How to Double Your Agency's Productivity + Profits With The ZenPilot System

In this video, I'm going to reveal our brand new battle tested agency structure and work management system that's going to help your team deliver better results faster and more consistently for your clients than you ever thought possible. And this is a system that's been leveraged by over 3,000 different agencies to essentially double their productivity and profits. And a few pieces of proof here for a few different agencies that are leveraging this system. The first one is Michael at Juice. And by using this system, they were able to increase their efficiency across the business by over 300%. In addition, Shayla at Seaworthy Strategy, her team was able to increase productivity by over 400% with this system. And then another one, Matt with Vendood Marketing. This system gave them the visibility that they needed to see how profitable each of their clients were. Once they saw that one category of clients they were serving was not as profitable as another one, they made the switch and were able to see their profitability soar across the business. In this system is what we call the Zen Pilot system. And in this video I'm going to walk you through, step by step, how you can leverage a system to efficiently scale your business. And essentially this is different from anything that you've ever leveraged and seen before because of its ability to create a simple and easy to use work management solution that your team will actually use on a consistent basis. In addition, while that's happening, it's also going to provide the powerful reporting and visibility that your leadership team needs to efficiently run the business profitably. And as you'll see, this system can help you serve your clients better with feedback. 50% less headcount based off how productive your team actually is. And this could provide you with a significant increase to your bottom line. And so that's all great, but you're probably wondering who I am and who we are. And we are Zenpilot and you may recognize us. Over the last 10 years we've helped over 3,000 different agencies like Gravity Global, Trinity, Insight, Sweetfish Media, Juice, et cetera, et cetera, build more productive, profitable and healthy teams. So most people know of us and you might know us because of this reason as well, because we're clickups first, first ever and highest rated solutions partner. But we're really much more than that. Let me tell you a little bit about our story of how we came to be Zenpilot. So before we actually started Zenpilot, we had built our own agency called Guavabox and we are one of HubSpot's first original partners. Once they first built that ecosystem. And so while we were growing guavabox, our inbound agency, we experienced all the common challenges that agencies are facing today. We are servicing a lot of clients, managing a lot of projects, and developing at the same time, the agency infrastructure to help us rapidly scale a cohesive team while also delivering consistent client outcomes. And as we grew, we struggled to maintain the visibility we needed to run our business. Well along with that work started to slip through the cracks as we delegated some work we lacked a single source of truth and client deadlines were not being met. And this lead led to some client churn and unhappy team, unhappy clients, so on and so forth. So to help us overcome these challenges and really streamline our operations as a whole, we decided to build our own process and project management platform. And we called this Do Inbound. And we actually launched this software to other agencies back in 2013. So what we did is we packaged this software with the process templates that we had developed for Guava Box, our own agency, so that other agencies could also benefit from having both those pre built processes and the software to help them really quickly plan, do and manage all of their work across the business. And so. So as we bootstrapped Do Inbound and grew to over 500 agency customers, we also began to consult different agencies that needed some additional process and project management help. And so this consulting with different agencies led to a key discovery for us. And what we realized is that agencies really need a consistent operating framework and those process templates, clear rules of engagement across the team, and consistent accountability, more than they actually need any other project management platform, tool, or technology. So in late 2017, what we did is we made the decision to invest all of our energy into helping agencies build that consistent operating framework. And this is really where the zenpal system comes from. So instead of splitting our time between the software and consulting side of things, we exited that software business and focused on building a training practice to help agencies streamline their operations to build more productive, profitable, and healthy teams, which is where zenpal comes from. So that is our main focus. Essentially, we exist to build the systems, and agencies really need to create clarity and build more productive, more profitable and healthy businesses. Everything we do in our business and for our clients revolves around canceling that chaos of hashtag, agency life and replacing that clarity, replacing that chaos with clarity. And so the truth really is, most agencies, just like we were at Guava Box, are operating in some sort of form of chaos. You're servicing a wide group of clients with a lot of Tight deadlines, and especially in today's remote environment and culture, keeping tabs on all those projects and what your team is actually work on can really make your brain melt and be very stressful and make you work super long weeks in some cases. Most often, the leadership team, as you continue to grow, has no idea what the team is actually doing. You're probably lacking the visibility into where your team is spending their time, how profitable your certain projects or clients are, or even how happy your clients are in general. And in a lot of cases, as well as you're struggling with that, your team team also has no idea what they need to work on or prioritize. And so because of that, that's where work starts to slip through the cracks. Your deadlines aren't being met, which leads to your clients getting upset and Churn is going to start to go through the roof. And so all of this is going to lead to a frustrated, unproductive and unprofitable team. So in terms of solving that, what do 99% of agencies do? They turn to tools and technology, essentially. You have so many different project management platforms out there, like money.com, clickUp, wrike, teamwork, Asana, the list goes on and on. And so most agencies are going to sign up for a trial of the latest and greatest project management system that's going to promise to solve all those pain points that they're currently dealing with. You're going to hear of all the benefits and all those case stories and excited that this new piece of technology is really going to make your life simple and solve all those problems that you're facing. And so what you do after you start going through that and you're about to implement it, you hype the team up and say, hey, this is going to solve all of these challenges. So from there, you're going to quickly migrate into that new tool to get value as soon as possible. And so you're essentially expecting the software to solve all of your operational and project management problems. But then a few months later, you start to realize that you're still facing some sort of challenges that you were facing before, and it hasn't actually solved any of that. And so now your team starts to get frustrated again because they weren't actually getting the clarity and that you had promised them with this new piece of technology. So from there, what you do is you pour hours and hours and hours each month, trying to optimize your current setup to make it right, because you told them this technology was the answer. And so now you need to make it work. And so you're proving that it is the right solution. Or maybe after that you're working 60 plus hour weeks, you decide to bring in a freelance and tech consultant to make a few tweaks and adjustments. But again, it doesn't work. Nothing sticks and chaos is going to creep in yet again. And then a year or so later you realize the tech doesn't solve your problem. So you start over. And now we're back to square one. In fact, we found out that on average, agencies are switching their project management tools every 17 months. Which is absolutely