The ClickUp Champion: The Role Used by 3,000+ Teams to Get ClickUp Right

Let's get this show on the road. Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Zenpiler Webinar. Today we're talking about the role of the ClickUp champion, the role that's used by over 3,000 teams worldwide to get ClickUp right and to improve project management and get clarity, not chaos, as we previously mentioned. With me on the call today is Gray MacKenzie, Zenpilot CEO and founder. Gray, how are you doing today?

I'm excellent. I'm excited for this one. This is going to be like. This is the undervalued role that's like the glue that holds so many teams together. So this is a really fun topic to get into.

Yeah, yeah, this is definitely one of. This was definitely one of the revelations as I was learning the Zen Pilot system before joining and after joining. So I'm excited to get into this as well. Some quick housekeeping before we move on. Ask your questions as you have them, but please, if you have questions, leave them in the Q and A, because we'll be monitoring the Q and A and going through that first and primarily. So if you leave them in the chat, they might be. We might miss them. And don't be shy in the chat. I can see this group does not have a problem with that. Thank you for sharing more about your particular issues with on the chaos side. You give us your numbers, we'll be looking at that. And we often get the question about the webinar recording. There will be one. We'll be sending it out via email within a day or two of this event, so don't worry. And for more events like this, I am already inviting you to follow us on pilot, on LinkedIn, on our YouTube. We have a lot of video content on there, as well as webinar replays and podcast episodes and more. And to get informed about new events ahead of time, go to zenpilot.com newsletter, subscribe and I'll send you an email when we have more stuff coming up. So one more moment on this slide. If you want to tell us more about what you're struggling with in terms of chaotic project management, in case somebody's joining late, have a look at that. Let us know which ones you're struggling with right now. And we'll be moving into. Let me just check the Q and A. I'm sorry. Great. Are you able to pull up the question for the Q and A?

Oh, we're all good now. All good.

Not a question. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, start with the intros then. So. So, hi. If you're meeting us for the first time. We're Zenpilot and we help you build a more productive, profitable and healthy team by streamlining your operations in ClickUp. We are ClickUp's highest rated partner since 2018. We've also historically been their first ever partner, which I always find an interesting part of Zenpilot history to mention. And we do. I mean a simplified way to say this is we do ClickUp implementations, but it's really more of a total project management or operations makeover for your team. So this includes training and coaching. It includes ClickUp architecture, design and implementation, but also looking at what automations and integrations might be useful for you. And this little part in the third bullet here is a little bit of my invention, but handholding and pep talks Change management is hard. Migrating to a new project management system and making sure everybody follows that system, which is a big theme for today. That's hard too. So we try to guide you through that, not just on a technical level, not just in terms of proficiency, but also emotionally speaking as well. And if you book a call with us, you know, to start your zenpilot journey, what we begin with is basically like a bit of a project management therapy session. So you will get us to tell us, you'll get to tell us about your project management and ops issues. We'll listen and we'll tell you where to go from there. We've served over 3,000 teams and helped them with makeovers such as this. And you might be next, we'll see. But for now, we've got a webinar to present. Joining you here today, as I mentioned, is Gray myself. My name is Kuba, full name Jakub Greitzer, but everybody calls me Kuba. My friends do. So you can call me Kuba too. And I'm Zenpilot's Content Marketing manager. And that's it for the intro in case you have to run in like five minutes to a more important meeting. I mean, I can hardly think of a more important one than this, but just in case, you can go to zenpilot.com resources, grab our free ebooks, some additional video trainings, even some plug and play templates. If you want to get a taste of the ZenPilot system and what a ZenPilot compliant template looks like, go ahead and grab that. And I mentioned booking a call with us, so just we won't be able to solve all of these issues that you're seeing here just today on this one hour webinar, but if you're struggling with any of these, some of you mentioned, you know, multiple of these. The best, fastest way, the easiest way to solve these is to book a call with us, have a chat with us. You can start with a free chat with us and we'll guide you to solving the issue of chaotic project management and guide you towards clarity. So let's get into the webinar proper, then quick check of the chat. Okay, we've got some people flagging what their issues are. I'll get into that once I pass the mic to Gray to have a look at that. So who is this session for? Definitely for teams who want good project management habits to stick long term. We'll be talking about the habits in more detail in just a second. But you know, surface level, this is creating and sticking to templates and updating and maintaining the templates, which is, I wish I used to lead a 10 person content team and that was one of our struggles. Regular time tracking regular updates in the project management system, updating the system as you go, not just once a week, which is also something that my team used to do, but much more regularly than that. If you want all of these to stick, this is what this session will be about. This is part of what the ClickUp Champion role is all about. So talking higher level or actually talking about deeper issues, you might say, if this is about clarity in your workflows and accountability for your team. If you're struggling with those, if you're thinking about those, then this is for you. I actually have an additional question for chat because I had some conversations before this one. Is anybody here already a ClickUp Champion themselves and looking to learn more about the role from that angle? Let us know in the chat because I'd be curious about that. So here's our agenda for today. What we'll cover the we'll first talk about before we talk about how the ClickUp Champion helps you maintain and kind of solidify the habits. We'll talk about the actual habits that you should be building in your project management system, at least a slice of it for today. Then the reasons why these habits don't stick. Then why you need a ClickUp Champion and who should and shouldn't be the champion. And then what the ClickUp Champion actually does to help solidify these good project management habits. And then we'll jump into this near the end. We've got a little bit of a Miro board to present which presents the four main rituals of the ClickUp Champion daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. So you've got a little Bit of eye candy to look at here. This is a bit of a teaser, but we'll get into that. Near the end of our presentation, something in the chat, somebody said, yes, I am, or was going to be ClickUp Champion will be passing the baton to another team member. That's really cool. That's really cool. That other team member should probably get the recording of this. Awesome. Okay, so that's it for the intro and the agenda. And now we've got the three keys. And I've got the person on the call who helped create the three keys. So I think I'm going to pass this on to you, Gray, for a moment. Can you tell us about the three keys? We'll be talking about the Habits piece primarily here, but, like, little bit of a brief overview before we go on.

