How to build company processes—the fun and easy way

Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Zen Pilot live show. It's been a while since we've streamed, so it's super good to be back with my guest today, Hannah Shark, our client coach, one of our client coaches here at Zen Pilot. Hannah, how are you doing today?

I'm good. You know, it's starting to be like that cool fall weather in the air, like season of change. So it's just always really refreshing and like, nice to start your day and not like die of sweating all the time.

Yes, absolutely. I get to bust out my leather jacket. You know, the gigs are coming back, the kind of fall tours are happening. My band is scoring some gigs this fall, so yes, super exciting time, definitely. I love that vibe. And Halloween is coming, you know, like, I can't wait for Halloween. You might not know that about me, but I'm a big fan. Probably my favorite holiday during the year. Anyway, dear watchers and listeners, thank you so, so much for joining the Zen Pilot live show today. Whether you're watching live or watching the recording, it's super nice of you to spend some time with us. If you're watching live, though, please let us know that you can hear us and that you can see us. Leave us a comment and we'll be sure to. We'll be more certain of the fact that we are coming to you loud and clear and everything is all fine. So let us know. In the meantime, Hannah will give people, you know, just a few more minutes to remember that they had something to get to today that's super important in our stream. In the meantime, Hannah, who do you hope is tuning in today? You know, we're going to talk about building company processes the fun and easy way, all kind of stemming from a conversation we had and I'm super excited to get into that before we get into it. Who do you hope is tuning in today? Who will benefit the most from listening to this stream?

Yeah, so anyone who's been working in project management tools for a while that's looking to maybe refresh any processes that they built to people who are like, hey, I kind of want to make some standard processes and not really sure where to start. This is a great place to be. Or if you're just curious about learning some differences between ClickUp and teamwork.com because maybe you're looking to make a shift like the fall weather and go to a new platform. This is a great place to learn more about some of the nuances and differences between those two tools.

Okay, awesome. Yes, that is very much the Kind of the value proposition. Part of my marketing speak for today. We've got comments rolling in. Jen is saying yes, everything is working. Awesome. Mikayla is saying hi. Awesome. That's so nice of you to join us today. That is super, super great and thank you for answering the question. Hannah, in just a moment I'm going to ask you kind of the traditional Zenpilot live show question. We ask this of all of our guests but before that another question to our audience. So we're going to be talking about building company processes today and I just wanted to get a feeling, you know, the people joining in today, what kind of stage you are at when it comes to building company processes. Are you just starting out? You want to know how to basically start this from scratch or do you want to improve your process building process? Or maybe, you know, it's not about the processes that you have on board, but maybe you want to help your clients be more process driven, give us some context about your current situation. Or hey, maybe you're more curious about sendpilot, sorry, ClickUp versus teamwork and we should kind of get into that sooner within our agenda. Super happy to do that. Let us know what would be the most useful for you to get out of the stream. We'll be waiting for your comments. In the meantime, Anna, I've kept you waiting. Let me ask you the kind of traditional Zen pilot live show question which is the same for everyone, which what is your number one tip for agency operators?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. So I think we need a little bit of context before I can answer it. Right. We, we all know that change is inevitable. It's going to happen. But even I think as human beings that we know change is inevitable, we can be so resistant to it. So if you want to be a successful agency operator, communication is the biggest like implementation that you need to do whenever you roll out any type of change, big or small. Because if you're not communicating frequent and openly with your team at the lowest level to the highest level, there's going to be a lot more resistance to that change. So making sure that you have a place to collect feedback, to send your messaging out often is going to make any change, big or small, more impactful and you'll be faced with less resistance overall. You'll still have resistance. Right. But that's, you know, the best advice I can give. Communication is key. Bottom line, you have to do it.

Okay. I love that. You know, it reminds me of remember, I mean we all vividly remember when Covid was just starting. Right, right. And we had these lockdowns coming in. The rules were changing so fast. That was such a change management challenge for kind of just governments in general. And they all solved it in different ways. You had TV ads, you had websites that were specific, always up to date sources of information. You had, I don't know, there were these bulletins, et cetera, or these kind of posters that you could always refer to. And it was a challenge because things got out of date so quickly and on such a scale that's kind of on a larger scale. But I wanted to ask you before we move in and I'm going to read out the comments with where people are with process building in just a second. So you're saying that kind of communicating the change is part of the challenge here. This is a very important piece to focus on. Can you share some quick tips on what are the most important pieces within communicating change? You know, some best practices or tactics that have worked for you?

Yeah. So I think it's a matter of controlling the message. Right. So what is the change that you're going to implement and then making a plan for when you're trying to send out that messaging? Is it more effective in a slack channel? Does it need to be sent via email and a memo? You know, what is the perception within your organization? How do they, you know, perceive if things are a serious change versus, you know, something that's kind of not as important? Does it need to be spoken at like a quarterly all hands on deck meeting? Is it a new meeting that you have to schedule for the full organization? So think about, you know, depending on the intensity level of how big this change is going to impact, your organization, may control what channels you use to announce that. Certainly also involving your team at any level to provide that feedback, whether it be on a weekly cadence during a meeting like, hey, I want to take 5 minutes at the end of this call to discuss XYZ is going to be really valuable so that they feel heard in order to be on board with whatever you're looking to test, experiment or implement moving forward.

