How Grizzle Documented Processes, Visualized Capacity, and Balanced Workload with Our ClickUp System

This year we want to really kind of put our foot on the gas and, you know, build an in house team. Slightly larger operation, expanded to new services, perhaps even new verticals. We moved over to Asana using Airtable as kind of like the front end and having those two things pieced together. And I was like, well, this is still not right. Like it was still breaking. Things were still falling through the gaps. It was really difficult to manage resources as well. How at capacity each team member is at that kind of thing. Again, important when you start hiring people in house. So then we discovered ClickUp and so we can basically look at, okay, this is how long it takes to edit a given piece of content of this format. And this format. How can we assign our editors and writers to those clients without bombarding them? No one wants to be overloaded. And so it just kind of allows us to kind of create that a culture of we're not burning our people out. Everything is just so much better. It's the only way I can describe it.

Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome to a very special, special Zen pilot story. With me on the call here today is Tom Watley, CEO at Grizzle at B2B Content Marketing and SEO Agency. Tom, how are you doing today?

Doing good, doing good. Pleasure to chat with you today, Kuba.

Yeah, pleasure to chat with you too. And yes, I'm Kuba Kuba Gretzar, your host for today here at Zenpilot. And what we're going to do here today is basically two things. I'm going to pick Tom's brain about his number one tip for agency operations and how to run a well established agency in just a moment here. And then we'll talk about Grizzle and Zenpilot working together to improve their operations for a little bit of a story of how that went down. But before that, Tom, I've got a little bit of a warm up question for you just so the audience can get to know you better. What was the most fun thing you've done this year thus far?

Oh, that's a good question. I had a great trip to New York recently which was fantastic. Yeah, good to see the sights and all that good stuff. And for my sins, first time in America. I've traveled all over Europe and Asia, but I've never been to America. So it was an excellent first foray into that side of the pond.

What was the most surprising thing you found about the usa?

I don't know if this is New York specifically. I hear it is, but how incredibly friendly and warm and welcoming everyone was obviously being a Londoner, any kind of, you know, friendly edge can often come as a surprise. Some of us Londoners can be quite abrasive, but I think it was just the general warmth of everyone.

That's interesting. I've been to London three times and I found the people quite friendly there. So maybe it's, you know, a matter of perspective, I guess. And never been to New York. It's actually a bucket list item for me. So, hey, I hope I'll be watching this video sometime from now and saying, yeah, I got to do this. All right, thanks for sharing that. So Tom, for people who don't know you very well, meeting you for the first time, tell us a little bit about yourself. How you usually introduce yourself. I don't know, it's a cocktail party. Somebody asks you what do you do? How do you respond?

Yeah, it usually leans into one of two things, travel or the business. I love to travel. Like I say, been all over this side of the pond, do it as often as I can. And the other thing is this whole thing that we're talking about today, Grizzle, the agency, building a business and businesses and all the challenges and the fun stuff it comes with, you know.

So can you tell us more about Grizzle, about what you do, what you specialize in?

Yeah, absolutely. So we're essentially content and SEO agency, specializing in B2B companies, both software as a service, some solutions, services based companies. Been going since 2016. Started as a digital PR agency of sorts, helping our clients get featured into other blogs and publications and connect with influencers and all that jazz. And slowly kind of evolved into an end to end content and SEO service. And depending on the type of clients we work with, that can involve taking care of the whole end to end process, I. E. Developing the strategy topic ideation, keyword research, all that kind of thing. Right. What is the goal? Who are we trying to reach? What are we going to create for them? And actually executing on that to some of our kind of what we like to call our production house. Clients who have their own marketing teams, oftentimes their own content function and we just kind of act as a partner and an extension of that where we help to kind of scale content while maintaining high quality standards, mostly editorial. But we are starting to enter the video world kind of in stealth mode as we speak. So kind of watch the space on that one. But there, that's the gist.

So how did you end up going from PR more in the direction of content and SEO? Did you Find that that's where the goal is, or did you have transferable skills? What's the story there?

Yeah, so I've been doing content marketing for many years. Before getting into or beginning Grizzle, I was working at an agency that offers C suite marketing services.

Right.

