How to Implement ClickUp for Agencies
A walkthrough of setting up ClickUp for agency teams, covering workspaces, spaces, folders, lists, tasks, and templates. The video shows how to structure your system and train teams to use it without letting it fall apart over time.
So let's start this journey with a few facts, or at least one fact. The typical agency switches project management tools every 17 months. And I know that sounds crazy, but unfortunately it's. It's true. And if you're anything like the typical agency, you're pouring hours and hours and hours of countless effort each month into trying to get your project management tool to work for your team. It's probably exhausting. And this constant trial and error is just frustrating the team, and they're being left hungry for a better way. Agencies are always on the hunt for this simple but powerful project management solution. So they switch tools and think that technology is going to solve all of their problems. Essentially, what they're looking for is a simple and logical enough tool that the team can easily pick it up and use consistently. But you're also looking for something that's powerful enough in terms of the reporting, visibility and integrations that it has to enable easy resource management efficiency and profitability analysis. But how do we achieve this? Well, let me tell you, you are in luck, because you've come to the right place. At Zen Pilot, we've helped close to 3,000 agencies build more productive, profitable and healthy teams. By streamlining their operations, we've helped them solve this exact problem that they've been facing. So, as ClickUp's first and highest rated solutions partner, we've learned the secret, the secret to creating that simple but powerful project management solution that you've been searching for this whole time. So I'm going to walk you through the exact steps that you need to set up ClickUp to achieve this clarity at every, every level in the organization. I'm talking clarity for your individual contributors, clarity for your account management team, your project managers and team leads, leadership as well as your clients, because your clients need to know what the heck is going on in the results that you're delivering them. So let's see how we can get clarity for all of these different people. So first, let's look at the future state. And the future state, as I discussed, is really clarity for all. With ClickUp, there is so, so much potential. There are a plethora of views and dashboards that you can create, but we need to unlock this, and we're here to help you unlock the potential of ClickUp. So first, let's discuss your individual contributors, or as some call them, your worker bees. So in ClickUp, they're going to have a view of all of their work. They're going to have context right in that view, and the process for how this Work needs to be completed in ClickUp. We utilize a dedicated my task view that allows them to see all this, and this is at the everything level, so they can see work across your whole ClickUp workspace. They'll be able to see their overdue work, today's work, and work in the future. So it's all right there, which will just make them more productive. In addition, they'll also be able to write. In this view, they can track time, as we can see here. They can communicate with the team via comments, and they can also just complete their tasks directly. In this view, it's all going to be in one place for them. So in addition to your individual contributors, you're also going to have your account managers. So in this view, you'll see they're going to have a view for all of their clients. This is going to help them prioritize issues. They'll get an overview of timeline and they'll be able to communicate with clients accordingly. We create this dedicated account management view like this, and there's also dashboards that they can have to also give them more context into what is happening with their clients clients. So after your account managers, we're going to have your project managers. Your project managers are going to have an accurate view of workload and capacity, which is a common question that we get about ClickUp or any other project management tool for that matter. How do we measure workload and how to actually make this accurate. So when ClickUp becomes your single source of truth and all the tasks have assignees, due dates and time estimates, that's very, very important. Don't forget that assignees, due dates, time estimates, signings, due dates, time estimates. Get that in your brain. Also you need to take out of office into consideration because that's also going to have effect on workload. Your project managers through all of this will be able to schedule and assign work without overwhelming the team, which is obviously super important. As we talked about, you need to be able to scale efficiently, effectively and healthy. You don't want to overwhelm the team. But they'll use the workload view to communicate with account managers and team leads and they'll be able to get work signed and planned to match client deadlines. So they're going to have an accurate view of workload. And again, we need to make sure all tasks have assignees, due dates and time estimates. Those are the three key things. There's a lot other things that we do, but this is how they're going to get the workload view accurate inside of ClickUp and have that clarity for them. And lastly, we're also going to have leadership. Leadership is going to have a view to see client in Project Health in one place. They'll be able to see NPS scores, they can see billing objectives, and also these account management updates. So we also have a CRM or account dashboard that we're going to use that all of this can be in one location for your leadership to see all that information. And that allows them to say, hey, do I need to jump into a client call or something like that to help out the team, or do I need to allocate additional resources there as well? In addition to this account dashboard, we're also going to be able to see profitability by client, by service line, by person. And this is actually a view outside of ClickUp, what I'm showing