absurd. Yes, that's right. Less than two years and they're back in the trenches of another costly and distracting project management migration. And this cannot continue. The amount of productivity that is wasted through botched project management implementations is a huge disservice to both your team and the potential that your business could achieve. Yet, out of all the 3,000 different agencies that we've worked with, all of them went through the same timeline and challenge. Year after year of switching project management systems, hiring consultants, working 60 plus hour weeks to try to make the system work. It never did until they leveraged the Zempilot system. So we designed this system after seeing under the hood of over 3000 different agencies over the last 10 years in understanding exactly, exactly what helps make agency operations thrive and super efficient. This solution isn't just a piece of project management technology that's going to promise you productivity, visibility and peace of mind. The only kind of solution that will stick here and actually work must be holistic. It's got to go way beyond the project management tool itself. And that's what the Zen pilot system is. This is a new kind of work management system that's going to guide your team to acquire the technical expertise, process building skills and efficient healthy work habits to help you serve more clients better and possibly even with a smaller team. This ZEM pilot system is built on what we call the 1,3 5 formula. And this is the exact formula that agencies are using to establish gold standard and crazy efficient operations. So I want to show you how this works. So the one where that one comes from is everything is going to start with a single goal. And this goal is clarity. So over the last few years, we've spoken with thousands of business leaders about solving their agency project management ops problems. And ultimately all their pain points boil down to a lack of clarity for at least one level in the organization. Often this is going to be the executive layer. Who doesn't have visibility into their team's key metrics. We're talking about utilization across the team, profitability across different clients and projects, resource management, workload, forecasting and, and client health. Or sometimes it's just your account or project management folks who can't see the performance of their team or progress of their specific client projects. And without this, they're unable to catch issues before they actually turn into client fires. And quite often it's going to be those individual contributors or contractors or who are lacking clarity in terms of what's actually on their plate, what are their priorities, what do they need to work on first, and exactly how to execute those tasks as well as. So without those clear priorities for them or the standards, their energy is unfocused and they're prevented from giving you their best work making them not so productive. So the number one thing that agencies are searching for is clarity for all, including that clarity is the guiding light of the Zen Pallet system. So I want to quickly show you what that clarity could look like in the future once you actually implement the Zen Pallet system. So at the highest level in the organization is going to be the leadership team. So we want to make sure the leadership team has four full visibility into where time is actually spent across the agency. So I'm able to see how much time is actually available, how much time has been estimated in my system and actually track to be able to pinpoint those issues or where time has actually been tracked, has been tracked on growing the business, servicing clients, or just on the internal operations work as well. So I need to see that so I can accurately workload forecast there for the workload of the team to see. Hey, can I actually bring on a new client? Or is our team overloaded? In addition, we also want to be able to see profitability by all of our clients, by all of our projects, and have all of that in one system to help me guide the business in a better direction based off of that visibility into profitability. Sometimes you might need to get rid of a service line, sometimes you might need to stop servicing a certain client because they're not profitable and things like that. I need to have the data in here to know how profitable each of these clients are across given months and also dig into service lines as well. In addition, your leadership team needs to have a good visibility and single source of truth to know how healthy each of our client relationships are. So I need to see the health scores of each of these, the status of them, maybe what that net promoter score is as well. I need to know the services I need to be able to dig into that health score there as well, and objectives, billing, so on and so forth. I need to have a single source of truth for all of my client accounts in here to help me know how are we actually doing with all these client engagements. So they need to have that. And now as we move away from the leadership team, we might also need to be able to see how well our team is actually doing overall inside of the system, how many unread notifications, overdue tasks, tasks assigned to each person. We need to know how well our team is actually performing in the system. In addition, you might have your project or your project managers in here that need to have a good view of workload and capacity across the team. They need to have one singular view for them to go and know, hey, who is a little overloaded, who's underutilized and who can we reassign work to and what are the tasks that are actually filling up their place as well. Just in case I need to reschedule, reallocate work to my team and be able to make those timeline suggestions and realistic timelines, provide those for my clients as well. And in addition, if I have to and maybe a certain project or deliverable falls behind, I need to easily be able to come in here and be able to remap all those due dates together so that I don't have to do those all one by one. So your project managers need to be able to see workloading capacity and be able to easily adjust those timelines for those clients based off of maybe our work and maybe even the client's work as well. In addition, your account managers need to have one singular view that's going to show them the progress across all of their clients and each of those projects. They should be able to come here and know exactly what's been done, what's upcoming, what those due dates are, how much time's been tracked in each of these, what's the progress overall? I could be able to get summaries of each of these as well, and then I should be able to dig in and is there any communication that's happening in here too to know what's actually happening so I can provide that information to the client. So I need to make this as easy as possible so they don't have to go asking every single person. In addition, for your individual contributors, they should be able to come to a single place and know exactly what's on their plate when it's due, what's that priority, know what's overdue what's due today, what's due in the future, and they should be able to track their time directly right there so we can get it and make it very easy and seamless for them. And in addition, they should be able to come in here and click into a task and see the exact process, whether this is linked out to an SOP or provided right here, to know what I need to do and how I need to do it as well, to be able to get done right the first time, making me super productive and efficient inside of the system. And that's going to be huge for all of your individual contributors. And in addition, you also want to make sure that your clients know what's happening as well. We need to really build this story for our clients and for that reason, we need to provide them a resource that's going to show them everything that they're asking. So what is the progress on all of our different deliverables that we're doing for them? What have we actually completed? What are the analytics so that we can provide with them? Hey, this is what we're doing, this is what we've done, These are the results, this is what we've learned. And then this is leading to us readjusting some strategy. You need to provide this for your clients so they have full clarity to see that ROI of your work so you can really tell the whole story and they can tell that story to the rest of their company as well. So when that renewal conversation comes, it's a very easy yes to continue working with your team. So