Sustainably Growing Your Agency with Gray MacKenzie

Welcome to the Agency Journey podcast where we connect with agency leaders to uncover the hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now let's dive into today's show. All right. Welcome into another episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray Mackenzie from Zenpilot and this is the show where we talk with agency founders and leaders about the systems and processes that make their agency thrive. And Today I have Dr. Jeremy Wise of Rise25 who's done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs and we flipped the script. Today he's going to be interviewing me.

You know, first of all, great, thank you. And I encourage anyone to listen to all of your episodes of Agency Journey. I've been binge listened to them. If you are an agency owner, it's a must listen because you go through the journey and you go through some of the trials, the tribulations and how people can uplevel. So I encourage people to check out episodes. What's a couple episodes that people that are must listen to?

Gray. There's a handful, but one that always sticks out to me. Marcus Sheridan at the time was running the sales line now as a partner at Impact Branded Design. He was on maybe episode number 56 way back in the day and is an awesome one that we can link up in the show notes here.

He was a big time speaker also.

He is, he does a bunch of events, a bunch of speaking. Yeah. Pool guy turned turn a little bit of Internet celebrity in terms of speaking at events. I think the most charismatic speaker I've seen in person. So I love it. Definitely an episode I'd recommend.

I don't think I've listened to that one. I need to listen to that one. And you know, before we get into this we're going to go over there is this walk through the journey and how this one agency up leveled and a paid ads agency. We'll go through that in a kind of some of their journey and trials and tribulations. Before we do, I want to just say this episode is brought to you by zenpilot and if you don't know Zen Pilot, you should check them out. They help agencies leverage proven systems and processes and streamline that you have streamlined operations using ClickUp. And so if you want an expert set of eyes on your current operations, I suggest everyone should gray, you know, because that's really what makes clients happy. It's what makes teams happy. And this helps agencies scale. So you can go to zenpilot.com, check out more if you visit zenpilot.com demo you can schedule a conversation with their team. And I've talked to their team numerous times. They are, you know, their superpower is this. So check them out. And so this paid as agency comes to you, Gray, what were some of the pain points they were experiencing?

Um, so they were not dissimilar to most agencies. And there's a little bit of. There's always an element of chaos at the root of everything that we're dealing with. But specifically trying to figure things out. They all awesome sales pipeline, really good network from the founders. The ability to win deals has never been an issue for them. The challenge is we're scaling up what's the right organizational structure? How many accounts can we load onto our account managers and our media buyers? Or what's the right org structure in terms of how we handle this and scale? And then inside of that, the distinction or the difference between kind of an A player account manager or strategist and B player or C player on the team. There's such a disparity in terms of the outcomes that clients were getting because there's no standardized process. So if they had someone who was great at running Facebook ads or Google Ads on the account, the account did well. And if they had somebody else, there might be things that were missed or the account, there was just a lot of variance in the client results.

That makes sense. If you go to McDonald's anywhere in the country, you know, you're gonna order hamburger and fries and they're gonna taste pro almost the same. And I guess we don't think of that from agency. If you, you know, you don't want to. You want to kind of take some of the human. As much of the human element out as you can, Right?

Yeah, I think there's. So I think of it not as. I think that's the. That can feel a little bit robotic. Like, I don't want to remove people's creativity. We're all creatives here in this space. But I think of it as giving people the guidelines to operate within where they can exercise their creativity and maximize the impact of that creativity. And once they have the structure that they need to operate within.

Yeah. And so that's a pain point, like making sure all people are doing following a similar system because you want the clients to get the outcome. And you mentioned sales managing different components of the business, what are some ways people use, I guess, ClickUp that maybe before they raise you, they didn't think of it.