you here. But we need our ClickUp data structured well to actually create this dashboard. This is also going to give us visibility into overall utilization for the team. In addition, leadership is going to have a view on time tracked across all of your clients. So I can create a dashboard to view all this and they'll be able to compare the time track to time estimates to see if there's any issues there. And lastly, they'll be able to see how the team is performing overall and ensure they're following best practices. With this level of visibility, as you can see in this report, we'll be able to continue to push towards better planning. And better planning is going to offer your agency better visibility into workload, which is what we're all trying to solve. And as a bonus, we'll also be creating views and dashboards for your clients. This will give them a full picture of how you're helping them achieve their goals. So, as you can see here, I have a client portal that's utilizing views, some links, reports and notes. It's all in place. I only have to send them one link and they can go right there. In addition, it'll be automated. It's not going to be a highly manual, tedious process. All I have to do is set it up, send them a link, and then they have one place for everything. As long as I complete my tasks, we'll be good to go. So let me ask you this. Wouldn't it be amazing to have this level of clarity? Let's now walk through how you can set all this up in ClickUp to get those levels of clarity. So first of all, we need to start off with the hierarchy inside of ClickUp. Every agency, once you come Into ClickUp, you're going to start off with a workspace. So the workspace is where essentially everything is going to live. Your workspace should be named after agency. That is hopefully a no brainer. So now after your workspace, that's easy. This is where a lot of agencies start to limit their visibility. You need to plan, manage and track your internal work along with client work in the same unified system if you want to actually achieve a comprehensive view of progress, workload and time allocation. So your work in all three areas of your business needs to be replicated inside of your PM tool. Let's talk about the best way to do this. So as you can see here in my left hand menu in ClickUp, I have three spaces. Well, I have more than that, but three main spaces for all of my agency work. We're going to have growth, we're going to have delivery, and we're going to have operations. So growth is essentially the space where you make your promise. This is where your sales and marketing work is going to live. Delivery is where you're going to be keeping your promises. This is where you're going to be servicing client work and then operations, essentially where everything else lives. So recruiting, finance, hr, party planning, which is very important. The list goes on. So those are your three main spaces that you need to have set up. In addition, you could also build out a CRM as we mentioned, or we can call it an Account Dashboard. This is a place for you to track all your deals, your contacts and your companies. As you can see here, this is extremely important because it's going to become a single source of truth for all of your accounts. So I have all of my account level information in here. Again, I have one view to see all that you're going to be using this track client health objectives, account management, updates, billing, so on and so forth. Basically, whatever fields you want to put in here that you need to be tracked, you can put in the CRM. And because your client services live in ClickUp, having this asset live in ClickUp as well is going to be extremely powerful. It keeps your team aligned on every client and gives leadership. A single view for every account your agency services. In addition to this, you're also going to need to build out a process library to store your process templates. We're going to dig into this a lot more, but this is arguably the most valuable asset that your agency is going to have. So aside from this, you can also have a contract management space to manage your contracts. This is a great way to centralize contract information such as costs, time, resources, and things like that. You might even have a space for your freelancers to help manage freelancers and collaborate with them efficiently on tasks where maybe they shouldn't have access to your your full agency's work that you have inside of ClickUp. And lastly, though it's not a space, you'll also want to have a knowledge base at the everything level. This is going to be a central hub for you to store information regarding ClickUp usage, company information, standard operating procedures, which you can also link to your process templates. But more on that later. This is going to keep everything centralized and making it super easy for your team to find. So as you can see here, I have a knowledge base where everything is going to live. It's going to make it super easy for my team to find it and learn how to use ClickUp, learn what they need to do, and so on and so forth. Okay, so now that we've covered the high level in the ClickUp spaces, we now need to discuss what's underneath all those levels. So every single space in your hierarchy is going to have folders. So to summarize, right now we have the everything level. We have our spaces, and now we have folders. So the folders can be sales and marketing folders in your growth space, where all the work lives for sales in the sales folder, and all the marketing work lives in the marketing folder. As you'll see here, this can also be an operation space. We can have a finance folder, people folder, and one for administrative tasks. And then within the delivery space, this is super important. This is where we're going to focus most of our attention at. Each folder is going to represent a different client, and this is where all of your client work is going to live. As you can see here, each client has its own folder. All of their work is going to live in their folder. And this structure is extremely important. Following this framework is going to unlock a ton of potential and ClickUp, you're going to