Yeah, for sure. So if you're not familiar with the 135 formula, the goal, and that's the small circle at the center of our Venn diagram here is clarity. Like, you hear, you know, all of these symptoms of chaos, the 11 or 12 points that Kuba had up on that first slide, all of those stem from, you know, the. The chaos that comes. It's all an expression of a lack of clarity. Clarity is the antidote in the opposite force to chaos. So what we're trying to create is clarity up and down the organization, and the three components of that. The three keys are tools, processes, and habits. So the tools that your team uses, the processes they follow, the habits that they employ to get there. And Kuba said the word ClickUp probably 17 different times up till now already. And that's totally natural because that's a huge part of how folks look to solve the problem, is, hey, is there a different tool we can go to? If we just used Excel, would all these problems go away? If we used Reich or Monday or ClickUp or Asana or whatever else, would that solve all the problems? We tend to overemphasize the Tools piece. The tools certainly help us be efficient, and there's a ton of pros and cons, and I'd debate with anybody for a super long time about what's the best tool for most teams. You know, in. In specific situations, the Processes piece is super important, but the Habits piece gets the least amount of love and is, in my opinion, the most impactful of the three keys. I would rather have your entire team in a worse tool, but on the same page than having the best tools, the best processes outlined, but very inconsistent usage. And so the Habits piece is what we're going to drill on a lot today. Tools plays into that. Processes like all three of those have to work in harmony. You can have the best habits, you're running the wrong processes and the wrong tools and there's no way to be profitable, productive and actually produce great results. So all three have to be there. But the habits pieces, you know, it's the least exciting piece and it's the most impactful at the same time. So if you care about impact, it's the most exciting. But to most people on the surface, it seems like the, the most boring piece. So those are, those are the three key elements though, to, to creating clarity for your organization.

Right? Yeah, thanks for that. And this is, I mean, we've shared this on basically every event and basically all of our pieces of content because this is, this is the lens through which we see the whole challenge of project management and this whole quest of canceling chaos and creating clarity. So next thing I wanted to. Well, some of it will be. Some of this will be kind of me picking your brain gray. Some of it. I think I'll also share kind of what I have mostly is experience on anti patterns. You know, whenever we'll be talking about issues or how these things go wrong, I've seen it happen. So I can throw in my two cents there. But first, so let's talk about the habits that you might want to be building or somebody already in the chat mentioned. I had a chance to catch up on the chat as you were talking, mentioned the time tracking, for example, as one of the key habits, key issues. So can you talk to us a little bit about the healthy project management habits that we've got here? Why these habits? Why are they important? And in a moment we'll talk about how they can be hard to stick to sometimes.

Yeah, I guess the heart of frustration in most relationships is unmet expectations. And so if you're here and you are an owner, a founder, someone on a leadership team and you're frustrated with how the team is performing, you've got expectations that are not being met right now. If you're on a team and you just can't seem to please, you know, whoever you're reporting to, there's a good chance that there are also ex. There's expectations on at least one side, probably on both sides, that are not being met right now. So all this starts with just being really explicit about what we expect from people. And then, you know, we're working towards the, the reality where the full team is consistently operating kind of in this single Heartbeat, like same, you know, following and meeting these expectations on a consistent basis over an extended period of time. So you've got to be explicit and you also have to be somewhat. You can't be explicit, but give people 200 pages worth of stuff to try to manage, maintain over time, because that's a task that no one's going to be able to keep up with. So there's got to be some element of realism to the expectations that we're setting for people. So what you're seeing here is half of the ten commandments of project management that we give to the teams that we're working with. And I thought this would be a really good example of, of what, what those look like. And then the magic in all of this obviously is, hey, we got to flesh out what that means a little bit. We've got to train the team on what that means and then we need to hold them accountable to that. And if we get all of those things right, we can build a world where it is true in our organizations that if it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen. Meaning, you know, we've got, we're building a single source of truth. If I want to find out what happened with that thing that went wrong or that thing that, you know, I'm just not sure what happened with, like, I can go in and I can find that answer for myself. So the five here that are listed out are just kind of a, you know, I think these are five of the most impactful and you could apply this in, you know, a ton of different systems. But if we're building ClickUp to be the main place where all our work lives, then everything's got to get in there and the team has to know the expectation is like, you don't get credit if you design that page or you wrote that email or you launched that campaign. If it's not tracked somewhere. Due dates is a, is a huge one. There's a whole bunch of different project management methodologies. The important thing is to pick a methodology and go all in on it. And for most teams, a due date driven methodology makes the most sense. But that means that due dates have to matter. The due date has to be the due date. You know, the date that we're actually getting it done is, is the date that was set as the due date that's going to force us to get better at. One of the key skills of any manager or leader is the ability to predict. And so can we accurately predict when this will get done and understand when we need to make changes to that. So building around, hey, these due dates are not just in here as like, hopefully you see this on this date, but it's like, no, this is where you're supposed to get your work done, tracking time and again. I think there's situations where you'd pick and choose what these rules are and customize them so there are teams where time tracking is not a part. And as long as you're realistic about the trade offs, what are we sacrificing when we don't have time data? There's a reason why, if you look back historically at all the productivity thinkers, almost all of them do time and motion studies. And most of the big improvements in efficiency that have happened have come out of or been tied to time and motion studies. And so tracking your time is, you know, for most teams, a crucial piece. But you don't get accurate data if 80% of the people are doing it or if 100% of people are doing it. 80% of the time we're missing a big picture. So you might as well throw it all out if you can't get the full team working together. Leaving a trail is, hey, I made a change. I, you know, there's plenty of times where we're, where we're doing something new, we're innovating in some way. We, we got a lot of creatives on this call. That's totally fine. We've got to leave a trail behind that people can follow and understand. What the heck did we do? Why did I make that decision instead of this decision? What happened with this? Like, did we throw that whole deliverable out or did we get it done in a different way or do we get it done as normal? So this is about, hey, you know, we're leaving comments, we're leaving a, a way to track this down. It's not a random email here and three Slack messages there and then that zoom call that we were on and then the task record itself and the last one. Making the process live where the work gets done has been a big productivity unlock for a lot of teams, which is, yeah, we can put all our process documents. How do you do this? That could live in Google Docs somewhere that I could go hunt for or we could build it right into the system itself and then have it in front of folks as they're working.