Yeah, I think that's great. And this is different for each organization. The meaning of an email versus a slack announcement, that's going to differ from culture to culture. So you need to analyze that for your culture in particular. I would add on top of that, you never communicate anything just once. Right. There's a reason why over communicating is a thing and it's recommended. So five minutes at the end of a meeting. Well, probably if it's a big change. Five minutes at the end of every weekly meeting. Just reminding people of this large change in progress might be a good idea. Anyway, thank you for diving deeper into this. So let's see what kind of answers we got to the question of where you are with process building. We have two. Foster is saying veteran. Okay. All right. Thanks for joining us here here today, Foster. He's saying. I'm saying right here. Right. Well, anyway, veteran process building. Okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Veteran of process building, but can always learn more, especially specific tools. Okay, I'll remember that. And somebody additional. Sorry, we've got a bug here where I actually only see LinkedIn user as the. As the name is saying, I have processes to document from scratch, plus processes I need teammates to document. Interesting, interesting. That is an additional aspect that we can focus on when we get to that point on the agenda. Cool. And you can always ask us questions continuously during the live stream. There will not be like a Q and A segment at the end. This is an ongoing Q and A. I have questions for Hannah to dive into, but if you have burning questions, please leave them with us. And at the appropriate time, as soon as feasible, we'll try to in the scope, within the scope of this conversation. Alrighty. So are you ready for kind of to start with our agenda? Talk processes, Hannah.

Let's do it.

Okay, let me hit you with a classic one. First of all, when I think about building processes, I have a feeling this is something that often gets kind of pushed to the wayside. It's like, it's nice to have, you know, one day we'll get all of our processes in order. One day this will all be documented. We'll have SOPs, we'll have templates that will all be great. So I wanted you to start by making the case for why building processes is not only important, but it should be treated as, you know, even within the realm of urgent. Like, how would you build a case for. Actually, the sooner the better is the time to focus on your processes.

Yeah. So when we're on calls with clients, you'll often hear us say that building processes essentially makes you and your organization lottery proof. So if you have an amazing designer who's really good at what they do, they. They just churn out quality designs for whatever deliverable you're working on, and they happen to win the lottery and decide to live out their best life in the Maldives. You don't have a process in place of what they did. Then whoever new designer is stepping into their shoes may not know, like, where to go to check all the things when they should be working on, you know, developing design, who they should be communicating with. So if you have solid streamline processes built out in place, that protects your team moving on in the future so they know exactly what they have to do. So a more like, less funny way I guess, of saying that is it gives clarity to your team. You're designing a roadmap for who needs to be doing what and when. And if you're adding or linking SOP documentation as part of those processes, then it gives them more context so they don't have to go and ask manager or account manager or strategic strategist, like, hey, where can I find this template? Or do we do this at this stage or not? So giving a solidly built process is going to reduce the number of questions teammates have to ask each other, and it's going to allow them time to focus on what they do best. Designing those graphics, writing that copy, or creating that code.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you know, think about the amount of interruptions during the day that, you know, you get an incoming question. You know, these are the kinds of situation that you can limit this kind of context switching by building processes. And that's just one of the benefits. The lottery analogy, I love it so much. I'm going to be using it for sure. You know, here. I mean, in Poland, when we're having discussions like this, even, like, even within my family, you know, when I get taught some sort of process related to like, home maintenance of our family home, my mom usually says something like, I'm not gonna be around forever, so you better listen up. Or even more grim, we have a saying like, your eyes are gonna open when mine are gonna close.

Oh, I like that. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah, but, but it's always said in a kind of warning kind of tone, you know, you better pay attention to that. Lottery is a much more fun analogy. I'm going to use that where appropriate. So that's awesome. Okay, thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. And I think that makes a strong case for why it's so important. So kind of on the flip side, why do some companies, despite the benefits, keep putting process building off?

Oh, that's an easy one. It's clients, right? We're putting the focus on delivering quality work to our clients. And we just have to get that draft out. We have to schedule that social media content. We have to work on this quiz for this campaign. And so it's really easy to say, like, man, I wish we had this but I don't have time. And so I think that's where leadership or subject matter, excuse me, subject matter experts need to step up and say like, hey, we're doing this all differently. We need to make sure we're all doing it the same so we can deliver on time. So we're putting forward the same level quality of work every time and that we don't cause confusion amongst our team members. So it's really hard to get out of the business and then instead work on the business so that you can be successful and your team can feel supported in the future with quality processes.

Okay, Okay, I got you. Thank you for that answer. I'm looking at the comments and apologies. Kevin is in the building. Good afternoon from Lakeland, Florida. If you're watching the Zen pilot live show, if you've watched any of our previous episodes, Kevin is always with us. So thank you for joining us again, Kevin. And we have got our first question coming in. This one is kind of tangential to what we are supposed to talk about here, but still let's address hasn't been asked on the Zenpilot Live show yet. So I would ask you for like a brief answer to this one from Mikaela. And thank you Mikayla, for the question. The question is thoughts on ClickUp vs. Monday. Which one is more customizable in terms of creating company specific tasks and processes? And Hannah, I'll defer to your experience. There's also kind of the whole Zenpilot story around picking ClickUp and teamwork as our kind of two main tools, but I'll let you take that one.

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess my question back to you Mikayla, is how many processes are client focused in that when we think about our processes we want to make sure they're going to address the majority of our portfolio. Because if you're designing new processes for every different client, that's a lot of different processes to manage. And while there is opportunity for variability in general, you want to make sure that whatever you're designing hits the majority of your portfolio. Now I can't speak in terms of Monday.com I will say transparently, but there is definitely capability to design, you know, whatever template you need within ClickUp, whether it is something specific to the client or it's hitting the majority of your portfolio, as I said, so you can definitely decide what steps you want involved. If there's specific checklist items you want as part of that process for a particular client, you can definitely include that. That's really easy to add as part of a subtask or an individual task so that you make sure to log into a specific platform every single time. If you're, you know, working for like billing and you have to like run payroll for them and they might use a different platform from another client. So there is a lot of flexibility there to cater to specific clients when it comes to processes in general.