There's one common use case inside ClickUp that's new to Almost every agency that we work with, we call it our account dashboard. And it's what's the profile of each client account that you're managing right now? On that account we'll have who's the team, who's assigned to it, what services are they paying for, what's the billing status, what's the health of the client, what's the feedback scores that they're giving? Kind of the, this is the one home base of your client accounts and that account health piece, the visibility and then standard, you know, a standard process around how that gets updated and communication gets sent back and forth internally on how accounts operate. That's, you know, that's one small piece of the overall puzzle of operations. But standardizing that and the expectations around it and then being able to using ClickUp and create these different views where we're visualizing, hey, how's one account managers, how are their accounts doing versus another? Or by service line, if we're looking at who's doing Facebook ads with us versus doing Google Ads with us versus doing CRO with us, what's the health by service line? And so being able to grab that has been impactful. And that's not, you know, I'm talking about it from a ClickUp perspective. It's something you could do in any tool. It's easy to do in ClickUp. You could set up that same system in pretty much any tool.

I'm curious. ClickUp is so flexible and could pretty much do anything you want. Are there certain things you recommend people not using ClickUp for? So in the instance you mentioned, the sales pipeline, do people use ClickUp for their sales pipeline?

We are working with agencies who are using ClickUp as a CRM. It's not my standard recommendation. So from a CRM perspective, almost always push that out to. Our default recommendation is HubSpot. And there's a couple of variables that might push us to recommend a pipedrive or a Copper. And then for very simple setups, I recommend ClickUp often just to simplify the tool stack. But that's kind of a unique set of circumstances right now. I think long term we're going to see more ClickUp CRM usage or kind of using ClickUp as a CRM. And we've got kind of a starting point in terms of ClickUp CRMs that we'll plug in for agencies we're working with. But yeah, there's a ways to go there before it's a fully functional CRM.

So some people use it. But a HubSpot Pipedrive copper. Those are, those are tools that you. Yeah, we'll recommend.

Draw the line and say, hey, pre revenue, push that into HubSpot or push that into the CRM that you have in place. Post revenue once someone signed up, that certainly has to live inside ClickUp.

Any other use cases that you're like, you know what, ClickUp is great for all this other stuff. This is not something that you should run in ClickUp like an external tool.

We've got a lot of folks who want to run invoicing or cost analysis inside ClickUp and there's elements. I see this pop up all the time in terms of criticism of ClickUp. Hey, we can't track external costs or we can't track some of the kind of variable costs associated with projects. And you actually can with the right setup. It's not native functionality, but we've got some really robust functionality built on top of ClickUp for tracking it. But if you want to do labor rates, billable rates, cost analysis and invoicing integration, ClickUp's not the right tool for that right now. And so we'll make some specific recommendations about when to plug in a third party tool, when to use ClickUp and just do exporting. But that's probably the other one that comes up pretty frequently that I'll push people and say, look, I know I'm supposed to be the ClickUp person, but this is just not the job that I'd hire ClickUp to do for you right now.

What are some of those third party integrations that you've mentioned before?

Yeah, Harvest and Everhour are the two prime primary, depending on the use case, the two primary third party time tracking tools that we'll recommend or that will help people plug in. And then obviously from an invoicing perspective, it's primarily QuickBooks Online and Xero are the two main players with a side of FreshBooks and wave accounting.

Got it. So we talked about this paid ads agency. Some of the pain points you were having. Is there anything else around their situation that would be notable when they came to you?

So this is not uncommon at all. But they'd already tried to solve this internally with a couple different efforts. They'd already just tried taking a block of time and making an internal effort around. Let's build out our processes, let's get this streamlined.

Then were they trying ClickUp or were they trying other tools?

No. Yeah, they were using Asana at the time. Okay. So then went and hired somebody internally in a leadership capacity to kind of come in in the coo type role and build it out. And that lasted for seven or eight months. They were paying a pretty healthy six figure salary to somebody and just did not get very far in terms of the current setup, having it actually be adopted by the team, having it. There's a lot of edge cases that come up and issues that are, that are hard to fight through. So they'd already tried to solve it internally a couple of times and that was actually was interesting was we had a conversation with them right before they made the decision to hire somebody internally. And that's not uncommon in, you know, we've got, in our sales cycle we've got two different types of customers. We've got customers who the pain is intense, we're ready to buy, we'll buy right now. And we've got customers who say, I'm just digging like I'd love to see it, I'd love to know how it works. And then they'll go sit on it for a couple months and come back at some point. There's really a barbell in terms of our sales veloc and this is one.