Yeah. So these are some of the habits you might want to be building and maintaining. This is not the brunt of the presentation today. We are going to be talking about the role of The ClickUp champion. But this is high level the kinds of habits we're looking at here. There's more content on our Zenpilot YouTube channel. You might want to check out about that. As you were talking Ray, one thing that came to my mind, kind of two things connected in my mind I think out of these, I mean all of them are important in a certain way. But we were just talking about ChatGPT for example, right before this call. Right. And I think number four, leave a trail becomes especially important in times like these where there's a lot of innovation like if you manage to, you know, create huge efficiencies. Like in the last few weeks I managed to do to create like a Claude, I think it's called a project, you know, like a little machine that spits out show notes based on transcripts. Right. And I managed to make it, you know, almost automatic if you manage to do something like that and your team members are doing that every day trying to find new efficiencies like that using AI. Leave a trail, leave you know, the prompt somewhere where it can be easily found maybe in a ClickUp template, for example, you know, leave the relevant links so that people can enjoy that efficiency as well. We have something popped up in the Q and A. I don't know if this is relevant. I can't.

Yeah, as you're, as you're looking at that, just tie note up like ta quick bow on this one and then I know we got a lot to get to here. So first thing is in terms of leveraging AI in your project management and for the benefit of your team, the better structured and the more thorough your documentation and your trails are, the more AI is going to be able to assist teams and do better reporting to better do better work for you. And then the flip side is like the reason that these are on the screen right now is if you are sitting in a leadership role, you're not the person you're. You're a founder and you're not the person who should be the ClickUp champion. Super important that you clearly define what your expectations are. If you're not sure, these are five great expectations to start with for most teams or work with zenpilot or work with some like get help but. But be super explicit about what your expectations are. On the flip side, if you are sitting in currently or about to sit in a click of champion seat or handing it off to someone else, like Sean mentioned earlier, you need like your success hinges on your ability to get clarity on hey, what are your expectations of me. And if you don't have them, I can help you create them. Is the way that that conversation should be happening with. With your boss.

Yeah. So if you're an owner, you should get your ClickUp champion to be able to recite these in their sleep. And if you're the ClickUp champion, you should get the rest of the team to be able to recite this in their sleep. I'll sum it up like that. Move on to the next one. So the next point here being why the habits don't stick or the certain ways that these things can fall apart. So we've got them on the screen here. I don't know if we do need to go through them one by one, but let me ask you, like this gray, out of those ones that we're seeing here, there's team members not understanding value, there's seeing it as micromanage management. There's this lack of model to follow. Which one do you feel or know in your experience as being kind of one of the most common ones?

I'm still trying to read all this text that you wrote here. Oh, gosh. I think the value of it is a piece I don't hear nearly as often as I feel like I used to like the micromanagement. I think most people want more structure than they're given and that's probably a function of a lot of the lot of the teams that we work with. It's not push back. There's certainly individuals who will push back, but that's not the. The majority piece. I think most of this is not understanding the value and then no accountability. Sometimes it's even like, I can see how that conceptually would be valuable for me, but I haven't experienced that. I haven't tasted the benefits that come from that. And it's hard to build any habit and so that, like you need some coaching and accountability to build these healthy habits.

Yeah. I think I would also draw attention to, for example, the insufficient training part of this. You know, there's the part of, like, for some team members, the issue is going to be, I'm not. I don't have enough motivation to do this. But for some other team members, it will be, you know, I don't. I'm not proficient enough in the tool to do this. And in a moment we'll say, I mean, this is spoiler alert. We'll be talking about, like, if you're the leader of the team or especially if you're the owner, you should not be the ClickUp champion. And that's part of the reason why, you know, if somebody needs additional training or potentially a one on one session to explain some of the nuances of a tool like ClickUp, you can have a champion for other tools as well. Then you know, you need somebody who can deliver that knowledge to the team fairly quickly, either synchronously or asynchronously to help make the habits stick better. And then the last one here that I would draw attention to is some of it is just simple human nature. Right. We would like it to be the case that we would. Sometimes I think some leaders would like their teams to be kind of like a code base. You push changes and the changes just start running each time the code runs. But people aren't like that. They need to be reminded, they need to see what kind of reaction happens when they don't obey the rules of the system as well. So we need to kind of train that and massage that change in there. And I think probably a lot of the people on the call are dealing with various variants of what we're seeing here. So I think we can go into kind of start going to the solution. Unless you wanted to highlight something else here.