And no one's searching for C suite marketing like abm account based marketing, probably the closest thing to it. And so my job was just kind of get content in front of the people where they're at. It was kind of like taking in that marketing approach, but using other people's platforms. But SEO and content was also part of that too. Kind of like at the top of the funnel, generating thought leadership. And I just had an idea for this digital PR service, this very niche area of my discipline, and I wanted to see if other people wanted it. Long story short, I manually put together this list of 100 people working at Martech organizations. Scheduled an email on a Wednesday, used the WordPress theme that I was using at the company I was working with at the time. And then I thought, okay, if I can get one sales appointment in a week or two, then I'll continue going 45 days later. We had like the first. I say we, it was all me at the time, our first three or four clients. And then as we were kind of creating content and getting it on, you know, the HubSpot blog, search engine land, marketing profs, our clients said, this is actually really good. Could you just do that for our blog too? And so the rest is kind of history.

Right.

It's kind of taking that strategic element that I developed over a few years and applying it to, to existing clients. So it kind of. Yeah, evolved naturally, just as a byproduct.

Okay, well, what a rush. You know, the funny thing about stories is that we always embed ourselves in them. Right. So I just, I was there, you know, at your laptop, sending that hundred emails.

It was done in a coffee shop in London on a Saturday afternoon. The inspiration took me and the rest is history.

Wow, that's awesome. That's such an awesome origin story. Thank you. All right, so. And before we start talking operations, can you tell us a little bit about what we're dealing with in terms of Grizzle? How many people working together? Are there? Teams? How is that all structured?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's five of us in house at the moment, quite a small knit team, and a dozen or so freelancers.

Right.

So structurally, most of our output, most of our service offering is editorial content. Content production, that's really 80% of our day to day. And that's the kind of strategic side as well. So our freelance talent ranges anywhere from content writers, editors, and then some kind of technical team members as well. Kind of taking care of a lot of digital VR strategy, data analysis, outreach in some cases. And our core team is really kind of like the strategy side of things, or editorial management, that sort of thing. And that was kind of done quite deliberately. It's just kind of a model that I've carried over the last few years where I wanted to just in all honesty, mitigate risk. As we were starting to scale this year, we want to really kind of put our foot on the gas and build an in house team. Kind of go from being a boutique agency, as some might call us, to a slightly larger operation expanded to new services, perhaps even new verticals, that kind of thing. But to answer your question about the team structure, yeah, in house is very kind of like the client facing the strategy side of things and then freelance talent across the board as well.

Okay, okay, that's already an interesting challenge, right. When you've got part of the team in house, part of the team freelance. And that builds beautifully towards my next question that I have for you. So before we start talking about everything that Zenpilot could help you with, obviously scaling Grizzle and growing the company, you must have learned a lot about how to manage operations and you've got your own secret techniques. And I was wondering if you might share one of them for us here today. So my question is, what is your number one tip for agency operations?

Yeah, I guess there's two that kind of feed into each other because my first one would be kind of simplicity and elegance.

Right.

I come from agencies in the past where procedures, SOPs, processes, they would feel quite clunky.

Right.

And when I kind of discovered this concept called via Negativa, which I discovered on some blog a long time ago, but it means kind of addition through subtraction, I. E. What are kind of like the 80% of things are actually getting. Sorry, the 20% of things are getting 80% of results. And that just kind of makes life so much easier. Oftentimes we overcomplicate systems and processes and sometimes you do need to kind of lean in that way to see what works. But I think we need to prioritize stripping things back in order to actually make the ship run as efficiently as possible. There's so much bloat. Call it technical debt, call it operational debt, whatever you like. Putting a stamp on that sooner rather than later. I found out the hard way is an excellent way to kind of help things scale and just peace of mind. As well. As an agency founder and operator myself, and that kind of leans into the second tip that I would talk about, which is documenting everything, right? And it took me far too long to drink from this Kool Aid. And it was actually thanks to Zenpilot that I was like, okay, I really need to buck my ideas up on this front. But as soon as it was done, both in terms of actual kind of training, so there's the kind of skills side of things as well as the technical. Step by step, here's how to apply for these different type of project types. Getting that out of the way as soon as possible has just been an absolute lifesaver. And of course, they're living, breathing things. They're never one and done, but once they're there, you can iterate and improve upon them, which is why it feeds back into this element of kind of simplifying, stripping back, making things as smooth and as elegant as possible. If that makes sense.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. When you were talking about this, I was reminded of at one point in my career, I was running a series of events and we made the mistake of doing the opposite of Via Negativa. You know, my manager at the time came to me and said, you know, for each of our events, let's put up also a landing page on our site. You know, it doesn't. It's not enough for it to live, for example, only on LinkedIn as a LinkedIn event. And I looked at it thinking, that's going to take me an hour or maybe more to put together in our lovely CMS and it's going to have, you know, 20 page views maybe leading up to the event. I didn't because. Chain of command. Right. But I do, I do feel you. So could we dig for just a moment, a little bit deeper into this? Especially, I'm curious, in the realm of content or, you know, content operations, is there a specific step or can you think of a specific example of something that's worth stripping down or maybe, I don't know, usually for content or like for 90% of the blogs in the world, it's there, but could be taken out anything. That's like a typical case of bloat.

