Implementing ClickUp for a 200-person Agency with Lauren Makielski

Foreign. Welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie from Zen Pilot. This week I've got the pleasure of bringing on Lauren Michelski, who is the chief of staff at an awesome agency called Hawk Media. Some of you will be familiar with Hawk. Their names come up on the podcast before Eric and the team released a book earlier this year called the Hawk Method. And I'm sure we'll get into as well. But Lauren, this is going to be an awesome conversation digging into your implementation of ClickUp and the way that Hawk operates. Welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Why don't you give people. Let's just paint the picture first of Hawk. Can you give us kind of the profile of what the agency looks like?

Yeah. Haack was started in 2014 with two guys, our co founders, Eric and Tony. Eric was the moneymaker out there closing deals and Tony was stuck in the back office making all of the actual marketing happen for our clients for a while. So started small, but grew really quickly. I came onto the business about four years ago as employee number 120. And we provide really bite sized, a la carte marketing solutions for growth stage businesses and beyond. So we do kind of marketing in a SaaS model. It's month to month a la carte lets people pick what they need to pick, execute on it for only the time that they need it, and then allow them the flexibility to kind of scale up and find a different solution if they're growing rapidly. Or maybe they just really like having the fractional resource we provide on a long term basis. But we kind of do it all for our clients.

What does team size look like?

Today we are at about 200 employees and our services organization, the folks actually executing on our marketing is the largest portion of that. So I think that team is around 120 right now.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think there's a certain scale to get to where that, like the ability to go a la carte. That's one of the things that makes Hawk different as an org. He's like, hey, we're not. I'm sure there's a driver still, I'd imagine to say, hey, let's try to. Obviously we want to deliver enough value that people want to keep coming back. And so the repeat purchase rate or the lifetime value of customers is probably a key metric. But the ability to say, hey, that's fine. If you want to be here for two months while we run these campaigns, like that's, that's fine. It's a cool, cool piece. Do you know when that evolved in the company history?

That was actually the entire. That was from the beginning. Founders Eric and Tony had worked in other businesses prior where they were looking at agencies and they didn't want to get locked into long term contracts. And it's funny, like still today if we enter into a vendor relationship, like we try to bully them out of getting us in for a year plus. But yeah, that was since its inception. They wanted to have that flexibility for themselves and then that kind of spurred them on to creating that solution for our now clients.

It's the classic anti agency archetype, agency types.

Yeah. We also don't have typical account managers either. So the folks who are actually on your weekly calls or bi weekly calls as a client are the people pushing the pixels, buying the ads, et cetera. So that was also something that came from its inception of Tony really not liking how he kind of had to jump through hoops to get to that technical expert. Um, we kind of leave that really open for our clients.

I want to get to the ClickUp side, but let's stay there for a second. So if I'm doing whatever SEO and Facebook campaigns and whatever else, am I talking to the media buyer, like how many people could show up on that call?

It's. Since we're a la carte, it really depends on how many services that client has engaged. If it's just like a Facebook ads relationship, they're just talking to their one person and that person is buying their ads. When we get scaled up to doing kind of a full digital suite for a client, like let's say we start off with a web build and strategy campaign for them and then ended up like going into paid and then into Lifecycle, et cetera, you're going to have upwards of five or six different people on the call and those will be a lot more like holistic conversations where we might bring in a strategist full time to the conversation, but then you're also able to have breakout calls with those experts since you can't fit all of that insight into just a one hour call every other week.

Right, Makes sense. All right, so let's talk about the piece that's going to be most exciting to everybody. Although there's a million things about Hawk that we could dig into that would be really interesting. And that is you went through this big implementation of ClickUp and migration from Wrike into the platform. So let's try and frame this as kind of. We'll jump back and forth between them. I'm sure. But kind of before, during and after. Walk us through kind of the evolution of project management over the last four years and then the like, what, what were the pain points that led to? Hey, we need to move towards, towards a solution like ClickUp.

