Our Exact Process To Streamline Your Agency Operations (Used by 3,000 Agencies)

In this video, I'm going to walk you through our five step proven process that we've used at Zenpal to help over 3,000 different agencies streamline their operations to build more productive, more profitable and healthy teams. So whether you're looking to really increase productivity, increase profitability, team utilization, or decrease client churn, or just build a scalable business that you as the agency owner or leader, are able to really take a step out of because you're able to delegate work to the rest of the team, you don't have to take every single seat and you can finally go on that vacation, then this video is going to be for you. So before I jump into that proven process, I want to first quickly walk you through what the end state is going to look like before you jump into this five step proven process. So really the end state of what we're trying to guide teams towards is going to be clarity for all. And so oftentimes agencies are dealing with a lot of chaos because you're working with a lot of different clients, with a lot of different tight deadlines, and, and as you begin to scale and grow your agency, it's difficult to always have a view of what's actually happening across the business. So whether it's your individual contributors, account managers, project managers, the leaders, or even your clients, as you continue to grow, it's hard to really build a system that allows everyone to have clarity into what they're doing, what's in their plate, or get that visibility that they need in their respective roles. So we're talking individual contributors that need to see what's on their plate every day and know what that proven process is to complete those tasks, or account managers that need to know sort of across their book of business, their clients, how are those projects currently progressing? Or maybe your project managers need to be able to easily assign work to the team that doesn't over use them so that they're not under or over utilized across those different projects. And they need to build realistic timelines for your clients or even your leadership team that just needs to see that 30,000 foot view on really how the team's doing, how your clients are doing, and how sort of profitable we are as a business in whole as well. And then your clients also want to know sort of what are you actually doing for them, what are the results and then what's actually coming up as well. So we need to have clarity for every level of the organization and that's really what we're trying to achieve here. So in terms of what that's actually going to look like, to give you sort of some visibility into these views that they're going to have is your individual contributors are going to have a task view just like this that's going to show them what work is overdue, what work is due today, what are those priorities. And they can also click into a task to see sort of what that, that proven process looks like. As you can see right here, I have my overdue work, I have today's work priorities as well as what's coming up in the future as well. So they need to have all of that to get their work done better and faster and provide better results for your clients. And then when it comes to your account managers, they need to have a view that's going to show them sort of that overview of all of their clients, how work is progressing, sort of what, what is happening, Are we sort of off track? Are we on track? Are some things blocked maybe by the clients that we need to talk about? So they're gonna have a view just like this to see all that information in one place, to see due dates, how much time has been tracked first, our estimates, what's the progress of each of these. And then I can click into all of these to sort of see what the communication is like as well, to be able to take that information to our clients and to get those deadlines to be met overall. So that's your account managers. In addition, they should also have sort of a dashboard that's gonna show them sort of what those, those burn rates are, how are our invoicing for the clients, are they paying, so on and so forth. Then you have all the information as well. And then when it comes to your project managers, they need to have a good overview into workload and capacity. So they need to have a view just like this where they can easily see how the team is doing when it comes to their utilization. Do we need to reassign some of this work? Do we need to maybe bring on someone new to the team to be able to meet some client deadlines? So they need to have full visibility just like this, to be able to make those smart decisions and build realistic timelines for the clients. In addition, they should also be able to easily remap projects if necessary and be able to sign and reassign work as well to again, to meet those deadlines that the clients and us have set. So if I come here, whether it's me being able to kind of remap some timelines, maybe the client fell behind on their Review for us. I need to push this out. We need to be able to remap that with all the additional work that's dependent on that that task as well. So that makes it super easy for your project managers do that. In addition, if they need to be able to reassign this work to someone, I should be able to group all the tasks by a specific role just like this. Maybe the strategist has changed for a client. I should be able to easily come in here and unassign this work and then reassign it to someone as well. Say Gray is now the strategist for Shrut farms. I should be able to do that directly here. So that's your project managers and you clarity into all that. And then when it comes to your leadership team, in addition to all that we just talked about, they also need to have a good overview on sort of how profitable we are. Are we estimating projects well? Is our team well utilized? Can we bring on another client? They should be able to answer all of those questions and have a dashboard that's going to answer those questions for them as well. So if I look at this, being able to see an overview of all the time that