How smart agencies go beyond ClickUp to fix all of their operations

1, 2, 3. Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Zen Pilot live show. Very nice of y' all to join us here. Whether you're watching live or watching the recording, it's very nice that you decided to spend some time with us here today. With me on the call is Maggie Cornerens, our client coach. Maggie, how are you doing today?

Just Andy, Happy to be here.

I should have said one of our client coaches. And by the way, I should have asked before the stream, how did I do on the pronunciation of your last name there?

So close, really genuinely, it just depends on who you ask, what time of day and where they are geographically located in terms of how you actually pronounce my last name. I tell people it's Cornerans, Maggie Corner. Sometimes I get lazy and I say K Narrans and act like that first R doesn't even exist. So.

Okay, Karnarons, I'll be sure to pay more and pay attention to that for the future. All right. Well, hello, everyone, hanging out with us today. Let's get the technicalities out of the way. So first and foremost, if you can see us and you can hear us, please leave a comment, tell us where you're tuning in from, and tell us what you would love to get from the stream. We're here to hang out with you. We're here to ask questions. We do have a general topic for the conversation, but this is a live stream, not a webinar. So let's make this more interactive and by all means, jump in with your questions and comments. I would love to get a confirmation that you can see us and hear us and it's all coming in. Okay. Because this is getting recorded and if there's any technical difficulties, it will affect the recording. What we want to talk about here today is going beyond the project management tool and how an agency can do that to fix all of their operations, to basically address more of their business operations than just, you know, we have this project management tool problem because it's something that comes up quite a bit in conversations at Zenpilot. So that's the topic we'll be revolving around. But within that, we'll talk a lot about various other things that you might be curious about. Okay. Sasha is saying this looks good. Somebody on LinkedIn says looks and sounds great. Team. If they're saying team, they should be one of ours, right, Maggie?

Maybe. Maybe they want to be.

Maybe they feel part of the team. And if so, we really appreciate you. Okay, so while people are still joining, I wanted to ask a few warm up Questions starting with my favorite one. Maggie, what is your favorite type of sandwich?

I love a club sandwich. Like even if fancy location, if a club sandwich is on the menu and I'm feeling especially casual or even not, I will almost always order a club sandwich. Sometimes something about like 17 pieces of bread plus bacon is just top notch.

Yeah, I personally do not mind bacon chat. Please share your thoughts on club sandwiches now. My favorite, and I think I said it on Agency Breakthrough, our new podcast recently as well. Or maybe that episode is not out yet. Ah, I'm excited to find out. My favorite has been peanut butter and honey.

Oh, my dad will do peanut butter, honey and banana.

Oh, okay. That is a nice combination. Did he get it from Keanu Reeves too?

No, he got it from his mother.

Okay. Yeah, I was reading this AMA on Reddit that must have been like 6 months ago or something, and Kian was sharing his favorite types of food and it's just, this is the one thing I remember that peanut butter and honey is his comfort sandwich.

That sounds good though.

Yeah, it is. I have a peanut butter and honey sandwich problem.

Now you have a Keanu Reeves problem. And Sasha a Reuben. You're right. That is delightful. My mom is a Reuben gal anywhere. Like if I'm ordering a club sandwich, my mom's ordering a Reuben on rye.

Awesome. Okay. And that concludes the sandwich section. Unless we get more comments and we'll refer to them. On a more serious note, Maggie, I wanted to ask you with the topic that we've got in mind, let's talk a little bit about, like, who should be tuning in to this conversation? Who do you hope is tuning in? Who will benefit the most? What kind of person? What kind of situation? Maybe what kind of agency? What would you say?

Yeah. So I think that the best kind of person to watch this particular webinar live stream feed recording thing is, it's twofold. Both the decision maker, the people at the agency level that think to themselves, we need to hire Zenpilot for this. That's a. That's one group of people who should be watching this because it's going to help them hear from the person conducting their implementation. You know, the types of questions and conversations we're going to have during the implementation. But it's also helpful for the end user or the other team members at the agency level that didn't necessarily sign that contract, but are responsible and accountable for participating in the implementation. It's really good for them to hear this conversation too, because sometimes the decision maker goes through the blueprint process first as an individual, and they look at the blueprint and go, yes, we need to sign on for a full implementation. And then they pass that project on to an implementation team that wasn't part of the blueprint process. And so the implementation team members who don't have all that background information that was uncovered during the blueprint, it's helpful for them to know what to expect during the implementation in terms of both workload required to carry out the implementation, but also the mental load, the types of change management they need to prepare for, the types of problems that they need to evaluate before they bake anything into their new project management tool. We're going to, I'm sure we're going to touch on both of those things. Agency, decision maker, agency, end user. And both of those groups of people would benefit from hearing anything that we talk about today.