Yeah. When I started at Hawk, there was no project management. It was kind of like very specific. People in each of our service channels would kind of evolve and hand raise as like hey, I can be the ops person for this channel. And then they kind of just go rogue. In whatever system we had which we were using wrike prior to our transition, they would just say hey, I'm going to just figure this out because no one else is doing it. Make a system, refine it over time. Then they would leave the organization. Someone would have to come in and build a whole new system because it was so key person risk intensive. And that was just happening in every department at the company. So when I started my role really was not focused on true operations. I was doing workplace ops. So like buying snacks for the office and then kind of kept taking on more and more responsibility to where I'm at now. And so through my time project management became like a really big interest of mine and I decided that I was sick and tired of people kind of just like having all these ever evolving processes that were never documented anywhere. And like no one felt comfortable using the system we had. So that's when I kind of took it upon myself to look at other tools and try to say, hey, I'll take, I'll take the blame if this doesn't go well, but I want to, I want to change this. And so that's how it started. Click up.

Were there any specific metrics probably coming from the leadership team where there like was there any pain around being able to see or have visibility into specific things? Was it more from kind of the individual team member experience and just general chaos or like what were the, were there any other drivers there?

Yeah, I think general chaos is probably the biggest thing that we needed to attack and nip in the bud. Um, we do pay attention a lot to like time and status and if something is on hold, is it because we're waiting on something, something from a client or is it because we are being slow and we don't have resources using statuses like that and being able to track like waiting on, client waiting on us, Those things were really important that we didn't have a good evergreen across the board set up for. Otherwise we just like to have like general transparency into things and we didn't have a lot of set standards as far as like, how are we sharing certain lists with people? Like, who has access to what? Because like I mentioned, everyone was kind of in their own departments spinning up their own versions of project management. No one had really thought like, oh, even if I'm on the web design team, I should share my ClickUp list with the Lifecycle team so that they can see what I'm working on. If we're doing stuff for the same client, that stuff just wasn't really present. We wanted to just wipe the whole slate clean and start fresh.

Yeah, that makes sense. As you. So when we're taking agencies through the implementation process, we kind of go systems design into the process development that needs to happen and getting all the templates built out and the technical build is like the whole infrastructure and what are we getting our data schema and what third party integrations do we need to plug in and then into setting clear expectations for the team and training and the migration and launch and then accountability and improvement. But you were going through this kind of leading the whole implementation into ClickUp. Take us through kind of that process and let's start higher level. How long, what's that time window between when you got the green light to say, hey, go plug this in to like, hey, we've got the whole team up and running on ClickUp.

I would say like for true, everyone's up and running. Like this is being used probably six months. But I think before from time where like I had ability to start provisioning user licenses until I had my first training was probably like two months.

Yep, makes sense. And then over that time, like, was this the main thing on your plate? What's the like the time commitment internally that went into that process?

Yeah, I think this was like one of my sole focus areas. I was also helping to act as sort of a product owner for a custom ERP that we had built, which we have since replaced with Salesforce. But there were always kind of things like on my plate at the same time that ClickUp was kind of a linchpin in terms of like these other things aren't actually going to be done to their fullest extent without these systems in place. So it was kind of an easy way to prioritize that with other team members. But I tried to make it as minimal as possible as far as Lyft goes with our other other leaders. So I probably forced them into like maybe a couple one hour sessions and then tried to do as much of the rest of it asynchronously. For them. And we were remote at the time. So we did this through the pandemic in 2020. And that was also just dealing with like, how are we going to move digital first with all of the communications? Anyway, I was trying to like try stuff out with this ClickUp implementation that we might be able to replicate for other sorts of like employee connectivity. But yeah, it was, it was time intensive for, for myself, for the people. I bugged for a little bit. But at the end of the day, if your teams have their SOPs already known, it is really simple to just slap that into ClickUp.

I felt that's awesome. So what is that? Kind of the high level overview is really helpful in terms of timeline. Hey, here's some of the resources that went into it. What did your process look like? And feel free to take this from either direction. Kind of like, here's what I did, here's how to do differently last time or here's how I do differently, here's what I actually did. But I love to just kind of hear like, where did you start in the process?