Exactly. Okay, so thank you for sharing that. And I'll add in a little bit of the kind of historical context what I, you know, the way I usually address this when I'm for example, you know, blogging for Zen Pilot is I would say, you know, one technical note, Hannah, I'm looking at what's kind of coming up on our agenda. We were supposed to screen share something. You need to kind of tee that up. So make sure that's teed up and I'll be able to kind of pull it up later while I kind of, to Mikaela's question, just a little bit more context. Like at Xenpilot, we tested over 70 different project management platforms primarily from the lens of what serves our kind of main group of clients, which are agencies, a lot of them marketing agencies, but also other professional services firms like law firms, accounting, etc. And we've seen that for like services based businesses, pretty much the best fit in terms of flexibility, but also to some extent, especially with teamwork, kind of out of the box functionality. The two best fits are ClickUp and teamware.com and these are the two that we've been working in ever since. And you know this. I mean, Gray and Andrew, our co founders, would be much better equipped to answer this question. Just, you know, the whole story of how many tools we tested and how this whole story of testing them went. But anyway, just to add additional context, this is kind of our deepest expertise is in those, those two. And that's what we love to talk about. Anyway, thank you for the question. And meanwhile we will dive into the nuances of ClickUp and teamwork a little bit later, especially since you, Hannah, are kind of. Almost everybody as impilot is deeply involved in the ClickUp side, but you're also deep in the teamwork side, which I wanted to leverage here. In the meantime though, I wanted to go back to process building just for a second. My next question to you is going to be, can you paint us a picture of. We've got an idea in our heads of process building, but what does like a complete process look like? You know, what are the kind of elements that go into, you know, what you would call like a fully fledged process that will serve a company well.

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So a complete process is going to outline the steps needed to complete a deliverable. So if we think about the container of work as a deliverable, like a blog post, you then have all the steps underneath it to complete said blog post. You know, have internal brainstorm meeting or client meeting to brainstorm, blog, you know, draft, copy, review copy. All of those steps need to be outlined. That's number one. Additionally, and we'll talk about this, I think a little bit later, Kuba is if you have accompanying SOP documentation, if there's more context that you want to provide to your team as they're working on a blog, you can link to that within your process so they can review that as they go along. You can also, as we said, leverage checklists where needed. If there's very specific steps that have to happen within a certain point of a process, including those where they're appropriate will be helpful. But most importantly are due dates, time estimates, and then task type. We want due dates because they're not just when things are due D U E it's when they're going to do, do, do them. So that way we can have an accurate picture of what our team's capacity looks like, which we can see in teamwork.com or in ClickUp. So a due date is when we're actually going to draft that copy, when we're going to review that copy. And we need a time estimate so that way we can accurately reflect how much capacity that's taking up from the team member who's assigned to that particular task. So whether it's 15 minutes or an hour, we can already see that's reserved in their total capacity for that specific date. A task type is going to tell you if something is actionable, if something is a meeting, or if something is non actionable, which when we think about blog post, the container, that is the thing that is non actionable. We're not doing work at the non actionable level. The work happens at the actionable level. And then we also want to make sure, depending on platform, to leverage dependencies. So there's an asterisk here because depending on if you're in teamwork or ClickUp, dependencies behave differently. And I'll quickly explain this because in ClickUp, dependencies are what we call soft dependencies. They're mainly used for rescheduling things. So when we send a version of the blog to a client to review before it goes live, if they don't send us their feedback within the timeframe that's been expressed, then we have to push out the project. Dependencies are so helpful to push out the rest of those tasks that need to be done. For that particular blog post in teamwork.com Dependencies are hard. They're not used for date remapping per se. Dependencies and teamwork.com are saying, I cannot complete this step until the previous one has been completed. So they actually put a stop to your team from being able to log their time and complete that task until the previous person completes what they have to do. Depending on how you want to leverage dependencies may inform or help you decide what makes the most sense for you to on which platform. There's nothing in ClickUp that's going to like prevent people from working ahead. They will get notified like, hey, this has been unblocked, but they can start working on it whenever they have the time. So just something to keep in mind.

Yeah, yeah. Like in ClickUp, when you're about to close a subtask that technically is blocked, I think you get a message like, hey, you know, there are some tasks that were blocking this and yet you're kind of closing subtasks ahead of the other task. Are you sure? And you can just click yes and that's it. So that's kind of where the soft part comes in from what you're saying. And teamwork, that would be like a no go. You got to complete the previous steps too, which you know, has its own merits to be sure. And you know, like what I like about just leveraging the idea of templates in general. I mean I remember the first time I saw like fully fledged process in the Zenpilot system and I thought, whoa, that's a lot. You know, the dependencies were all there, due dates, time estimates like you mentioned. A lot of the sub tasks even had like detailed descriptions, you know, or they had checklists. The kind of. The main task itself, what we call the parent task, usually non actionable, you know, had some links references in itself. And at first I thought, wow, that, you know, it seems like a lot of work. But when I think about it, if this is a template and you keep redeploying it, you just keep kind of reaping the benefits of okay, set it up once, I'm going to iterate on it, but I set it up once and then now every time it's going to be deployed basically perfectly. And the stuff, especially the dependencies which can take a little while to set up when you have a template, you can always be sure that people are aware of the dependencies between the system. If it's an, if it's an orchestra, if it's a symphony, then you know, kind of when your part is basically coming up. I recently posted a poll about like, what process building is like for people. We should come back to it if time permits. But anyway, I wanted to kind of grill you a little bit more in the meantime about process building. Okay, so you mentioned, you know, documentation, you mentioned SOPs. So you know, if I'm in the process of, like one of our commenters said, you know, thinking of starting to set up process building. Oh, Raymond is saying great call out regarding dependencies. Thank you, Raymond. Okay, what was I saying? So if we're talking about, you know, somebody who's getting started with process building or wants to improve the way they build processes, what kind of documentation needs to be gathered? What kind of information is kind of the input to where the output is actually the finished process? Not the best question I've ever asked, but I hope you understand what I mean.