we have as an agency across everyone on the team, so what's that total? Maybe a lot of people are out of office in a certain month, so we should be able to see that information as well. And then how are we doing in terms of estimates first tracked, Are we over pac? Are we under pacing? Are we not very good at estimating projects to know? Sort of like is that realistic when we're actually projecting future projects for our clients? So what's the health of all that? In addition, how is the team utilized? Are we way underutilized? Are we over utilized? We should be able to see that information because sometimes it comes down to it where maybe we are overstaffed right now based off of the amount of clients that we have. And maybe we actually need to let go of someone because our team is so over or so underutilized right now. Or maybe we're over utilizing, we need to bring someone on. So we need to have good visibility into that information. Otherwise that's really going to affect profitability. If your team is super underutilized. In addition, I should be able to see sort of how all of my projects and all of my clients and all my services in terms of profitability, because this is what's going to help you define really what that ideal customer profile is. Because maybe you have great relationships with some clients, but they're not all that profitable. So we need to build a business that we're actually making money on those clients and those projects and those service lines to know, hey, maybe this sort of service line is not one that we can actually make any money on. So we might need to get so we should have all that information in one place to really be able to guide the business forward. In addition, your, your leadership team is also going to need to have an overview of all of your clients, the health scores of all those MPS services, objectives, so on and so forth to be able to see how we're actually doing to spot some issues before they become client fires. So maybe Vance Refrigeration, they're ready for a case study or a testimonial but surrounding to buy Jan, they're not doing so well. So maybe I need to jump into a conversation with them to really prevent any issues before they become client fires there with that client. And then in addition with them they also need to be able to see sort of the overview of how the team is actually performing in our project management system to know, hey, is the team developing healthy habits? Are we doing well in terms of planning tasks and completing them when they're actually due, and so on and so forth. And you'll be able to see all this information to be able to track those habits across the business to see how well we're actually progressing forward. And then a couple other things. Your clients also need to have a good overview of of what you're doing for them, what has happened, what's coming, what are the results from what you've done for them to really able to build that story as well as be able to prove sort of the ROI of what you're providing for them. So this information also needs to be sort of in a single spot for them to see sort of that progress report, those completed projects and the current analytics as well, and maybe some meeting notes. Just building a single source of truth for them to be able to find that very easily to again build that story for them and have it all in one place. And then lastly, the biggest piece of this, when we're actually working through this five step process that I'm going to show you in just a moment is a fully systematized business where all of your processes are living. You have all of them saved as templates that you can use over and over and over again. So as you can see, we want to have a whole process library in our project management system that all of our things, all of the deliverables all the projects that we do, whether it's podcasts, case studies, webinars, blog posts, or even larger things like HubSpot implementations or website redesigns, everything needs to be built off in a workflow just like this. With all the processes living where the work is happening, and all of our due dates, any of our custom fields and things like that, with all the tasks built out so that we can use these as very repeatable processes over and over and over again, so that our team can actually delegate work and be able to track progress of all of these deliverables. So that's really what the end state is going to look like. Again, clarity for all. And, and having a fully systematized business that's gonna allow us to use those templates over and over and over again. So now let's jump into what this five step process is to actually get you to be able to streamline your operations, to get that clarity for all, to help you build a more productive, more profitable and healthy business. And so really at the heart of this, all of this is gonna be like leading you through the last project management implementation you're ever gonna need. Cause oftentimes, agencies today are switching systems every one to two years because they go into it thinking it's all a technology problem. But what they realize is that technology only solves really a third of that problem. And to actually get clarity, what I just showed you, we need to think about a few additional components, and that's going to be the processes and the habits. So this five step process is going to lead you through the tools, piece of it, the processes and the habits. That's going to give you clarity for all to build that more productive, more profitable and healthy business. And so this five step process is going to be design, build, train launch, and then optimize. So let's take this step by step, starting with our design phase here. And so the design phase is oftentimes what a lot of agencies miss when it comes to actually building out their project management system. Because again, if you're switching one to two years, or even maybe sooner than that, oftentimes you're just trying to migrate work as soon as possible to get the team into that new system, because you believe that new technology is going to solve all of your problems. And so oftentimes you probably skip the