Nope. Let's go.

Yeah, let's move on then. So let's talk about the ClickUp Champion then. And could I start with you, Gray, like in your own words? Because I did put a lot of text on the slide again and we'll get into that in due time. Why is the role of the ClickUp Champion needed? And as you know, as you were creating the Zenpilot system kind of in the early years, how did you land on like this being an actual named role and why is it like that?

Yeah, I don't, I don't care or get caught up about the name ClickUp Champion. I think we've run with that because that's been catchy for folks. But this is not like a full, you know, most teams is not a full time role. And sometimes I think that's, that's a mistake that people might hear that and think, oh man, I need somebody who's, you know, I need to go make a whole new hire just to manage this, this simple system or something. What I'm trying to convey is, hey, if we're going to commit to a tool, we need somebody to lead that and lead that across the team. Well, and so what I need that person to do is be able, be the go to person when folks have questions about how it works, be the person who steps into the gap and is Looking at the data every single day and holding the team accountable to start building those healthy habits. And so those are like, that's the main, the main functions of the. What a Click of Champion needs to do is be the person who helps the team get more productive, get more profitable, get healthier across the board by being the one who's going to lean in to make sure those expectations are met.

Yeah, and again, I would, I would draw attention to, you know, the fact that what I like about this is that it creates this kind of clarity of there's, there's one specific person you go to, you know, with your ClickUp problem. So at my previous team, for example, I was the de facto ClickUp Champion. There was a ClickUp issue. People came to me. I did make mistakes in the vein of even as ClickUp Champion, I should have recorded some training, you know, scaled myself a little bit better because I did a lot of it one on one and it kind of took up a lot of my time. And we'll talk about kind of the time investment of being the ClickUp Champion in a couple slides here. But actually also coming back to kind of my previous experience, this pre Zen pilot, actually we didn't call it the ClickUp Champion. I was being called the ClickUp Police. This was a role that we tried to kind of share. But I was a de facto the chief of the police department, so to speak. But this is about more than that. I would highlight that on the surface level, it might seem that this is the person that makes sure everything is updated in the system, that people are kind of following the habits. But the knock on effects of that, the effects on productivity, what that can do to efficiency and even profitability down the line. The ClickUp Champion plays an important role in that and we'll start digging into that in just a moment. So we talked about the why. Next let's talk about the who. So who makes a good ClickUp Champion? Who should or shouldn't be the ClickUp Champion? And if I could ask you. Great. To, to expand on that a little bit.

Yeah, for sure. And Kuba, I don't know which slide you are trying to be on, but you're still in the habit slide if you want to switch it at all.

Oh, well, it's showing me the.

Well, maybe I'm seeing it differently, but I think that's what I'm seeing. So in terms of who should be the who should be your click of champion or what are some of the characteristics of that, are you resharing Kuba.

I'm restarting the screen sharing.

Yeah, cool. I was gonna say I can re, I can share it all or not. Okay, cool. It's pulling up correctly. Now. First thing you need is somebody who's disciplined. So it's got to be the person who, and this is why it should not be a founder or someone who is an entrepreneur because inevitably they get distracted oftentimes with stuff that on that specific day is more important. But it's got to be someone who's going to show up day in and day out and run the system. So, hey, I'm willing to do a spot check of our system every single day. It's not a huge lift, but that's the, the very first thing you need out of that person is like the word tenacity should, should come to mind as you think of that person. The ability to manage up is huge. And see, we've got on here happy to manage up like someone who's, you know, more than willing to, to do that. Manage up just means Cuba, you can go to other people on the team if you're the ClickUp champion and say, hey, like this isn't, you know, you didn't put in the time tracking data that we need here. You know why it's important. You know what the standard is. Is there a reason that this is not working? You have that conversation with other people. You need to be comfortable going to me or anybody else in the organization who's living by those rules as well and saying, hey, I realize, you know, in this hierarchy of the organization, I perceive you as above me, but you've got to be comfortable going and saying, this isn't good enough either from you. And so, Greg, you need to step your game up. So that piece is super important. They can't be conflict diverse or the person who's just like, hey, that's okay, let's try and do better tomorrow. There's times where that's the right answer. There's a lot of times where that's not the right answer. Data Driven is a piece fast learner. Someone who's tech savvy, who's, you know, they want to be. They want to know how and why the system works and they want to be on top of stuff you don't like to. I've seen some really good ClickUp champions who aren't reading the release notes every week and they're not paying attention to everything that's, that's brand new. That's fine. That does not need to, like, that does not need to Be there for some period of time. Somewhere someone's got to know, hey, what's new? How can we work even faster, better? I'd say the, the best ones tend to be more that way, but they can't be afraid of hearing a question and saying, you know, I don't know how to map dependencies for this. And your ClickUp champion, you can't be like, I don't either. So you know, go figure it out and then, and let me know. Like they've got to be, they do not always have to be the person who has the answers, but they can't be afraid of getting their hands dirty in the, in the system. So I think those are a couple, couple things that I would, I would point to and then I mentioned this earlier, but this is not a, a full time role for sure. You know, a typical team that we're working with is in that 30 to 50 person team size. Like they're gonna spend two to five hours a week on this once, once the system's up and running. So those are a couple of, the, couple of the characteristics that I'd add in. Anything that I missed that you want to highlight.