Yeah, so at the time when we like signed on with ClickUp, I had been using the tool for about a year and a half previously solo. And again since everyone was really siloed, no one back, no one batted an eye when like, oh, Lauren's using a completely different tool internally. It just didn't even matter at that point. I think we had people using, we're mainly using Wrike, but I also saw like some Monday logins pop up. I saw people using Trello and then I was using ClickUp. So I'm like, okay, we're just going to ignore that for the time that I need to get really comfortable with the tool if I'm going to be leading this. And I went like, so heads deep in everything that I could with my free license, got really comfortable with it, started to create some test templates, like looking at, okay, what would this look like? And ClickUp. We had so many use cases that come up that I could just kind of on my own play around with. And then when we started, I knew that just SOP refinement across the board was going to be the biggest time consuming piece. So people did have a lot documented in some departments, other departments had nothing documented. And if you asked two people on the same team, they'd have completely different answers for like, hey, what happens when you when a client signs their contract? You know? So I just like went through the process manually of like having meetings with each of those people taking Copious amounts of notes like describe everything for me, like what are dependencies? Or like that is the norm but when would it not be the norm? Or like what types of clients would maybe need something different? And asking the who, what, where, when, why, how questions for every point of the process from a milestone basis was really helpful. And then yeah, after that I ended up with this like what I thought was a beautiful library of just documented processes tabbed out by client type, by service, by sub team, everything that we were doing, knowing the difference of like hey, when SEO comes in with lifecycle, how is that different than web and paid media or something like that. So ended out with that and then I went heads down dark for like a couple weeks and built that all out myself as made every single template, set up the hierarchy of all of our spaces and then imported all of our client folders. And that was also a big intensive thing. But what we did have that was in Wrike I was able to port over really easily. That was great. And then at the end of that I just kind of like did my same individual meetings, basically saying hey, you gave me this, I got this from it. Here's what's in ClickUp now, here's how you use it. And then we kind of refined, then kind of did a full rollout with leadership and then rolled it out to our individual contributors, which we did at a really bad time in the season for us. If you don't know Hawk, we mostly work with e commerce clients, although we do service all types of businesses. And holiday season needs to start ramping like September, October at the latest to really get performance juice for anything you're doing for Black Friday Cyber Monday and we I was like kind of just ignorant of that. I'd been in the ClickUp hole for so long, I just kind of emerged when I was done I was like, okay, now it's time. Ended up trying to shove a lot of individual contributors into like training sessions that they didn't want to be in. And we had some really enthusiastic adopters that helped to carry the rest of the team for a little bit. But then after holiday season ended, probably end of December and January for us, we were able to like relaunch in a more more efficient way I would say. And that's when things have kind of took off from there.

Yeah, that's awesome. I got so many follow up questions. First piece is is there anything you did to try to measure, like what are the results before and after? And it could be specific client services metrics could be Efficiency. It could be internal team survey. Or it might just be sentiment from the team too.

Yeah, sentiment was a big one. Also, since we were trying to figure out how does our business actually work digital first, I was using the Pulse feature a lot in ClickUp to just see, like, are people online? Like, are they getting value out of being able to comment to someone? And like using ClickUp to actually describe what's happening in tasks instead of like always opening up another Slack thread. That kind of shift where I saw like less messages and Slack and more comments and ClickUp was a really big indicator of success for us. Otherwise just kind of like speed to close things out and people at leadership team meetings being able to say like, this is transparent, like this is what I needed or hey, this is like so fast for me to onboard a new hire because they have a template and this is what they do. And even if they don't know, like Hawk's way of executing on something like lifecycle marketing, we have all of the resources that they need in there through docs, through task templates, etc. And that was really what we were trying to do at the beginning. Right? Like we never had. Oh crap. LTV that we're trying to shift by using ClickUp. We just knew that the way we were doing work was so inefficient and sometimes just those sentiment pieces were what was able to move the needle for us.