step of actually designing the strategy or designing what it's actually going to look like before you actually jump into that technology. And this is a common problem when it comes to any technology, whether it's a project management system, whether it's a CRM system, whether it's an account based marketing system, whatever that may be. Oftentimes people forget the strategy component to actually build it out before they jump into the tech because they think the tech's going to solve way more than it actually does. And so with this, essentially what we need to start off with is documenting what we're trying to achieve as a business. Because maybe again, you're looking for that productivity gain, but maybe it's more about profitability or utilization, or maybe it's really just being able to systematize the business so that you can delegate work as the agency owner. So whatever that is, you need to make sure you build out a scorecard of what you're actually trying to achieve. And that could look something just like this. So this is actually what we do at the beginning of our process is documenting all this so that people know what they're trying to achieve so we can actually benchmark against that. And so then when you figure out what you're trying to achieve and you get your leadership team together to understand what that is, now we need to talk about what's blocking us from actually achieving that. And so this is where, because this is really a change management component and we're actually building out a system that's going to change the way that the team operates on a day to day basis. We need to make sure that we're getting the whole team involved at this step and not just kind of setting them to the side and saying, hey, we got a new system set up for you, come use it. We need to make sure that we get them bought in from the very beginning. And so in order to do that, we need to understand from their perspective what's actually the core issues that are blocking us from achieving our goals. And so a few ways of doing that. What we typically do are surveys, team meetings and one on one. So with that, the surveys are going to be in. All of these different methods are essentially people have different sort of communication preferences. You might have more extroverted people that are fine to jump on a team meeting and voice all their opinions versus maybe some more introverted person, people that just want some more one on one conversations, or maybe they want an anonymous survey of some sorts like that, because they don't really want to voice anything out. So you want to have multiple avenues of communication for those different preferences to really get all core insights from the whole team. So when it comes to surveys and all these questions that you should be asking, you should Be looking at people and wondering what their sort of day to day workflow actually looks like for them. Because especially in a remote team, you're not going to understand all this when people get to their computer screen. So a common question is how do you start each day to identify, prioritize and plan your work? Sometimes maybe that's, oh, I don't really have a method or I have no idea what I'm going to do each day and I just kind of jump to slack or something like that. We need to understand what that is to know how people are actually working or how do you end each day and manage any outstanding work that maybe you didn't get to. What are the top challenges? What's currently working well, what are your communication habits and routines, so on and so forth. You need to understand those things to be able to get to the root problem of what's not working and what's blocking you from achieving your goals. And so what we do in our process is we actually go ahead and benchmark agencies versus other agencies, be able to see sort of where do you line up when it comes to agency operations? So we've collected data from over 3,000 different agencies that we, when you actually complete this process with us and go through those surveys, will benchmark you and give you sort of what, how you line up. Because that always leads to a good conversation to say, hey, we're really far below people when it comes to communication habits. How can we improve that across the team? And so if you want to get started and actually get a quick sort of assessment of your operation, what you can actually do is we actually have an agency project management health benchmark which is going to help you assess your operations in 20 questions. So if you want to send this to your leadership team to really understand and sort of benchmark yourselves against other agencies, this is what one way you can do it. So whether you strongly agree or disagree with some of these statements, you'll be able to see sort of how the team is feeling when it comes to your operations in whole. So that's a great place to start. Feel free to go to that. I'll put the link in the description below if you want to take that benchmark. Now after that, once we understand what the team is feeling and we get sort of all those insights into this, now we need to really look at and take a step back to understand how our agency is operating when it comes to our work management or project management solution. So this is really where you go and audit your current systems that you have set up. So take a look at your project management system and figure out sort of where are the bottlenecks, where is work breaking, where are handoffs not working, what is sort of our pain points and what's working and what's not working well in the system. Maybe get your whole client journey laid out just like this to be able to understand again, this is where work is falling through the cracks, or this is where we're not meeting those deadlines for our clients. Get your whole team together or whoever needs to be there and start to understand what is happening to so you understand what's working and what's not working across the business. And then from there, what we're going to be able to look at is figuring out what's that foundational problem for us. And so again, this is where in terms of getting clarity, we need