Of those where they're debating should I bring someone in house to do it? Now you could do both. I mean, right? Someone could hire someone in house and be like, cool, this person is going to be head of this and I'm going to work with Zen Pilot to implement everything. But on the other case, what do you think is holding them back in their mind when they're like, I'm just going to bring someone internal to do it? What do you tell people when you're like, well that's fine, but right, I.

Mean it's like any other job that you'd hire for somebody for if they've got, if you trust the experience and they can prove that, hey, we've got the system and processes. I know how to plug this in, I know how to train a team, I know how to motivate people, I know how to make this all work together and I know the right tech for us. If you're confident, then that person long term and you're going to have that person in a long term capacity. It makes more sense than hiring somebody external if there's a high enough level of confidence. But the best case scenario is when you have somebody who's the internal champion and then you also bring in an expert who's seen it hundreds and hundreds of times and can give you hey, here's the playbook and customized to your specific situation, here's the playbook to follow and scale with. And so combining those two makes a lot of sense for the majority of agencies. And it's not always a new hire. Sometimes it's upskilling somebody who's already on the team or giving somebody a framework. Sometimes it does mean hiring somebody as well on the inside.

Yeah, you get the best of both worlds in that situation. So they go off and they hire someone, they try and do it. Well first I guess they try to do it internally, then they hired someone specifically to do it and then what happened?

So I want to come back, let their internal person go once they figured out, hey, this is. Although they had agency experience and they've run ops, none of that translated to the way that they were trying to run their business. Engaged with us, we went through our audit process on the front end. Let's pinpoint what the main issues are. Let's benchmark your performance against the hundreds of other agencies that we've benchmarked it against. Figure out a prioritized action plan or game plan and then into an implementation of ClickUp combined with kind of developing out the processes that they need and standardizing that and then training the whole team on what those expectations are, how the processes work. So that's, yeah, that's kind of the next steps in the journey.

What were some of the questions they ask you? I imagine people say gray, like we need to get this out the door. How long is this going to take? How many hours? What were the common questions they were asking? And then what did you say?

One thing that we get a lot of pushback around is the timeline. So I told them, look, you're biting off a lot here. This is gonna take you, this is somewhere between an 8 and 12 week engagement if we're gonna move fast but get this done right. And they like most agency owners, not very patient. They're like, nope, let's make it a four week engagement. I was like, we, like that's. Even if we had the bandwidth to dedicate all our time to you, you're still running an agency in the day to day. Your team already has a lot on their plate. Like you guys, you just won't. There's, there's so much that needs to happen here that it's not going to get knocked out and be done well in four weeks. So that's one of the objections obviously around how can we accelerate the process. One of the other ones was can we just have a, like, can you guys give us the playbook and then just kind of reactively support afterwards and talk through pros and cons of what the setup is. But that's one of the most common ones is how do we accelerate the timeline? How do we make sure that this is going to work for us? Is this really going to be the solution when we've already been burned? We try to do it internally. We spent a lot of money to pay someone else to do it and got burned on that. How do we make sure this isn't a repeat of the past history?

You know, Gray, there's, you know there's two things, right? There's you do help them through the guide implementation. There's another one that sometimes that's probably, I would say, you know, it seems like the most popular one. What's the alternative to someone who doesn't want that one? Yeah, maybe explain the difference between the two.