all this clarity is our guiding light of the ZenPilot system and really what we're trying to build and achieve with the Zen pilot system. But where does this clarity actually come from? Like, how do I actually build all that so that you could see that information? So this clarity is really going to come from operational excellence across three key components. And that's tools, that's processes, and that's habits. And this is really the heart of the whole zempilot system, as you can see here. If we want to get clarity, we need the right tools. Yes, tools are still a part of it, but not the core solution. But we also need the right processes and healthy habits to make all of this work. If even one of these components is missing, you are going to be in trouble. The most souped up, expensive tech stack in the world can never overcome bad processes or bad habits. We should especially realize this as marketers. You need a strategy. You need that process to make any sort of technology work. For people. And in addition, those best processes that are followed poorly or inconsistently is going to put a bottleneck on your productivity. You need those healthy habits along with those processes. And even if we have amazing work habits across the team, and this is probably the most difficult part to actually achieve, poor processes and tooling will still create inconsistent and inefficient outcomes for your clients. You're only going to achieve this gold standard, operational excellence and the clarity that comes from it, which I just showed you. If you build on the foundation of having technical excellence, which is mastering the tool, you need procedural excellence, which is mastering, building and following those processes and procedures. And then you also need behavioral excellence, which is mastering those day to day work habits that your team needs is to use the tool well and take ownership of the processes. Whether this is communicating, closing tasks, tracking time, they need all of that to really get anything out of the system as well. And so the focus on all three of these elements is what's going to make agencies thrive. But how do we actually get there? What do you need to finally get clear on what your agency is doing and planning to do and to achieve that kind of efficiency that allows you to deliver those better client results faster? And even if you were to cut your team by 50%. And so this is a really straightforward five step process. And this is where the five comes in on our 1, 3, 5 formula. This is the five steps to really make all of this successful and to make sure our Zenpilot system is working smoothly. So we're going to be doing is designing, building, training, launch and optimize. And so I want to briefly talk about all five steps. So the first one is going to be design. This is the one that most agencies are skipping today, which it's so important. And as a marketing people, we should understand that oftentimes the strategy needs to come before we're actually using that technology. Technology is not going to work without a strategy or some sort of system behind it. And so really that's what the design component is all about in this five stages to be successful here. So what we need to do in design is identify the core problem that we're facing and design a system to fix it. So what you need to start off with is understanding what you're actually trying to achieve and make sure you design a scorecard that's going to help you benchmark what you're trying to achieve, what your goals are to see if we can or actually being successful in the future. So whether that's increasing productivity, utilization Profitability, client health, team health, whatever it may be, make sure you understand what your goals are before you jump into any of this. And so from there we need to understand is what's actually blocking you from achieving that. And so to understand that, we do a few different things in the Zenpilot system. The first one is going to be assessing your operation as a whole. And so we actually utilize our project management health benchmark, which I can put in the description below, if you want to take that, to help you understand what are your weak points and what are your strengths there, to help you kind of prioritize what the main issues are. And in addition to that, when you actually evaluate on that sense, you also need to get your team involved at this step. Because this is not just the leadership team understanding this problem, this is everyone should be in this process as well, because this is all about change management. When you update any sort of project management or operational system, you're really changing the way that the team is working on a daily basis. So we need to, to get the team involved here if we're going to be successful. So a couple of different ways that we do that are one, through surveys, we have team meetings and we also have one on ones. The reason we do that is the more avenues you can open for communication, the more sort of personalities you'll actually get their sort of thoughts and feelings about it. Because not everyone's going to jump in voice in a team meeting. Some would rather have an interview, but some would rather have more of an anonymous survey that's going to be best for them. So a couple of ways that we do this one survey and questions that you should ask is for the first one, how do you start each day to identify, prioritize and plan your work, or what is your routine to end each day and manage any outstanding work? Or what are the top challenges for you and your team and what's currently working? Well, you really just need to understand their insights and their thoughts and their feelings about the current project management operational environment to really help you understand what's blocking you from, from achieving your goals. And from there that's going to get the team bought in, that's going to help them feel like their voice is heard in the system. So when you go to actually make a change, they feel like they were brought into the process and have clarity on what's actually being built, rather than you just going and doing it and then feeling like, hey, this system is for you and not for me. You want to get the team involved and bought in here to really understand those root issues. And from there, in addition to understanding sort of all of that, you now need to figure out what, what's fully working and not working across your business. And what you can do to do that is start looking at your current system that you have now, how is it designed, how is it set up, where are sort of the breaking points here? And also start to look at your overall workflow as well. What's your sort of high level process for how you service your clients, how you pass things from one team to the next, sales lover, handoff, onboarding, whatever it may be, figure out where those bottlenecks are, figure out where work is breaking and really what is working and not working across the business. Essentially through all of that, what you're going to figure out is what is that foundational problem that's making it so that we are living in a life of chaos and not getting that clarity that we're looking for. Maybe it's a technology issue, maybe it's a process issue, maybe it's misaligned expectations across the team, or maybe it's a habitual problem as well and you haven't built a good culture of accountability. So figure out what piece of the puzzle this is that's really causing that foundational problem for you and then solve against that of how we're going to actually get around that and create a culture of accountability, get that clarity that we're looking for. And so from here what you need to do before you jump into any technology is design the system. So from all those learnings, now let's figure out what is the structure that we're going to need. What is this new system that we need to build to help us achieve what we're looking for. So to do that, what we need to do is lay out the hierarchy, where is work going to be put place? What's that structural overview that's going to give us good visibility and to make sure all those tasks have a home and so it's super clear for the team to get that visibility and clarity that they're looking for. In addition, what are the different automations at each of these levels that's going to really help us automate some of that repetitive work that can just help our team be a little bit more productive and efficient. Also, what are the custom fields that we're going to need that's going to help us get visibility into things like our team's work