to look at the tools, we need to look at the processes and the habits across the team. Because sometimes it's a technology issue, sometimes you just don't have the correct project management system to get you that visibility that you're looking to. But oftentimes that's not the case because a lot of project management systems are super strong today in terms of what they can actually offer you. So sometimes it's a process issue. Maybe you have no processes or templates saved out. So basically your team doesn't know what they need to do on each each day. And your proven process for what makes you an agency is not embedded somewhere for the team to follow that. So that's why you're getting some inconsistent results for your clients. Or maybe it's just misaligned expectations. Maybe the team thought this is how they're supposed to work and you thought this is or you were wanting them to work this way and there's no sort of aligned expectations there. You didn't voice that to them kind of. Cause they're not going to know unless you voice it to them. So sometimes that can be the factor that's causing things to not work or causing things to break. And then in addition, maybe it's just an habitual problem. Maybe you gave them your expectations, but maybe the team is not doing a great job on tracking their time or closing their tasks on time or communicating well. Oftentimes that's the case. That's the hardest one to really get across your agency. So that's one of the big things at Zenpal that we really work on. And I'll show you how to get better habits across the team. But that's the Biggest one there that most teams are missing. Because oftentimes habits are the hardest piece, especially in a remote environment, to get instilled across the business. So we really want to find out that foundational problem. And then from there what we're trying to do is design the system before we actually jump into the technology. So the system is basically we need to lay out what that hierarchy is going to look like, especially when it comes to your project management system. They all have hierarchies that can be designed in so many different ways. But. But we need to make sure that all work is accounted for. So oftentimes at zenpower, we're designing it with a growth space for our sales and marketing work and operations space for basically all that hr, that internal work, any kind of professional development, all of that's going to live in the operation space. And then we also have a delivery space where all that client and billable work is going to live. So you need to design that architecture, that hierarchy so that all work is accounted for and has a home. So it's easy to know where that should live. In addition, that's going to be what gives you the visibility and things in the future, like I showed you earlier. In addition, we need to look at what are these automations that are going to be built out at those specific levels in the hierarchy to be able to automate some repetitive work. We need to think about what those custom fields are that's going to give us the visibility into our service lines or for our teams to be able to see just workload for their teams, things like that that'll give us that visibility in the future. Also views, what are the views? And this is especially for ClickUp. What are those views that our team's going to use? Especially when it comes to like having a My task view like this or having a view for our account managers. We need to get those views built out just like this at those levels of the hierarchy and design those so that your team knows what views they're going to use to get their job done. In addition, what are the integrations? What are. What's our tech stack that we're going to connect here? Maybe it's your CRM system that we need to pass closed one deals into our project management system or communication. What's going to be sort of the integration there? Maybe it's Slack and ClickUp. We need to figure out what those integrations are and then in addition dashboards as well. What are they going to be? The dashboards that are going to help Us get that visibility into the work that we're doing and then from there we also want to have sort of a resourcing flow laid out in terms of how work is going to be passed across the business. So oftentimes it's demand, resource and fulfillment. So the demand side is sort of the account managers that are building that strategy, they then deploy those templates and the resource team as your project managers, looking at workload and those timelines to be able to build out sort of where that's actually going to fit for those clients. And then fulfillment is your individual contributors that are coming in and actually getting all that work done that's been assigned to them from the resource or project management seat. So we need to figure out what that resourcing flow is, figure out what the system is going to look like and then take that. And now we're actually ready to go into our project management system to get this implemented. So again that's step one. We need to design the system to fix the problems and that core issue that we're actually facing before we jump in too fast. And so now after the design stage, now we're actually going into the build stage. And so what we're doing here is, is we're actually building the system inside of our project management system. So what we're doing is taking this two dimensional blueprint and turning it into a living breathing system again inside of our project management environment. So what that's gonna look like is taking your hierarchy essentially and getting that installed in here, taking any automations and getting those installed in here, any custom fields, any views, any integrations. We wanna make sure all of that is set up in our project management system. And we have everything sort of built from to give us that sort of skeleton of what this is going to look like in the future. So from there now we actually need to go and build out processes. But that's sort of the first step is getting sort of that high level overview done. So we're about 60% of the way there and every task is going to have a