Here in the editorial content world, that often translates into kind of wordiness.

Right.

If we're getting really into the weeds of editorial content, there's a idea in the content marketing space that the longer the piece of content is, the more Valuable. It is.

Right.

A lot of SEOs and content folk are now pushing against that. Rightly so. It's not about the length. It's about kind of like the velocity of ideas and new information that you're bringing to the table. We're really militant on wordiness and redundancies and repetition just because we've already said it and our readers are smart and they might understand these things. It's like, get to the point quickly. Every sentence needs to kind of pack a punch and, like, really move the narrative forward as quickly as possible.

Right.

So, for example, you might have a section in a article that talks about how to set up a sales pipeline. And in one of those, it's. It kind of talks about. Okay, how to identify each step of your sales pipeline.

Right.

So from lead to appointment negotiation, all that jazz. And within that, you talk about why steps important, and then quickly get onto some examples.

Right.

An example of how another organization has set up their sales pipeline and how they arrived to those stages. Okay, done. You've set the stage, and then there's a takeaway on that.

Right.

And within this section, it could be three to 500 words. But every piece of information, every paragraph, every example, every anecdote has a purpose. So in the content world, yeah, it often comes down to kind of, like, stripping things back, and oftentimes, again, going back to what I said, sometimes we need to kind of overdo it, put all of our ideas and all of our thoughts and expertise and experiences on the paper in order to then go through an editorial process in our own minds as writers or whatever that might be, as editors, as strategists as well. Just to kind of like, condense that for the reader, because that's who we're ultimately serving.

Yeah. For that particular question, for that search intent, what's part of the answer and what's just the distraction? Right. For that particular piece.

Exactly, exactly. And it is important to add additional things to a particular piece of content as well.

Right.

Call it information gain, whatever you want to call it. What are the gaps that other articles are leaving on the table, and how can we fill in those gaps? And that helps content perform very well as well.

Yeah, yeah, I feel that. And this is something that's very close to my heart, having been in content for, calculating seven years now. A little over that, actually. It's all about what you leave in and what you take out to make it, like a nice, dense, informative piece of content. Awesome.

Yeah, 100%.

All right, so at this point, I would love to start digging a little bit more into your operations. Working with ZenPilot, tell the whole story, kind of Pixar style. From there was Tom and his team. Every day they did a. And then, you know, through this whole story, they got to a different state. Now let's call it Z.

The Z state. I like it. The Zen state. Okay. A Zen state indeed.

Yes. Okay.

The state of the state of Zen. There you go. You can have that for free.

Wow. And I'll tell you, this is the second conversation where we arrived at that organically through different means. But anyway, so tell me about the A. Tell me about where you started. What were you dealing with? What made you started looking into your operations in the first place?

Yeah, absolutely. I knew it was going to be pretty important when I was moving from just me and some freelancers to in house. And you know, the. The before state kind of went through several iterations. First it was spreadsheets, of course it was right, you know, mpp, you're just starting. Exactly. It's got to be scrappy. And then we discovered airtable and things started running far more smoothly.

Right.