Right? Yeah, well, yeah, kind of high level in our models. You know, we will do from time to time there, you know, there may be somebody who needs a super large agency, they need a custom engagement. We're coming in and doing it for them. Ultimately it's not the best solution for people but you know, that would be a 50 to 100k project. If we're going in, building it all out, training the team and then training them how to use and manage the system. The kind of the middle tier in terms of our service offering is our favorite and our most common which is a guided implementation process where we're doing it alongside an agency's team. And in those situations you've got somebody internally who's kind of being coached the whole time. But we're playing quarterback, we're coordinating the whole project. Even though they're clicking the button so they're learning the system and they're running it, we're the ones who are leading the project. And then we've got our ClickUp for agencies program right now where we're giving people the playbook, we're giving them the pre built training assets, we're giving them the pre built ClickUp install and we're giving them support and there's some proactive pieces to it but we're there getting the quarterback and we're leaving it to them to say hey, go as fast as you can into this. We're going to check in with you and we're going to answer questions as they come up. But you're the one now who's assuming that role and responsibility of I'm going to save some money but now I need to play quarterback and make sure that this is getting completed on Time.

And well, so for this case, they chose the middle tier. And what were some of the things that you did with them? Because I think people have in their minds what they want, but they don't really know how it's going to work and what's going to happen. What were some of the things that you took them through that maybe opened their eyes inside of using ClickUp or even their systems that help them manage their company and clients better?

So in their case, there's some mapping out simply of the journey that they lead clients on first to say, hey, this has to be consistent across the team. You can't have one person who's running a client call every week for the same sized account and someone else who decides they're going to do it once every two weeks or once every three weeks. So we got to standardize some of the inputs here or else the process building will just never stop. It's going to be. There's always going to be process improvement, but I want some type of time box. Hey, here's how many processes we have to get built out. This is kind of the first piece of simplifying or standardizing the inputs. From there, leading the team through the first thing is kind of the vision, what does a healthy paid media agency setup in ClickUp look like? And is this going to get them excited about? Here's the potential. When you have your work plan in this way, here's the type of clarity that it gives to individual contributors, managers and executives and then leading them through the process build out inside ClickUp itself. So building out and standardizing. And there was so much edification that happened of the internal team talking through, why don't you do things this way, I do these things that way. And that could go on and on forever. So our job is to streamline that and make that as efficient as possible so those meetings don't spiral out of control.

Yeah, you have to kind of sort out someone's internal baggage of processes in a sense.

Right, right.

Because in the okay, here you got to choose a path and it may be a combination, especially if they don't have all of it documented. Taking everyone's and meshing it into actually a standardized process that everyone could follow.

Right. And for them, I mean, one thing that they really had going for them was they had strong leadership to step in and make decisions when decisions need to get made. Anytime a process for us falls behind, it's almost always an indecisive team where no one wants to commit to anything and we have to Push hard to say, here's our, here's our recommendation, but you have to make the decision on are we going to do weekly meetings, Are we going to do bi weekly? And there's got to be a decision made if we're. Because we need to standardize this somewhere.

I want to give you a new nickname and tagline Gray, which is. It's a working nickname, but like the process psychologist or something. But you step in and like, okay, let's, let's figure out what's best for the team in navigating the process counselor or psychologist.

That's funny. Yeah.

Anything else with the kind of implementation that sticks out, that was helpful for them or that stuck out, that helped them create efficiencies.

The team all being trained on. Here's exactly what your morning routine looks like and what the expectations are in the day to day was a big piece and at first that felt cumbersome. Most teams that we work with go through a little bit of a trough of sorrow for the first week or week and a half after implementation.

What do you mean by that?

They're being asked to do more than they were being asked to do previously. And there's no way around the fact that that's true because most of the time no agency has, hey, here's the expectations. They might say, don't have any overdue tasks, but the easy workaround is just don't add your tasks into the platform and then you don't have any overdue tasks.

Is it because they're not used to the platform and it's like a learning curve thing or more. They just see more of the processes up, so it seems like there's a lot more to do. But actually that's the stuff they're already doing. It just wasn't being tracked.

