Why ClickUp is the Fastest Growing Project Management Tool for Digital Agencies

Welcome to why ClickUp is the fastest growing PM tool for Digital agencies. We're going to go through a lot to cover. So just to give you kind of a quick overview of what we're going to tackle here in this webinar, I'm going to spend a little bit of time on ClickUp versus the competition. To start, we're going to dive into the nine key areas of ClickUp that I think agencies ought to use and we're also going to talk openly about where ClickUp is the right fit for an agency and also where we think it's probably not the right fit for an agency. What the you need to be realistic about what tools we're hiring. So this is not a, we don't get paid by ClickUp to do that, do this. This is the business that we run is around helping agencies optimize for success. And I'll tell you a little bit about our background. So we are not, we're not just ClickUp folks. We're in the business of getting Agencies Ops results. So that said, let's go ahead and get started here. We'll dig deep into the platform as we go. I am Gray MacKenzie. I'm one of the co founders here at Zenpilot, Andrew. Andrew is my co founder. We're the SEAL Team 6 or the special Forces crew for Agency Ops and We're one of ClickUp's premier implementation partners. We're the largest implementation partner right now for ClickUp. We've worked with over 2,000 agencies and the background or the backstory to this was we actually Andrew and I co founded a startup called Do Inbound and we built a project management tool explicitly for inbound agencies. Back in 2013 when we were running our own agency, Guavabox built that scale it to a little over 500 agencies and we were doing a ton of agency coaching along the way. We found out that the tool was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the systems and processes that agencies needed to scale. So we had a decision to make back in 2017, early 2018, where we're going to be a coaching and training company which got the right results but was way less sexy, or we were going to be a software company and compete with the big boys in the project management space. And we decided to optimize for what we were trying to solve the whole time, which was the agency operations challenges, the challenge of trying to scale a services business in the digital marketing space. And so we went through 71 different PM tools over six months. We wound up choosing ClickUp as the tool to implement and we thought there was a lot of, a lot of value in specializing in one specific industry and area that we knew inside and out and then one specific tool. So we could both have kind of the high level. Here's the value of the high level systems and processes down to the granular. How do you actually execute on that? So that's our quick background. And with that said, I want to jump right into ClickUp versus the competition here and talk through what the different players are in the space. So I pulled a slide here. I pulled a handful of different things, but what we see all the time and actually when we went through the tools back in, we've made our final decision in 2018. ClickUp was the one that obviously we chose to partner with. Asana was number two. Teamwork was number three. All the rest of the big players Monday, Reich, Trello, Basecamp, you know, all those names were tossed around. Notion was relatively early on. But this is a slide from G2 Crowd, which is one of the two main review sites here in the US and this is looking at the momentum leaders in the PM space. So ClickUp is just kind of blown up. They raised no money until the summer of 2020. So a year ago they raised $35 million. Then in December they raised another $100 million at a billion dollar valuation. And they're growing really quickly, but they're growing in the agency space at an even faster rate. And there's a few different markets that they're growing very quickly and there's a handful of distinct reasons for them for that happening. You can see there's a handful of other players. We've got Asana, Monday, Airtable and Notion. We bump into Trello we don't see super often in the agency space depending on team size. Very popular with early stage agencies as larger teams grow. Typically, some of the two of the most common ones that we see agencies outgrow are Trello and Basecamp because they both struggle with high level visibility. And then you've got other platforms like a teamwork and so we'll talk through and I'm going to weave a lot of that into what we're jumping through in ClickUp here today. Cool. So as we dig into ClickUp, I'm just going to give you a super high level overview of what we're going to dive into and then we're going to go real deep and specific. Throw your questions in the Q and A pane and we'll get to those. We've got Time at the end here jump through all the questions and answers. So we're going to talk through Clickups hierarchy why it is preferable as an agency versus tools like Asana, Basecamp and Trello. Talk through views for each role folks using Monday often about Big Challenge with kind of the high level overview of where things stand and so we'll talk about some of the differences and distinctions between those different tools. A lot of the project management specific tools. So this is where notion is absolutely awesome for docs and you've got all these blocks that are super flexible but it's missing a lot of the project management tools. And a tool like Airtable suffers from the same thing where it's not built fundamentally as a project management tool, but they're awesome for database management. And so ClickUp kind of blends those two things together and we'll talk through what those specific features look like and how agencies are leveraging those. I'm going to show you actual examples in all this stuff. We'll walk through what that enables in terms of resource management, workload allocation, the dashboards and reporting. So Teamwork is one of my favorite platforms outside of ClickUp, but where it struggles for a lot of users outside of the UI and UX and kind of the personal preferences of what the tool. ClickUp is definitely a more modern interface for teams and easier to use but flexibility in terms of dashboards and reporting. We'll look at your agency's account dashboard. This is something you can take and build really in most platforms you could build out. But