It's very easy to manage data. Clients kind of loved it because we gave them like an actual front end act as a client portal of sorts. But it wasn't great at project management, at least not back then. And so then we moved over to Asana, using airtable as kind of like the front end and having those two things pieced together. And I was like, well, this is still not right. Like it was still breaking, things were still falling through the gaps. It was really difficult to manage resources as well. You know, how at capacity, each team member is at that kind of thing. Again, important when you start hiring people in house. So then we discovered ClickUp and we looked into it for a while and then we decided to stick with Asana and then we went back to it, thanks to an article I found by zenpilot. Funnily enough, I kind of gobbled up a lot of the articles on the blog, you know, talking about how to structure different spaces. You've got delivery, growth, all that good stuff, operations. And it made a lot of sense, right, because you can store documentation on there for processes, the way that dependencies work, the workloads, you, all that kind of thing. And so we decided to slowly move over to that, using the Zempiler model as our kind of baseline. And that took a while to get over because again, it was just a handful of us kind of making that transition. But once it was done, it Felt a lot smoother. And then a month or two or three passed and we realized that we could still be doing so much better. There's something not quite right here. There are certain things that are kind of, you know, slipping through the gaps. I only have so much time, yada, yada, yada. And so we thought, screw it, right? Zenpile have taken us this far. Let's have a conversation and see, you know, are we on the right track or can they help us take things to the next level? And after speaking with, I think it was Kevin, the answer was clear. Yes. The process that Kevin outlined, from start to finish, it seemed like a breath of fresh air. It was filling in all of the gaps of the questions that I knew that we had in order to take this kind of, okay, nascent dream world to actually, it's becoming a reality. And so would you like me to go into the process of speaking about working with Zenpilot?

Actually, I wanted to zoom in on one element first, and that was because you're describing something that we find to be a pretty typical case where, you know, a lot of agencies or other types of companies, they look at, you know, all the content we've got out there, and there's a lot of tutorials, a lot that enables basically the DIY route. You know, you can take all of this. And like you mentioned, based on the Zenpilot model, the system, build it for yourself. I wanted to get a little bit more detail about what made you specifically kind of veer off the DIY path and work with Zenpilot. What did you feel was missing? Were there particular areas, features, situations that made you make that jump?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it was just a sense of expertise and that we were only, you know, 60% of the way there. And if we wanted to set a good foundation to get to where we wanted to go, then we needed to get to at least 80%. And then there's obviously 80 to 90%, 100% is some kind of utopia. But, yeah, I think it was just kind of understanding that the model was already working for us and it could be better and that it would just be so much more efficient just to let the people, the experts who created this model in the first place get us from 60 to 80 or 90.

Right.

And so it was a combination of things that kind of made us pull the trigger. Like I said, it was tasting the Kool Aid in the first place and actually using the model, but also a lot of the content on the blog. Thanks to you, Cuba, I'm sure. And, yeah, just kind of going through those initial conversations with Kevin and the team and just looking at what the journey looked like, it's like, here's the blueprint. So it's kind of laying the foundation. What is it going to look like? And then the actual implementation, it was really the implementation that I wanted someone to handhold us through. Okay. Because we've done this all ourselves. We've gone through the mire. Let's just kind of let someone who knows what they're doing do it for us. And again, it was important because we wanted to set the foundation for our next stage of growth. We didn't want to start onboarding a bunch of clients and then realized that we needed it and not be able to commit the time and the effort required to do it. Right.

Okay, so tell me more about the implementation then. For somebody who might not be familiar with this, watching this, to find out more about working with Zenpilot, for example, what were the stages of that process? How did that go down? Maybe some parts that you particularly enjoyed or appreciated.

Yeah. On the implementation side of things, I think it was just the killer team shout out to Maggie and Nico. Yeah, it was kind of a mixture of just being guided through all of those steps, but also the expectations at the beginning that said, this is going to be work. We're going to have to roll up our sleeves and really kind of get into this. And so committing to that process was important. And having that communication, it was great because it set our expectations and we knew that we were going to have honest conversations with each other. That was something else that was very apparent is we're not going to get told what we want to hear. If something that we're doing sucks, then we're going to get told that it sucks. But in terms of the actual implementation process from start to finish, it was very well structured. I think the fact that we had a lot of the groundwork set already made it a little bit easy for us or easier than it could have been. There was a lot of things like, okay, we're already doing that, and Maggie said, oh, great, let's move on.

Right.

