James Carberry, founder of Sweetfish, explains how working with Zen Pilot's blueprint process helped his media agency spot capacity problems and fix workflow issues. The system relies on tools, processes, and habits to keep projects on track.
Just pull the trigger and do it. I waited way too long to do this. I wish I'd have done this a year, two, three years ago even. It's obvious that the Zen Pilot team lives and breathes this stuff. Agency operations is their game. Building media brands is my game. It's what I think about, what our team thinks about all day, every day. We don't think about how to optimize process, how to build habits, the right tools to use for this stuff. We don't know what we don't know, and most agency owners don't. And so I would say stop hesitating, pull the trigger. These guys absolutely know what they're doing, and you need to bring their expertise into your organization as soon as humanly possible. I'm James Carberry. I'm the founder of Sweetfish, and we're a media brand agency that helps B2B companies build their markets. Favorite corner of the Internet. Every year we ask our team to fill out this organizational health survey. And the glaring hole that we discovered through this process was that our systems were very much lacking. The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. And in a lot of cases, we had no semblance of workflow planning. And so we just didn't know how tapped out our people were in different parts of the organization. We had some folks that had a lot of capacity and bandwidth and other folks that were completely overrun. And so that was the pain that we were feeling. Before getting started with Zenpilot, we were on our blueprint review call, and during the call, our creative director, he said, oh, my gosh, this is overwhelming. And I thought, oh, gosh, like, what's, what's going on? He's overwhelmed. He's like, this is overwhelming because of how many problems this is going to solve for us. And that, I think, is the sentiment across our team as we've gone through the blueprint process. We haven't even gotten into implementation yet, but. But the blueprint process alone has assured us that so much of what zenpilot is going to be doing for us is solving an overwhelming number of problems that we currently have in our agency. And I am really, really excited. We have never had a system that has been able to visually tell us when somebody is over capacity. Looking out a week, two weeks, three weeks out, and being able to see, hey, our designer is going to be really overloaded because because of the implications of these two client launches, we have to staff accordingly and be able to get ahead of that, whether it be with freelance talent or bringing in other people from different parts of the organization to help. We've never been able to support our team in that way. And that's something that just seeing the Zen pilot process for focusing on tools, process and habits was really eye opening for me. And it took something like this implementation for project management solution, you know, this massive project, and it boiled it down into something that felt like an attainable thing. Thinking about it in terms of, you know, process, tools and habits has been really, really helpful for me. Was very eye openen.