Right, that makes sense. You mentioned going to the total opposite and like the technical side of ClickUp and I'm gonna come back to processes, but you mentioned setting up client folders. How did you decide? Like, where do clients belong in ClickUp's hierarchy?

Oh yeah, that's an age old question, isn't it? We have a very large number of monthly active clients because we're doing things a la carte. Like we'll have a whole client environment just for someone who's on paid social doing Facebook ads. And then we also have to account for the people who have maybe like six, seven different services at a time. And we knew going into it that like if we made a client environment like too high in the hierarchy, it was going to be really hard to use for the people who are just doing like a paid, paid social engagement. On the flip side of that, if we made it too low in the hierarchy, like just at a list level, we were not going to be able to scale if we ended up upselling that client. So for us we landed on folders and ClickUp. I think, I think in 2.0 they're going to nix the maximum number of folders per space. I'm not sure about that. But we did hit our maximum. So we kind of have like we have a client's A through whatever clients L through whatever and just split them up alphabetically. But folders seem to work really well for us. So we've got a client as a folder. Each list is a service we provide.

Yeah. And then for from a process perspective, I think that you already answered this question. But everything lives inside ClickUp like all the processes either in test templates or in reference docs.

Yep, absolutely. That is all there.

How's that worked out?

I think it's good. People are pretty surprised that ClickUp has like a docs feature. I think that's just not something that's really present in other platforms. And it's docs are my absolute favorite. I could talk about that for years. But yeah, it's in there and I think it's gone really well. Like the way that ClickUp has evolved their template library too over time has been super helpful for us and it's really easy for teams to tweak them. Also giving people access like what can you do with a specific template as a specific user? I don't need everybody to run things through me. We've got other infrastructure for our service operations now that's not just me. So we have lots of people who can kind of come in and make changes as needed and it's really easy to kind of just send those things out with links to people if they need to be informed.

You know, we talk to some people who are like going back and forth between Notion and ClickUp and what do I use or do I keep my documentation in Notion. And there's some advantages that Notion still has like synced blocks is a pretty cool feature that Notion has. But ClickUp docs have just gotten such a huge upgrade really in the past year.

Especially.

The ability to quickly create tasks directly from in docs. And like there's so many things that have really powered up ClickUp docs and made it a huge asset for teams, which is awesome.

Yeah. I use Notion in my personal life. There's no shot that I would probably recommend using it as like a full time task solution for for sure an agency but any other business like like you mentioned, if you're using a project management tool to manage projects like you can write your heart out and brain dump in a doc and then anything that's interesting, highlight, make it a task, highlight make it a task or mention tasks in Docs is amazing. They're like, oh, I'm talking about this at. At here's my task. Cool. Hover over it, see what it's do. There's just not that agility in notion. Although I do think notion is like an amazing wiki source for companies. Yeah.

Want to talk a little bit about the team training side too. For most team members, what do you think? The timeline for them to get kind of up to speed or comfortable or. Yeah, I don't think that. I think sometimes in a lot of agencies there's this obsession over keeping people happy and we can never be unhappy for a period of time. So maybe not necessarily happy, but like competent inside. ClickUp.

Yeah, I think it's just all about what you do after training more than the actual training itself. For us, I'm sure for others as well, we did like kind of a general training, like this is what a task looks like, this is where to find your notifications, how to set a due date, that kind of thing. And then we would do like a next level down, more granular training per team to kind of talk through like their specific client processes and their templates. So I think, like, the general training is helpful for people who've never used a project management tool. But a lot of times at agencies, like, there's very high turnover for employees in general. So you're usually getting employees who have either absolutely zero experience with any professional tools because they're coming fresh from their undergrad degree sometimes, or you're working with people who have used like seven different tools at the last seven agencies they were at. So you're working with really extreme pillars of literacy in terms of that. So the general training is just to get people all on the same page about, like, what is this? And then the next trainings we did, those were a lot more fruitful, I would say, in terms of getting people hooked on the processes and ClickUp and the tools within, like the Qlik apps, et cetera, because they're able to contextualize it. They're able to see like, this is my workday in ClickUp. And after that, though, it's really just about keeping it top of mind. Like people want to default to Slack, they want to default to email, whatever they do. But I would be remiss to say that I think I, like never mentioned anything in ClickUp without linking directly to the ClickUp thing. And I'd say like, oh, thanks for responding to me in Slack. I'm going to copy and paste that into the ClickUp comments or like can you put that in the comments? And just forcing people to associate like task with ClickUp over and over again on their day to day really helps to shift the needle.