for maybe some manager views, or maybe looking at profitability by service line or Work category or whatever it may be, we need those custom fields built into the system as well. In addition, what are those views for our team and how are they going to use those views and at what level are those views built in to make sure that they can have them? As I went over those a little bit earlier, we built all of those out to give everyone clarity. And then in addition, what are those integrations? How are we going to pass work from one system to another? Maybe it's your CRM system like HubSpot, PipedRiver, Salesforce. Anytime a deal goes closed one, we need to push that into our project management system to onboard new clients, figure out what those integrations might be and get those designed out first. And then lastly dashboards, how are we going to report on all of this and get the visibility we need? What are those dashboards that are going to be necessary for us to have in this system? In addition, start to think about sort of what is that resourcing flow and what views and things are the people going to use inside of that system so that they have full clarity on how they're going to do their jobs well. So whether that's demand seat, resource seat or fulfilled fulfillment, we're looking at and building the strategy with our clients. We're then building realistic timelines and then actually completing that work. Make sure all those rules and roles are listed out for your team. And then from there, once we actually design all this now our team has full clarity into what we're building, where we're trying to go and how we're going to be successful. And then once you get that design step now we can actually move into building that system inside of our project management management tool. So now we're actually getting into the technology component to it. And so this build step is really key on the technology as well as those processes. And so what we're doing now is we're going to be building the system, taking that two dimensional blueprint that you just created and then building it into a living breathing system inside of our technology. So we want to design the tool to fit the system, fit that Zenpal system that we've created and build the processes for for us to be successful as well. So once you actually get this living breathing system set up, you want to make sure you have the correct hierarchy structured as you did in your two dimensional blueprint. The automations are all set up, ready to go, you have the custom fields listed out, your views and then in, in addition, we want to make sure we have the integrations here as well. So whether we're passing work from a CRM to our project management system, whether we have communication happening inside of ClickUp or maybe stemming from another tool as well, maybe our invoices need to come from a QuickBooks into ClickUp, whatever that may be, make sure those integrations are set up and ready to go for your team from the start. And then once we get sort of that tech side of things down, that structure is all built out and it's ready to go for us. We have a good foundation or that good skeleton. Now what we need to do is start building out our processes. And so the first step is always going to be prioritizing which one should be built first. Essentially what you need to do is think about everything that you do as an agency and get it listed out in a spreadsheet. So whether that's blog posts, whether that's SEO strategies, whether that's website or HubSpot implementations, whatever that may be, make sure you prioritize and list out all of those in one spot. And then start going through this exercise. Start thinking about how often do we do that, how much documentation do we currently have, and then what's the pain point of that if we don't have that actually built out as a process template? And you can get this process prioritization worksheet in the description below. I'll put a link there for you if you want to go through this exercise to help you prioritize your processes. Because we're not going to be able to build out all of these at once. We need to prioritize what should be built first, what's really necessary for us to get into this new system, the ones that we're actually doing for current clients. And so once you have that, now is the biggest part of this Zen pilot system here. The biggest mistake people make, other than not designing the system first, is they jump into a new system, the new project management tool, without any process built out whatsoever. And when you do that, essentially what you're doing is you're just making it so, hey, that new system, it comes as a blank canvas and all you're doing is putting maybe one task in there and assigning it to five different people and hoping people will communicate back and forth. But you're really making it so no one has clarity. You're going to make it impossible for you to track any project progress, impossible for people to know what's on their plate. So do not do that. You need to make sure you're building a process library that looks just like this. So if I come in here into my ClickUp workspace, I have a whole process library with everything that we do as an agency, from podcasts to landing pages to case studies, any kind of emails to our client onboarding process, to any sort of website process as well. All of this is built out in here and saved as process templates for me to use over and over and over again. So you need to have that inside of your project management system. And again, in this case, I'm using ClickUp as a technology tool of choice, but you can build these processes in a lot of different project management technologies as well. So what I need to do in the way that I'm going to build these out is all I'm doing is the parent task is going to represent that deliverable or the project phase milestone, whatever you need it to be, depending on the template that you're building. And then underneath there, all of those subtasks are going to represent all of the action steps that my team needs to take incomplete to complete this specific deliverable. So client onboarding, what do we need to do to actually complete client onboarding? We need to confirm the invoice payment, we need to add client contacts, to retently confirm login credentials, run kickoff calls, complete our ClickUp setup. All of it is in there and all of these are going to be assigned to one single person. That's super important. So when you build out these workflows, just know all these tasks should be broken into one user in one sitting. That way each of them has its own due date. It's going to have a time estimate on there and my team can track their time against these tasks. But what this does now is it allows my team to one, have full clarity on what they're going to be in charge of. So remember our my task view now I can see, hey, I'm in charge of confirming invoice payment, I'm in charge of closing the client deal on the CRM. I'm in charge of proofing the blog copy. In addition, I can also click into this and see that exact process for how this should be done right there. In addition, what that's going to do is it's going to help you see progress as well for how far along these projects are. So as you can see the specific blog post, what have we actually completed and how far along are we on this process? I'll see all of these tasks right there to know what's been done, what's not done, what's coming and so on and so forth. That's going to help hold our team accountable and help us pass work back and forth between the team. So what I'm going to do is again, all these steps need to be listed out, broken into one user in one sitting. All the customers fields need to be on here as well. The due dates, time estimates, the dependencies need to be on here as well. Which that's super important because remember, as I use this view before, I can now remap dates if I have those dependencies built in for my team. So all of that needs to be listed out just like this. And then in addition, you need to make sure your SOPs, if they're somewhere that you have, whether it's Google Drive or whatever, make sure the process lives where the work gets done. So take all of your SOPs, if you have a knowledge base or some something just like that, take those and link them to the tasks that actually need them. The worst thing that you can do is document a lot of processes, document a lot of standard operating procedures, and not connect those to the tasks that actually need them. Once you put that in a task, then you'll know when someone clicks on a task, they're