No, I get it. So if you're starting from scratch and you don't have a lot of SOP documentation readily available, it's time to start collecting, right? So getting your team together to say, like walk me through what you do when you write a blog. If you don't have time to sit one on one, if you can leverage tools like Tango, where you can have your team go and create those steps and documentation at the same time that you can then use as a reference for building out your processes. Because within ClickUp we're just putting or teamwork, we're putting the bullet points like start here, then here, then here, then here, and linking to external SOP documentation. So if SOP documentation doesn't exist, leverage your team or use tools like Tango to help you quickly create SOP documentation that you can reference later on. Another great tool for SOP documentation to use is Guru. If you're not familiar with it already, you can create what are called cards that house different information, give different context to your team. And the great thing about this is you can actually set a time frame for when that particular card that was created by a specific subject matter expert needs to be re verified. So you can make sure everything is up to date, it's current. So if there's been changes in your process and how you're providing a service to a client, you can have that gut check every three months to make sure you have what you need or it's reflective of the most relevant way of doing things.

That is very much the killer feature of Guru. When I first saw it, I thought, that is so smart. I've used wikis in the past, but I always had this distrust for them. How current is this information? Can I trust it? Some of the stuff in previous company wikis was ancient and it was actually a big mistake to follow them. Guru removes all of that. Before you go on, I wanted to just quickly ask. I have heard of. I've seen tools like Tango. I've never used Tango myself, but it's such an interesting class of tool. Could you explain briefly what it does?

Yeah. So it's really cool because you share your screen and then you can click and navigate to where you have to go. If you're like going into a HubSpot or if you're going into a Google Doc and updating a template or a slide, PowerPoint, whatever it is. And Tango will actually capture the clicks and take screenshots of where you click and then say what the step is and then you can add more description to that. So that way if the Tango is like not 100% perfect, you can give more information if needed to describe what is happening based off of that initial instruction and that screenshot. So very cool. Very handy if you're pressed for time in creating documentation for your team.

Exactly. It's like it removes so much. I've used a similar tool, which I kind of forget the name right now, but anyway, it removes so much of the legwork of creating these step by step how tos for more simple workflows. It just works like magic. So, yeah, I really recommend checking that out. That's Tango Us, if you want to check that out, but not now if you're live, because we're live too. You can ask your questions and you can get tips from Hannah. We were talking about documentation for processes. So anything more that's needed here? Kind of. What else should people think about here?

Yeah. Ooh, it looks like LinkedIn user said scribe question mark.

That was the one. Yes, that was scribe. Thank you, LinkedIn user, whoever.

Yeah, Scribe's another good one for sure. And I would say, you know, back to leveraging your team, I bet you most of your team members have notes documented in some way, shape or form of how they do something. It might not be consistent across your team, which is what we're trying to iron out. We're trying to establish that consistency across the members of our team. So giving kind of a general call out of like hey, does anybody have notes on how they do this? So you can start to collect that information and then rehab it into an sop, Whether it's through Tango, through Scribe, or just a good old fashioned Google Doc is going to get you leaps and bounds as to, you know, instead of trying to create something from scratch from your own head.

Yeah, I feel like that can really be a linchpin, you know, in the sense that there was this question in the comments about not just building processes ourselves or getting team members to help in building processes. Having a tool like that in hand, you can just go to the team members and say, hey, you don't actually have to invest extra time. Let's just do the mvp. And the MVP is just tango it or scribe it. And then we'll at least have some sort of. If you win the lottery today, at least we'll have this, the Tango, you know, a series of screenshots of how you do this. Yeah. So that's awesome. That's actually an awesome tip. I'll remember that even for myself. Certain. All right, so I wanted to devote more or less like the latter half of this to teamwork versus ClickUp, depending also on what kind of questions we get. So, you know, that would be a good time watchers and listeners to kind of guide us in the direction of the content that you want. Choose your own adventure. But before that, I promised in the copy and kind of the genesis of this was you had this comment during our call when we were kind of brainstorming the topic, where you said, it's like, it's so fun and it's so pleasurable when a process comes together. You know, it's like, I got hyped just thinking about it. So tell us, give us a look inside your brain here, if you will. What are some of the things that you can do or kind of the approach or the mindset that you can have here that actually makes process building more fun? How do you see this?

Yeah, this is where my process building nerdiness comes through for sure. But when I build out a process, you know, I look at it as one of two things. It's either a jigsaw puzzle, right? We're trying to find all the different pieces that we have to fit together to make this one deliverable or this larger project work, or adult coloring. Because it's very apparent when you're building a process, Whether it's in teamwork.com or in ClickUp, if something is missing, it's so satisfying just to see, like, everything filled in and all of the colors there, all of the time estimates, all of the due dates, like if you've ever gone down a rabbit hole, like on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and you see like those cleaning, you know, reels where they're like pressure washing stuff and like showing the clean sidewalk, it's kind of like that, seeing everything done and just holistic and oh, it's like the best feeling in the world. I don't know why I get such a kick out of that, but it just, it's like so satisfying to see. Like I know that this is going to be intact, I know that my team's going to have clarity. I know I'm not going to forget anything because we're all trying to manage multiple clients, we're all trying to manage multiple deliverables. And so when I have that reassurance that I know it'll get done, it makes it so much more enjoyable. And once you collect all of that documentation from your team, actually going and building a process is very soothing because it's very repeatable work. You know, whether you're importing it, whether you're copy pasting it or filling in the fields with bulk applies, it doesn't take a lot of brain power. So if you're really intently focusing on creating something or working with clients all day, it's a very relaxing activity to me. I don't know, creatives might like throw me over a barrel for that. It's more monotonous work that doesn't take a lot of brain power to do once you get the mechanics of it. And the other thing that can make it fun is I think it builds a lot of trust and team amongst your team. Right, so you're, you might not be the subject matter expert, but you might be the one building the process so asking for their feedback. I mean, the other client coaches and I, when we have our own processes to review, we're like, oh, I actually don't do that here or I put this in there or this is. When I do that thing. I think it builds more trust among our team because now we're more aligned. I'm like, oh, that's why you do it that way. Or this is where you do that, or that makes sense now why you're doing it this way and so we can update our process so we're all running the same service, providing that same quality level of work and understanding where one another are coming from. So I think that makes it more fun too, just to know everybody's on the same page. Sorry. I just saw Jen Burger. She's like, rug cleaning. Yes, Jen. Rug cleaning videos. When they get rid of all that mud, that is what building a full process is like.