why this is so key and how we do it specifically in ClickUp talk through the templating. This is there's a lot of variants and tools around templating. This is one of the things that we did get right with our software back in the day and it's been hard to find and I think there's a lot of room still in the space for improvement. Talk through some of the native automations and what that empowers and then how to work with guests. So agencies all need to work with specific other users, whether that's contractors or clients, and we'll dig into each of those pieces. Cool. So that said, I'm going to jump right into the ClickUp interface here and you can see I'm just going to give you the super quick orientation. Left hand side is our main menu. Top side I've got a bunch of favorites pinned and there's some items specific to the view that I'm in right now. But you can see I've got all of my work. The way that the work is broken down and the hierarchy is demonstrated and displayed on the left hand side here. So we break every agency into three main pieces. This works super well with ClickUp's spaces concept. There's growth, which is your client acquisition, you know, your marketing, your sales, business development, delivery, which is just our vernacular for client services. What needs to happen to deliver work for each client and then operations is all your backend people, culture, hr, legal, finance type of stuff. And so those are all broken down and then you can see we've got a CRM and a process library and we'll get to those. But those are not. We've got these three core areas of the business, two additional spaces, and that makes up the five core spaces that we build in most agency implementations. So I'm going to go into inside of these spaces we then have this layer that's folders. So we've got a folder in this case for each client and depending on what services they're receiving, we've then got a list for each one of those services. Whether it's branding and design or website redesign or email marketing or paid social or SEO, all of those are built out. And so what we have here is we've got three layers of hierarchy. Where most other platforms, if you're using an Asana, you've got projects and then you've got tasks and subtasks. If you're using a Basecamp or a Trello, you're kind of in the same place where you've got a board and then you've got a card and then you got tasks and subtasks. We get a couple extra layers of hierarchy which works super well for a service based business like an agency where you've got a client and inside that client you may have specific projects or service lines that need to be reported on. And we'll talk when we get into the actual, the next levels in the, in the hierarchy about why that's important and how that's helpful. So then we've got each of these kind of parent tasks will equate to a deliverable, something that we're producing for a client, a blog post or we need to get them onboarded, or our monthly reporting meeting or you know, a phase or a phase or a milestone in a website project. Inside of each of these deliverables then we've got a subtask. And our rule of thumb for any subtask is one person, one sitting. We want an individually assigned and owned piece of the process. So here's all the different steps that need to happen to complete client onboarding down through the kickoff call. Make sure we've got everything set up correctly and we've got the right access to tools. And then inside of that, the last level of detail here becomes our checklist and our integrated process where we're giving the team member who's responsible for doing this not only the assignment, but what specifically they need to do. So we're taking anybody who's got a base level of competency in that role and they can go through and complete it. So that's the hierarchy all the way from at a high level, these spaces, areas, components of the agency, down to clients, down to service lines, down to deliverables tasks, and then the checklist for how to do each of those pieces. That hierarchy has been really helpful because most of the features, once you get into a subtask, there's a lot of similarities in different PM tools. Every tool has to integrate with Google Drive and Dropbox and Box and whatever the file storage things are. Every tool has to either have integrated time tracking or native time tracking or integrations with other parties. There has to be a due date and an assignee clicked up, has dependencies and some of these things that we'll talk about here in a moment. But all of this information rolls uphill. So If I track 10 minutes here on this specific task, that's then going to roll uphill, where my time tracked has now been added to each of the other items that I have, and those will accumulate at the parent task level, which will roll up the list level up to the client level, and so on and so forth. Same thing. If I'm in a list here for client onboarding. If I wanted to see this at a client level, I can go see it and create all these different views at a specific client level. So that hierarchy becomes really helpful as you climb up. You know, I want to see across all clients what's going on, or across the entire agency, or just what's going on in operations, or just what's going on for this group of clients. I can go create those views for each of those pieces. So that's number one is ClickUp's hierarchy. And that blends seamlessly into the views, which is the real power of ClickUp, which is you can take any underlying data here and you can visualize it and produce it for the right person at the right time in the right way. So if you are an engineer and you'd like to see everything on board View and move your cards through. Because you're used to coming from Trello or from Jira and moving things through the process, you can take all the same underlying data, you can figure out how you want to filter it and say, I just want to see my specific work or I want to grab whatever it is, I want to group it differently, I want to show different items on each of these cards, I want to show pictures or I want to have whatever. I can do that and I'm using the same workflow. However, I want to see it. So if I'm a list type of person, I can see it here. If I'm a board type of person, I can see it there. If I like to see it on a calendar or in Gantt view, I can go grab it and I can see the data in any