I think I would just highlight even more strongly the part about discipline and rigor this person should not shy away from. And you know, some people are going to be more challenging than others in terms of being trained on the system. And you know, for some people the habits stick faster. For some others it might be a little bit slower. So they need to ping them and ping them again and grab that call and just be really insistent about getting everybody who's in the system to use the system consistently. So in that sense it requires a lot of like internal drive and that's what I would highlight. But all of these are important and it's important to establish some of the ground rules like you know, the time investment and this not being, you know, the founder, the owner. So yeah, I think the, the thing.

That I skipped over here is if you're trying to figure out like, well, I don't have anybody on my team called a ClickUp champion, like what's the, what's the job title? Most frequently this is an account manager. Sometimes this will be ahead of delivery, somebody who's, or you know, head of client services, something in that space. But more often it's a project manager, sometimes it's someone in an ops role. You know, sometimes it's an assistant, sometimes it's especially earlier teams. This is the, you know, the person who's leading ops.

Yeah, yeah, Exactly. If you have more questions about this, like who should be the champion or you're. I don't know, maybe you've got two or three different people in mind and you don't know how to decide, leave us a question like that. I think we'll be moving some of the Q and A towards the end, partially because I can't check the questions and also be running through the slides. But if anything pops up on the way, we'll try to address it. Let's move on to the next piece of this then. So we talked about the why and the who. Let's talk about what does the champion actually do day to day? What are the different ways in which they support the team? I would start with you again, Gray, and we'll dig into this in more detail, including, as I already mentioned, the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly rituals routines that they should be running. But you know, when people ask you this, like, what does a ClickUp champion do? How do you begin to explain it?

Yeah, I think we've hit on some of the functions of it. There's a lot of words here. I think this one might almost be easier to show than to, to run through here. But ultimately I mentioned like the first line there. I mentioned that earlier, like this.

Right.

The proof of, hey, the champion is worth it. And there's a question that we got about like, the ROI of this is the team has to show up as, like, we need to be improving team health, productivity and profitability. And good champions are part of delivering on that. Accountability is like the number, probably the number one word tied to this. And that's a combination of the things that we've talked about, staying on top of what's happening. The monitor piece, enabling the team with training, reminding and enforcing the rules that we've got. And then I think the data piece is huge here. So what's the. There's a reactive and a proactive component to the cookup champion role. And the, the proactive piece here is a. I'm paying attention to the data. I know what the data is saying about how long it takes us to deliver, which clients or projects are more profitable and less profitable, which teams are more profitable or less profitable, how we ought to be assigning work. And that's all data that either that person is executing on if they've got that kind of influence in the organization, or they're giving to the folks who do have that kind of influence to make better decisions around how they scope, price and deliver on work.

Yeah. So as I was learning about this role myself, kind of immersing myself in the Zenpilot system. This is one thing that surprised me a little bit. I knew the Champion against Surface level as somebody who primarily maintains compliance. You know, they're the person that makes sure that everybody's updating their tasks in ClickUp, tracking their time in ClickUp, using templates, correctly using templates at all. If it's repeatable work, then it should be templatized. What I was surprised by, though, is this data component that you mentioned. It goes further beyond that. It goes into again, the weekly and monthly and quarterly rituals of. Here's how our productivity has been trending. It's been up, it's been down for certain team members, some might need more support than others in their season of productivity, so to speak. And then even further, because this also ties in my mind to the question of roi. This is not just the person that you're tasking with keeping people compliant and you've got clean data in the system. They're also looking at the data themselves. The Champion is looking at data and can go as far as to be making suggestions of. It seems like we're lacking some copywriter capacity. We should probably look at adding another copywriter because. And the Champion made sure that the data is clean and reliable. It looks like our copywriter capacity is going to run out the fastest relative to our designer capacity, web development capacity, and that can be huge in terms of intel to drive business decisions. So that's part of what I learned here that surprised me and I think it's an additional component here. There's a question here. Interested to learn how you compile the quarterly ClickUp performance trends Got the eye candy coming up, so let's try and move closer towards that first. I had one more thing to show you to kind of make it more tangible, what the ClickUp Champion does. So you can imagine this is about the compliance piece. We're kind of moving further to that Surface level. But one thing that the Champion might do day to day is to check in with your team members. And you might be wondering, especially if you're a ClickUp champion yourself, how do you talk to the team about what they're doing? So the first message that you send them in terms of supporting them through learning how to be compliant is, I noticed you didn't track your time here. Can I help show you how to do that? But what was interesting to me is if that person continues to struggle or if it's somebody that, for example, you already had a one on One call with and you thought the issue was properly explained and there's still issues. There's a different kind of language that you can use. I know that you know how to do this. You know why it's so important for our team and this is our standard. Is there any reason you can't fully track time moving forward? So the language kind of changes when you're the ClickUp champion, it is really important to make these habits consistent and you kind of imprint that on the team. Gray, can you talk to what happens if you're talking about a particular team member, maybe not even struggling, but kind of resisting in terms of following the project management system here, what happens after messages like the first one, after messages like the second one? What are the next steps there?