Yeah, that makes sense. Who's responsible? So in the day to day right now, kind of managing it, making sure people are building those healthy habits. Who's the. We call this world the ClickUp champion, but who's that main person who's like, you know, are we doing, are we hitting those standards that we've set and trained people on or are we not?

Yeah, I mean I'm still very much that person. I'll never relinquish my grip on it. I just love it so much. But we do have kind of an awesome operational player in our services teams. Her name is Molly. She's like doing exactly what I do for the business, but just specific to our service channels. And she's been great about like helping to identify inefficiencies there and help workshop, like how could we change this? Or helping people tweak their templates. So I would say she's doing a lot. But we also still have like specific people in each of our service channels that just default to being that ops person where like yes, they love their client relationships and doing like their affiliate marketing or whatever it is, but they also like being behind the scenes doing kind of those more administrative like power ups. And so I always have like at least one person in every channel who can help disseminate information.

Yeah, that's awesome. As you're going through this whole process, what were the most helpful outside resources to plug? Like, as you were figuring this all out, obviously you spent a lot of time, you said a year and a half I think, playing with it personally before the team. So there's a lot of personal experience there too. Was there anything that stood out from an outside resource that was helpful?

I think what was great about ClickUp is that it really does like the one app to replace them all, I think. Rings very true. So there were some times where like I could watch a video about how someone's setting up notion or what someone's doing in Trello and I'm like ClickUp has all the ability to do that. So I'm like gonna watch this video for this tool but then just co opt it to ClickUp because I know it can do that. So when there wasn't like a ton of ClickUp specific content or when I kind of went over and above what they had in their knowledge library, which I think is amazing, just ClickUp's own like their knowledge base that you can access is awesome and their blog is great too. But I would just kind of take whatever people are doing in other tools and just slap it onto ClickUp pretty easily. I thought that was great.

Yeah, that's great. Outside of timing, if we had to go back and you could wave the magic wand and redo it, is there anything you change in the implementation process or kind of team training process?

Yeah, aside from timing, if I had a little bit more resources, I would have spent the time to just like check in more with each team their first couple weeks of using it and just sit with them for an hour and do side along task building or making sure that they have time to work through templates. Um, because you kind of like leave everybody teed up and you're like here where your resources are. But then when they're actually in there doing it, people aren't necessarily thinking like, oh, I have 10 minutes to go read this doc Lauren made like they just want to get it done. And I think doing that more hands on side along, whether it's like through a Google Meet or Zoom would have been helpful. I learned that from when we did our Salesforce implementation last year. I also led that with our team and we did a whole bunch of office hours that were just open and that was awesome about everything. We've also since brought on Loom to use for tutorial recording in the last couple months and that's been a game changer. We didn't really have a resource like that. And ClickUp and ClickUp hadn't done its like screen recording thing at that time. So that has also been great just to like provide people with a multimedia library to access like not just a written guide but also a video, a transcript, whatever it is. Those things in office hours I probably would have done more of.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What like looking forward here, what's next to take ClickUp to the next level? Or is it kind of like, hey, we did all the hard work, we're in chill mode for a little bit.