I've seen those. I've seen those. One of the most popular rug cleaning channels is actually a Polish company, you know.

Oh, my gosh.

I obviously can't name them, but, you know. Yeah, I watched them like it was one of one evening of my life. Went to that. And I don't regret that even, you.

Know, it's so soothing.

Exactly. And I wanted to add, kind of the way this feels to me is like as if you had, like, a kitchen full of chefs and they were preparing the same dish, but each of them was kind of following their own mental pattern for it. You know, it's just. It's just not to prepare.

Just.

Just stand aside, you know, just give me the pan, and I'll do the rest. Right. And ingredients, whichever. And they finally get together, you know, maybe over some wine, and they're like, okay, but if we were to write a recipe for everybody at the restaurant to use so we don't have to come in every day, for example, like, what would the recipe be like? And then you really zoom in on the details, you know, so that's when you. Or, you know, how you slice this or when you kind of put that on the fire. Obviously, I'm kind of going deep into the analogy here. Right. But this is what allows you to really just align around, you know, how a certain thing is done Also, with the caveat being like, I like to think of processes in terms of recipes, because then you also leave a little bit of leeway of, okay, you can make. You can create a recipe. It can be very detailed. You still need skill to execute it, and there's still room where you can add a little bit of more nuance. Some of the things are kind of more suggestions than strict instructions. I feel like that kind of frees up a little bit of this mental load if I have to follow the instructions exactly. Differs from process to process, and different people have different analogies. Some liken it to coding or building a machine where it's much more strict and rigid, but that's just how it works in my mind. And just one final piece to share, because we do have a question coming in. Following a process. To me, it feels like I'm kind of. I'm on rails, you know, I'm following a groove, especially when it's a process. Then, I mean, it helps if I wrote it but at least if I'm following it for like the fifth time, that's when velocity starts to happen. And it removes so much of the anxiety of. Am I missing a step? No, it's all in the process and just allows you to go so. So much faster. Really important for big companies and small. All right, so Mikaela is coming in with another question. I think you've been looking at it for a moment there, Hannah. Let's tackle it. And I think after this one, we'll go into ClickUp versus teamwork, just to devote a little bit of time to this. Some watcher listeners are definitely here for that. So Mikaela is asking, is there a process step that you see a lot of companies miss when reviewing their processes with them? Awesome question. I want to hear your answer.

Yeah, so I think I'll say 50. 50. Miss this, which is receive feedback or receive approval from clients. Because if you go from like, send draft to client to schedule posting, you don't have anything to keep your team accountable to confirm you received that approval from a client. And it also helps you make your clients accountable because you can say, like, hey, we haven't received this feedback from you, and if you don't give us feedback on this date, we're going to have to push out the whole Project X amount of days based on our own capacity. So I think that is a really key step that some agencies don't always adopt is getting that approval or feedback from the client within their processes. That one's huge.

I love that one. And clients need deadlines. We would like it to be different, maybe, but clients really need these kind of smaller milestones. It helps us help them, basically, which is when I was building processes, for example, at my previous company, I think I called it get feedback. I wanted to make it kind of proactive. From the perspective of the person doing the work, is your responsibility to. To proactively reach out for the feedback and actually get it? Because even though the person on the other side might be a client, you need to kind of motivate them however you can to get that. That's awesome. You know, Hannah, if I were to pull on this thread a little bit more, is there like a number two here? You know, another step in the process that often gets skipped? I would love to know if there's something that you see kind of consistently.

Yeah. Ooh, that's a good question. I'm trying to think something that gets skipped. Well, I'll tell you something that I think a lot of our clients kind of resist at first, and that's having individual tasks as meetings by the attendee. A lot of the time they're like, you know, you have the capability in teamwork.com and in ClickUp to assign multiple people to the same task. And they're like, it's just easier to put everybody on one than create a task for everybody. But what you're doing is, again, you're not giving that accurate picture of capacity because both teamwork.com and ClickUp split the time estimate among all the attendees, so you're not getting the most accurate picture. So I wouldn't say that's a missed step rather than just a different way of doing things. So making sure you're having like one task per attendee whenever you have a meeting to get the most clear picture of your team's capacity.

Yeah. From what I've learned here at Zenpilot, the way I would phrase it is this. When you're looking at these subtasks, don't think about how they show up in the process. Think about how they're going to show up in somebody's workload. You know, it's. It's a confusing experience to see something with multiple assignees. Am I supposed to close this? Does this get closed by, like, whoever ran the meeting or the last person to kind of track time on the meeting? That can be really confusing. When you just stick to the Zenpilot system rule of, like, one subtask, one assignee, one sitting, then it's super clear. No. Oh, Maggie. Coming in. Clutch. One user, one sitting, not to exceed four hours. That includes meetings. Thank you. That is the way that is always phrased with us. Right. So when it shows up like that and when you kind of make sure to have it in the back of your mind at time the same. This is something that somebody can do and close and not wait two days to close, like send the blog. That's something that you can actually close at the end of the day. That makes a huge difference and that actually helps people build this positive momentum day to day. All right, thank you so much, Maggie, for that comment. Really, really clutch. And thank you for joining the Zenpilot live show today. Alrighty. So, Anna, I've got you here. I do want to use a little bit of time to talk teamwork.com and ClickUp. Like, there's a bunch of ways to phrase this question for sure. Let's talk about, like, we can talk a little bit more about kind of teamwork versus the ZenPilot system and how kind of those two sit Together, what are the nuances of the system between teamwork and ClickUp? But for now. But first, I think the question you would get most commonly, and I want to kind of represent the audience, is pros and cons of both. Like, in which kind of cases you would recommend ClickUp over teamwork, or like, just in your view, what are the strengths and weaknesses of both?