going to see what they need to do, they're going to know how they need to do it as well, so that they get it done right the first time and follow your proven process for what makes your agency successful. So that's what you need to do, essentially building an entire process library with all of your processes, all of your workflows, those deliverables and projects that you do. Make sure everything is out saved as a template to make you a super systematized, repeatable business, that you can do things over and over and over again, making it super easy for you to delegate work to the rest of the team, to get clarity on where a project is and to tell people this is what you're doing and this is how you need to do it as well. So make sure you have that entire process library set up all of these saved as templates so I can deploy them over and over and over again. And now after you get over this big massive step of actually building your business essentially inside of that process library and get everything ready to go. Now we can actually move into training our team how to use it and preparing them for the future state. So what you need to do is train your team on the software as well as your expectations. You need to give them your expectations because that's what's going to help you hold Them accountable to those expectations that you've set in front of them. So what you're doing is you're going to show them this is how you're going to use the tool, this is how you're going to follow our process. And these are the habits that you are going to need in here as well. And so the best couple ways that you can do this is one, provide pre recorded training. So record yourself via loom or some other different video recording tool. Record all that, put it into somewhere. We like to use circle for us so they can watch that over and over again at the speed they need and start going through some exercises as well. In addition to that prerecorded training, provide some live training. That live training is going to help you sort of further enforce what they've learned in that prerecorded training. Provide some Q and A as well and just help create alignment over. So you need that prerecorded training and that live training, prerecorded training is great too because then you can onboard new people on your team over and over again because you've built that asset overall. So that's super powerful as well to have that. But it's just going to be two great elements with for different learning styles to help your team understand what's required of them. This is how they're going to use the tool, this is how they're going to follow your process and these are the habits that they're going to need. So when you go through this training, a few different things that you should be answering. One is start talking about your expectations of them. So how are they going to communicate in that tool? Is it going to be inside the parent tasks, subtasks, whatever it may be, we prefer the parent task, but tell them how they're going to communicate, tell them how and where they're going to track their time. Tell them how they're going to prioritize their work, tell them what they should be doing when work falls overdue. And essentially what you should be building is really your core rules, or as we like to call them, ten commandments. And so we have our ten commandments of agency, project management. Just to give you a few of these examples. The first biggest one, if we want to actually build a single source of truth, we need to make sure everyone understands, hey, if it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen. Essentially if you don't have it tracked and ClickUp if your time's not tracked, you don't have the task in there. We're just going to assume it didn't exist. This is going to make sure that everyone knows that they need to, if they're working on a task or anything, it needs to get into our system so that we can track it and so that we have that single source of truth that's reliable for reporting, for invoicing and for everything. In addition to that, we need to make sure that due dates matter. If you want to have realistic timelines for your clients and you want to make sure that your team is completing things on time, you need to enforce that due dates matter. If I say it's due tomorrow, that means it's due tomorrow. That doesn't mean we could push it off and off and off and off. In addition with that, maybe it's leave a trail. So maybe a task does fall overdue because priorities were shifted. We need to make sure we leave a trail and leave a comment or something to say, hey, this is exactly why this was pushed. That way we have that historical information and that story is in that specific deliverable to know why a project was pushed overall. So all of these different elements are going to give your team an understanding of what is really expected of them so that you can hold them accountable to that standard that you've set. And in addition, through all of this, you can also provide things like role specific training, whether it's for your project managers and how to use Gantt views or the workload view, or maybe it's for your account managers to take their notes inside of your system or be able to use those progress views, whether it's your individual contributors on how to set up their my test views, things like that, or even your contractors, how they'll work alongside you in the system. So make sure you train the team before you push them into anything that they're not comfortable with yet and after we've actually trained them. Now is the fun part. Now we actually get to launch inside of the new system. And so the biggest thing that you can do is create a clear launch date and make sure that you're not using two systems at once. You need to make sure that you're building a single source of truth so that you can catch habits and start correcting habits off the bat. So what you need to do is say, hey team, on Monday, July, whatever, August, whatever date that is. This is when we're going to be inside of our new system and we're not going to be in the old one. So you need to make sure that what you're doing is deploying all Those different templates into those client folders, into that new structure that you've built. So the team has all their tasks waiting for them on a Monday morning. They're assigned to all of them, and then they can come in and see exactly again what they need to do, how they're going to do it, when it's due, what's that priority, and they can start tracking their time in the system. This is what you want to build for all of your team members. And so again, you can still have that old system, still using it, or not fully using it, but you can still have it as a reference. But all of the active work, all of the project timelines, everything that's going to be tracked and realistic is going to be in that new system. Use the old one for reference, but make sure everything is living and all the team is living and breathing inside of that new system. So make sure you're seamlessly migrating client work, make sure you're creating a single source of truth and starting to help the team build healthy habits, making sure that they're using these new views, like their My task view or the workload view, and get all the data into that new system. And now when we've actually launched inside of that new system, the best part of our Zenpilot system is the optimized step, because through here what we've built is we have a whole bunch of data in this new system and nothing in the Zenpilot system. There's no place for people to hide or for tasks to go die. So that's really the most helpful piece of this. And the biggest mistake you can make here is to say, hey, after we've launched, we're good to go. And now we can just coast once you've launched. That's really only the beginning for what is to come. Now that you have all of that data, now we need to actually do something that with that data that we've just built, we've just built a system that's going to give us so much to help us build a better business, help us build a more profitable, productive and healthy business. So let's start to use it. So now we need to figure out how to actually extract that data from our system, to really use it and leverage it and make good decisions based off of it. So what you're going to be doing in this Optimize step is building a healthy cadence for how you're going to really audit the system, analyze it, prioritize issues, optimize it, and actually train and activate the team. In addition, through here, you want to create a culture of accountability. I've