That kind of thing. But the things that we. We didn't have in place, just being walked through how to do it, having it all set up for us where applicable. You know, some things we have to do ourselves, which comes with the territory of these kinds of things. Yeah, just. Just having the structure, having the resources, you know, from you guys as well. Start to finish. A lot of it was, we've got to build ourselves. Some of it was, you guys have to build it for us. And then a lot of it was, hey, here's something that we've already got. Let's just plug it in. So, yeah, that kind of collaborative process was, like I said, like I keep saying, a breath of fresh air.

You mentioned something that I would love to hear more about, and that's actually the hard part of the process or the work involved in the process. I mean, we try to. And everybody we partner with, we try to prepare them for that. From your perspective, could you talk a little bit more about, you know, the difficult conversations or, you know, the work? What was the heaviest lift there or something that stood out?

Yeah, I think, for lack of a better word, it's compliance.

Right.

Like I said, we work with a lot of freelancers and most of them kind of get it, luckily. So there were elements like time logging. I like to call it time logging rather than time tracking because most people do it. In retrospect, I think that's probably fair, rather than kind of track it live, but that's a technical thing. That's neither here nor there. So, yeah, kind of communicating why we're doing certain things, why we need communication. ClickUp, that was a longer process than expected, but I think it's just kind of human nature and it's part of the process. And I think it's just a matter of having those reminders in place, which is why that concept of the ClickUp champion is quite important. Having someone who's not kind of militantly there, breathing down your neck, but kind of looking at the data, looking at where are things at red, where is time not being tracked, that kind of thing. I think that's pretty important. So having someone to kind of lead the process definitely alleviates some of those difficulties. But yeah, I think it's just kind of like those teething issues, going from, like I said before, the previous state to the new desired state. Communicating to people why it's important.

Yeah. So was there anything specific that you did that helped you get over that hurdle of time logging? Anything particular you said to the team? Or was it helpful that Maggie and Nicole were there to kind of reinforce the message?

Yeah, I think it's kind of framing it in an honest way why we're doing it. And the reason that we're doing it is because we want to make sure things are as efficient as possible. It kind of goes back to this element of via negativa. If there are certain elements of the process that are taking longer than they should.

Why is that?

Are there things that are just unnecessary? And I think some healthy element of constraint without sacrificing quality is important. And I don't want to, you know, breathe out people's necks and ask them, hey, why is this taking too long? When we can just look at the data with certain elements? And that really helps us kind of like hone in and so communicating that to everybody in house, freelance alike, instead of a bunch of, you know, aha moments. Because again, we're quite lucky that our freelancers really embed themselves into our processes, which is great. And so they want to kind of make life easier for us because it makes life easier for them. And we just create a, well, you know, a pretty smooth operation as a result. And it's, it's not a one and done thing. You know, we're consistently looking at that data, jumping on our L10, our weekly, you know, standups, and looking at specific issues. Yeah, but yeah, I think it's that communication that's key.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. And you know, at zenpilot, we like to talk about the three keys to gold standard operations. That's processes, tools, and habits. What you're talking about connects closely with the habits piece, which we found the most crucial but also the hardest to maintain because habits are 100% quite easily.

100%, yeah.

So on the flip side of the previous question I asked about the hard and the work, was there anything that stood out that was easier than you expected or something surprised you in that way?

Easier than expected is probably the documentation side of things because again, a, I talk a good game about documenting everything as soon as possible, but not everything was in there. And so that was something that I was personally dreading just because there's so many moving parts to the methodologies that we've created over the years. But once we kind of mapped everything out and prioritized things so there was a scoring system of sorts when we went through the blueprint process before implementation, it's like, what do we need right now and what can come later? What are those individual steps within it? Just looking at that from a macro view, it made it a lot more manageable to kind of break up and go through and do if that makes sense. So the actual documentation side of things, I know every agency founder dreads that. We all know it sucks, but we all know that on the other side is an easier life of sorts. So it was good to have some guidance going through that process in a structured way.

I think I'm going to title this one, you know, drink the Kool Aid, even if it's bitter, because that's kind of the.

It's bitter, but it makes you feel better at the end, you know, and there is some sugar in there, to quote Mary Poppins. So it's not all. It's not all doom and gloom.