And I think on a more general level, if you're hearing the words blueprint implementation, and these are not clear just yet, we'll dive into that for sure. But you can think of these as the blueprint is the part of the process where you diagnose the project management issues and design a solution, whereas the implementation is where you actually perform either a migration to ClickUp or restructuring of ClickUp. And I would love our watchers and listeners to also think about, by hearing more about our process, if at the end of the day you are leaning more towards the DIY route, at least you'll hear about some of the challenges you encounter along the way, even if you go diy, because we've seen these challenges, we know it's not always an easy transformation. So we wanted to talk a little bit more about that. Let's start then by defining a little bit more about what is the whole puzzle and what is Maggie the piece of the puzzle and what is your role in this whole process? So could you, in your own words, explain kind of the transformation that we take agencies through kind of blueprint implementation, how you figure into this process, at what point during the process people meet somebody like you? So one of our client coaches.

Yeah. So like we mentioned, the blueprint is setting the groundwork. You work with one of our team members to really talk through why you came to zenpilot to begin with. There's a lot of agency owners have a really great ability to identify the symptoms, but because they're so close to the problem, they don't necessarily have enough distance to identify what the actual problem is. And so during the blueprint process, there's a lot of conversation to get to sometimes uncomfortable truths about what exactly is causing friction within the agency. So in the midst of those conversations, the blueprint that comes out of that particular phase is legitimately a blueprint for how their project management tool, whether that be teamwork, whether that be ClickUp, how that actual hierarchy will look once people log into that tool for the first time. So how it's going to be laid out, what kind of automations need to be created, what kind of third party integrations, what kind of custom assets need to be built. All of those things are discussed, uncovered and documented during the blueprint process. That takes a couple of weeks, depending on how urgent agency owners are feeling about this situation. Once that blueprint process is buttoned up, they can choose to go through a full implementation, which I strongly recommend because we've seen companies who go through the blueprint process, choose not to go through implementation, try to implement themselves and then go, ha, that didn't work. And then they come back anyway. So once the implementation starts, blueprint ends, implementation starts. That's where your client coaches come in, myself, a couple of the other team members. In between that blueprint and implementation process, the solutions team is configuring and customizing the actual workspace teamwork ClickUp. So then you've got, you're, you're activating what was built and determined inside of the blueprint, you're activating it inside of the workspace. And then implementation starts where we start to really dig in. We go through all the different spaces. Spaces being specific to a specific function within the agency, whether that's client services or sales and marketing or operations, all those things. And we go through layer by layer of the business during the implementation, structurally inside the project management tool. But then during that implementation, as we go layer by layer, business arm by business arm, we are extracting even more information regarding any sort of friction, any sort of opportunities to fine tune that particular operational function within those spaces. Spaces again being client services, sales, marketing, operations.

Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of the lay of the land here. Like Maggie mentioned, you go through the blueprint process here first and that currently you'll be working on with Derek Harvey, our director of Client Success. Think of him as Dr. Derek, okay? He looks at the symptoms, he diagnoses the problems more deeply, helps you uncover more of the root causes and creates a plan of treatment, at which point you can self medicate or you go into the implementation process. That's kind of how I explain it to myself in my head. So the part of the process that we'll be talking about here in more detail is the implementation and also sharing kind of more context along the way. So first I want to. So like next I want to dive into you, your role. Why is it even called client coach, et cetera. So that's coming up first though, just to make people more aware of the kind of problems that we help with or kind of the kind of surface symptoms that lead to the more root causes. Can you talk about the surface symptoms that people come to us with or that even prompt them to start looking at companies like Zenpilot to make a change?

Yeah, so we've heard from people who come to Zenpilot with complaints of like, we spend 40% of every single week trying to locate assets or documentation or trying to locate XYZ in order for the team to even do their day jobs. That's horrific. I cannot imagine the financial waste that that would cause. So that's, that's certainly one symptom. Another symptom is upset clients like they're the A team that would be dropping balls or missing due dates or failing to deliver quality work due to lack of process. That's a big one that we see. People come to us with a lot and just general lack of visibility where they know work is getting done. They know that their team is progress providing specific types of projects, deliverables work to their clients. But they have no clue how much time their team is spending. They have no clue if they're charging their clients an appropriate amount of money given how much time it actually takes to execute on those things. And so it's, it's a lot of like not knowing what in the world is going on.

Yeah.

Not even being, not. Not understanding how your own sausage is being made.

Yeah. And we call that problem, for short, a visibility problem. When you're not seeing what's happening, how much time things are taking, what balls are being dropped, so to speak. That all falls under the umbrella of visibility. I wanted to ask chat at this point, you know, we're talking about the symptoms that make agencies think, okay, we have a project management issue we'll get into if it's really a project management issue or if it's something deeper. Tell us about the symptoms that you're seeing so we can comment on them more directly and help you more directly with the time that we've got here. You know, you're watching this, tuning in to spend some time with us for sure, but also I assume to solve a problem. So we would love to hear about that, to address that more Directly. And also, I'm not going to get the people from Zenpilot off the hook here either. Okay. If you want to fill something in about the problems that people are coming in with, call them, you know, the pains that they're coming in with, then by all means, add to the conversation. We're not going to mind that at all. And we're going to feature your comments as well. Very well. So we know about the symptoms, the kind of the impulse that can prompt an agency to start talking with companies like ours. And we know that the first stage that we'll be diving very deep into here because we don't have Derek on the call, is the blueprint, the diagnosis, the treatment plan. Now for implementation, you meet a client coach. And this is something that actually I personally, when I was about to join Zenpilot, that was interesting for me to see that the role is even called client coach. I've never seen that before. And a comment came in and read that quick, Sasha saying, okay, this is still on the topic of symptoms. Let me fill that in then. Team members not using the system that is being set up, still complaining about the system symptoms. I think we can get to that. You know what? Okay, since Sasha, since you're tuning in and leaving that comment, I'll press pause on the client coach role.