home to live and the system is kind of built out now we need to get sort of everything else designed here correctly. And so once we have that sort of living breathing system now we actually go to design out our processes. And so the first step to do this is going to be prioritizing your process building. And so we actually have a whole worksheet if you want to get this as well. I'll put this landing page down in the comments below in the description below so that you can go and snag this process prioritization worksheet. But obviously we can't go and build out all of our processes all at once. We need to kind of take it step by step. This is a heavy lift. So we need to focus on the ones that we're doing most often, because oftentimes you might have a ton of different services at an agency, but we don't need, we're not doing all those actively right now. And so what you're going to do is essentially lay out all your deliverables, all of your projects that you might do for a client. These are for your clients and for internal purposes as well, because you're going to have those internal operational processes as well that you're going to need and start to think about the frequency, documentation needs and pain. So how often are we doing this? How much do we actually need documentation? Do we have some right now versus do we not have any? Then how painful would this be if we didn't have it documented? Is it a one or is it very painful out of five? Because the most painful ones that we're doing all the time, if you look at that frequency, are the ones that we're going to need to get built out first. And so once you've prioritized all these, now we can actually go into documenting all these workflows and processes inside of our project management system. So as I showed you all of this earlier inside of this process library, essentially what you need to do is start thinking about again, we already have these all prioritized, so we know what those are going to be, we know what these deliverables are. And so now we need to build it so that the parent task here, and this is for ClickUp's case. But most often, most project management systems are going to be built in a similar way. We have the parent task representing that deliverable, and then all the subtasks are going to represent sort of the action steps that should be taken by each individual person. So the biggest mistake that people make when they jump into a project management system is they just have parent tasks that are assigned to five, six different people that are on that team. And then they might have a start date and a due date with maybe a rather large time estimate on there, and no one really knows what they're in charge of doing. So if I relay back to my, my task view just like this, I know exactly what step I need to take in each individual process here. I know I need to post the client feedback I know I need to proof the blog copy, I know I need to design the BL imagery, I know exactly what I'm in charge of, and I know exactly when that's due, which that's also going to help us see sort of this view here to know where, how far along are we on this specific blog? So that's why we need to build out all these processes just like that, so that we don't just have one parent task that says podcast and assigned to five people. Because if I go here and it just says podcast, I don't know what I'm actually in charge of, and I don't know when that's actually due, because that's just encompassing like 10 to 20 different tasks that are going to be passed across the team. So we want to make sure we're efficiently passing this work across a bunch of different team members, like our senior strategists, like our copywriters, like our designers, so on and so forth. That work needs to be passed across the team. So in order to do that, we need to make sure all of these are built out like this as a workflow. We have the due dates in there, we have the time estimates in any custom fields, which is going to give us good visibility into things like workload and utilization in the future as well. So get all of your processes built out like this and build a nice process library where all of these are here. And then you save them all as templates just like this, so that each individual process is saved as a template so I can use it over and over and over again. That's going to be so important to really systematize your entire business. In addition, you also want to build any of those dependencies into those processes as well, because then in the future you can be able to remap due dates like I showed you here. So get those dependencies built out in your processes, and then also think about what those standard operating procedures are as well, that then you can take those and you can actually link back to those tasks. Because we always want to make sure the process is living, where the work gets done. And in order to do that, I need to make sure each task is going to have something like an SOP built here so that I can click directly into that to know, hey, this is how I'm going to complete this specific task as well. So start to think about that too. If you have SOPs, whether they're in your project management system, maybe they're in Google Drive or somewhere else, make sure the process Lives where the work gets done. So each individual task that I have here has the process linked directly into that task so people know what they need to do, how they need to do it, and then when it's due as well. So that's gonna be what builds you a more scalable systematized business that's gonna be much more productive and profitable as well. And as I mentioned, build that whole process library before you actually go ahead and train your team and get launched in the system. Because if you get your team using those new process templates over and over and over again, that's going to be what makes them start to follow and build those healthy habits and get the visibility that you need as well as the clarity for the rest of the team. So take time to do this step. It does take time and effort, but it's going to be so important to make sure that you build a business that's going to be more