This all goes back to expectations and is this really a standard or not a standard? Don't call things standards or policies if you're not willing to. I think think the, the biggest test of a policy is like are you willing to lose money over sticking to that or not? Are you willing to, to lose somebody over them not living up to the standard that you have around time tracking or if it's not in click if it didn't happen or whatever. So if yes, then for sure make that a standard and expectation. And that means then you're having the conversation with folks and you're probably, you know, like we run on eos. So EOS has this, you know, thing, not uncommon. It's not like an EOS first policy. But an EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system. It's a framework for running a business. It's not a, not a software tool. It kind of sounds like a software tool, but the three strike rule. So, you know, hey, our first meeting, we're clearly sharing. Here's hey, you, you didn't track your time. Here's three specific instances of where you didn't track your time. Here's where we corrected and told you whatever and this is a standard that we have. We've shared why it's important if that, you know, if that's unclear, let me know. I'm happy to clear it up for you. But you continuing to choose to not track your time is you choosing not to work here. And so that's ultimately where this goes, is that's a very clear, you know, then, hey, we're going to meet again in 30 days and we're going to look at what the data looks like together. And 80% of the time everything's good after 30 days. People just need to know how important is this actually? Is this just like a nice to have thing? Yeah, I know you told me to track my time. Like I've worked places before and they told me to track my time. And sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't, and it wasn't a big deal. Sometimes people just need the clarity again of, oh, this actually matters. I get it now, okay. I'm taking this at another, with another level of gravity and other times it's just not the fit for them. And ultimately, you know, you get through a 30 day period, it's still an issue. This is the, you know, hey, you're on your last strike now, this is your second strike and you continuing to choose not to do this, continuing to choose not to work here. And then, you know, ultimately if they don't want to do it, then there's going to be a parting of ways.

Yeah. To me, this comes back to like the main theme of gray McKenzie in my mind. And I know that you write about this on your LinkedIn quite a bit. Clarity is kindness. It's kindness in the sense that it makes it really clear what's acceptable, not acceptable, what the consequences are going to be. For example, for not being compliant. But also in the moment, it might not be the easiest thing to do. I imagine some people listening to this might be thinking, oh, that's a really hard conversation to have. That's a really hard stance to have. But if you want the roi, if you want the outcome, if you want the clarity, then for, for certain individuals, this is what's going to be needed. This is how far it goes and how much work you have to do here to actually make compliance happen. So I'm glad we discussed this a little bit. But now that was a perfect segue. That was nice, but now, but anyway, I teased this before and I think this is part of the brunt of the presentation and I want to leave ample time for it. So let's talk about, you know, dive in, dive into the details even more here. Let's talk about the four main rituals of the ClickUp Champion. Daily, weekly, monthly and Quarterly. Gray is wrestling the screen. Share from me as we speak, we'll be presenting that mirror board so you can see some of, you know, some of the checklists, some of the views here. And I'm going to stop talking at this point. You've got the goods here, Gray. So tell us about it.