Actually, I think I can answer what Sasha is saying, assuming that the question you're about to ask is, you know what, what role does the client coach play during an implementation and why are they called a client coach?

So that connects to what Sasha is saying here.

Oh, yeah. So, Sasha, a lot of that comes from, you know, if there's not a level of accountability within an agency where people are being held to the standards that are set in terms of operational excellence and engagement with a PM tool, then of course they're going to complain and they're going to not use the system. And so a lot of the premise behind a client coach and why it is called a client coach is because we are truly coaching people through how to use the PM tool. And that doesn't stop at the implementation team. So, Sasha, as a pm, if you were a member of the implementation team, you're one of the four or five people I would be working with at your agency level to implement the PM tool. At some point, I would also be talking to everybody in the agency and I would be, as the Zenpilot client coach level, setting a new set of expectations with the entire organization to say your leadership has brought in Zenpilot to establish these best Practices and build a PM tool that will solve all the things that you complain about on a daily basis. However, it relies on you participating and engaging within the PM tool in the manner you are about to be taught today. That's a, that's a function that the client coach plays. That is a meeting that we have with the entire organization. So after they go through the full team training with Zen Pilot, then you can actually hold up like the, the ten commandments of Zen Pilot's pm. The Zen Pilot ten commandments of project management to say, like, hey, we went through this, we talked about this, we established best practices and we built this workspace to solve all those things that you're complaining about. But you have to be able to help yourselves solve those problems by actually using the system that was built for you. I think a lot of times somebody in my position at any other type of implementation agency may be spending a little bit too much time talking to the decision maker, talking to the agency owner about why an implementation may be beneficial. And the important mind shift that zenpilot has done a really good job of is focusing on the change management and the behavior change aspect at the end user level. You know, we've created content and, and meeting agendas specifically for the end user because those are the people who are supposed to be using the system. And so by giving them the tools necessary and by making it as easy as possible and as efficient as possible and as beneficial as possible for the end user, those team members to use the system, then if that change management, that behavior change, the distance between old way of doing things and new way of doing things shortens quite a bit. And so as a client coach, we position this change as a benefit to the end user and not like a oh gosh, we're about to change everything you do on a daily basis conversation.

Okay. To quote our co founder Gray, that's awesome. What you just mentioned there. I noticed this is the segue that he used to all the time on Agency Journey. When the guest finishes their thought, it's like, that's awesome. Next. Yeah, look for it. Actually it happens a lot of the time. Sasha is saying, that's perfectly stated. That's awesome, Sasha. And keep the questions coming. Both Sasha and everybody else. I'll remind any pilots watching, if you want to fill in any additional detail, please go ahead and do so. What I wanted to fill in is that, you know, if you're thinking about the DIY route for this, I just wanted to, to focus on, you know, kind of the scale of the Challenge sometimes is I don't think fully appreciated. Like my story is, I was, how should I say this? I was driving a ClickUp implementation at my previous company and I was really an evangelist of ClickUp. I mean, still am, still love the tool, of course, but I was really driving kind of adoption from being, you know, the patient zero user of ClickUp, to gaining the whole marketing team on it and then getting most of the sales team on it and some of the design team. We never really got to getting the whole company on it. And I did not appreciate this level of challenge where you had to have multiple meetings explaining this is the additional visibility we'll get, this is how this will streamline our workflows. But I also noticed that I can turn people, people who were initially very skeptical if I gave them enough time and attention and maybe customized the workflow a little or made adaptations or really explained the thinking behind this. They went from being the resistance to being part of the ClickUp alliance, so to speak, and they helped then carry the change. I actually had somebody from the design team say, initially they said, we don't really want to get on ClickUp, sorry, to saying if it's not on ClickUp, it doesn't exist for us. That's actually the first commandment of the 10 Zen pilot commandments, and not in the PM tool.

It doesn't happen.

Exactly, exactly. And that is extremely important because otherwise you don't have a reliable source of data. You don't have that single source of truth that you need for visibility and data and to be able to actually see comprehensively what's happening in the agency. But anyway, so that was me just adding my 2 cents here. What I wanted to expand on is I wanted to dig just one level deeper into this and to share a little bit about, you know, you're mentioning that you're positioning this as a benefit to the end users. So all of these conversations, what would you indicate as the kind of the biggest hurdle is it, you know, it might be scheduling or actually what you say on the call or, you know, whatever, whichever tactical thing that comes to mind. And also, let's give a tip to the audience how to overcome that hurdle if you end up going the DIY route or just to understand more of the context of your position.