have powerful views and reports that we had discussed in the beginning. So don't skip this part. You need to have this framework down. So after our folders, we now have lists. And lists are where the work is actually going to live. And we also need to know that we don't necessarily need folders. A list can live on its own, but folders are a great way to provide a level of organization to your workspace. So just to recall, we have everything level. Our spaces, our folders, and our lists. So a great example of a Folder, list, list, just to show you, is going to be this client management list that you see over here. Essentially it's on its own in the delivery space. I could put tasks in there that are related to delivery, but not a specific client. So in some cases you can have a folder list list. And now for the structure inside of our client folders and what those lists looks like. So you can either have lists for different service lines, or you can just have a singular list for a retainer. And these decisions are really why we start off with the blueprint process. We want to make sure that we have the structure all set and ready to go before we get into the platform. We need to know what you need, you want, what your goals are, and the visibility that you need as an agency. And that's what the blueprint is really all about. So we can design that structure and everything included and then build it out inside of ClickUp. So in addition to those service line or retainer lists, you're also going to have lists for different projects. So the retainer list is where my smaller deliverables can go, but I'll also have lists for website projects, HubSpot implementations, onboarding, things like that. Larger projects that are one off, I can also have as their own separate lists, essentially, if they get billed separately, then we can create that list for them. Okay, so now after lists, we're also going to have parent tasks, subtasks and checklists. So remember, we have our everything level. We have our spaces, we have our folders, we have our lists. Now we have parent tasks, subtasks and checklists. And as you know, this is where the work is actually happening. So lists are where it live. Work actually happens in paradas and subtasks and checklists. So the way that you're going to use para tasks is these parent tasks will represent deliverables. So in this example, I have a blog post. This parent task is going to be used to group together steps in a workflow which are my subtasks. It's going to keep all of my work in one place and it's going to make sure nothing in this blog post deliverable falls to the cracks. And it's also going to keep track of progress for both our sake and our client's sake. So as you'll see in this example we'll have some subtasks that are action steps that need to be taken to complete this deliverable, this blog post. These are going to look like write the blog copy, proof the blog copy, apply blog proofing revisions as well as design the blog imagery. So each of these is going to be assigned to one person who is in charge of completing that step. Now, some important details. Within every task in ClickUp, you're also going to have checklists. So these checklists should be used as reminders for seasoned users. So it's essentially going to tell them to don't forget to do this, this or that. You need to have your checklist in there. It's going to hold them accountable and ensure that we're delivering high quality work because we're not forgetting anything. We're going to deliver high quality work for the client every single time. So in addition to the checklist in these subtasks, you're also going to have task descriptions. So this is going to be a place for you to write your instructions or provide a video for a new user. You can link to an SOP document in the knowledge base, which we discussed earlier. You can just write content in this text box, or you can embed an outside template like a Google Sheet or something like that, or just instructions into this description. This is really going to be how you make sure that the process live lives where the work gets done. And this is super powerful because anytime someone goes to a task, they're going to have the context, they're going to have the best practices, and it's going to make your team way more productive and follow your best practices because it's right in front of them, it's right in the task, it's going to make them way more efficient. So now once you understand this structure, it's time to start actually building out these processes in your process library. So let's dive into this. Your process library is going to host all of the source files for your agency templates. So as you can see here, here's my example in my process library, I'm going to have folders in here as well to sort of group together my different processes for like growth delivery for operations. It's just going to help me organize my processes into work categories and make it much easier for my team to use them and navigate when they're actually constructing them. And remember, these are going to be updated over time. They're not going to be static. We need to continue to optimize these processes over time. So we need to keep them organized inside of our process library. And for those that do work with Zenpilot, we do have over 150 some agency templates to use these stem for HubSpot implementations, onboarding, webinars, SEO audits, Even critical internal operations processes surrounding recruiting and finance. We have a lot of processes for you to use. These have been worked on over the years, battle tested and offered us an amazing head start and best practices for every agency's ClickUp success. I've even had people say that they were able to expand their service offerings just because they already had processes built out for them. They offer a great place for you to start so that this can be really sped up and you'll have the best practices on how to actually build out a process in ClickUp. And remember, your processes are one of the most important, important components of this implementation. You need to have them built. You want to get your subject matter experts involved here, you