talked about this a lot before. You set your expectations now hold the team accountable. We also need to make improvements and all of these are going to be backed by data. So let's talk about a few of these steps and really this healthy cadence for analyzing how the team is doing. And so what I'd recommend in this and really the heart of the Zenpalit system is having a champion, having someone that's super passionate about the system that you've just set up, someone that's probably a bit more project management focused and someone that can have a little bit of time each day to go in and really audit what has happened in the system on a daily basis. So what they're going to be doing is you'll have dashboards and reports that are set up for them to really start to see all those habits that are happening in the system. So where are there a lot of overdue tasks across your team? Who is falling behind, who is not tracking their time? Who has been creating tasks without due dates or assignees or anything like that? Make sure you're catching those habits on a daily basis. So your champion of that system is going to be spot checking your system on a daily basis to really check and review any of those issues. And then if they have to reach out to someone to say, hey, you got a lot of tasks overdue, you're not tracking your time. Make sure they're there to help hold the team accountable, but be there as a helping hand as well to help coach the team. In addition, after those daily spot checks, you can do weekly roundups to really start to see how the team is performing overall. There's a lot of data, again, that's in your new system and a lot of tasks that are going to be flying in and out of the system based off of new client deadlines, new client priorities coming in, and we need to make sure that we're actually completing the work that's assigned to us on that given week week. So what we're going to be doing in the weekly roundup is to start looking at our weekly performance ratios. We want to understand, hey, are we actually completing the work that was planned that week? Oftentimes people are going to have a system that can be following those processes, but essentially what they're doing is priorities are always shifting way too much and we're not able to actually give our clients realistic deadlines and realistic timelines because all of that is very shaky. We don't actually have due dates mattering in the system. So what we want to do is get into this gold zone where essentially the tasks that are completed are the ones that were planned for that week. So that's really what we're trying to get after with this weekly performance report. So every single week what we're going to be able to do is grade ourselves on how we actually did to reach that standard on a weekly basis. Now after that, once you start to see those habits and how well we're actually performing in the system, to see how well we can actually forecast and really start to set those timelines for our clients. Now we're going to move into the monthly review and quarterly analysis. And so what this is going to do is start to look at overall and as I mentioned, sort of these reports where we're starting to look at profitability, where we're starting to look at things like utilization for our team and we can start to catch some of those issues, like, hey, we have some team members that aren't quite utilized all that well, or maybe we have some projects that are not profitable whatsoever, maybe we have some clients that haven't been profitable for the last six months. So what we need to do is identify what those biggest gaps are, figure out can we take on new clients, figure out if we cannot, do we need to bring a new role on, do we need to bring on some new people to help us out here and then really start to make data driven decisions from there? So once you get all of those healthy habits, the right processes and the right technology and then start to leverage all that to get the good powerful reporting, you're going to be able to make those decisions. To know, hey, what do I need to do to, to make this business more scalable, make it more healthy, make it more productive and more profitable overall. So get all this reporting out, build the correct system and the Zen palette system will help you do just that. So that's a little bit about all those different steps in the 135 formula that we just walked through. So this is really it. It's one goal, it's three keys and it's five steps. That is what fuels the Zempilot system. And so really this is what's helped teams like Trinity Insight gain full visibility into their team's capacity, just like this inside of this workload view. And that's helped them essentially increase utilization by 29%. Once they understood how well or how utilized their team was overall, they were able to move tasks back and forth to each of their team members to increase that utilization overall. This has also helped teams like Guice improve efficiency of their team by over 300%, mainly because they were able to know what is on my plate each and every day and how do I do it so that I'm getting it done right the first time. The worst thing that you can do is have multiple rounds of revision internally that didn't need to happen. So that's really what increases that efficiency. This has also helped teams like Gravity Global once they actually were living by the due dates matter. This helped them complete 99% of tasks on schedule, which is huge for agencies except especially when it comes to helping give your clients realistic timelines. Other teams that have worked and had the ZenPal system in place were able to cut their team size in half because of how productive they were. This also simultaneously increased their clients average MPS scores and cut Churn in half. So there's hundreds of stories like that on our website and I can show you all of those if you really wanted to look through all of them. But we have hundreds and hundreds of of stories just like that of those that have leveraged the zenpal system. But by now you should really start to understand how the Zenp out system is so effective at actually helping you serve your clients better and getting the most out of your limited number of resources. And so if right now you're ready to just join this elite tier of gold standard agency operators, we're offering to help you install this Zenp out system in your business with you. So if you're ready to uncover the opportunities and just go through the steps to build a more productive, profitable and healthier team at your agency, I recommend you just book a call with our team right now. If you're ambitious and ambitious driven agency, we want to work with you one on one to install the ZenPilot system, lead you through that 135 formula and install that in your business. And the sooner we begin, the sooner you're going to start to realize the benefits to your bottom line and not just to mention the lower stress levels that you're going to have when you work day to day in the smooth, calm and productive workflow. And our potential start dates really depend on the availability of our team and not all agencies are going to be a fit for this. So the easiest way for you to find out if you qualify for this and if you're ready for an agency ops makeover is to simply book a call with our team and speak with our team about the benefits that you might realize from the Zenp out system in your particular case, that call alone could really just be the project management therapy session that you need to get unstuck. Whether we end up working together or not, some people say that this is the most valuable 25 minutes that they've ever spent on their agency overall. So go ahead and just schedule that conversation. But on the other hand, you might want a bit more information before we talk. So I'm going to briefly explain why I believe the ZenPilot system is the most effective way to build a better agency. And let's go through a few different options or a few different things. The first one is it creates clarity for your team overall. And I've gone over this a bunch in the this video, but clarity is really kindness, as we know it's going to make your team show up to work every day knowing what they need to do and how they need to do it. With a Zen pilot system, you're creating clarity for everyone in your organization, no matter what role they're in. So let's break it down. First, your individual contributors will have a view to see all of their work with context in the process for how this work needs to be completed. And we went over this, my test view, plenty