scalable, more systematized, and actually provide clarity for all. So take the time to go through this build phase because it's so super important. Now, after we actually get all those process templates build built out for our team, now we can actually go and train them on how to use it. So this is when we're going to be training them, not just on the software. Most often people, they do some training sessions and all it is is like this is how you do this or that in just a very technological focus. But we need to train them on the software and the expectations. If I go back here, one of the big pain points and one of the foundational problems can often be misaligned expectations. So we need to make sure that we're setting the expectations, that we have those documented and we build training for the team on that software as well as our expectations for them. And one of the biggest things that we do is we provide training. This is what you should also do in this process. You have training around sort of your rules of engagement. So as you can see here, we have the ten commandments of agency project management that we build out so that teams make sure they're following that. So as you can see here, a whole sort of training course on the ten commandments of agency project management. That way we sort of put all of our rules, all of our expectations that you need to follow this in order to sort of operate in our way. They need to follow this. So if it's not ClickUp, it didn't happen. Due dates matter, track your time, leave a trail, so on and so forth. Those are the foundational components to how we operate. And we need to make sure that those are clear before we actually jump into this new system so that people follow it. So that's what you want to do. Again, the way that I would build this out is have pre recorded training as well as live training. Pre recorded training. As you can see here, we have all these built out so we can kind of track people's progress as you sort of bring on new members. They'll always have that pre recorded training as well. So it makes it easier to onboard new people. But the prerecorded training is a great way for them to be able to watch that over and over and over again. Be able to watch it at any speed, be able to sort of act as they're, they're watching it as well. So if it's things like setting up their, their task view like this one, they'll have that prerecorded training, watch it and be able to set it up as they watch that as well. So they can kind of take that as their own pace when they have time. It's helpful to have that. But then also do live trainings as well where you're really reinforcing that training that they learned. And then they can answer sort of higher level questions on that call as well. So we want to have this and then use the live training to be able to answer questions, create alignment across the team, communicate our timeline, discuss any personal settings and walk through some scenarios as well. And this is where it's also helpful to have any sort of role specific training for maybe your account managers, your project managers or individual contributors, or even sometimes your contractors as well. We need to make sure that we have training so that they know how to use maybe their specific views, how to do their specific jobs and roles inside of this new system. And so through all of this you should be giving them full clarity on all of their expectations, like how they're going to communicate in the system, where should they be tracking their time? Are we going to use maybe ClickUp? Are we going to use a different tool here? How are we going to prioritize work? Sort of what's the process for that? So that you know sort of what you need to do first and second and third and so forth. What do you do when tasks actually fall overdue? So what's the process for that? And oftentimes we always say you need to leave a comment and sort of mention any stakeholders and then in addition your ten commandments there as well. Build that training. That's going to revolve around answering those questions and utilize the live training to answer any questions as well as walkthrough scenarios is there. So we want to make sure that everyone is fully prepared and pumped and excited about jumping into this new system before we actually go ahead and launch it. So again, don't skip any of these steps. Make sure you design it first before you jump in, make sure you build it out and then train your team. And then when you're ready, we're good to go and launch. And so the biggest thing here in your launch phase is we want to have a clear launch date for the team. And so basically what that means is you're going to maybe migrate, all work with those new processes, get all the everything set up and ready to go for the team, get all the timeline set up, and then that'll happen on a Thursday, Friday, and then maybe you have some Saturday and Sunday flex time as well. And then on a Monday morning, your team is going to come in and you've completely gotten out of that new, that old system and now you're in the new one. So especially important for this is because if we want to build a single source of truth that's going to give us clarity and make sure no one's confused and start to build that sort of single hub so I can get really understand what's happening. I need to have a clear launch date and have a good seamless transition. We can still have the old system and we don't need to sort of cut that off completely. That can be used sort of to reference any communication or anything that maybe has happened in there. But that old system is not going to be used to track any time, not going to be used to have realistic timelines or complete our tasks in there. The new system that we've just set up, in this case, ClickUp, is going to be on Monday morning, you're coming in and you are going to be in that new system and that is it. So we want to make sure we have a clear cutoff there so that we can start to catch habits and correct those habits as well. Because once we build that, once we seamlessly migrate our work, create that single source of truth, now we can start to understand