Okay, awesome. Awesome. Okay, we're nearing the end of our time here. Slowly. I wanted to ask, zoom in on another element that you mentioned that others might be curious about. This scoring part at the beginning of the blueprint process. Scoring your processes, can you tell from your end how that went down? And to somebody not familiar with this part of the designpilot flow, how that went down?

Yeah, Cubit, you're scratching my brain here. Because there were some metrics. I don't remember exactly what those metrics were, but they made total sense at the time. So when we went through that blueprint process, we basically mapped out all of our service lines. So digital PR Content Production Optimization. Then within each of those service lines, once defined, there were delivery roles. And from there, it's each individual kind of deliverable, and each deliverable has subtasks, and each subtask has checklists. And so kind of breaking that down was key. And then that helped us to kind of prioritize what we needed upfront as part of the implementation process versus what can come later. And that was done through some kind of scoring system, if I recall correctly, where it's kind of like the frequency that we do it in, maybe how technical a particular process or deliverable was, that kind of thing. And you guys had this kind of formula that allowed us to kind of score things, maybe from 1 to 5, green to red kind of thing. And you could correct me if I'm wrong here, because, again, it feels like an age ago, but that kind of scoring system, again, just allowed us to prioritize.

Yeah, there was frequency impact, and I think the last one was something to do with, like, the difficulty of documenting it, but it's a file that I also haven't viewed in just a hot moment.

No, that sounds about right as well. Yeah.

Yeah. So I wanted to learn a little bit more about that. Okay, well, so to summarize, because we're getting close to the Z, to the Zen part of the story, can you tell the watchers and listeners a little bit about on the other end of the process, what are the benefits that you've reaped from this?

Yeah, absolutely. It's visibility into a lot of things that are Happening within the agency that we may not necessarily have had before, both through kind of time logging data as well as workload capacities across the team. That high level macro view, it's all of the processes, how smooth it is. A lot of the onboarding processes for both our clients there, they were pretty smooth, but they could have been better. Now they are far better. Same with onboarding, new team members, especially freelancers, having kind of like a structured approach for them to, excuse me, having a structured process for them to kind of come on board, get used to like the processes without getting in their way too much.

Right.

Freelancers are freelancers for a reason. They don't want like a pseudo boss telling them and what to do and having to kind of come in as like a pseudo employer of sorts. But we always get compliments from our freelancers how well structured our processes are from start to finish. It's something that they really appreciate. So those are just a few things and just again, it's not a one and done thing. We haven't kind of reached this utopia and now we can kind of all sit back and relax. But it's given us a compass for when we do need to improve upon things and iterate. We know exactly how to do it and manage it and manage our time around it as well and why it might be important and maybe what not to do, that kind of thing. So it's a mixture of those things.

Right.

It's the processes, it's the visibility and it's the platform to kind of springboard us forward as we begin to grow in 20, 24 and beyond.

Yeah. So if I could ask you for just a touch more detail here for onboarding, I believe, because I'm trying to think for somebody who hasn't seen ClickUp or what it can do, how we can paint a picture of how that's structured for onboarding. The big part are templates, right. There can be a click up and take form that you can fill out and then that gets translated into tasks in the system. I feel like that one is pretty easy to explain but. But the workload capacity on the other hand that you also mentioned, can you tell somebody who hasn't seen the system what you get when you have that in place and how that works?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is really key for your in house team members. I think what we really liked about ClickUp is the ability. So the workload view is kind of like this table of sorts where you have kind of days on the X axis and then team members on the y Axis and for each team member, you can set the number of daily hours or weekly hours, that kind of thing. And then within each day you see how, at what capacity they're at.

Right.

So it's kind of like a bar, a meter of sorts.

Right.