Yeah. Yeah. So the fundamental rule for us is if it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen. We're trying to make this a single source of truth and that can only happen if the inputs are good. So, yeah, at first it's going to, you know, there's, hey, here's more stuff that I'm being asked to do. And the outcome that they got to was, hey, we. We're now at a point where they had multiple account managers on the team. Say, I used to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about, did I remember to do that thing or did I write it down somewhere? And now I'm sleeping through the night because I know that all my stuff is in here and I can forget I can let it go at the end of the workday because it's all centralized, all the context is there, the tasks are there, the team knows what to do. And once that, once a couple influential people on the team had that experience, that was kind of the switch that flipped for the whole team where all of a sudden everyone said, okay, well if they're into it, I can be into it as well. And that's super common in these implementations.

Let's talk about gray that for a second. So one outcome is that was really that stuck out to you and them was just team satisfaction. And I could see how that can just help with team retention because everyone just kind of knows what they need to do. They know the expectation because it's all there. What are some other outcomes that you see either with them or with other.

Companies, agencies in their specific use case? There's a big uptick in terms of number of accounts. Once the processes got standardized and junior team members kind of got the expectation, hey, here's the time allocated to these accounts, their efficiency increased pretty dramatically, which the byproduct of that is obviously profitability. If you can get your same account management team to deliver the same or better results to clients in less time, their capacity increases, which allows your profitability obviously to increase. So we see that pretty common. And then just the data into like how do we make decisions around where there's things that need fixed. They had kind of that all the data points that they need to prioritize. Oh, here's the service line that needs to get fixed next, or here's the client that needs to let go or the clients that we need to clone and try to figure out how to find more of.

Yeah, so it helps, it helps the marketing and sales team as well because, oh, we're spending all this time. Once you have the data, you can know, oh, we're spending a ton of time on this type of client, but. And this, this person like just a thrill to work with. And we want 10 more of these. And you can track that more with the data from what you're saying for.

Sure and really get a little bit of that. But you know, right now we're wrapping up a client with or wrapping up a project with one of the largest HubSpot partner agencies. And we've worked with a couple in HubSpot's elite tier here over the last couple of months. And the differences between how they. There's a couple fundamental things that have made one client specifically much more challenging to work with. So to take that back to our growth team or sales team and say hey, these are things that you need to watch out for and that you need to issues to address during the sales process to set clear expectations in terms of how are we going to create profitable, efficient, streamlined on time projects. Great.

I know we're at the time. I have one last question. I want to point people to Zenpilot. Check out more. Check out more episodes of the Agency Journey. It's a fantastic podcast and great guests. Last question is about clients. Throughout this do clients notice or do they say oh things are smoother or what's usually the feedback from the client.

Side during the implementation itself?

No, just once it's released. Yeah, afterwards.

Yeah. So from the end client there have been a number of agencies who've kind of.

Yeah, your client's client. Yeah, exactly.

Who've kind of promoted it to their hey, we worked with a team who's worked with 1900 other agencies to streamline our operations. Here's some things that are changing and it's a great way to couch especially if you're resetting some client expectations. It's a great way to kind of frame changes that we making. Hey, I know we were doing an hour long weekly call. We're going to a 30 minute weekly call but here's the thing that we're adding and it's going to be better and this is all part of working with someone else. But they're for sure noticing we're measuring client retention and client outcomes. And so the retention side, there are direct comments or direct feedback that agencies have gotten kind of the anecdotal pieces. But client retention is where it plays out the most just in terms of increasing agency ltv which if you're running a retainer recurring revenue model in an agency, that's the, that's the key in terms of enterprise value that you're driving.

Love it. Everyone go to zenpilot.com and check out the more podcast episodes and gray, thanks for having me.

Awesome. Thanks Jeremy. Thanks for listening to the Agency Journey podcast. Visit agencyjourneyinsiders.com to join the podcast community and be sure to subscribe for future episodes.