how the team is performing. So we start to know, hey, who's tracking their time, who maybe is not closing tasks on time, who's not communicating well, we'll start to see who's not going to really meet those expectations. That's not necessarily a terrible thing. That just means, hey, maybe some People we need to coach. Maybe some people aren't going to adapt at all and maybe that might be a problem there. But oftentimes it's just kind of coaching through a lot of this. And this is also why we say you need a ClickUp champion or someone that's going to be there to hold the team accountable. But I'll kind of mention that in our next optimized step here. But so through all this, once you launch, you can catch those habits, you can correct those habits. Essentially you're going to have a system where everyone is working now out of those new processes like this, with your whole sort of spaces set up just like that, with all the timeline set up, everyone has all their work assigned to them and now they're working out of that sort of new process templates and everything that you've just built out. So now we're going to have our my test views, now we're going to have our workload views, we're going to have sort of our health score set up as well, which is super important for all of our clients with sort of our account dashboard or agency, client health tracker, whatever you want to call it. Just like this one, we have it all set up and we're good to go. The team's working out of that new system. Now the most exciting piece of this, once you actually get it launched, that is not the end, that is really just the beginning. Now you've actually created that single source of truth where you have so much data to leverage and use to help make better decisions for the business. And so now we move into this stage of optimization. And so this is the ongoing never ending step that now that we have that single source of truth now we're going to continue to build on what we've learned. So what we can do is we can build sort of a healthy cadence of sort of auditing the system and understanding what's happening and collecting that data, collecting that information to again get those insights, get those reports, to be able to make better data driven decisions, to know, hey, this person is not meeting our expectations. Do we need to coach them? Have they not met it for the last month, two months, three months? So maybe this is a bigger issue, maybe this is a people issue, something that now we can start to understand what's happening, to really create a culture of accountability, which is super important. Cultures of accountability, the ones that people are putting all their tasks in the system, the ones that you're able to kind of say, hey, you're not doing it correctly, that's when we're going to be most productive and have those healthy habits across the business. So we're going to make improvements from that and all of them are going to be backed by data. So in terms of the healthy cadence that we're going to set up, and this is really what a client ClickUp Champion will be doing, or project management champion. Whatever system you're using, what you're going to have is a couple of different things where really you're going to be analyzing performance, prioritizing those issues, optimizing the system and activating the team on any of those, those new things that we've just built. And really the core piece of this that's so great is that there's going to be no hiding in this new system that we've just built because everything is going to be in there. If I go back to the one of the Project 10 Commandments of Project management, if it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen. This is so important to follow because essentially what that means is if you don't have your task, if you don't have that in ClickUp, we're just going to assume that you didn't do it. So that's what's going to help us make sure that there's no hiding inside of this new system. So again, what we're going to be doing is really four different cadences here for how we're going to actually audit the system and really be able to make some good data driven insights and decisions. So the first one is going to be a daily spot check. And so this is essentially every single day your ClickUp Champion is going to be coming in here for 10 to 30 minutes, depending on how actually large your business is, and looking at sort of an overview of all of your tasks. So again, once we get all the tasks in the system now we can rely on that because we have healthy data and good inputs are always going to give you good outputs. You can't have a dashboard unless you have good inputs into that dashboard. That dashboard won't give you any insights unless all of your data for that dashboard is healthy. And so what your ClickUp Champion is going to be doing on a daily basis is going to be going into the system to track and check all of this. So looking at things like how are our tasks in the system? Do we have assignees on all of them? Do we have due dates on them? Who's creating these that don't have the things that we need? Are there no time estimates? Do we have a lot of tasks overdue and who has those overdue tasks? Is the team tracking their time in the system? Are they closing their tasks? Are they looking at their notifications in their inbox? Or do they have a lot of overdue tasks? Again, there's how's the team performing in terms of adding comments, completing tasks, working on tasks, so on and so forth. They need to come in and track those habits overall to be able to understand who is meeting those expectations and who's building healthy habits. So we need to every single day go pull that information to be able to track that and basically at the end of the week be able to pull together sort of report for who did well and maybe who didn't do so well. So this is where you can have some friendly competition as well, to be able to say, hey, this person is the winner and the leader for this week. They close the most tasks, they track the most time, so on and so forth. Make it a little competitive because gamification always helps in a lot of these scenarios. And