of times to show you what that looks like. They're gonna be able to see overdue work, today's work, and work that's in the future, which is super, super powerful. They'll also be able to track their time directly there, making it super easy. And if you need time to be tracked to give you that visibility, it's gonna make it way easier for your team. In addition, they'll know how exactly to communicate with the team. That'll be much easier and complete their finished work. All this is gonna be in one place with clear guidelines on how to do it. So if I gave you a little story here, Chris, with Lean Labs, their team, after they implemented the Zenp out system system, we're able to save hours and hours per team member every single week because of that clarity with having the tasks, how they needed to do it, what needs to be done, and so on and so forth. And so secondly, from there, in addition, your account managers are going to have a view for all of their clients, which helps them prioritize issues, get an overview of timeline, and communicate with clients accordingly. So your clients are really going to love you because of this. In addition, if I go into project managers, they're going to have a super accurate view of workload and capacity with this workload view and so with this visibility, your project managers are gonna be able to schedule and assign work without overwhelming anyone on the team. The worst thing that we can do is way underutilize or way over utilize some team members because that's going to increase burnout and make your team silent quit. Plus they're going to know exactly where projects are at all times and they won't have to check in every 10 minutes, which we know project managers can get annoying when they're just tapping on the door and saying, hey, where is this? Where is this? Where is this? You won't have to do that anymore because they're going to know exactly where projects are. And then lastly, your leadership team is finally able to see things like client health, profitability, utilization, team performance, and that's all going to be in one place. And so as a bonus, you're also going to be able to provide your clients with full visibility into what you've done for them, what the results have been and what is coming. This is going to paint the whole story and give them the visibility that's going to keep them around for the long run. So now if I move into number two of why the Zenpilot system is so great is because it's going to make your team much more efficient. Most people think the only way really to get people to be more productive or efficient is to build out some automations or to leverage some sort of AI technology to cut out manual effort. And there is a lot of truth in that, I'll be honest, but both of them have their place in the Zen pilot system. But the true heart of productivity, especially here, is going to stem from your team knowing exactly what they need to work on, when they need to work on it, and how to work on it. This clarity and certainty is really what drives the speed of their work. We've actually surveyed over 10,000 agency team members and the biggest efficiency enhancements came from a detailed task list that they woke up to each and every morning. All this detailed task list had the priorities, instruction and all the client details built in. So this is going to help them do their work faster and they'll do it right the first time. Really, there's nothing worse than completing a task and having to redo it because you didn't do it right. In the Zenpilot system, these cases are few and far between. Even after such a situation, you're going to be able to easily update your processes and templates so that it never happens again. And the third way that the Zenpilot system is so great is because you can actually finally delegate work. The inability to delegate work is what kills all agency owners. They're not able to take time off, step out of the office for even a few hours, and the whole business runs through them. And they're the biggest bottleneck in the business. The Zenpilot system helps you put that to rest. Yes, part of delegating work comes from hiring the right people, but the other piece of delegating work to the rest of the team comes from having those detailed tasks and process templates. So you're not just going to have a task with a title because not everyone actually knows what you're telling them to do. The ZenPilot system extracts all of your creative thinking as an agency owner and all your unique procedures and puts them into reusable templates to help you easily create and delegate that work. And number four is you're going to get the visibility that you need as an agency owner. Most agencies owners have no idea what's actually happening across the business as they begin to scale. But agency owners in and are using the ZenPilot system in place know exactly which clients are the most profitable to their business. They know exactly which team members are underutilized or overutilized. They know what clients are at risk and why and what their team is doing on a daily basis. If you try to operate without this as an agency owner, you're going to go crazy. The Zenpilit system is going to build you this single source of truth so that you know exactly what is happening each and every day and you can rely heavily on that data. So say goodbye to making any guesses and drawing assumptions. You're going to be able to run your business on data and on facts. And so number five is you're going to be much more profitable. There's plenty of different ways to become a much more profitable agency, but most of them boil down to understanding the data of your business. Visibility like this, especially in the reports I was showing you earlier, are going to prompt fundamental changes to your business. I want to give you a quick example. Matt, who was the founder of Vendigital Marketing, implemented the Zenpilot system. And using his newly gained data and having all that visibility, he found out that his main niche of services was actually bringing him his least profitable clients. And he found out that his agency had clients outside of their main niche that were 400% more profitable. Guess what they did next? Venn Digital made the switch to servicing that other clientele and saw their profitability soar and that's just one example. When you know exactly which clients, projects and service lines are most profitable to your business, you can continue to refine your ICP and focus on what makes you the most money. Even those clients that are the best relationships are not always the most profitable. And you're going to be relying on be able to refine your pricing structure to price your projects better as well. And then when you can allocate your team to more billable work, you'll boost profits even further. And all of this can be done with the ZenPilot system. And this doesn't even mention just how much more you can boost profits with a more productive team that can get much more done in a 40 hour workweek. And so after that, number six is going to be your clients are going to love you and your organization. Clients start to churn when they feel like you aren't bringing anything to the table or when you can't prove roi. And that's a risk you're taking when you resign yourself to being just another order taking and yes man agency without a clear sense of direction for your clients. The Zen Pilot system is going to help your team get super, super organized. When your team is super organized and work flows smoothly across your account managers, your project managers and your individual contributors, you're going to be a much more strategic partner than just an order taker for your clients. Why is this? Because when you're organized and in sync with your team, you're creating a shared context with everyone that allows them to bring their best ideas to the table and make them relevant to the details of the client situation. And with that detailed system, detailed data in your system, you can show clients at all times what you've done, the results of what you've done, your learnings and what you're doing because of it. You're building that client story and that story is what you'll show them, all that you're doing for them, the return on investment for them and make them excited to continue your journey together. And the same situation happened with a team at a Olidia. Once they implemented the zenpal system and got that much more organized, their clients were so happy with how organized their team was and they raved about it. And this actually helped them implement a four day work