Yeah, that's a great question. So when I explain the key difference between teamwork and ClickUp, I usually start with this analogy, and it's that ClickUp is a blank canvas. You can do a lot of things in ClickUp. You have all the brushes, all the paints, but you have to be the one to develop them on that canvas. Teamwork is paint by numbers. There's some structure and assets already built in, like their reporting, their workload planner view. They have dashboards that you can configure really easily within teamwork.com but you still have flexibility to go beyond the bounds. Like, I don't know if you have. Remember Mona Lisa smile, like at the end all if you've seen this movie, no spoilers, it's been out for years. But either way, you know, Julia Roberts students all come in with the Van Gogh sunflowers painting, but it's all their own interpretation of it. So there's a framework in place, but you can modify it to suit your needs. So when you're looking at Teamwork to ClickUp, the biggest difference is if you want to build it all yourself, you have a lot of opportunity to do that in ClickUp. If you want some structure already in place, Teamwork's going to help you out by already having some of that there.

Okay, I got you. So can you talk to, like, certain kinds of situations where ClickUp would show its strengths more or teamwork would show its strengths more?

Yeah, so. And this is going to depend on your point of view and your preference. So when you go into ClickUp and you're navigating across the platform, whatever has been constructed or applied to the canvas is going to look similar, same to all of the users, unless they've been restricted particular access. Teamwork.com is more heavily reliant on what the user wants to see. So if I navigate to my workload view, it might look differently from yours, Kuba, Because I can decide what I want to see and it won't impact what others are going to see. So, pros and cons of this approach. With ClickUp, there's lots of consistency that you can establish across your team. That's the Benefit. The downside of that is if people have the access to make changes, and I don't think you have to be an admin to make changes to views. You could reconfigure things that aren't what are supposed to be there. So that means a lot of protecting has to be done. Could be a lot more to manage with teamwork. The good thing is, again, it's catered to the user. So if I don't want to see things a certain way, I can change it and it's not going to affect anybody else. But the downside to that is that then you have Bob who's seen something one way and Lindsey who's seen it another way. And that could create some dissonance across your team if you're not careful setting proper guidelines of like, we recommend that my work today looks like this and that your workload looks like looks like this. Or here's the filters that you can apply and save in teamwork.com so you can establish that consistency. Now, I will say I just Learned today that Teamwork.com has made a feature available where you can create a shared view. So it sounds like they're starting to get more of those opportunities to have that consistency across the site. But you can still change it back to how you want it if you don't want to see that shared view version.

Okay, gotcha. Yeah, it's like I feel like there's a difference in awareness to both approaches with ClickUp. I mean, for example, I joined zenpilot and the my tasks view was already configured for me. And you know, I obviously was well versed in ClickUp, let's say just the tool, but still I looked at this and I was like, okay, this has been pre configured for me. Kind of pushed on me. I'm not sure exactly how, like what information is included here versus not included. I had this feeling this was pushed on me. Right. Whereas if I were to. And I mean, this is also possible in ClickUp. Right. But let's say, you know, with the teamwork example, if I were to construct this view myself, I would have a much better understanding of like, what's even possible when setting up views. You know, it's like the IKEA effect. You know, I built this and that makes me much more likely to accept it and understand what I've actually built and what I'm actually seeing here. So that's kind of an additional perspective I would add on top of that. All right. Okay. Just one tactical Note. We've got 15 minutes on the clock here. So any additional questions that you might. Exactly. That you might want to ask, Hannah, now is a good time to drop them because, I mean, if we get just a few questions here, that's probably going to eat up the rest of the time that we've got here. And that would be great because we're here to answer your questions and we want to know what you want to know. So don't be shy. In the meantime, Hannah, I'm going to ask you about, like, the ZenPilot system versus teamwork. Like, you know, we've published a lot of content about what the ZenPilot system looks like. You know, in ClickUp, we also have Teamwork content now as well. You can even check it out on our site on the resources ClickUp for agencies, teamwork.com for agencies. You can kind of compare and contrast. But I feel like you've used the Teamwork system kind of the most in the company right now. So could you talk. Maggie, I see your question. This will be the last one I ask if time allows. Okay. I was saying, tell me about kind of the nuances of the Zenpilot system when it's in Teamwork. You know, for somebody who might be aware of our ClickUp content, what's different? Or how does the way Teamwork works influence what we see as the optimal system to use it for agency?