Yeah, so I'm going to zoom out for a second. So there's these four main things that I've found work best for most teams, these four main frequencies and specific rituals that we're running through. So as you mentioned, the daily spot check, the weekly roundup, monthly review and quarterly analysis are those four things. The click of Champion is involved in all four of those habits. And I'm going to break this into kind of proactive and reactive. And this is not the only thing that a ClickUp Champion does. So this is a lot of the like the day to day checking and accountability. The hard part here is the conversation and escalation of hey, how do I, how do I solve, you know, the, the folks who are challenging to comply with. But when I'm looking at these four things, I kind of break daily and weekly into the category of activity based. I'm really focused on the activity. Are we getting the right inputs into the system? I'm not going to make any big assumptions that we ought to be doing this way differently than we're doing it today off of what I happen to see on Monday and Tuesday this week. And so I'm really focused on the activity. Are we getting the right stuff in? When I'm looking at monthly and quarterly, I'm really focused on what are the results coming from that and what decisions should we be making differently because of this. So let's zoom in to the daily spot check. If you've got questions, 30 questions in the chat here. But daily spot check and there are teams where this is a three minute check. There's teams where this average is out to a 30 minute check every day. But this is either end of the workday or beginning of the next day. Either way I'm looking at and you'll see some of the stuff here. So our methodology that probably 90% of our clients use, that we personally use here at Zen Pilot is a due date driven methodology. And we're huge on every single task has an assignee and a due date because we track time. There's also estimated time. All those things have to be true on each task. So in any system it doesn't matter what methodology you have, there's some way for some tasks to fall through the system and we just need to know what those are and solve for that. So we'll look at, you know, what tasks are overdue. These didn't get done, they didn't follow the system. Is there anything that got added to the system? This is in ClickUp. But we, it didn't get assigned out. Did something get assigned out? But it didn't get a due date. And so in that case it's going to be missed in the system or it has the potential to be missed. Are people actually tracking time? We'll run through some other things about like who's actually seeing it. And the reason that can be very fast is it's super easy to build dashboards to grab whatever you want. So the ClickUp champion, like the daily spot check dashboard, has each of those things. What are the overdue tasks and how are those broken out? And here's an example of how we can go and see who's got overdue tasks and what should these look like, but then it'll pull in. Hey, what tasks are built out that are unassigned, where tasks that don't have a due date and so you're able to quickly kind of process through those. If I'm doing this, you know, daily spot check, I'm going to be clicking into any of those issues, any of those tasks that, oh, these are overdue. And I'm just making sure that those are being managed the right way, in the right way. Sounds nebulous, but hey, something's overdue. Obviously you can't go back and do it in the past. That should move to the next available date that can get done. Anybody impacted? Back to the leave a trail expectation. Anybody impacted, there's a comment mentioning those people, they're tagged and there's an explanation of hey, here's where this is and here's why I need to move it. If you're blocked, you know we're reaching out to those folks. So that's what the daily spot check looks like. The weekly roundup is kind of a summary of this. So here's the summary data and I'll, I'll share a little bit more about what this looks like. And this is the kind of high level, very quick bullet points that go to typically the leadership team. And this might be, hey, Kuba. I'm not Kuba's direct manager and so I need to go to Cuba's direct manager and say, as you can see, Kuba has not tracked time on 30% of his tasks and this has happened over the whole week. I've tried to coach him and it's not happening. Like, can you help me make sure that he understands how important this is for that to happen? So that is the weekly roundup. I'm going to share a quick other. So we've got this tool. This is like a. This is not in ClickUp. This is a Zen pilot tool that we've built that pulls in a bunch of performance metrics over a specific week or period of time. And we're kind of breaking those down into, hey, what got planned for the week, what didn't get started, what's in progress, what got completed. And then we've got some ratios or some scores here that are helpful. We could nerd out the entire time on what the heck does velocity or compliance mean and what is the score. But what we're trying to build is we're trying to build a system where we get better and better each week at planning work accurately for that week and actually completing what we planned over the course of that week. And if we look at, hey, what does that, what does a roundup look like? You know, that could be a quick update that goes in whatever, whatever platform. Most people will see it. As we zoom out to a higher, like a higher level, and we're talking about monthly and quarterly, here's where we're really looking at, like, what fundamental changes do we need to make from a resourcing perspective? Are there, you know, are we majorly overstaffed or understaffed? And there's things that need to change. Do we need to make changes to scoping? Because we keep going above. We had this shape of the project all planned and in the system at the beginning. And what we found out is the shape of that project changed a lot. We're not doing a good job of scoping, and so we keep going over budget or we're going over time in terms of getting that stuff done. So do we need to make changes to project scoping? If so, if we're going way over budget, then do we need to make changes to pricing or do we need to fill that gap on the efficiency side of how we deliver it? Somehow we've got to earn our revenue profitably. And so what's the right way to do that? And when we get into quarterly basis for most teams, like we're, we're really starting to dial more into. And there's probably a better example would be maybe this one here, like, what's the profitability of client on a client basis, a month by month or profitability, you know, service line by service line or work category by. By work category. And so, and there's a whole bunch of different ways to solve for how do we get that data out of the system? You know, there's folks who run all kinds of exports out of ClickUp. We've built a tool called Zenpilot reports that lets us get out looking for profitability and utilization reporting. Other folks will use plugins to go Build this. So if anyone's got questions on any of that, and you're wondering, like, oh, how do I get these kinds of dashboards reach out to us and to walk through, what's the right solution in your situation? But, but that's the type of stuff that I'm looking at on a quarterly basis. So we're really looking on a monthly and quarterly basis at the higher level, like, hey, what changes ought we to make? And we're going to prior, you know, almost always we're prioritizing. Like, if we just talk about clients for a second, this profile of client, we're dialing in what's our sweet spot? And, you know, that's then being relayed back to our growth team. And hey, here's who we're going after. And this client we're not profitable on at all. And there's, you know, can we redeem that or not? If not, let's figure out how we, you know, end that unprofitable relationship with a client. If we're looking at service lines. So we're talking about, hey, when we do website projects versus when we do SEO engagements, you know, we're constantly way more profitable on these website projects than on our SEO work. Why is that? And is that a. Like, usually there's at least one or two specific processes that we can point to every single quarter and say, hey, this needs to be improved. And now we're back into the process component of the three keys and we're focused on, okay, how would we figure out how to do this better, faster, can we produce the same results or better results in less time? And that's a combination of a bunch of different possibilities for what that might look like to get there. But that's the type of stuff that is happening in the monthly and quarterly components. So, Kuba, there's a lot, like, we could nerd out on a ton of this stuff and go into more specific examples. But anything right away that you would add to that, from an overview of what are these four key habits that a ClickUp champion does.

One tactical thing I just wanted to mention because the questions popped up in the chat, not the open chat, but for, for panelists, is if you're curious about these dashboards, particularly the ones on the bottom, that's the Zen Pilot profitability reporting product. So that's built on top of your zenpilot implementation. You work with our team and you can get to, oh, what a lovely, lovely view of that. So if you want to see profitability per service line, per team per client that can all be broken down. This is built on top of ClickUp data, but this is not I ClickUp native dashboard. You can see it's in Power Bi. So I dropped a link in the Did I drop a link in the chat? I'll drop a separate link in the chat about that in just a moment. But the easiest way to get this for your team is basically to book a poll with us. And to your question, Gray, I just thought we might look for a moment at the remaining visuals there. There's one of my favorite visuals is in there about the types of tasks in the system. Can you zoom in on that one and just briefly explain the philosophy behind what is the gold zone, why is it called the gold zone and what other types of tasks have we got here? Because we got a little bit of spare time here. So let's nerd out about that for a bit and then see if we have any other questions.

Sure. I think there's a breakdown. Different organizations are going to have different levels of what did you know going into a week was going to be on your plate? So what was already planned versus what was not planned? Like in my personal experience way back in the day we were running these inbound marketing retainers at the first agency that I built and we basically had a plan going into each quarter that almost laid out like here's exactly what we're going to be producing and we're following these same templates to do it. And we would had we had an extremely high percentage of tasks that could be pre planned for an entire quarter coming out. We work with a lot of email marketing firms and boy in that world there's a good amount of information that can often be pre planned and then you've got the unplanned stuff. And so we'll see a lot of like media buying ad agencies, folks like that, where hey, depending on how an ad is running, like I might have to do, you know, 10 new versions of it this week or I might not have to touch this thing for a month because it's printing money. So there's some element or some ratio in your organization of how much work comes planned versus what is unplanned. Either way, we're trying to figure out how to complete stuff and complete it on schedule, you know, as much as possible. So this is basically just kind of a quick flowchart or overview that helps inform what we're doing from our performance ratio. So there's probably a little bit more to get into than we've Got time here, but just basically breaking down, like, what work is done, what work's not done? You know, where are we in terms of, in terms of, hey, have we made any progress on it or not? And then obviously we're looking to maximize what actually got completed each specific week. And so there's a, a bunch more we could dig into there, but I'll pause that there and we can move to Q and A if you want. Kuba?