So let's say Claudia works seven hours on a Monday and right now she's at three hours capacity. That means she's underutilized for on a given week. So we know that, okay, we perhaps need to reallocate some client tasks to Claudia or maybe put us work in other areas, so to speak. And when you kind of couple that with assigning specific tasks and assign clients, signing clients, you can quickly see, okay, how frequently should we give a certain team member certain projects or how many clients can an account manager realistically handle? Both by looking at what's coming and also retroactively looking at some of that, you know, time tracking, time logging data as well. So we found that to be like super key. And we're in a fortunate position relatively where what we do on a monthly basis is pretty consistent. So for a given client we might create, I don't know, 10 pieces of content every single month. And so we know we need X amount of writers and X amount of editors to handle that. And so we can basically look at, okay, this is how long it takes to edit a given piece of content of this format. And this format. How can we kind of, you know, assign our editors and writers to those clients without bombarding them? What you don't want is that green bar that I just talked about that kind of, it visualizes capacity to go into the red. Ideally you kind of want it significantly below it, not significantly, but you want some wiggle room.

Right.

No one wants to be overloaded. And so it just kind of allows us to kind of create that a culture of we're not burning our people out, focusing on quality while also making sure everybody is. Yeah, they're assigned the right amount of work and all that good stuff.

Yeah. And that seems to be one of the key problems that we help solve, especially for agencies, service based businesses, is having finally that workload view where you can see how much capacity you've got on. Can you take on that next client or would that be too tight for the team? Over utilizing underutilizing.

And the templates make that really easy because you can set time estimates for every single subtask and that's kind of what fills up that capacity. Which again is why it's important to kind of have visibility on that data. Because if the time estimate and the time tracking data do not match, then there's something wrong. And people are obviously going to be overloaded with work because the reporting is saying one thing, but the time tracking data is saying something else. And so it's important to kind of measure those two as well. But that's not something that we got in Asana or Airtable back in the day. That kind of visibility of how utilized our people are.

Okay, awesome. Awesome. All right, one last question before we go into where people can follow you and learn more about you and Grizzle. What would be a piece of advice that you might share with somebody considering working with Zenpilot? Maybe they're on the fence about booking that call. What would you say to them?

Yeah, I would say, first of all, book the call because it's enlightening. Any question, any question that might be unanswered through the website or for your content, I found to be very quickly addressed, which helped seal the deal for us personally, but also, I guess, strap in to do a fair amount of work. This isn't just, you know, working with an agency or consultancy where you just go through an onboarding process and they do it all for you, and rightly so.

Right.

This is like the. The baseline. It's the foundation, it's the engine of your business. You've got to be involved. And so, yeah, just kind of understanding that before jumping in is important, but after the, you know, two, three months, however long it was, once that kind of period is over, again, everything is just so much better. It's the only way I can describe it.

Yeah, exactly. Thanks for saying that and hearing strap in. On the one hand, I'm thinking that might be off putting, but on the other, I mean, if you're an agency owner, an entrepreneur, you did not exactly pick the easy path. Right. And if you're signing up for. Right. And if you're signing up for, we often use like a gym metaphor. You know, you're signing up for a gym, you have to actually leave some sweat in the gym. But the results are worth it. Thank you, Tom.

Exactly. And I say strap in just as kind of like a colloquialism. It's just you do have to do the work. But like I say, Maggie and the team just kind of guided us through, said, do this by this time, and we said, yes, boss, and it made the process much smoother.

Even internally, I hear Maggie and Nicole talking to each other like, yes, chef, received. I'm not sure where that started.

That is a excellent metaphor. For it, yeah? Yes, Chef. Exactly.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, so final part of this conversation. Thank you so much, Tom, for everything you shared. Really, really enjoyed this chat with you. So where can people follow you? Learn more about Grizzl. What kind of people are you looking for? What kind of clients? Or maybe talent? What's on the docket right now?

Yeah, yeah. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure. So you can learn more about grizzle@grizzleio and follow me on LinkedIn. It's probably the best place. Tom Whatley search for me. There's a few of us on there, but put Grizzle in and you should be able to find me.

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. And for more information about Zenpilot, I mean, you're probably watching this on the Zenpilot YouTube channel. If not, look us up. Zenpilot.com Zenpilot.com call is where you go to finally meet our team and to get started on the journey that Tom just told you about. And Besides that, on Zenpilot.com, you'll find a bunch of resources to maybe do what Tom did initially and his team to build out some of this yourself to check out the model. We share a lot about the system kind of upfront for you to be able to get a good taste of it and be able to DIY before you dive deeper into what can be done with ClickUp and with sendpilot. Alright, thank you, Tom, so much for the time here today and for you watchers and listeners. Have a nice one.

Thanks, Jira.