again, after all those daily spot checks, at the end of the week, now we're basically taking all that information, pulling it together to provide a report for the management and leadership team. And so some things that can be super helpful, and I showed this earlier, is having a dashboard like this where essentially we're able to sort of see sort of how are we doing overall as an agency, how are we doing in terms of the task performance? So a couple things here like velocity compliance and completed ratios, we're starting to see, give you more visibility to that. We're starting to see, hey, we're planning a bunch of tasks and tasks are coming in that are not necessarily planned for that week, but we want to be able to complete all the tasks that were planned. So we need to start to look at like, you can get a bunch of tasks in your system, but if you're not completing the tasks that were planned for that week, then you're not able to build realistic timelines. So we want to make sure that again, we have those demand resource and fulfillment seats. We want to make sure that the demand is building a good strategy. Your resource is planning those tasks well, and the fulfillment is actually completing those tasks when they're due. Because if they're completing a bunch of tasks, but those tasks are not the ones that we actually planned, and they're not actually the ones that are most important for the clients, then that's not going to be very helpful. So we really want to get into this gold zone. Where we have our tasks that are planned and we're completing those tasks that were planned on the week that they were due. So again, the due date needs to be followed. If we have due dates and we're not following them, then really what is going to be helpful for us? If we want to have realistic timelines, we need to follow those due dates that the project managers are giving to us. So we need to make sure we're in this gold zone. And that's going to be what we're kind of looking at on a weekly performance ratio standpoint. So then from all that, you start to see how the team's actually performing in the system. You could provide sort of in Slack or wherever your team's communicating, a summary of how the team did, from assignees to the whole company to account managers and so on and so forth. You could start to provide that on a weekly cadence. And then in addition, we're going to have the monthly and quarterly review. And this is really where we start to get into less about sort of how the team is performing on a habitual standpoint to how we're performing as a business overall. So this is now where you start to look at sort of your high level dashboards that you should have based off of that data. Again, these are all fueled by the data that we're putting into that new system. Like we can't get profitability analysis unless we're tracking our time in that system that we just created. Because we need that hierarchy, we need that structure and we need the team tracking their time in the right place and have an accurate time tracking to be able to understand how profitable we actually are for each of those clients in each of those projects. So on a monthly and quarterly basis, we're now taking a look at how we're doing from a profitability standpoint, we're taking a look at how we're doing from a utilization standpoint, so on and so forth. We start to be able to get all this data to understand how we're actually performing as a business overall. So start to look at what does your capacity look like with that time visibility that we looked at earlier? How well is the team actually utilized? Where are your biggest gaps overall across the team? Like who isn't well utilized, who's not doing super well in terms of performance? Can we actually take on new clients as well to know like based off of this time visibility, if we have, if this is as accurate as possible, we can actually know, hey, can we take on a new client versus this is not accurate. How are you actually going to know? In addition, we need to look at how profitable we are by those clients, by those projects, by those services, and maybe even by a specific person as well to know who's most profitable to the business based off of their work habits. So all of this is going to help us basically understand we're able to track all this, audit it because we built that single source of truth and now we can recommend sort of ways to make this better. We can recommend new workflows, maybe new automations that'll help sort of those issues. Because maybe a biggest issue was sales delivery handoff isn't doing all as well and things are getting slipping through the cracks in the onboarding process. Maybe we need to add an additional automation or integration there or maybe just switch some people around or maybe we need to build out process a little bit better and we can make those recommendations once we're able to understand what is actually happening. So again, that's the five step process here. We're going to design the system, we're going to build the system, we're going to train the team how to use it, we're actually going to get launched and then it's just an ongoing phase of optimization to understand how people are doing, how the team's doing and how we're actually doing as an overall agency to make recommendations there to build a more productive, more profitable and healthy agency. Because we've built that culture of accountability and a culture of we're providing clarity for every level in the organization. And all this is a part of the core Zenpilot system that we build for agencies to really streamline their operations. If you want to see any stories of agencies that have worked with us and been super successful, I'll put a link below to our success stories. We also have a ton of different videos on our YouTube channel that you can watch. But again, that's our five step process for how to build a more productive, more profitable and healthier agency by streamlining your agency's operations. If you have any questions, feel free to put them in the comments below. But otherwise, thanks for watching this video. We look forward to seeing you in the next one.