want to prioritize which ones you need to build, and then you need to build the most important processes. But within ClickUp, you're going to have three main types of templates. So first off, as we could see here, we're going to have our task templates. These are going to be your smaller deliverables or just tools in your toolbox. These are going to be things like blog posts, as I talked about earlier, social media post audits, emails, webinars, things like that. A little bit smaller, and we just deploy them over and over and over again into your lists. After your task templates, you're also going to have list templates. These are going to be your projects. Think about things like website builds, HubSpot implementations, brand redesigns, etc. Essentially a task template versus a list template. A task is just going to bring the parent task and subtasks with all the time estimates, due dates, custom fields and things. But a list template is going to bring the whole list. It's also going to bring the views within that list, all the parent tasks and subtasks in that list, so you can make it a little bit larger for larger projects. After your task and list templates, we're also going to have folder templates. This is essentially, as you can see here, be used for, for new clients as they come on board. I'm going to have a prepackaged service. I'm going to put my sort of onboarding in there and put it all into a client folder template. This is going to allow me to get my views and tasks sort of in order for consistency. And then in addition, a big benefit to this is going to be I want to be able to have a centralized client document in this folder that's going to be able to keep all the meeting notes and client info in one location. Make it super Easy for the team to use. So you're going to have task templates, list templates and your client folder template there. In addition, you also have the ability to that you've used ClickUp. Basically build out a template for anything so you can create view templates which will. You'll be able to use more. You'll have doc templates which you can use as well, checklist templates which I wouldn't use as much, but also things like space templates. Really the list goes on a lot of different options, but let's focus on the three main use cases with task list and folder templates. So as I mentioned earlier, your parent tasks are going to represent the name of your deliverable or your project phase, as you can see here. And your subtasks are going to represent all the action items that are needed to complete a deliverable or project phase. You need to make sure that the process lives where the work gets done. So you're going to use checklist and task description for this. If I click on a task, you'll see that information. Really the more process that you can get into these workflows, the more productive your team will be because they'll have all the instructions of how to complete something. In addition, it's going to help them follow your best practices in your clients. Because of that, we'll be much happier. So let's go over how to best build out a process. So in here you're going to craft each of these tasks, these subtasks, one user in one sitting. This is going to make it so that everything is bite sized pieces to ensure that the team doesn't forget to do anything and so that we see a full progress of a deliverable or project. Essentially this means that each task should only be assigned to one person and it should keep the time estimate under about four hours. We don't want anything floating in an in progress view or something like that for too long. That's how work is going to get lost. In addition, we're also going to add in a date map. So each task should have a due date, but within this we really only care about the distance between the dates. We can remap everything later on, so don't feel like you have to get the dates right. And this can only be used once. Essentially you just put the first date in that and then day after that, day after that, so on and so forth. We only care about the distance between the dates. This allows us to just remap it based off that first subtask due date in the future. And in addition to that you also want to make sure with those due dates you have independencies. I can add those into the Gantt view. These are going to help us string together the project or the deliverable that allows us to remap due dates in the future as well as skip the weekends. And then lastly, after your time estimates, your dates and your dependencies, you want to add a custom field. So custom fields we're really going to be using, the main one is a deliver role for this. This allow us to sign work in the future because with these templates we need to build them to scale. If you assign them now, you're essentially just building them for today's environment and that person that might be doing that test now might not be doing that in a year from now. So we want to make sure we use deliverable custom fields so that we can make it more scalable and build these for today and in the future. This deliverable is really going to allow you to focus on work in the future and just know maybe what role you need to hire for because that role has a lot of work that you're deploying in the system. In addition, we also use things like work category and task type. As you see here, work category and task types are just ways for me to get additional filtering capabilities especially for task type. And the work category is going to help a lot with showing you visibility into the work categories or service lines your agency provides. So maybe SEO is very profitable for you or maybe more content marketing is be able to see the difference between those two. So when you completed this workflow in reminder, it doesn't need to be perfect. You can always update it and change it and add to it later on you can save it as a template. So you'll click on the ellipsis right here, find the template center and then I'm going to save it as a template. And when you have your structure in order and all your processes are saved and ready to go, it's time to start thinking about the getting the team trained and ready for