The Best ClickUp Hierarchy For Agencies (From ClickUp's #1 Solutions Partner)

Foreign. Hey, it's gray here with Zenpilot. I'm super excited to talk about how to build and set up the right hierarchy for your agency inside ClickUp. I could talk for 90 minutes on the INS and outs and when to do this versus that. But what I want to take you through today is why the hierarchy in here is the right fit for most agencies and also what to think about to make sure that this is actually the right hierarchy for your situation. We have designed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hierarchies and had to support that over four plus years. At Zenpilot, we've worked with massive agencies, we've worked with early stage agencies, we worked with agencies that deliver just about every service under the sun and a ton of professional services teams who are not even agencies. And there is some hierarchy distinction between them. But the majority of the time the hierarchy that I'm going to share here makes a ton of sense. And you should set your agency up like this and we can debate all the reasons and have the back and forth on why that's the case. The starting point, the context here is your hierarchy is crucial. The ability that you have to report to build custom dashboards in ClickUp is unbelievable. But one of the big limiting factors, or if you flip that to the other side, one of the big opportunities is how you set your hierarchy up. So if you're not thinking about how you're going to wind up doing reporting and using the ability that ClickUp gives us from a dashboard perspective to its full potential, if you're not thinking about that when you're setting up your hierarchy, then you're missing a huge chunk. And I know because when we originally built out ClickUp with probably the first dozen or 15 agencies back in 2018, we set every single client client up as a client space. We set up some internal spaces. We had all these spaces. And what happens is you then try to go back and get the reporting that you need and you're limited. And I'll show you a little bit of what I mean there. And so there's cases where that trade off still can make sense, but there's also a lot of cases where you're just inhibiting what you're able to do inside ClickUp. So let's talk about the basic hierarchy. Enough of the preamble, right? There's three main areas of every agency. You've got growth, which is how you, how you grow the business. This is your marketing, your sales, your business development, your partnerships. You know, all of that should fit in there. And that probably looks like a folder for each of those specific areas under growth. Depending on what you're running and how you're executing, you should be a. You should be treating your agency like your best client. That means for us at zenpilot, you know, our ClickUp, we should go through the same journey that we'd put our clients through. We should be receiving the highest level of ongoing support from our own team into the business. And so you should be doing the same thing as a marketing agency. You should be, you should be delivering on, on what you do for yourself as well. So this is where, what I like to call keeping the. Or making the promise, rather this is where we're making a promise to clients. Someone comes to Zen Pilot and I say, listen, if we can't do it on ClickUp, nobody in the world can do it on ClickUp. We're clickups. We're the, we're the best team in the world. We've done the highest volume of projects, we've delivered with the highest success on top of ClickUp. Well, that's. The first part is making that promise. The second part, deliver. Delivery is our language for it. This is keeping the promise. So you made a promise, now we got to deliver on it. And this is all of your client services. So you could call this services, you call this client, you call this delivery, you call it client services. I don't care what the word is, that's what the bucket means. And then the third thing is like the biggest juncture in business and it's operations. And operations means your people, your culture, your hr, your legal, your finance, kind of all the admin things. It's where everything that doesn't fit into growth or delivery winds up going. So those are the three big buckets that you've got here. Now if you're trying to track time across the business, this is one of the big implications of your hierarchy. If you're using time tracking and you're looking at ClickUp's native time tracking, or a third party tool that will use the hierarchy to infer project names or details around the work that you're doing. What you name these and how you structure these are really important. So I would love to be able to walk into your business and see, just think of this like a P and L. How much money are you spending in growing the business? How much money are you spending delivering on your services? And how much money are you spending keeping the lights on in the business and executing on the stuff that it takes to build and support a great team. Well, I'd like to be able to see the same thing from a time perspective. How much time and effort is going into that? Because those two things, when you calibrate those together, how much time are we spending on this and what are the budget dollars? And there's some clear correlation right on the delivery side of the business, the amount of time is going to be very directly tied to the amount of money those two things are going to go together. But in growing the business, do you grow through content marketing? That's been our bread and butter is inbound. So our ad spend is zero, but so the dollars look, look lower. But we're putting in a lot of time and effort there. Or on the operations side, this is where a lot of things get hidden. You know, are we putting in, are we doing a lot of bookkeeping in house ourselves, and that's an owner staying up late at night to do that, or are we working with a fractional CFO or bookkeeping firm? What does that set up? That's not the only reason to set the hierarchy up this way, but that's one of the outcomes of it. Obviously we think about things like permissions, about how to organize the structure, we think about reporting and then time tracking as the main considerations. There's a couple other spaces here. I think there's one that I would 100% recommend to everybody, which is a process library. And this is going to be all of your latest versions, the most up to date versions of every template that you have across the business. And there may be some other things that you have in here. You may have your process hub, which we could talk about in another video at some point and we can talk about how these are all going to be structured. And let's just take an example here. You know, we're doing website redesign or we're doing an SEO audit or we're doing a HubSpot setup or whatever it is. We'll just take a website redesign as an example. Here we've got each of our milestones set up in ClickUp or each phase of the project that needs to happen and then all the supporting subtasks. This is the layer where ultimately we'll set an automation and project setup is complete once every single One of these 18 steps is also complete. And so the automation will say, once all the subtests are done, this phase is done. But then the project is done. Once all of these phases are done, we've delivered on the promise that we made to our client in the first place. So you'll have a process library. You may have a CRM, in which case you'd have deals, companies, contacts as your three main object types in any CRM. There's certainly an argument in some cases in earlier stage business to keep that even simpler and just say deals. Let's worry about companies and contacts later. I'm going to skip over the contract area and any of the hidden spaces that's only applicable in some cases. But pretty much every agency should have growth, delivery, operations and a process library. Okay, inside delivery then we're typically looking at client, but this could be by project as a folder and inside of that folder you've then got lists for what work is actually getting done. Are we working on SEO then we should have our tasks. This is not a good example of a grade A task. Let's find one that's a better example here. We'll go to paid social as an example. We've got our deliverable, which is the campaign, and we've got each of the individually owned subtasks to get there. And each of those should have their own checklist for how that gets done eventually. But this is the hierarchy that we're looking at. What does this allow us to do then? This lets us be able to pull instead of having to go to the everything level and filter down by location to go find all our different client spaces or apply some kind of massive automation in each one of the spaces that to go create. You know, this is part of delivery. What this lets us do then is go to the delivery level and we're then able to say, hey, I just want to see work by. And you know, here we're filtered down to whatever. But I just want to see work by either all client work or a specific account manager. I just want to see what's happening across these clients and I can pull and grab that very easily at the delivery level or from a reporting perspective, I can go and I can see whatever dashboard I want to ultimately be able to see if it's time reporting or if it's whatever else. How much time is going in by space? How much time is estimated versus tracked by client? What are team members doing, you know, time reporting by client over a specific time period. Whatever I'm trying to get, I'm then allowed to go grab from the hierarchy. So we could go super deep into variations for that. Why we'd vary from that. What would those variations wind up looking like? How does the rest of the space play out? But I just wanted to quickly touch on. This is the hierarchy. That's the right hierarchy for most teams, which is growth, delivery, operations and then a process library. And you may have some other spaces built in there as well. Then obviously, when that's combined with views and with automations, you're really able to take advantage of all of the.