week based off how productive, efficient and organized their team actually was. And so I want to talk about how you can actually implement the ZenPal system. If you're ready to jump on this one of a kind opportunity, do not hesitate to get started today by booking A call with our team right now. We're looking for agency owners and leaders we have who have a desire to reduce internal chaos and give their team more clarity. We're not going to hard sell everyone. We only want a few people that see the value of becoming a more systematic, process driven and organized business. That is what the Zenpilot system is all about. So go ahead and book a call with us right now. There's absolutely no risk in you setting up a call to talk about how we can implement the Zenpilot system in your business. But for those of you who are interested but still have some questions, let me walk you through a bit more about how we work with teams. So I'm going to spend the rest of my time here explaining how our process works, how quickly you can start seeing results and what you'll get when you work with us. So first of all, I cannot stress this enough. There's not just one thing that's going to make the Zenpal system work. You need to leverage every part of that 1:3,5 formula that I talked about. It's not just jotting down some processes, implementing a new technology or getting your team to track their time. All of this is a cohesive system. All of the three keys, the tools, the processes and the habits all work together. Just one missing element could lead to an absolute disaster. This could easily take you 100 plus hours if you tried to piece the whole Zenpilot system together on your own. Thousands have tried, but it's difficult when you've never built it before and you may not know what the end state should truly look like. In fact, we've had clients come up to us saying all the time that they managed to DIY themselves the setup, but it was all only 60% of the way there for them. And they ended up coming back to us to work with us to implement the Zenpilot system to help realize this full potential. Just like Tom at Grizzle. And so this is our life's work at Zenpilot here and we're working in it every single day. We're learning, we're growing and we're continuously building and iterating on the Zenpilot system. And after working with over 3,000 different agencies, 10,000 plus agency team members over the last 10 years, we've boiled our process down to an exact science. So let me explain to you how our process works. So first we're going to understand exactly what's working across your business, from the client onboarding to your handoffs, to how your team is invoicing clients. We'll deeply understand your business at ZenPilot to define the root causes of what's causing this chaos. Again, as I mentioned, we'll survey your team to get them all bought in to really understand what is happening. We'll also work with you on all this. Define exactly what success looks like and we'll be benchmark your team against others. From there, we're going to build you a blueprint that will address each and every one of these operational bottlenecks that your team is facing and how you're going to fix it. So you're going to get a whole blueprint that looks just like this, which I showed earlier. We've done this 3,000 times before, so we know exactly how those gold standard crazy efficient agencies operate. You along with your team, after this first step, are going to have a full understanding of how your work management system will be designed to provide the needed visibility and simplicity for your team. From the hierarchy to those custom fields and views, you're going to have full clarity on the end state. And we do this first because it builds the foundation for every other step in the journey and allows us and you to understand exactly how the zenpal system will be designed to fit your unique business requirements and goals. And so next, what we're going to do is we're going to take this blueprint, this two dimensional blueprint, and plug it into your project management system. As I've talked earlier, we always recommend ClickUp. So in phase two, we're going to take your two dimensional blueprint and turn it into a living, breathing system inside of ClickUp with as little touch and effort from your team as possible. So we take that heavy lifting off of your team's hands. We're going to configure your ClickUp workspace, including those client folders, your contract records, your team list, your views, your custom fields and a whole lot more. And we do this second because this is going to save you hundreds of hours of effort and trial and error. Additionally, what we're going to do is we're going to get your whole team trained through both our pre recorded and live training to make sure they know exactly how to use the software and your expectations. This is going to provide clarity for everyone. And we have a whole training center built out for your team to leverage and use all that prerecorded training as well as live trainings right in there. And so after that, once we actually move on or phase three is where the magic is really going to happen. Through weekly Cohort cohorts and one on one support with you. We're going to help you systematize your entire business. So we're going to help you build out all those templates that I talked about earlier for each one of your core workflows. We're going to help you set up those custom fields you're going to need for added visibility. And we're also going to help you migrate all of your work into ClickUp. This is going to make it very seamless and easy throughout all this process. You're also going to work alongside other agencies to learn best practices and understanding what they're doing in current situations and things. And so leadership and your ClickUp champions are also on. Your team are going to have the needed visibility and support to ensure that we all have strategic alignment. And by the end of this, you're going to have a robust system that's going to be tailored to your business. You're going to be super repeatable and scalable and it's going to just flow without you completely. And so finally in phase four, you're going to set up interactive dashboards like I showed you earlier and reports to give you critical insights into client and contract profitability, your team's utilization, account management and much more. With this approach, you're going to have a clear path to climb the mountain and reach operational and gold standard excellence. But this is going to take a committed partnership from you. You're going to need to be an active participant in this. You're going to need to provide access to leadership across your team. You're going to need to complete assignments that we have for you and openly complete communicate with our team. If you're ready to put the work in here, we're going to guide you to the summit. And the view from the top is worth it, trust me. You're going to have streamlined processes in that process library. You're going to have a very hyper focused team, actionable data to drive decisions and a profitable, thriving agency. And we're really just scratching the surface on what we can do for you here in this video. And if emergency arises throughout any of this or you have a pressing question, our team is going to have your back. You're going to have access to us via ClickUp where our entire team is dedicated to seeing you succeed. Your agency's success will become our team's passion and we're dedicated to helping you build a gold standard and crazy efficient agency operation. Our only one request for this is that you have the desire to reduce internal chaos and give your entire team more clarity and you need to lead by example and due to the done with you nature of the work that we do and the intimate one on one support that we offer we can only work with a certain number of clients each month and we only partner with agencies, internal marketing teams and professional service firms that have at least 10 plus team members that desire to make their priorities more clear, their capacity more visible and their workspace more organized. So if you're ready to build a more productive, profitable and healthier team there's no reason you shouldn't go to our website right now and book a call with our team. We can only work with so many agencies per month so do not wait. Just go book a call right now so we can provide a more in depth overview into what the Zenpalot system could look like in your agency. We look forward to speaking with you soon and thank you for watching this video. Thanks.