Yeah, that's a great question. So it's, it's funny because when we were talking about Zen Pilot methodology and how we can Adapt that in teamwork.com, if you were a part of that conversation, you would probably see Gabriel's Brain, our solution designer, just go scramble on the spot because you have to approach it with a different perspective. Ken.com and click up do the same things. Yes. Asterisks. There's going to be differences in how they're applied depending on which platform you go with. So the biggest difference that we looked at when we're adapting our framework into teamwork.com is instead of relying more heavily on custom fields as we do for ClickUp, we're leveraging more tags. So in teamwork.com tags are really the key to all of the filtering and subsets of data that we're trying to see see in the platform, whereas in ClickUp, we can create custom fields to help segment that data. So I think that's the biggest modification in the adoption of our framework for teamwork.com and also, you know, more documentation for the individual users. Right. Because it is catered to the user. We now have to Educate each member on. All right, so if you're navigating to this area, we recommend you have these particular settings turned on so we can establish that consistency. Because in ClickUp, you can see how it's set and how everybody should see it. In Teamwork, you can't. Unless this is actually a really cool feature I wish ClickUp had, which is called Impersonate. So if you're an admin within teamwork.com, you can actually impersonate a user so you can see. See what they are seeing when they're navigating across the site. So if they're saying, like, I can't find this thing for whatever reason, this is a great tool for training your team to see what they're looking at and then correct them and help them and adjust their settings if needed. Gosh, I wish I could see what some of our client ClickUp users were looking at. When they're sending us stuff, we don't have to say like, send me a loom or give me a screenshot so I can understand what you're looking at.

Yeah.

Where in Teamwork, if someone says, like, I can't find this, I can go and impersonate that member and look for myself without having to bother them. Or again, I could jump on a call with them, I can impersonate them and say, like, now I understand. Here's how we can fix that. So I think that's a really cool feature that we are implementing more with our team than with our ClickUp clients, for sure.

That is so huge, that Impersonate feature. I have to say I haven't heard about it. And like, okay, Teamwork has it great. ClickUp should have it. Agreed. But like, so many other platforms would benefit from this Impersonate feature, you know, like, so many tech support tickets that would get resolved so much more easily. And I'm sure other apps have that as well. But just, you know, this is the first time I'm hearing about a feature like this, so yeah, I. I love that. Alrighty. So is there anything. I'm tentatively going to pull on the thread to see if there's more here. Is there anything else that kind of differs from Click up to Teamwork within the Xenpilot system? If not, we've got a little bit of time left over. I've got some extra questions for you, but just wanted to see if there's more here, if anybody's curious.

Are you asking who's attending or are you asking me?

Well, I mean, the attendees can obviously pull on any thread that they want. But I wanted to hear more about kind of the ZenPilot system. Are there more differences? You mentioned these dependencies. Does that kind of figure heavily into how the systems are set up or not so much?

Yeah, I would say we probably leverage dependencies more often in ClickUp than we do in teamwork.com because they're not as required for date remapping. You already have, I want to say, maybe natural dependencies that are created within teamwork.com and you have the same Gantt view that you can use in ClickUp in teamwork.com, but you don't have to string them yourself to reschedule things. Me personally, I actually like to reschedule in teamwork.com using the bulk Edit task feature. I think it gives me a little bit more control than their Gantt view personally. And I know like I want this date so I can apply it across all of them really quickly versus using the Gantt view and teamwork.com but in ClickUp I'm more comfortable on a Gantt view because then I know everything can be pushed out. It can skip weekends. I can choose if I want to move one individual subtask or push out the whole deliverable. So I think we adapt based off of due date remapping with Teamwork utilizing the bulk edit versus using dependencies for sure. That's a good catch.

Yeah, to me it's all about kind of the strengths of each tool and utilizing them to the largest extent versus having a system that in one tool it's like 100% fitting. Trying to kind of. Let's just say this, there are certain things that Teamwork can do that ClickUp can't. And just leveraging that makes a ton of sense. Alrighty. So I'm going to go into kind of my final two questions here. Maggie, your question is still going to be last. Leave just a moment for it. In the meantime, I'm going to cheat a little bit. I usually ask, is there anything more that you might want to add that I failed to ask about? It's my insurance question. But you took notes before this live stream and I can see in your notes what kind of question you would answer. So I'm just going to ask that question instead. Instead of asking anything more that I should ask you about or that I failed to ask you about that you wanted to share you notice. Here's something that I would love to dive into for a moment. How much time should one devote to building out new processes versus updating Old ones. That's huge. A frame of reference for how, like what, what's the size of this task? Building out processes, you know, doing it properly so that it serves us for a long time. Like how heavy is this? And you know, how, how much time should be devoted here? So tell us about it.

Oh yeah, that's, that's a really great question. So when you are building something net new, you're going to have to dedicate the time for it, whether it's scheduling meetings with your team, collecting documentation, creating documentation, especially if you're starting from scratch. If you're new to ClickUp or teamwork.com, it's going to take a little bit of time and effort on your part and depending on how many processes you're trying to build at once, it's going to vary. It's also going to vary based on the length. Are you building a whole website redesign? That's going to take a lot more time versus just building a blog post. So depending on the number of processes, depending on how long your process are, whether they're for a project or an individual deliverable, I would still try to allocate, you know, timeline wise at least two weeks. That's being conservative and that's if you have an understanding of what you need to collect. If you're trying, if you have no idea where to start, it could take longer than that. But definitely we make the recommendation during our implementations outside, outside of our hour long calls. Minimum two hours a week to devote to just getting processes built and when you're leading up to implementing or deploying those new templates, maybe a little bit more like three to four, five hours a week depending on how familiar you are with the tool and if you need help or other input, so definitely take the time and that's for net new. If you're refreshing old process processes, you can leverage in teamwork.com or in ClickUp reminders to update those processes through automations. So when you set a due date on a specific process, you can come back every few months, like once a quarter or at least biannually to just look at those and then see like is this how we still do things to make those changes? And it might take you 15 minutes if there's not much change, just to give everything a once over, make sure all of the things are linked properly, so on, so forth. So that's also why it's good to dedicate the time up front because once you have a process built, it doesn't take much time to maintain after that, unless you're doing a whole overhaul, if you're completely changing how you do things, then it might be more like a net new process or template that you're building. So it might require more time to dedicate, talking with your team, getting their insight and feedback, and then redesigning the SOPs that need to be attached to that new process you're creating.