Oh my gosh, so much is ready to go. We don't use a ton of automations. We do for like a couple teams. But automations are something that I want to really dive into with our service teams. We're using it a lot for our back office operations like in accounting and people operations, but for our service channels we have so much more ability to use automations there like for changing tasks, statuses, etc. And we have so many people working on the same task sometimes. So using a signee switch would be great to use for their, their use case. But otherwise, like, because I'm such a docs proponent, I need docs to like be completely redone and reduced for the team. Like, there's just so much more we're sleeping on there. And other than that, like, we do have some ClickUp spaces shared with our clients, but some we don't. And I want to make sure that we're really like developing and hitting home an SOP for that because the sharing tools are so great. Like just one shareable link to send a client a Kanban board of like, here's how we get you started is awesome. And I think people don't necessarily feel as comfortable, like, oh, how much should I share what's going to be too overwhelming for a client versus what's not? And like, we just need to kind of define a agency standard for that and get that deployed. But really not worried about that. It's really easy, but it's, it's going to be fun to kind of figure out like what will be the next evolution of our service with like ClickUp at the forefront for all of our clients and not just the way we execute on business internally.

Yeah, isn't that funny how from the inside things look so you've always just got a different level of perspective. I think you hear the first part of your story and the thought is like, this is great. Like you got, you know, you're at a 10 out of 10. But internally, it doesn't matter what point you get to. There's always going to be a new goal. There's always something new improving. You're like, well, yeah, that was great that we got there, but we're still like a 5 out of 10. Like we. There's so much more we could go to. There's always this opportunity to keep improving and making it better, which is the exciting part. And that's just if you're anybody with ambition, we just have to get comfortable with that because that's all of life is going to be. Whenever we hit whatever our target was before, like, we set a new goal. That's part of being a high performer.

Yeah, for sure. I think that especially in an agency, you can't get too upset or too tied to things changing and people kind of going rogue. I care so little about the fact that we have eight people fields with the same name in our custom fields library. At some point you have to just understand the fact that users are going to be innovating on their own in their little ways. And sometimes it looks like clutter from a oversight standpoint, but it really is people just trying to use the tool to get their jobs done and you kind of have to lean into whatever they're already doing. I know some author has called that like the hidden factory of people just spinning off and doing their own things. Like, I really try to embrace that with how we use ClickUp.

Yeah, that's cool. Do you guys have like a dummy? Like are people doing that in a live environment or do you have like a sandbox type portal?

For sure. They're for sure doing that in the live environment, which is fine. It's like, hey, love that you built this. We also have this here and now. You can look at all of the things that have this custom field and not just the new one that you made. We do have a sandbox though, like a template space that people know to go to for most things, but you can't. With how many employees we have and how fast we're onboarding people, you can't always expect that to go well.

I love digging into this. There's a couple of different things here as we're starting to wrap up. One is, I think I've mentioned this previously on the podcast, but Hawk has a lot of agency partners as well. And so especially as we're moving into holiday season, you know, whether it's holiday campaigns and people don't have capacity or whatever, the ability to partner with Hawk and what's existing clients or potential clients or just folks who are not a fit for you to shoot people over. From a partner agency partnerships perspective, is there anywhere that you'd point people other than other than the website directly?

Yeah, and we have a great partnerships team at Hawk that can kind of help resource folks. If you do go onto the website and you send us a kind of email to hello Hawk Media or you do drop us a line and kind of mention partnerships, we'll get that really easily directed to our team. Otherwise, just emailing me if you want to and I can direct you to the right place. My email is just laurenhawkmedia.com but we if you're prepping for holiday stuff, obviously we'd love to do your marketing service if you, if you need that. It's kind of the Christmas in July season just ended and we're really ramping up clients for their e commerce campaigns for Black Friday Cyber Monday in the coming weeks, so come to us. But we also have partners that help out with drop shipping if you have supply chain issues and you need help. Like our partner network is very, very extensive in terms of martech companies and people that really help out e commerce clients. So get in touch with us literally whatever way you need to and we will make sure that you are resourced for sure.