Man, the DIY route, though we provide people with a pretty comprehensive playbook. Should they come to Zen Pilot and still end up deciding they want to do the DIY route. There is, man, it is really hard to convey how much hand holding people benefit from when they go the full implementation route with Zen Pilot, because we have the time and we have the distance to really examine the problems being caught, the problems that are causing the symptoms. If you go the DIY route, you're so tactically focused on building out the workspace and technically that we find a lot of people don't take the time to truly identify the core issues and eventually they just end up baking in the symptoms to their new PM tool. And so they would have spent all of this time and energy essentially solidifying the issues in their agency and a new PM tool. So they're just perpetuating the problems that they came to us to begin with. As a client coach, it is one of my responsibilities to, to, like I said, truly extract from people and then hold a mirror to them to say like, okay, as a reminder, you came to Zen Pilot because you were spending 40% of your time on administrative work or actually just like finding stuff to get the work done. And you are in fact trying to replicate that problem instead of solve the problem without having that, like, feedback mirror. Provided we see a lot of DIYers just create another vicious cycle of inefficiency. I will tell you that as your client, as a client coach, I am spending upwards of four hours per week on one client. So that's, that's a ClickUp expert, spending four hours a week on one client's implementation. And I expect that would be a bare minimum for somebody to be diying something. And so if you don't have the time and the ability and the discipline to hold yourself accountable, to spend four hours a week in ClickUp to build out a workspace appropriately, then it's going to take you like a year to get it all done. And at that point, things have changed, functionality in your business has changed, team members have changed, and having that kind of a long, drawn out, unguided process, I cannot see that being useful for people. And in fact, we've had plenty of people go the DIY route and come back to us anyway to say, I should have just done full implementation to begin with.

Can you give more detail about that? When these situations happen that agencies come back to us, what do they usually point to as their particular pain that makes them come back?

Yeah, so a lot of what we spend time on during implementation is process documentation and template building. And there's a very specific Zen Pilot framework for building out a task or a list or a doc or a folder or a view template. All of those things are designed with the end user in mind and we have the education and agency experience to walk people through their own processes in their own words. But following the Zen Pilot framework, to ensure that you have one user, one sitting, not to exceed four hours for every single subtask, and that you're breaking down every deliverable in every project with subtasks tasks, having that kind of visibility, having that kind of granularity in the processes is what allows agency owners, account managers, project managers, to what I call predict the future. All those subtasks have time estimates that are assigned to an individual human being. And when the delivery space, for instance, when all of that client work is programmed into the delivery space utilizing Zen Pilot approved process templates, then everybody in the agency, including team leads, have visibility Kuba has 36 hours of work scheduled for three days next week. That's obviously a problem. We need to make sure that we rearrange things, that we reschedule projects, that we have a conversation about prioritization. But when companies, when agencies do the DIY route, the biggest problem they come to us with is I had no clue what I was doing in terms of building process templates. And so all of that forecasting, all of that future telling, I wanted to be able to see inside of ClickUp doesn't exist. And so without having again, that third party perspective to say, like, are you sure you want to do it like that in the future? Without having somebody check you on that, without having somebody truly walk you through, step by step, how to build out a task template that does in fact help you predict the future, then congratulations, you just onboarded a new PM tool and that's where the buck stops. That's where the benefit stops.

Yeah. So I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that. Actually, the watchers and listeners are hearing that, you know, there's a particular way to set up a process template that, you know, that we preach that works. I would love for you to peel back the curtain on this a little bit. We can't. I mean, we probably have to have a whole session about that. And you know, that is also covered in our training, of course. But let's, let's give the watchers a taste, like what is the key or at least, you know, one very important element of a good process template.

So speaking specifically in ClickUp terms, the most critical part of a task template are the series of custom fields that we require every single subtask to have. So when you think of a task template, you've got your, the name of the template itself, whether that's like email Campaign, blog post, whatever it may be, everything underneath it. Those subtasks are each individual step that each stakeholder has to perform in order for that blog post to be written. And every single subtask is assigned a series of custom fields that help describe what kind of a task it is, what delivery role would be expected to perform that task, what work category does that task come through? What team is it a part of? Who's the account manager on that task? What client does this apply to? When is that task due? How long is that task supposed to take? And so we build all of that into every single subtask so that when each individual team member logs in every single day and views their workload for the day, all of that information is pre configured into those task templates. So the only thing that they need to worry about is what's on what's due today. Because otherwise everything else before what was due today and everything else that's due after today has also been planned and has also been executed and will be executed after you accomplish that task for today. And so all of that information, all of those custom fields regarding task type, work category are built into those templates. So every possible question somebody could ask to get the job done has already been baked into that template and provided to them for every step of their job.

Yeah, and obviously that takes a little bit of doing to get to that point, but once you have that. I recently looked at my ClickUp and I understood the name of our company, dramatic as it sounds because it clicked for me. I looked at the Today section. I need to get this swag finally on me. But I looked at the Today section in my Tasks view, which is a view that we have preconfigured. We make all the choices for you here. I realized, okay, that's the to do list for today and there's nothing else. When I get all of these things done, I log off or maybe pull something in from tomorrow if I'm an overachiever. We all have those days and, and I don't actually have to worry about the rest. You don't have this nagging feeling of, okay, here's some of the things that I have to do and also all the other stuff that I have to remember to do. What's Zen is that it's all in there, but that takes discipline and putting it into, into one system. Like, yeah, it feels like that, doesn't it?

I like to say to people that we aim to build their task templates and their workspace in a way that reduces the cognitive burden that wears us all down every single day. So, like you said, instead of sitting there and stressing like, oh, my gosh, I owe this client X, Y, and Z, but I have to take care of 1, 2, and 3 before I can even deliver x, y, and z. 1, 2, and 3, and x, y, and Z should be in a task template, which means that when you're sitting there thinking to yourself, have I forgotten anything? The answer will always be no, because you took the time. You should be taking the time. And during implementation, we take a lot of time making sure 1, 2, and 3, 4, X, Y, and Z have been completely thought through. So that when Kuba, you log in and you see you're my task view for the day, and it says, edit the live stream for YouTube or whatever it may be, you already know that whatever you did yesterday and whatever you're doing tomorrow has also been thought through. And you don't have to fret and worry about what you're accountable for.

Exactly. Yeah. I love the way you described it, and especially that part that the answer should be no when you're thinking about, is there anything more? And by the way, you know, I am sure not everybody watching this or listening will ultimately work with us. So just remember that is the standard you should strive for. If you're trying to implement yourself or you're setting up your tool, that is the vision that you should try to realize that nothing is missed and it's not easy to get there, and there's a bunch of pitfalls along the way, but it's worth it for that peace of mind. So, chat, I wanted to reach out to you and make sure that you don't have any additional questions or comments about this. We're taking them and, you know, Maggie is here for you to answer questions about anything that you might be curious about here. In the meantime, I thought, so if something rolls in, we'll address it. We try to address questions as soon as they come in, if relevant. In the meantime, I wanted to actually address kind of the way we titled this stream and go a little bit deeper. So a little bit of backstory here. The way this live stream even. I almost fell off my chair. The way this live stream even started is that we were on a call and we came up with this analogy that just really clicked with me. So I think you deliver the analogy a lot better. We were talking about nails and hammers. Could you dive into that and explain kind of how that relates to going beyond ClickUp and beyond the tool?

Yeah. So It's a lot of what we've already touched on, the idea that people come to Zen Pilot suffering a whole bunch of symptoms. So what I think you're talking about is when we. When people come to Zen Pilot, it's like when you are trying to do some sort of home improvement project on your house, and you know that you want to install. You've tried to install a light in your kitchen, and for whatever reason, the light switch is not working. And so you're like, oh, I should probably call a contractor. And it's at that point that people call Zen Pilot. I don't have visibility. My light won't turn on. I need to call Zen Pilot. I need to call a contractor. And so the contractor shows up and they look at the light and they go, yeah, that is, in fact, a problem. But it's not your light switch. It's the fact that you have knob and tube wiring that is completely outdated and in fact, unsafe. And we need to peel back the layers and perhaps punch a couple holes in walls and unpack the insulation and rewire your entire house. Because if you don't take the time to do this, then you will lose all of your lights and none of it will work. And it's a potential hazard. It's this idea that it's not the light, it's not the light fixture that you're unable to install. It's. It's the fact that you hired somebody to come in and fix the light, but they were able to uncover the fact that the whole foundation of your electrical setup is faulty and needs to be addressed. So not only does that one light in your kitchen perform better, but you also now get the opportunity to install LED light fixtures throughout your entire house. And it's going to save you an absolute boatload of money on light bulbs and utility bills. And because you took the time and invested the money and the energy to address the issues that your contractor or Zen Pilot has been able to uncover, the end result is something that is much more sustainable, much more scalable, and actually solves the problem versus just fixes.

The light, solves the problem, and it removes the hazard. So, you know, I haven't been here for an awesomely long time. It's been, what, four months and change since I joined? But here's one story that I already heard play out a few times, either by listening to pilots or by looking through some sales recordings that we may have, and it's. And the story usually unfolds like this, and it unfolds over time. That the initial conversation is around ClickUp. So we need to set it up properly is what a prospect might say. We need to set it up properly because right now it's not configured well and it's not working for us. And that's a very general statement. When we dig in deeper, often the kind of underlying problem that gets unearthed is, well, because it's clunky and unwieldy, the way we set it up, the teams are not using it. So. And that is often a hook into us talking about, okay, so the teams are not using it. What is the culture like around using the tool?

Yep.

Have you taken into account kind of the accountability aspect of it? And here's usually where we talk about the 135 formula. So for anybody who's been on those Empire website, this will be. Oh, thanks, Sasha. Sasha's coming in with an exactly here. There's a bit of a delay. This might have been to what you were talking about, Maggie. So the 1, 3, 5 formula is the one goal is clarity, but to get to that one goal, you need to actually address three aspects. One is the tool, another are the processes. And the third, which to me is kind of the deepest but also the most important in my view is the habits, the culture of accountability, the way the tool is used. There's no, like, if you think of physical tools, if nobody's willing to pick up the hammer and use it every day, it doesn't matter what the quality of the hammer is or how the hammer is set up. Okay, so I wanted to turn it over to you, Maggie, and talk a little bit more about that, you know, being one of the deeper problems, like, what does it take and what is the process usually like, how does it unfold? Addressing the issue of habits, accountability, the culture, you know, this whole change management piece of it, how does it unfold?

That is the toughest part. That is the toughest part, undoubtedly. So the people hate change. That's very clear. And if anybody is orbiting the medical space, medical tech, any kind of medical industry, the one medical buzzword that people are using to position new AI technology is behavior change, because it is a huge gap in how humans interact outside of themselves. And so in the medical world, it's like people are their own worst enemy because they don't take the medication that's prescribed to them. They don't get preemptive care. So there are a lot of companies trying to bridge that behavior change gap so that people do take their medication, people do schedule preemptive care. There's A reason that market is so big. There's a reason an implementation for a new project management tool can be very daunting. The behavior change piece of this is so big, you've got a whole bunch of people who are very protective of what they do every day. They're very cautious about their position within a company. And then all of a sudden you roll in as an implementation team and say, hello everybody, welcome to a brand new way of doing things. It can feel like a threat, it can feel like, oh my gosh, do you think I'm not doing a good enough job? And now you want me to do this whole thing? Is this a, is this a mark against me? Are things going to change for the worst? Is this going to be more work for me? There's, as the end user who was not part of the decision to bring in Zen Pilot to build a new infrastructure inside of a PM tool, as the end user about to go through a massive change, there's a big black hole as to why are we changing at all. And so that's the biggest part to address. Like, like I was saying earlier, you have to position this as a benefit to the end user, having those frank conversations with people to empathize with how the problems in an agency probably impact them on a day to day level. If you sit back and think to yourself, like when that person closes their laptop on the end of the day and they turn and look at their roommate and say that particular client is off their rocker, why? Why does that employee feel like that client is off their rocker? Probably because at some point a deliverable was dropped and then now they've been fussed at and now they're teamly disgusting at them. Those are points, problems that need to be addressed that Zen Pilot's implementation addresses. And so if you say to them like, we know that at the end of the day you are stressed, the changes we're going to implement are going to reduce that stress, are going to prevent that stress. Being able to show them the light at the end of that particular stressful tunnel will encourage them to not only be open to change, but kuba, like you were saying, your designers who initially were against it become harbingers of change. And they're like, whoa, everybody, you thought your clients were cuckoo bananas. They're not. It was the way that we were working. And if we address the way that we are working, they won't be cuckoo bananas, they'll be fruit punch, sweet and charming. I don't know, whatever. But the idea is that if you can convince people with your words that this is a positive change to make their lives better, then the end user is more likely to adopt that change. It's all about positioning. It's like the greatest mark internal marketing project. It's tough.

And you have a marketing background, don't you? Does that help to have these conversations?

I don't know if it's my marketing background that helps. It's probably my dad. My dad was the director of sales and marketing for the Ritz Carlton for a long time, and some of their more famous taglines came from him. And so I've been listening to my dad make stuff up, make up some really compelling taglines my entire life. And I think I've just learned how to compel a group of people to think I'm right.

Okay, I love that. So, look, Maggie, I think I would love at this point for you again to peel back the curtain a little bit more. Like just a moment ago, there was this moment when you were kind of giving us a piece of how this actually plays out. Like on a call, you know, oh, you're stressed. We're here to reduce that stress and address that stress. I'll admit that had a soothing effect on me, you know, just listening to that, just imagining it. So again, for somebody who is thinking of, like, themselves as, like an internal, you know, change maker, somebody who's facing that challenge themselves, give us a little bit more about kind of what to say, what to ask about the kind of mindset you need to come in to actually start turning people from, you know, from being the resistance to being these harbingers of change. What else needs to be done or said or asked about.

So if somebody on my implementation team, so Sasha, for instance, a PM member at an agency level on an implementation team, it would be their responsibility to carry out this change through it throughout their organization. And part of that responsibility would be to sit down internally with their team members. And it would take quite some time. And it could be done in an all hands meeting. This is. This is. Okay, this is how. This is how I would stage this. In an all hands meeting at the beginning of implementation, Sasha would get up there and say, hello, everybody. We have partnered with Zenpilot. We're going to implement ClickUp. This is why. This is what the timeline looks like. That's part one, part two. She would meet with all of the team leads that would be expected to execute work inside of ClickUp. Design team, Solutions team, Account management team, Operations team. And she explains to them how, moving forward, I want you to start thinking through how your work can exist inside of a project management tool and then sit down with individual people and say, explain to me, in an ideal scenario, if you were to log on to your computer on a Monday morning and you wanted to see what your week is going to look like, what would that look like? What information do you want to know and extract out of each end user what they think they want to see? Because the great thing about ClickUp is that you can configure ClickUp to answer literally any question 1000 different ways. Just depends on the question you're asking and who is asking. So at that point, once somebody has been able to extract an ideal scenario from the end users, they can then craft a workspace along with our partnership to solve those problems for all the team members. So the team leads, the operations team lead, the design team lead can have visibility across all of their team members if they want, that they can see workload, how many hours are on people's weekly workload capacity. This idea that partnering with individual team members to have them buy into not only the recognition of the problem, but the idea that there is in fact a solution to be found in this implementation is what enables initial buy in. But that buy in doesn't happen if Sasha just talks at them. Sasha has to listen and then she has to provide a potential solution. And with partnerships with zenpilot, we can help craft those conversations, we can be a part of those conversations, we can lead those conversations, but definitely help present the solution inside of the project management tool.

Okay, well, you really kind of transported me to that Zoom call, I assume. And I could really see that Sasha is saying, I love having these conversations. This is not really a question, but I'll read it out anyway. I love having these conversations. I ask them what they would like to see versus what they think ClickUp can do specifically, and, well, it turns out, I think at least looking at what I've seen our solutions team do, anything ClickUp can do a lot more than some people might think.

That is true.

Yeah, true. Okay, so I wanted to ask from this point about, well, we're approaching, we're nearing the end of our time. So first of all, I remind the watchers and listeners, if you have additional questions, by all means drop them in, because we'll be logging off here, I mean, logging off, off the live stream in about 10 minutes here. In the meantime, I had a few kind of extra questions to throw at you, just to share a few more stories from, you know, the life of a client. Coach, one of these questions was can you tell me about like some of the, I mean we're talking about kind of what typically the typical process. Let's flip that coin. Can you tell me about some of the, you know, from your experience, some of the strangest situations that thus far have happened. You know, you think X is going to happen in a, in a co op, in a partnership, but something entirely different happens. What kind of stories have you got to tell?

Gosh, you know, it's funny, we have tried, a number of client coaches have tried to standardize the implementation. Meaning like we have set agenda we will follow every single week to ensure we talk about all the things that does not work. Because almost every single week with every single client, something new comes up. So no matter how hard we try and standardize what we talk about, when and how and who it's relevant for, there is so much customization that happens for every single client that we work with that it's like there's nothing that's ever like I've never come across anything that's completely bizarre where I was like what are you doing? Or anything like that. But it is certainly impossible to have an implementation that looks anything like an implementation that came before it or even at the same time. It's all totally custom, totally dependent upon the agency and how they do things and who they work with.

Okay, so maybe let me rephrase it like this. Tell me about some, some situation where there was a particularly hairy like requirement. There had to be an additional integration, you know, some automations that came into the picture. Does, does that jog the memory?

Yeah, we had a, we had a client based in New York City that did a lot of huge video and photo brand campaigns for massive clients like worldwide known luxury brands. And Zen Pilot was able to create a photo studio and talent manager, meaning every single single piece of a photo shoot. Scouting talent, hiring talent, keeping talent in a Rolodex of sort, being able to grade the talent, keeping track of how much the talent cost talent, meaning models, photographers, editors, videographers, caterers, all the things, all the human beings involved in a photo shoot. And it also corresponded with one of the largest list templates I've ever seen created. So there was this like massive integration of financial information and to do lists and location based information and which studio was available when. But does this model fit into this studio's calendar? It was magnificent in terms of its complexity, but not only that, its usability. To be fair, the main point of contact, the ClickUp champion that I worked with at this particular client, was totally bought in, totally clued in, and invested a lot of their own time into understanding how this particular asset worked. And now that asset is like one of Zenpilot's like, crowning achievements in terms of what ClickUp is potentially capable of. But that came from understanding the problem, diagnosing the issue, coming up with a solution, and having a completely and totally bought in client that it was going to work and that they had somebody willing to spend the time to make it work. It was, it was a masterpiece in terms of complexity and just overall incredibleness.

That was excellent. We should run a whole session like that, you know, these particular cases.

It was crazy.

Okay. I love that. Okay, so what would you say to somebody who just listened to what you said and thought themselves? But wait, you're talking about managing models and studios. But I thought ClickUp was just for tasks. Everything is called a task. So how do you actually even get started managing people within ClickUp?

That's a good question. ClickUp following the Zen Pilot framework, knowing what we know from having worked with thousands of agencies over the last several years, we've been able to manipulate the tool to solve almost every problem people have brought to us, whether they are a tax firm or a library or a photo studio in New York City servicing some of the largest luxury brands in the world. Yes, ClickUp is a task management tool and the base unit is a task. There's more that you can do inside of a properly configured PM tool. I like to. I have a joke with myself that I try. I have tried very hard to identify a business that you can't run inside of ClickUp. Like I have. I have thought through like, you could run a daycare. You might probably be able to run a 911 call center. You could definitely run like a contracting company. There's. I have yet to come up with a limit to what ClickUp can do, and it's not just based on task management. And I've challenged people on LinkedIn multiple times to come up with something that ClickUp can't solve, and nobody has gotten me yet.