Yeah, I'm looking at the Q and A. We have one question in there. I would say, Jess, you've got quite complex questions and they're a little bit out of scope for today's session. Other than that, there was a question about sharing the Miro board and we don't have a set policy yet whether we do share these Miro boards, but if anybody wants that, you can DM me on LinkedIn, send me an email. I shared my email in the chat and I'll see what I can do about that. I actually wanted to. Okay, we're five minutes out from the, from the end of the session, so I will wait to see if other questions come in. Other than that, I had one question of my own, actually, so we can handle that one and tie a bow on this. My question was, is the ClickUp Champion role one in which there's. Would you say there's like a growth trajectory in the role? Because I think, how to phrase the question, that's a lot for the ClickUp Champion to do and a lot of complexity to handle, and I wonder if you would structure it in levels of a beginner. ClickUp Champion is going to handle this well, but maybe grow into some of these other elements of the system. What would you say?

Yeah, that's a great question. There is. So the first thing I'd say is a founder sitting in that seat is almost always a mistake, just because daily spot check will not happen. At some, at some point in time, though, you know, I'm, I'm the same way. Like I would go look at whatever shiny object and forget about it for three days and then come back to it for a couple days and then, you know, I'm, I'm as guilty of that as anyone else. But there are pros and cons to having. Like I've seen terrific ClickUp champions who are directors of operation, head of client services, head of client success, and I've seen terrific ClickUp Champions who are admin assistants, project, like entry level project managers, but you're making trade offs. Typically, the more seniority, like farther along career wise that head of client services that is more their time is more expensive to go towards running this daily spot check and analyzing hey, what tasks are wherever. The flip side is they've got a lot more context for oh, this task accidentally got unassigned like I just need to reassign it to Eric. You know, this doesn't have a due date, but I know that that should go out next Friday. I don't need to ask anybody. I can just do it so I don't have to go back to who created the task and I can create some efficiency there. And so there's some trade offs on that front. So sometimes that click of champions already in a pretty high level position and it's gearing up, up well, you know, they're either thriving that position or gearing them up well to, to lead a firm someday. I'd say almost everybody who's in that situation. There's not a better training for somebody who's coming in as a project manager or they're in a, you know, in some firms this has even been an account manager who wants to have a holistic scope of like what is all the work that we're doing and all the context around how we run a firm and understanding the math of the business that we're running. So you know, profitability by. I'm, I'm. We're using all these examples of service based businesses like profitability, service and clients. And so if that's the space that you're in and that's not, you know, there's, there's plenty of teams who are in tech or manufacturing or in something else where that same language, those same things are not what we're looking for and we're focused more on the activity piece. And there's, there's other stuff that we're reporting on from a results perspective or. Well, yeah, we could, we could spend a whole nother webinar just on hey, what are some of the things we've been measuring in those situations. But right there's, there's not a better way to equip somebody who came into an organization than understanding what these numbers mean, why these are important and how we ultimately get to hey, what's the profitability of this? And I think to like, I think Jess's question is probably more technical than what we want to get to, but we had a couple different questions or comments around the same thing. Like from a profitability perspective, as we're making changes from a process perspective, all this boils down to did we have time tracking data before and then what are the results when we run it now with our new process and that's where we get to highlight what the time saving looks like. So it sometimes is hard if you're in I think what Jess's seat is to say here's the, here's the profitability or here's the productivity gains that we made if you don't have any before data that goes back to the time study and motion study stuff that we talked about earlier. But yeah, I think that there is a ton of growth that can come and that's a frequent trend with clients who we've had especially for multiple years we're working with where the person who was their ClickUp champion originally, often a project manager moves into leading client services and graduates out of that role and creates a, you know, then creates the vacuum of here's the next person to train up and have do that.

That's excellent. So if you're a ClickUp champion listening to this or thinking of becoming one, you can think of this as the trajectory this puts you on. So that's perfect. And I love this note to end on. I'm not seeing any additional questions and I think people are moving on to their other calls of the day. So I, I think we'll call it there. We talked about some of the difficulty involved in this, in building this and running this and certainly we know about the challenge here. So we talked about the difficult. If you want to take the easy route and hit the easy button on all of this, then we do recommend you to grab a call with us. Senmpile.com call let's chat about your project management and we'll help you involve a ClickUp champion and build the project management system that will get you more productive product and profitable and build a healthier team. But that's it for today. Thank you everyone so much for joining us here today. This was a great group, quite active. Really enjoyed our time here today. So don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter too. Zenpilot.com Newsletter you'll get informed about our upcoming events. We're spinning some up. Not all of them are going to be in house Zenpilot events so you'll hear about those in a while. Okay, the chat is coming alive with thank yous and thanks for the session. Super, super nice. All right, that's it from me. Gray. Any last thoughts or shall I hit the button?

No. Thank you everybody. Appreciate your time today. This is fun, fun to dig into this topic.

Oh and I should probably say also, thank you, Gray, so, so much for joining us here. Okay, so I'll do the standoff. I've been working on it. It's not perfect yet, but thank you, everyone, so, so, so much for joining us here today. That's all, folks, and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. I'm hitting the button as soon as I can find it. See you next time.