launch day. This is extremely important and it's a piece that a lot of agencies miss. You always need to think about your team. Your you need to train your team on the software as well as the expectations that you have for them in the software. We need to make sure we walk our team through real life scenarios too. So make sure you have time, set up for Q and A and walk them through. If this happens, then do this and over time you'll be able to develop also a sort of training course that they can use and that'll help onboard them into the system. They need to also make sure that they know what each status means, what views are, how to use views, where to communicate inside ClickUp. Really the list goes on. There's a lot that you need to train them on. So make sure again that gets documented your knowledge base or elsewhere, or you have a training course for them to take and you hold those live sessions. So at zenpower, we also take everyone through an agency project management certification. You want to build out a training course for your team. That way it's way more scalable, it helps walk them through how to set things up. It makes it easy for you to bring on new employees into the system and have a training course all set up for them to take. So make sure you build out something like that for your team. And so once your team is trained up and you have everything you need, you are ready to launch. You'll be using your new templates to deploy all this work. So don't be thinking that now that you've done all this, you're going to be doing a bulk CSV import from another project management tool or from ClickUp into these new spaces. That's a no, no, we don't want to do that. That's not going to solve anything. We need to make sure we're using our new templates. So what you're going to do is you need to come up with a migration plan. You need to be thinking about all your account managers, who has the most sort of visibility and knowing of each client, and they're going to be really in charge of migrating your clients one folder at a time. So what you're going to do, you're going to go to your delivery space, you're going to have your client folder, you're going to deploy that client folder just so you can keep that, that structure consistent and easy to follow. And then after that, you're going to have your folder with your list under there. Now you're going to take your task templates and deploy them and assign them out. Make sure the due dates match reality. And then you're also going to put in your list templates and deploy those projects and assign those out as well. Make sure everything is lined up. And then make sure you have a single source of truth inside of ClickUp. So really, if I can give you one piece of advice here, it's do not do a soft launch. Make it a clear transition. Everyone should be Working out of one system to create the single source of truth. And to do this, I'd recommend you launch on a Monday. This is going to give the team a fresh new week inside of the new system. And so now, after you've launched, you need to focus on building healthy habits. And this is super important. So what we do, we always set up views and dashboards and things like that for your ClickUp champion. And your ClickUp champion is going to be the glue that really holds all of this together. You need to remember that you can only get out of the system what you put into the system. If you want all the awesome views and dashboards and things we talked about at the beginning, you need to focus on getting the team to close their tasks, to track their time, indicate, keep the system clean. That's really where your ClickUp champions going to come in handy. Essentially what they're going to do is they're going to be taking care of your overall systems design to make sure that spaces, those folders and lists and parent tasks and subtasks all stay consistent. That's super important. They're also going to be monitoring habits and behaviors of your team inside the system. So I have this dashboard right here where they can monitor all that to see where potentially tasks are not completed, where they're really overdue. We can also see where there's no time estimates, no due dates and assignees. Remember, that's super important for workload and making sure nothing slips to the cracks. And then lastly, they're also going to be your ClickUp expert to answer any questions that your team has, looking daily at obvious things like who tracked time, who did it, who has a lot of overdue tasks, who has completed tasks in overall profile set up. Also who's clearing the notifications. They're also going to have more weekly and monthly cadences to evaluate profitability by service lines, evaluate utilization and where time was spent. And we have all these dashboards down here for them to look at all of this information and through all these cadences are going to be able to prioritize their issues. I'm going to optimize the system and continue to train the team to get better and better and better each day. And really, there you have it. This is how you take the chaos out of project management. So let me ask you, are you ready to completely transform your operations? At Senpai, We've taken almost 3,000 agencies through this process and we've also trained over 10,000 people on how to use ClickUp. We've helped agency owners increase productivity by 400%, completely remove themselves from the operation and sell their business. We've been able to help agencies grow profits by $1.2 million in year one. They've been able to triple headcount seamlessly and improve client retention. Taking your operations seriously will change your life and I want you to experience this life changing impact. So if you're ready to experience the power of world class operations, go to zenpilot.com call we're here to lead your last project management implementation so that you could stop tool switching and finally get the project management system that's simple and powerful and actually sticks for your team. And I cannot wait for you to be the next agency success story. I'll see you over@zenpilot.com thanks for watching this video. We'll see you again next time. Thanks for watching.