If you're hearing this and you're thinking of a case that can't be handled in ClickUp fight Maggie on LinkedIn, I'm ready.

The deal is, if you come up with something that I cannot devise a Solution inside of ClickUp to solve, I will give you a $20 gift card to a local coffee shop in your area.

That's worth fighting for. For sure.

We'll fight for Caffeine Okay.

Yes. And isn't that worth fighting for? It certainly is. Okay, awesome. Well, last call for questions. If anybody has any, now would be a great time to drop them. I wanted to add on top of what you said. I think that's even in ClickUp's pipeline to rename the task you went from tasks to I think it was item or object because that's, you know, when I get deeper into ClickUp, that's one of the first things that you find out is like with custom fields, a task can basically be anything and that opens up a whole world of possibilities. And we'll be talking about that more on this Zenpilot live show. We're planning to interview more people from the pilots roster and who knows, maybe have roundtables and other discussions. We're just trying to give you a little bit more FaceTime with the ZenPilot team here so you can ask your questions and see what this looks like from behind the scenes. So last question to you, Maggie. I always like to have some insurance as a host, and my insurance is this final question. Is there anything that I neglected to ask you about, forgot that you wanted to add in to fill in any of the gaps that we discussed or something more that people should know about what we discussed that we haven't mentioned yet?

I would encourage people to stay curious and like having the ability to have that conversation with a client coach. What does it mean to be curious in terms of an implementation that can be on our next agenda?

Sure. Yeah. We should do this again after I talk with some other pilots that I already have in my backlog. Does anybody in here know Jeff Seifer, our productivity professor? He's next on the agenda to livestream with me probably in two weeks time or so. You'll hear about it from our channels. Okay. I'll start wrapping up with some CTAs here because I'm head of marketing here at Zenpilot and I got to do that. We did not even pull up. Oh my gosh. We did not even pull up the banners for our names. Well, this has been Maggie Karnarans. I need. I need to at least pull up the names now. No, I'm not going to be able to do that in time. Look us up. Look up Zenpilot. I'm Jakub Greitzer. This was Maggie, our client, one of our client coaches. And how can you get more project management and agency operations Goodness for us. I'm so glad you asked. Go to zenpilot.com over there. Okay. Private chat. Has something. Okay. Oh, Maggie needs to drop off for a client call, actually. Well, Maggie, thank you so much for being part of the show. I'll handle the CPAs myself then. Okay. Awesome.

Bye, everybody.

Yeah, say hi from us. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Okay, so that's Maggie dropping off. For more agency operations goodness from zenpilot, go to zenpilot.com over there. You can find a few different things. I would point your attention to our ClickUp for agencies guide, 47 pages and you can use that to get even deeper. Look into how we set up ClickUp and the philosophy that we follow and the implementation process. If you're thinking about the DIY route, that's a nice first step. If you're thinking you want the easy button and you want some support handling all of the obstacles that we mentioned on this call, go to zenpilot.com call. You'll meet Kevin, our account executive. He recently moved to a new house that he's now renovating. Make sure to ask about that. He will start the diagnosis process with you asking about where it's hurting when it comes to your agency project management. And we'll start devising a solution. And working with us is the fastest and surest way to get ROI on your project management transformation. The way we say it is. We'll lead you through the last project management implementation that you need instead of switching project management tools on average every 17 or 18 months for an agency. If you want to hear more from yours truly, I run Zenpilot's first class operations newsletter. You'll find that on Zenpilot.com as well in the top menu and in the footer. Subscribe and you'll be getting the newsletter every two weeks or so. I share the links from Zenpilot and from around the web, so go subscribe to that. I recently did a dramatic reading of one of the newsletters. Check out my profile for that. Last but certainly not least, aside from these live streams, we run two podcasts now. One is called Agency Journey. Look it up on YouTube and on your favorite podcast platforms. That's run by Gray. Another one just launched is called Agency Breakthrough. That's co hosted by Gray and myself. Agency Breakthrough is more of a storytelling podcast where I resurface the stories of agencies getting to the next level, whether that's in terms of growth or it's in terms of serving their clients. Even better. Or maybe, you know, some of these stories are about stepping away from the business and actually finding freedom as an agency owner to take your hands off the wheel. A little bit. So we invite awesome guests to the show. One of our first guests was Marcus Sheridan of they Ask youk Answer fame. That episode is out now on the ZenPilot YouTube, on Apple, podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. So that would be it for today's show. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in today. We'll let you know when the next one is coming up. Subscribe to the newsletter or follow Zenpilot to get informed about that. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, whether you were watching live or watching the recording, and see you next time.