That's awesome. Lauren, I've got one more question I got to invite you because everybody's listening to this, thinking like, man, I want that Lauren internally. And so we're a great like outside. For folks who are trying to implement ClickUp, you get these outside consultants who would help you design and build and get processes down and that kind of stuff. The piece that we don't replace though is having that long term, like who knows the business, who can run it internally and it's such a core business function. You've got to have that person, maybe not in, in a full time capacity, but you've got to have that person who can keep the, the system running. And so whether this is conversations with other agencies or friends you've had who've gone through this or relationships you've built by going through the process. Like what if you, if there are specific people you're thinking of, that's one way to answer the question. But how? Basically the question is how do agencies find a Lauren Michaelski? And then I think the piece there is kind of if there's not specific, like, hey, here's a specific place. More like what are the characteristics that you think have helped you drive this through? And I'm happy to share a couple of things that stick out to me about you as well that I think have contributed to why it's worked well.

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say like those people who are just incredibly detail oriented and really nitpicky are going to evolve to be people who can kind of champion a process like this and on an ongoing basis. Also, ClickUp has a great ability to be very into the minutia of the tool, but also zoomed out if you need to be. And someone who's naturally like going through other people's work and correcting typos or like making sure that file gets into the right place, like they're going to be able to ensure that process is followed. Otherwise, just like finding someone who's really curious and not afraid of a challenge, like if you've got someone who's always asking process questions, are trying to default back to the why of how you do business, they're also going to be able to develop like a really strong sense of business. Practice that they can help use as like a pressure test of new things that people might want installed in the system and being able to filter out the bad and just go forward with what's actually beneficial. I have been at the company, like I mentioned just for a long time. It feels like in, in Hawk years, probably like a decade for me. And just knowing like what people's preferences are and what happens in actuality, like anyone who's just been around for a certain amount of time or like shows that curiosity will be able to tee up a tool like this for success long term for sure.

Yeah. That's awesome. I think the two things I tag onto that, that stick out right away, one is someone who's got a curious, who's a curiosity and a natural propensity to go like try out the new tool or try out. They're comfort in the unknowns of like oh yeah, I haven't really figured that out but I'm confident I will figure that out. And you've got people who approach it totally the opposite way. Like I'm really comfortable with what I've got and then people are like I'm never completely comfortable with what I've got. I'm always pushing for the next thing. And I think in this role you want that combination of detail oriented but also the innovation mindset to go try new stuff. And another piece I always point out to people is you want somebody who's comfortable managing us up so willing to deal with people who they, whether they truly are or they just perceive them to be higher in the organizational chart or accountability chart or whatever. You're structured getting buy in from those people and accountability from the leaders as well. There are so many ClickUp implementations, any PM platform implementations that have failed because an agency owner or a leader has said yeah, go do this and but they never express. There's no. The team is all very clear that the agency owner has no intention of using the tool or even being that plugged into what's happening. And it's ultimately mostly on their shoulders, but it's also on the person who they tasked to, you know, not getting buy in and support to lead it through too. And so there's gotta be an element there where they're comfortable pushing on the people on the resources they, they need to truly get adoption.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm no like top seasoned executive at Hawk Media. I've got the scary title of Chief of Staff, but I work with our executive team day in and day out, whether I'm years their their junior or just don't have as much work experience. Like, at the end of the day, if you've got strong acumen for understanding what the business itself needs and the organization is all marching to that same drum beat, you can't really discount yourself from being able to be having a seat at that table, being able to make calls or at least just proactively connect people to the right resource, the right way to get something done. It's fine if people are really staunch in their feelings about how to do something, but if you're trying to adapt that into a tool like ClickUp or just general process that needs to evolve for changes in the workforce, being able to say like, hey, well, what if we did it this way? And not being afraid of that is. Is definitely a game changer.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, we could, we could go on forever nerding out about ClickUp. Love to dig into all the dashboards when we need a part two to talk more about kind of, hey, what. How are you harvesting data out of this and what you continue to learn? But this has been really fun. I appreciate you coming on and being willing to tell the story. It's a super personal story for you, but a really impactful story for Hawk as well. And so props to you for the work that you've done and thank you for coming on Agency Journey.

Yeah, thank you so much. It was great to chat.