Yeah. On top of that, like, the more I work in a process driven way, I find myself, like, tactically speaking, I have, you know, in ClickUp, for example, we've got the, you know, the template that lives in the process library. And then I've got like an instance of this task, let's say it's running a live stream, for example. Right. So I have those open in two separate windows. And it's kind of, as I'm going through the process, I kind of, I scribble on the recipe, you know, like, oh, actually you have to watch out for this part of the process. If you don't have this, something from a previous step, you know, this will fail. Or, you know, whatever, or, you know, or I find. I don't know. Recently I was looking at podcast links and you can grab two different links and grab the second one, for example. So as I'm learning this, I'm like, okay, I'm going to devote the 15 seconds now to add an additional bullet in the template and push that template to the template center. And now never again will I forget to do this extra step. That's another pitfall that's been kind of. We've got this banner around it now that says do not cross. Right. Like, that is so huge to have it in the back of your mind that you're not just cooking the dish, you're also updating the recipe. If you take just a second to do that, then that helps a lot if you make it a habit. Alrighty. I promise I'm gonna get to Maggie's question. Maggie's question. Got a laughing emoji from Raymond, a laughing cat emoji from Foster. Here it is. Maggie's asking, if you were in the shark, what ocean animal would you be?

Do mythical creatures count? Because I would definitely be a mermaid if, like, that's no question. But if those are off the table, I'd probably have to say seahorse.

Would it be? Would it be a half shark? Mermaid?

Ooh, I guess it has to be now, my last name is Shark, but yeah. What about you, Cuba? What would you be?

What would I be? I would like to be an owl. I Don't know. I've always been a. I mean, it's called a night owl, right? But you get to fly, you get to see very well in the darkness, which I don't do right now. You get perceived as wise, though, from what I hear. Owls are not like up there in terms of intelligence. Like, I don't know. That's the first thing that came to my mind. I would love to be an owl. Maggie summarized kind of the updating the recipe continuously thing as. Do the work that Future Kuba will appreciate. Yeah, well, future, yes, Future. Future. You. You don't all have to appease Future Kuba, although you can. All right. Alrighty. We're nearing the one hour mark. This has been a delightful session. Super fun, especially the analogies. You. You are the queen of analogies, Hannah. Honestly, that was awesome. A good analogy is, how should I say this? Worth its weight in gold. So thank you. Thank you so much for that. Was there anything else that you want to kind of share? You know, people should obviously follow you on LinkedIn. Are you on other social media platforms? Do you have, like, something kind of. Do you have a secret Pinterest that we haven't heard about?

You know, it's not probably a secret. You could probably look me up pretty easily on there. But yeah, feel free to find me on LinkedIn. You know, if you have other, like teamwork versus ClickUp questions. Happy to answer those. You know, you can message me directly, tag me in a post if you're considering things. Happy to interact with you that way. So yeah, that'd be the best beta to find me if you have more teamwork slash ClickUp questions, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah, if that comes up, you can always summon Hannah. Just Tag her on LinkedIn and she'll be there to answer. Our client coaches are super, super helpful. So, yes, thank you so much for that. On my end, I would say if you enjoyed this, definitely follow ZenPilot on LinkedIn and or on YouTube. We put out a lot of content on both. Our YouTube especially has been just popping in the recent months. We've got live streams, we've got two different podcasts there. We've got a whole content series with Maggie with ClickUp tips, another content series with Jeff Seifer, our productivity professor, also with a lot of advice for ClickUp and teamwork. I think also is in pipeline here too. So anyway, just follow us there and I would be remiss not to plug if you want to hear more from yours truly. I run the Zenpilot newsletter called First Class. Operations. You can find that on Zenpilot.com under Resources. There's a bunch of things there that you can click, but one of those is going to be subscribe to First Class Operations bi weekly. You'll get a rundown of of our content, interesting content that we found around the web, and just basically stuff that will improve your operations and save you from chaotic project management. We have one last comment from Mary.

I miss you too. Hope you're well. Glad you could join us. And I do have one more shameless plug if that's okay, Kuba, because I know we had a LinkedIn user earlier who said they're trying to build things from scratch. Scratch. We talked about Tango, but our productivity professor, Jeff Seifer has put out an amazing spreadsheet that you can use if you're using ClickUp or teamwork.com to outline your processes for imports. So go find that information. That's a really great tool to help speed up that process. If you're trying to design your templates, get them into the systems in a quick and effective way. Great resource.

Are you talking about. Are you talking about the AI Process Builder?

Yes. That thing is amazing.

Yes, it is.

It's so good.

Yeah, and it got like a bajillion reactions and comments the first time Jeff shared it on LinkedIn. Yeah, you can find that on Zenpilot.com under resources too. So that will be the Maggie coming in clutch with the link. Here it is. AI Power Process Builder. For all of you who are not actually watching, but just have it open in a separate tab. AI Power Process Builder. Just look it up, it's there. Anyway, that'll be it for today. The time went by super, super quick. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us today. Y' all watching, don't forget to follow zenpilot. We've got more webinars and events coming up. We've got one coming up that I should already mention. We don't have a landing page up yet, but there will be one about integrating ClickUp and HubSpot if you have any questions around that or if you're curious about that. I currently do not have a landing page to link you to, but you can always just message me directly and I will let you know once that is up. And that is just one of our events. So just follow us and you'll learn about more. Meanwhile, Hannah, this has been delightful. Thank you so much for being on the show, you watchers and listeners. We'll see you very, very soon. Anything more to add or shall I Click the button.

Click the button. Click the button. No. Thank you so much. This has been fun. So appreciate coming on here.

Yeah, seriously. And your first time you mentioned. Right. So really, really good showing today. Okay. Okay. And stream. Clicking it. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye.