or hey, we need to fix this. And it creates the inability to consistently deliver client results on time and in budget versus the flip side of that. When you have scoping done right, you create consistent profitability. So it's not just that you have. We want both, we want high profitability, but we also want consistency in that profitability where there's not the big spiky, hey, this was super profitable and this one's not. There will always be some variance. That's the nature of the business. But the more mature and better you get at scoping, the more consistent that will become when you scope things right, you also create clarity, which is the antithesis of chaos. You create clarity for your own internal team, which is super important. Team members know, hey, we're following the right playbook here to get the results to the clients think that they're going to be getting and clients at the same where. The flip side of that coin is that clients can trust in your ability to plan properly and then deliver results within that scope. And I mentioned the maturity piece and I think of this kind of as like a ladder of maturity of a firm. And almost every agency starting out, you might be in this bucket. You can kind of bucket yourself into one of these and try to figure out, hey, where are we today and what's our goal? What are we ultimately looking for? Which is the point of this is not to beat ourselves up because we're at level one or level three or whatever level, but to say, hey, what's the vision? What does scoping projects well need to look like? So if we talk to somebody who is primarily scoping projects around time and material and saying, I'll bill you at an hourly rate, this will be, I think the first, this is the very first project we ever did in our agency was a video project for a industrial steel manufacturer. And I think we charged them $45 an hour. And we could rent out or we could get the equipment for free because we were on campus and it was the college's equipment at the time. But that's a very immature approach to scoping projects. But it's purely time and materials. And then most folks will move into some element of fixed pricing relatively quickly. Or milestone based pricing as it's sometimes called. But at level two, you've got a lot of scope adjustments and chaos and oh, we miss scoped this, the, the spikiness that we talked about. And then as you move up, you get fewer scope adjustments. You still have some inconsistency in the profitability. When you do miss those are meaningful and you keep moving up and you probably move into realms where there may even be outcome based or value based pricing or some type of, you know, pricing around a value metric as well. But scope adjustments continue to decrease and then really the Level 5 agency for from a scoping perspective is consistently correct. That doesn't mean that they're 100% correct. That means that the overwhelming majority of the time though that scoping is very close to what was ultimately needed to deliver the result for clients. They're also consistently producing delighted clients. So it's not just you can be right in your scoping and run a horrible business and you can just say, hey, we're, we're sticking to it because what we scoped is what we thought the result. We thought we were going to hit a result and we didn't hit it. But hey, we did everything that was in the scope. And so it's not just can we stick in scope. The big part of this is, hey, we should be producing tremendous results to our clients. Andrew talked about the delivery side of the business that he runs and the growth side of the business that I run. And we look at that as the growth side of your business makes the promise. Your marketing and sales is what's making the promise. The delivery side of your business is what's keeping that promise. And you have to be really good at both to live in integrity and to produce a long term successful agency. And then the third bucket there is both highly inconsistently profitable. So because you're consistently correct in your scoping and it's delivering the right outcome, you're consistently profitable. But also there should be enough profit margin in that. If we looked at a normal business and a normal agency profit and loss, you would look at 100% of your revenue comes in 10, 15% of that goes back out to grow the business. 40 to 45% of that goes back out to deliver on client success. 10 to 15% goes back into back end operations. We think of the three main buckets in an agency is growth, delivery and operations. And if we figure between all that even at the, at the, you know, 15% in both growth and operations and 45% at delivery, that's a 25% pre tax margin in your business or if some of those numbers are bucketed down, that's a 35% at the kind of the minimum range or 40%. And in that 25 to 30% net margin for your agency, if that's what you're producing and you're fairly compensated, you know, you're normalizing your compensation as an owner, you are a highly profitable agency when compared to the average agency out there. So that's what we're looking for in maturity. Let's talk about how we actually measure scoping success. And Andrew, I'd be curious if there's anything you would add to this, but I'll I'll give you a quick overview of the four main ways that we think about scoping success. The first one is that profitability side. So I don't know what's your overall profitability as a firm, but also what's that profitability by client, by project and by team. And if you are a relatively early stage, maybe you're sub 10 people as a firm, if you look at this quarterly, that's probably okay. If you're larger than that, you should probably be looking at these numbers on a monthly basis. And you can just think of this as the number of times that we're going through, the number of iterations or revolutions that we have at running projects that determines how frequently we need to be evaluating and how much good data we have to go in and adjust things. But I want to look at our profitability across at least those three main vectors of client project. And I guess I should have added service line here as well. And team. So is Walmart as a client way more profitable than Wegmans or do we have some commonality there in the types of projects? From a service line perspective, when we do Facebook or Google Ads, are we way less profitable than when we do web projects or email marketing? That tells us we either need to raise prices in the lower profitability areas, we need to find ways to become more efficient, or we just simply need to charge more. Or at the extreme end of the equation, like hey, we need to outsource, we need to kill this service altogether. And then obviously from a team perspective, we're looking at this across departments and then by individual as well. And this is where we talk about utilization rate a lot. And hey, what's our overall as an entire team utilization rate target and then what's our utilization rate by individual? Folks, you got the in our business today, my utilization rate and utilization rate being the percentage of hours that I'm working that are going to delivering on those project scopes for clients, my utilization rate leading the growth side of the business is going to be very low. But that doesn't change our team target utilization rate across the board. Number two is estimates versus actuals. And when we normally think about this, you know, we're primarily thinking of this for most agencies, probably most of us here today. This is going to be a function of time. How much time did we estimate that was going to take? I say we thought this web project was 160 hours. It turned out it was actually 210, you know, pretty substantially beyond what we originally had scoped. But there could be pass through costs as well. This has declined in popularity over the last couple of years. Four years ago, every single agency that said they were a million dollar Facebook ad agency was really like $800,000 in pass through client spend and $200,000 in revenue. And that has shifted. But there are still cases where there's a good amount of pass through costs that an agency is fronting and then they're ultimately billing back to the client. So there may be cases where your costs aren't a function. You're using a lot of contractors or you're using a lot of software to deliver on what you're doing. And so it can't just be a function of. It's both the time costs or the labor costs of what you're delivering. And it's also whatever the rest of your basically your cost of goods sold your cogs need to look like. The third number I put on here is the average number of scope adjustments. That's not necessarily. We could have a separate conversation about tracking how many times do we have to do revisions or fix stuff, but actually how many times to get to where we need to go from an outcome perspective for this client, do we need to change what we originally had scoped? Hey, we thought we were going to grow traffic by 30% if we produced content once a week. And it turns out we had to actually ramp up and add an extra four pieces of content over this time period. Or we thought that this amount of creative would get the job done and actually wasn't. We had to add these. We want to be able to track the average number of adjustments that we're making to scope. And obviously the fourth huge one is what are your clients telling you how? What's their feedback on your process and on the experience overall? And then what's the satisfaction? Here's where we look at Adding a lagging indicator like NPS to be able to look back and say, hey, you know, if we look back at our trailing 90 day NPS, how is that trending and where are we going and what's the overall health of clients? I think the typical agency right now is in the 40s and we can talk more about how NPS is calculated. So are we 60s and trending upward, are we 30s and trending downward? Or ideally we've got a, that some, some sort of lagging indicator is totally fine and valid. That system makes a lot of sense. But the flip side, we have to have some leading indicators as well. So something like client health, which is a combination of clients feedback and project progress and progress against KPIs and your internal team's reading of what's happening. We talk about that more in Q and A if that's helpful. But Andrew, those are the four that I had outlined here. First, anything that you'd add to that?

I think it's important to measure what your internal team is saying too. I liked what you said earlier about growth and delivery being the promises made and the promises kept. So there's some agencies that we've worked with which to get a sale, they'll sell the kitchen sink just to get revenue in the door and then they toss it over to delivery and say good luck. To be not just to operate with integrity but to have longevity as well, you need to be able to have alignment in what's being sold and what's being delivered there. So I'd say listening to your delivery team as they provide feedback and don't take everything that they say as gospel because you know the delivery team, if it's a bad client, you know, they might just be cranky because the client's hard to work with or if it's a, if they're pleasant to work with on the calls, they may say everything's hunky dory, but turns out they're over delivering on the scope time and time again. So that's where the estimate estimates versus actuals come in to kind of check some of that feedback. But just making sure that you have regular rhythms to check alignment between those who are making sales and those who are delivering on the promises made in those sales, that's going to be an important rhythm to establish to keep honing that down. Because at the end of the day scoping is about expectation setting and living up to those expectations. And so we want to make sure that there's alignment there and what is scoped. Assuming the scoping is detailed enough, is actually being delivered on the back end. And listen to the delivery team to see how that's doing.

We could do a whole webinar just on how that's the most crucial relationship in every professional services. Org. What's that relationship between whoever's leading growth and whoever's leading delivery. But we'll save that for a future webinar. There's three fundamental ways that scopes get built, and so we're just going to talk about these approaches. The language, even on this slide, might give away a little bit of how we feel about it. Your first option, and this is not uncommon at all, is to just give away basically the discovery and strategy in the sales process to scope things out correctly. So super common with web development shops and anyone really who's delivering a product, some type of digital product, this is how we started our agency. And we go through five or six different conversations with folks to map out what the website should look like. And by the end of that, we have roughly, hey, here's the site architecture, what that's going to need to look like. We've got some agreement on who's going to be creating content. Is SEO involved in this or not involved in this? Who's doing the design? Are we doing the design? Are we working with your designs to go build it? All that kind of stuff. And so that's, that's one option that's out there. And those are the types of areas where it's probably most common is to do it in the sales process. The challenge with doing it in the sales process, obviously, is that as you try to grow, as soon as we try to hire other people to sell, that's a really technical conversation to figure out what the site architecture looks like and to figure out all of these pieces. And so it becomes really hard to bring in people who are excellent at sales and get them ramped up quickly enough from a technical perspective to be able to deliver real value to prospects and be able to close deals for you and then have it correctly scoped and move back. So the alternative then becomes, well, now we need to involve members of our delivery team, the real experts in that sales process, to try to design this all. And you wind up just giving away a lot of hours there to a lot of tire kickers. And it can become a really frustrating experience all the way around. The flip side of that is that clients are going to value it less if it's free. You know, we assign value based on what it costs us to get things and so because it's free, the value that prospects are willing to put into assess to it and the effort that they're willing to put into it looks different than in a paid engagement. The second common approach is to say, hey, we'll do scoping as kind of the first project phase. And this is really common in retainer based shops. Say, hey, you know, you're going to be paying us $8,000 a month, but the first 30 days is our onboarding and you know, that's where we'll build the full plan, which is totally fine. You're getting paid for a lot of that thinking work that you're doing. You're not giving it all away like you are in step number one. But the flip side is it's really hard if you decide, wow, $8,000 is not the right amount to hit their goals. We actually need to ramp this up. And the opposite could be true as well. But you're creating a ton of friction because you've already committed to hitting an outcome without doing the full scoping engagement. And you get in and realize, oh, this is just not going to happen. We're going to need to upsell and you're creating friction within the first 30 days around what that engagement should look like. And the third main approach is to treat scoping as its own project. And you can think of scoping here as the nicer words that we probably use are discovery and strategy or diagnostic prescription or something else there. But scoping is in reality a big part of that. We're trying to, we want to get paid, we want the client's buy in to be there, high enough to be able to really put our best people on a job, fully understand what they're trying to accomplish and build the right plan for that. This is just like, you know, going to an architect before you start building something, you're going to pay them to build the right plan. That's the professional level of attention that we'd like to see if we're building a house or going to a doctor, you know, the diagnostic we don't want, you know, a quick look at your knee versus an MRI or X rays and a professional opinion on that, which they will get paid for. But for some reason in this industry, in the creative field, almost everybody leans towards, you know, option A, we don't have a choice. They expect to get it for free, so we give it away for free. Or option B, it's just going to be baked in and, you know, we'll do a very cursory Glance first.

We'll.

We'll bucket them into what retainer level they should be, and then we'll, you know, we'll do the real scoping once we, Once we get in there. But really, the professional way, the point that I wanted to make here today, the professional way to do this is to scope as its own project. Andrew, anything you'd add there before we go to a couple examples of how this works out and what it looks like?

Yeah, I would just, I'd ask folks who are hesitant about this, who've not, like, tried this approach before, just to kind of take a step out of your assumptions of how stuff has to happen or take your. Take a step away from the experiences you've had in the sales process so far and what prospects have demanded of you. And just try to think with an open mind because there's other ways to do this that you're going to walk through here in a second that can change the game. Change the game not just in the revenue that you can generate out of your sales process, but in the level of expectations you can establish and the level of results that your team can deliver. So just approach this with an open mind. If you're kind of scratching your head and saying, hey, number one is just, that's the way we do business, that's the only way to do it. Um, let's, let's talk about a new way to do this because this could be transformational for your. Your whole business.

Yeah, that's awesome. Speaking of transformation, this is an agency, an awesome client who we've had the chance to work with on the OP side, but a really cool SEO firm called linkflow led by Josh Elkin and Ben. Ben Yost. They had a great solution, but the common path was client comes in commonly a SaaS who's trying to grow quickly, and they're trying to grow from an organic perspective on the SEO side as well. Come in. There's a diagnostic in the sales process. Oh, yeah, here's the volume of links that we need to build a month or what the SEO scope looks like that gets recommended. They go straight to a retainer, start working, and then try to make adjustments as needed. The challenge is that those were very frequently needed, especially as the team continued to grow and caused a lot of friction to say, hey, I know we started out at this retainer level, but now we actually need to move to this retainer level to hit your goals or, you know, actually like the initial targets that we were going after. That actually is not the right strategy. And if we'd known these details ahead of time, like we would actually recommend a different plan than what we did here in the first 30, 60, 90 days. So linkflow switched their approach and they added in a paid scoping engagement. They call it the roadmap. It's a pretty quick process. This is probably very small to read, but seven to 10 days is the normal length on that roadmap process. It's really not a super long process. There's a good amount of work that happens there and that's a paid engagement with them. Now they do the full diagnostic and prescription in the roadmap. And that is, here's the exact deliverables that you need to go do, here's the exact links you need to go acquire. Here's the rate at which you'll need to grow based on having access to all of your data now from the client side. And then they move from that into the retainer relationship and they start executing on that plan. And there's predefined interviews to review and adjust that plan. And what happened once they moved through that is a, you know, a very common agency experience. Once people move to that model, they produce better and more efficient results for their clients. So client satisfaction improved. They got rewarded for both the thinking and the doing. And there's three main things that almost every agency that we've seen implement this benefits from. The first benefit is they increase sales velocity or they decrease the time to close a deal. And that's because they simplified. Hey, I'm not asking you for a $5,000 a month retainer. I'm asking you for a 1500 dollars commitment to go build the, to do discovery properly and to build the right playbook for you. We'll talk more about what that pricing should look like. But because of decreasing the complexity and the amount of risk that, that a client needs to take on to be able to jump in and have a real life experience working with you in a real situation where they're paying you dollars, you're earning those dollars with the work that you produce. You're communicating like you're going to communicate together. That will speed up the sales process. The second impact is an increase in close rate. So almost always close rate will go up by 5 to 10% very quickly after implementing an offer like that. And there have been cases where that's been super dramatic and it's doubled or tripled. And there's been cases where it really, they were closing it at a decent rate before. And most of the pain is on the back end and the close rate improvement is very small. So that's not a guarantee across the board. Here's what it'll be. But it'll typically go up 5 to 10% in a very short time period. Again, same same principle. We're not asking people for everything out of the gate, we're asking them to make a smaller commitment. And then the third and most impactful to agency growth piece that happens off the back end of that is that client lifetime values or the average ticket size of the ensuing deal increases dramatically compared to what the retainer or the engagement would have been on the other side. And it's mostly because the full scope is known ahead of time. So some of those deals wind up being smaller than they would have otherwise been. But in the cases where you already knew that you should have been charging more and doing more at the beginning, but the client's budget wasn't there, the buy in after, they have the experience of working with you. So now there's trust in that relationship and they understand the level of professionalism you have in your engagement, but they also have a totally different level of understanding and buy in around what the plan needs to look like. You've gone through the full discovery, they trust your diagnostic a ton more. So that is probably the most impactful win that comes from splitting out a paid scoping engagement on the front end. The second example I wanted to pull up is I pulled up our own because this is. There's nothing more qualified to speak on than talk about myself. Right. I think we're all pretty much in that boat. But I wanted to go a little bit deeper into how do we actually think about scoping. Let's go into the actual not just hey, we should separate it out, but what's a framework for scoping that we can apply here? I'll just give you the quick overview of our process. We ran into that same thing we used to agency comes in, hey, we're struggling. We don't have our act together when it comes to our processes and our systems or hey, I don't have any visibility. I don't know how to do workload management or resource allocation. I don't know when to hire and when we need to assign more resources to internal work because we're underutilized. I just don't have that visibility right now. Our individual contributors, they don't know what to do. Everyone's walking in with a totally different experience and working differently and we're just really inefficient. Client results are all across the board, whatever those issues are, people will come in and say, all right, so what's it going to cost to fix this? You guys are the, the best in the world at ClickUp. You know, what is this, what is this going to take? And we go through the whole exploratory process together. Talk to me about your teams and talk to me about what service lines you're producing and scope it out. And then three or four conversations later say, okay, here's the price, jump in, get started and what you find is through your car, three or four conversations, spending, you know, roughly two hours together or maybe three hours together on zoom, not digging into what's actually happening, not having the entire team bought in together led to a lot of scope adjustments after the fact. Not only that, but as we have grown and brought on, you know, the rest of the growth team, scaling that to folks who are not, they haven't lived through all of those ins and outs of the process detail before. Really, really hard to grow. So back to the challenges beginning and then because the entire client team wasn't all engaged, the full buy in, which is maybe the single most important factor in whether this is going to work or not, is the number one reason why agencies on average switch project management tools every 18 months is because the team wasn't all bought in together at the beginning. Nobody led that with a vision, with clear rules of engagement, with, you know, strong accountability to that. And so that, that dooms some projects from the beginning. So we made the switch, we simplified the sales process and now that looks like, hey, we're going to do a paid basically a design sprint at the beginning. We're going to do full discovery, we're going to do the strategy, we'll have it fully scoped and we'll design what that will look like and that creates and the whole team will be involved in that process, some to the core implementation team to a high degree, but the whole team is going to go through a survey process and have their input as part of that. So we create clarity for the entire organization and buy in and we fully guarantee that. So it's become really frictionless because we carry all the risk in that engagement. It's not just a money back guarantee. We take it a step farther than that in terms of our guarantee. So we're able to take all the risk out of the process and get clients better result at the same time. And then that's created really consistent, long term lasting client success. And I wanted to pull you through a couple of the elements like, how are we looking at scoping? Because I think everybody here can go through the same type of overview. So, Andrew, as I'm pulling up my screen, is there anything you'd add to that before I keep going?

Yeah, I'll just say that the scoping helps you understand what you need to build out, but also it. In our journey, what we were uncovering was there's a huge gap in expectations where people would come to us because they wanted to implement ClickUp, I've got a software problem was kind of like if you boiled it down, that was their assumption. By adding in the right scoping, the questions that you ask and the process that you walk them through to get real scope out is a journey in and of itself for your clients to better understand their business. And you as the expert, get the chance to use that process to teach them about where their real pain lies. And so we were able to go three or four or five levels deeper because we had crossed that massive chasm from lead to customer. And now that they're a paid customer, we have access to different members of their organization and we can do real discovery with them and not just talk to the main person who's running the procurement process there. And that allowed us to teach people by the questions that we asked what the core problem was that we were trying to solve. And that set us up so much better to prescribe the right solution that grab that full scope. So don't forget about the expectations that your client has in your sales process. They may be coming to you for one thing, when they really need something else. And this scoping phase can be a great tool to cross that chasm and kind of lead them to the right point. That gives them the perspective that they need to really engage you well. So you can serve them in the process there too.

Yeah, that's awesome. So I pulled this up. This is from our 1-35-formula that we talk a lot about in our marketing and with with clients. But I think every agency should have the same, you know what, basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out what are the vectors that we need to understand well to be able to scope projects properly. And so we've boiled it down to these three key areas. Every agency being successful from a project management, really from an operational perspective, what they're ultimately going for is they're trying to get rid of all the chaos that is there. And all the thousands and thousands of conversations we've had with agency owners over the last nine plus years. The core need at the end of things becomes clarity. That's what's going to drive operational excellence is at the executive layer, I need to understand what's our profitability, what's our utilization rate, the key metrics, how is client health trending, what are the specific issues that I need to get involved with At a middle or manager layer, an account manager, a pm, I need to know how's my portfolio of clients or projects or my department performing. Then at the individual contributor layer, I need to know what's on my plate to do and how do I execute that well. And that all boils down to clarity. The three pieces that we need to get right. The way that that boils down is into a tooling problem. So that's, you know, not just what's the PM system that we're going to use, but it's also what are, you know, what's the key integration points between your CRM and your project management tool, or your invoicing and your project management tool, or your time tracking or your office suite or your team communication. What are the touch points between all of that and then what is, what are you ultimately reporting on or needed? What data do you need to be able to pull from this to create clarity for everybody? And then what's the right hierarchy and setup and data schema and all that from a tooling perspective? So there's that piece at the beginning or as a, as one of the three key elements. Then there's the processes. So what are we actually, what are we actually running? How are we, you know, do we have real world class, standardized, documented processes that should be followed by everyone in the organization? And then the third piece is the habits is the behavior side. Do we have healthy habits across the team? Are we all actually going to execute consistently? And really, if you look at this, you take any two of these and pull one of the legs of the stool out. If you have tools and processes dialed in, you get the coolest system in the world. But with inconsistent habits, you're going to get inconsistent outcomes because you don't have full compliance in how it's happening. If you have tools and habits together, that's great. You're going to be really efficient in producing results. But you might be misguided and inaccurate because the process was wrong. And if you have processes and habits, that's maybe the best combination. You're doing the right thing and you're doing it consistently, but you're inefficient because the tooling isn't there. And you might be missing the high level clarity or the data feedback in a consumable way to be able to make better decisions moving forward. So whatever that looks like in your organization, you need to understand what are the key components that we have. Then what you'll do is you'll take that and you'll translate that into.

What.

Does our process look like. Actually, let me take you, I can take you to this step. Once we have those three keys, we take people through these five steps. Here's how we're going to overcome that. Whether you work with Zenpilot or you don't work with Zenpilot, these are the key steps. Here's how we're going to solve for each of those three key areas. As we're doing that initial design sprint, that scoping engagement and systems design engagement. We know we need to understand where we are today. That's the discovery piece we need to define. From a behavioral perspective, these are the habits, what needs to happen, what needs to change to become gold standard at operations. From our process perspective, we need to identify all the processes that need to be built and prioritize those. And then from a tooling perspective, we need to craft the technical playbook. So what is this actually going to look like once we build this all out and that becomes a, you know, this is a. There's a lot of technical detail that happens there in our situation. In your situation, it might be three totally different pillars that you have that you're building around, or five pillars or two pillars. And you might have very little time from a technical perspective. And it might be an awful lot about user behavior or about the process side, or about some totally different category. But I wanted to share that and pull people into that so you could see, here's how you need to identify what are those core areas that we need to understand to correctly scope something. If someone's working with Zenpilot and they go beyond, I'll pull up this as an overview. So if someone's going through, they've gone through that discovery and design engagement, which we call the blueprint, and into implementation. The way that we'd correctly scope that is to understand from a technical perspective how technically complex is this, which in our case becomes a function of what's the ClickUp build, what are the integrations, whatever else from a process perspective, what's the gap in what needs to get built? Do they have 80 processes that need built or do they have 20 processes that need built? From a team perspective, how many people or how many unique individual roles have to be trained for and accompanied for. And then obviously, the last layer on top that we do is the effort side. And in your agency, you may do this, this may be. You may have some flexibility or you may not. But today our engagements as opposed to our agency, are more flexible. Hey, we'll, we'll lead all this, but do you want to be more involved in doing this, or do you want us to take and do everything for you? So that's kind of the layer that sits on top of it. In the web design days with the agency, there was much less. We would sacrifice sometimes on design or on content, but there were a bunch more pieces that we for sure take and own every time. So I want to pull it up as a real. Here's a real life example. You kind of get to see a little bit behind the curtain at what we do, as in pilot. And I want you to think about how you can personalize that and apply that in your use case as well. So, Andrew, I'll stop screen sharing here. I want to go back to where we are. Layer on anything you have there, and then can you lead us through how scoping should impact? Like, okay, we've got the scope built. Now we're moving to the next step. How does that actually impact what we're doing from an execution perspective?

Yeah, absolutely. So, like, you walked through right there. We want to have a phase of our client journey where we're focused just on scoping. And within that phase, you're going to have a process of discovery. You're going to ask the right questions, you're going to send them surveys, you're going to do competitive research. You're going to have steps in your process, depending on what your implementation looks like or what your recurring service looks like, to get the information that you need to scope it out really, really well. And this is where ClickUp can come in and really be kind of a solid foundation to build your scoping on, because once you know where the client's trying to go, you can prescribe the best path to get them there. Let me share my screen and I'll walk you guys a template structure here inside ClickUp that can help you make this stuff happen. So we pull this up here. All right, there we go. All right, so here, the first thing we want to think about when we are, when we're preparing our ClickUp environment for, like, good scoping is first, we've got our. Our hierarchy gray mentioned earlier. Everything in your agency should fall under delivery, growth and operations. But we also want to think about our processes. What are the core processes that power the team? What is the kind of the sweet sauce about how the secret sauce of how we get the clients to their outcome. And that starts with detailed processes. So we work with a lot of e commerce agencies here. So I'm going to walk you through an example of a Shopify website design and build here. So here I'm in a template area. I have a Shopify template built out here. I've gone through this and I've thought about all the different phases of a Shopify web build. I've got the new business phase, I've got the planning phase, the design phase. Then within each of these phases, I've outlined the individual action steps that need to be executed every single time this process is run. If you look at some of the attributes I have on these tasks, I've got a due date. The due dates are here at the template layer just to tell us the sequence between the steps. So that way when we roll this out in the delivery space, we can automatically remap using the template deployment, we can remap all these dates to be a starting point estimate for us when we roll this thing out. We've also got the time estimates in place here. This is really, really important to understand. How long does each step in your process typically take? We then map out the delivery roles. So see, there's no assignees here at our template level because we don't want to approach templates from an assignee perspective because as your company grow, move around, you'll see a lot of volatility there at the assignee level. But you want to approach your templates from a role based perspective to know what's the team and role that would map for each of these steps. That way when we roll it out, we can quickly set the assignees based on the role on each of those tasks. I've got some other custom fields here just for segmentation purposes, but what I would do is I'd build out this template process in the process library and once this list is ready to go, I'd come in here to my list settings and I would save this list as a template. I come to my template center here, I'd save as a template and then during my scoping process I would come into my delivery space here and I would deploy this list in a given area there. When I deploy this, jump over here and show you what this looks like. I've got a couple of different views on that deployment that can help me as I'm scoping things out. First of all, I've got a nice top down view of all the different phases that are going to happen inside this project. And because I put the due dates of my parent tasks to match the due date of the last subtask in that process, I can get a quick view here on the calendar of how long this is going to take to build out here. So I can see we're going to start in January, we're wrapping up here in September for this example here I can also get a quick snapshot of what's the total time estimate from the team for each phase and get a high level overview of the time estimate here. This might be a little bit small for you guys, so I'll try to blow this up a little bit. But at the bottom of this list here we can calculate the sum of the time by rolling up the time estimates just at the parent task level here. And if I expanded this, I could go and I could see what are those individual subtasks here? I can put individual assignees on those. If I want to begin to block availability for those team members, I can do stuff like that right there. When I build this out. I also have another view here. So if I come down here in my views, I've got a buy role view here. I've taken those delivery roles and I've grouped this view by those delivery roles. So the delivery role is a drop down custom field and I've customized this to be my project manager, my account manager, my admin, kind of go through all the different roles. Again, not an assignee but a role that power the delivery of this process. So I'll come in here and I'll say, okay, project manager, if I expand this, I can see here by role what's the total amount of time needed for that role in this project. So as I'm looking at a resourcing perspective, I can quickly go and see who do I need to preserve for these roles right here. And as you're going through the scoping process, this is your chance to take your template and add in any additional scoping you might, any additional steps you might need. Remove things that you don't need based on that scoping work and really use this template and refine it down to what your prescription is going to be. You can even use the Gantt view here to get a, to get a nice high level view of the individual tasks. You can zoom out of it to see like, okay, where are these different phases falling on the calendar right here? Once you have your solid template in place. It really gives you a great lens and framework through which to scope a project at the detailed level so you can build out what they need based on your prescription and also get a little preview of how is that going to impact my team when we actually commit to this work and we roll it out that way. We're not saying yes to something when we don't have the resources available to actually deliver it. If you want to share stuff with a client, you can also use ClickUp to kind of create a transparent view out to the client as well. Jump over here. This is a public version of a ClickUp doc. Use this as a client portal. So I scroll down through this. You can set up different structures here where they can request information from you. You can put in embedded ClickUp views here to show them your progress on different elements inside of your your work and sum up what you've done so far. And again, this is a public doc. We've embedded a data box report in here to show stats on their particular marketing campaigns and efforts and stuff like that. And since this is a public doc, I don't need to worry about the client being inside of ClickUp. Some people want to bring their clients behind the curtain and get them assigned tasks and stuff like that. Other people don't want them anywhere near that. So this is a nice way in the middle where you can use ClickUp. Once you do, nail that scope down to engage the client in. Show them where you're at in the process right here. Even share meeting notes, kind of recapping your sessions right there. So having those templates in place, that's kind of foundational and that's step one to really mastering the detailed part of your scoping. Have those tools in your tool chest. Take some time up front to identify, outline, prioritize, build out all of those processes. But man, once it's there, that's just it allows you to overwhelm the client with the amount of specificity that you can speak to in the delivery side.

That's awesome. Thanks for that, Andrew. It's always cool to get behind the product and see what are other agencies doing. Actually take this from scoping into execution. So I know we're running out of time here. We will wrap up as you mentioned before, and both of these will be here in the event screen as well. But you can go to zenpilot.com ClickUp to get the I didn't even talk about this. The Client Journey template. So similar to what Best Coast Marketing used In that example, you can get that. You can get our ClickUp for Agencies guide and even a pre built ClickUp client onboarding template as well that's specific for agencies. You also go to ClickUp.com templates and access a whole bunch of additional templates that can be used for agencies. You'll find some stuff from Zenpilot in there as well, but there's a ton of options for all kinds of different use cases in the ClickUp public template library. Okay, with that, we probably have time for one or two questions. I think we're going to take a lot of these offline reminder, go ahead and drop them in anyways. We'll make sure that we get back to all of those questions. But Andrew, if you pull that up, is there one or two that we could hit here quickly?

Yeah, I've got, I've kind of grouped these together a little bit. I got two around pricing that maybe you could, you could hit together here. One is how long should scoping take and how, how much should it cost? So like what's the pricing strategy behind your scoping? And then kind of the follow on to that is what would you say to a prospect that objects to paying thousands of dollars just to be given a price to pay?

Again, those are both really good. I think the first piece, how long should it take that the snarky answer is like as long as it needs to to properly scope it. But the shorter generally the better. So I've seen most agencies tackle this in the one to three week range who've done it most successfully. It's long enough for you to do your work well, but it's short enough that not all momentum is gone. If you do a three month scoping engagement, the odds of there still being momentum at the end of three months, it's just hard to keep people as excited over that time range from a pricing perspective. I do think there are some principles that we've seen play out over the year. If you're selling into a retainer after that, if that initial price can be close to the rate of what a first initial month of service will look like, you just want to make sure you're setting good expectations between those two. So if you're saying, hey, this thinking thing is the, is the, you know, this is the most valuable thing we could do together, this is absolutely the right way to start and it's going to cost you $500. When you get through that, it's going to be an $8,000 retainer. Those two things just don't jive and don't line up. Now we're going to start executing. And the thinking was the more valuable part, but that was a fraction of what I'm ultimately paying in the retainer. So you need to make those two things match up in some way from a proportional level. And then I think that the last piece that you said, hey, now we're telling people you're going to pay for something, but you're not going to know what the full price is until after it. The first answer is embrace that head on and just explain. Look, when you go to the doctor, they don't do the MRI and everything for free. That's all paid. And you do not want them recommending. Here's what the exact plan is until they actually have a chance to look at those pictures and understand where things are. You don't want somebody to give you a price for your house and say, okay, now we'll go architect it and we'll. There's certainly budget ranges. So I think you need to be honest about having those conversations and say, look, here's what I love giving people benchmarks. Here's what's average for someone who's like you. But you can't get married to that because we're doing this intentionally. This is the right way to scope projects so that we know what do you actually need. And it might be less, it might be more, and you'll have options at the end of this if that's something that you're willing to do. You know, we can very easily scope stuff up and down in a pretty transparent way with people. Hey, if we cut down these processes or if we reduce the amount of training that happens after the fact, there's a core, there's a, an amount that absolutely has to happen. Or if we, you know, save these integrations that you want built until later, here's what this can look like. So you can give clients a lot of transparency during that scoping engagement around and ahead of time. Hey, we'll be able to work towards this budget. And you should also, I guess the one other thing I'd add is you should tell people clearly, look, it's not going to come in below the $5,000 you have total to spend here. So, yeah, it would be unfair to push people into something when you already know that they don't have budget.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, like I mentioned, drop any other questions that you have in the Q and A. We're grateful for you being here. Thanks for your time today.