place. And then the coolest part is inside of any of these views, we can take any of these properties and we can hide them or show them or run calculations on them as we're moving. So if you're used to using something like Monday, this pairs really well with what you might be used to from a Monday in terms of the database features of being able to run calculations on different items and have different properties. If you're coming from a tool like Basecamp or Trello, this is going to be a little bit more foreign. And so I'll just show you a couple actual examples where we'll take client onboarding as an example. Here's what it would look like when we're live, where we showed the assignee, we want to show the due date, how much time's estimated for it, how much time has actually been tracked to it, any comments that have happened on this, or leave comments directly from here, how long it's been in the specific status that it's in. So I could take that. But at the same time, if I'm building out my templates, I don't actually know who's the assignee yet. I don't. Time tracking's irrelevant and so I've taken and we've hidden those properties. Most of the properties that we had before, we don't need comments there. But now we've added in roles and we'll talk more about how we use automations to pull things together later. So that's the view when we're in individual list views and then if we roll up, I'm going to go up to the everything level for a second. So now we're looking down, if you can imagine this from the top down across all spaces, folders, lists, tasks, et cetera. And now I've got a view here. It's filtered down for just me. It's filtered down to specific locations, filtered down to tasks that have a due date. And I could add another filter here to say I don't want to look at things where I'm blocked. I don't want to see anything using dependencies, which we'll get to in a second where I, where I can't use it, but I don't have it set up in this example. And now you can give every individual contributor on your team the ability to have and really everybody the ability to see what's all my work for the day outlined. It's grouped by due date, shows the context and it's got the step by step process. What I need to complete directly inside of this. I can now give them that list with how long it's expected to take and I can go in to start my day and say, okay, here's what's on my plate, here's what I'm cleared to do. Get three hours worth of work, that's great, I can work ahead or I can go help somebody else. And they get a lot of clarity in terms of what they need to do. But from a management level you create the same view and say, hey, I just want to see this for my specific team. So I want to look at what does Brandon have on his plate today or what is one specific person. If I set the assigning differently, we'll just flip over here to Brandon, what's on Brandon's plate, Where does he have or group this to have multiple people shown here. If I want to look at it across the calendar, see everything that's going out across the agency or this is the next piece in here, which is the workload view, which kind of ties in here as well, which is what do people have on their plate and where are they open? So ClickUp's got another view called box view, which is really helpful to see kind of the overall load that people may have. And we can sort it in different ways. We can see what people have on their plate. I'm just going to pull this over to time estimates for a second. So now I can see over the next whatever period of time Brandon has, depending on what filters I have, Brandon has 15 hours of work done. But that's not that helpful if those 15 hours are all due today. So a view like workload, which breaks it down and shows me on a day by day basis what's on someone's plate makes it really easy to see who's got some capacity and can help out. And where can I move things up? Where do I need to move things back as I'm building things through? Cool. So we've covered a bunch of stuff with views, and we'll get into a couple more examples when we get down into the CRM side as well. But the two views I'd like to leave you with to be aware of are kind of a list view when you're live, if you're already a ClickUp user, having kind of standardizing each of these views across the across the entire setup and then a separate set of ideas for a template view where we're then going to use these delivery roles or custom fields for different items to go through and use in automations as we move a little bit farther down the road. This next piece, which is how ClickUp has integrated time tracking dependencies and custom fields to ClickUp. If we just take ClickUp versus Asana as an example, you can get all three of these. Well, you can get dependencies and custom fields in Asana. They don't have a time tracking tool, but you can build an integration with harvest and for $10 a month per user, you can have Harvest or sign up for an Everhour or Toggle or something and plug those in. And if you upgrade the clickups or Asana's kind of premium plan at $30 a month per user, you can get dependencies and custom fields and some of the automation stuff as well. So a lot of other platforms have this type of tool. What's nice about ClickUp is it's all integrated. So I'll pull up like we'll jump over to SEO for a second. Just say we're running SEO questionnaire, we're setting them the template. What's really nice about this is we can hook up dependencies between different items and we can say, here's what this specific task is blocking, or this specific task is waiting on something else. What that allows you to do is then trigger notifications when something gets done. It may not be due for three more days, but we notify a team member, hey, this is open. You can now get started on it. There's some cool things you can do with dependencies where you can automatically reschedule things if you've got dependent tasks and this gets bumped. This is super common in the agency world. The client says it's actually not as important as I thought it was. Let's bump that back a week or I can't get you that feedback today. Let's bump it back two days or whatever. Go through and and move the date of one subtask here and with an option and ClickUp you can have all the rest of them sequentially Also reorder their due dates as well. So dependencies built in natively are super helpful. Time tracking and time estimations are also super nice to have directly related to the tasks themselves. So it's really clear how long is this supposed to take me. I always tell teams, don't stress about what the estimate says, get the job done right, get it done well and over a period of time. If it's something you do frequently, you might be able to update this every month or three months. And if it's something that you need more larger sample size to reorder your priorities on, you might look at that every six months to update your time estimates. But where we're setting a target and we're intentionally tracking our time to make sure that we've got some visibility into where we're going. And if you do that all correctly with that gives you is it gives you the ability in this specific setup to see if we look back over time, what's our profitability for clients along or profitability as an agency along three main vectors which are profitability by each client, profitability by each specific service line, and profitability by each team member. And all three of those are important to optimize as you're building and scaling out a profitable agency. Custom fields I mentioned the role custom field. There are a lot of different custom fields. We're going to look at one here in just a moment on the account dashboard when we get there. From a resource management perspective, there's a couple different tools that we use. The workload view is one. We use some external cost tracking in many cases, especially if teams are working with contractors, we can pull into that for the sake of time. I'm going to skip by that one for now and I'm going to go straight to dashboards and unlimited reporting. But if anyone's interested, just drop it in the chat and we can come back to some of the external cost tracking as well here during Q and A. So we're generating all this data, we're building out all kinds of different work and this is obviously the goal of ClickUp of any PM tool is to be your single source of truth for where your agency lives and works. And we know, hey, did you put that in email? Do you put that in drive? Do you put that In Excel. Did you put that in Docs? Do you put that in Slack? Where did that go? We're trying to eliminate all of that and build it all natively into ClickUp. So dashboards and I showed you some of the views at everything level. But dashboards are super helpful. Whether it's internally trying to see, you know, how do we perform. It's purely metrics around internal, like what activity got done, where do things stand right now? I'm going to show you all an example real quickly. This is both a pro and con of ClickUp. When you go into ClickUp and you build a new dashboard, you wind up with a blank slate. You're kind of starting from scratch. And it's super cool because you can customize and build whatever type of report you want to build inside ClickUp. The downside is a blank canvas means that you've got to figure out first what do I actually want to visualize and then do I have the right setup to build it all. So that's part of the value that we bring to our clients when we're working with them, is we lead them through, hey, here's what you should be optimizing for. Tell us what goals you have and then here's the metrics that we would look at based on our experience and then run through. Okay, here's how to design the system to get that and then how to build the dashboards to visualize that data so you can build that all. And I'm going to show you a couple examples of what we use with agencies over and over. One is this internal Qlik Completer board that I just showed you. It's just making sure that everyone's running along. We use this for our daily spot checks in ClickUp. We'll often have kind of an overview for each client, what may need to happen, what folks should be optimizing for. And so we're looking at things like, hey, how are we coming along on progress? What are we overdue on, what's been happening, how much time is estimated versus tracked, all those types of tasks. In a few cases, there will be a client facing dashboard. Really depends on the agency type, how popular this is. But some folks will want to share quite a bit with clients. Some folks want them to stay out of their ClickUp. That's a longer conversation to get into. Skip over some of the. I'll pull this up just as an example, but some teams will use a personal dashboard. Some teams will just use a view but get a quick overview. So you may want this if you're managing a small team, you may want this as a dashboard for your direct reports. It'll often be an estimated versus actual. So this is where we're starting to get into time as a proxy for profitability on a client by client basis, team member by team member basis, any of those things. And there's a handful of other dashboards that will commonly run through, but those are a few of the most frequent ones. I think the thing to keep in mind with any tool that you're hiring to help out from a project management perspective is you need to set the targets. You need to understand what you're trying to optimize for, rather than getting in and starting to play with buckets. We hear a lot of frustration from agencies who feel like they can't get the metrics out of ClickUp that they want or can't get the metrics out of their current tool. And often there's a the tool is kind of a small component. It's generally what tool, what metrics should we actually be looking for and optimizing for? And then what's the best way to get that back out of your project management infrastructure? ClickUp's got a whole bunch of different reporting features, and for most items, if you want to measure it, there's a way to get it out of ClickUp. I'm going to take you to a different we call this an account dashboard, but this is not truly a dashboard. So now we're going to look briefly at the CRM side of things and this is where we measure. And I'd be curious to know if you have this in your portal right now, or in your whatever PM tool you're using, or even if it's in a Google sheet. Drop in the chat. Let me know if you have this built already or haven't built it yet. But we've basically got. We're only using this in this example for once, once a contact has become a customer. And so we've got an actual CRM built out here where we're building relationships between deals, company records and contact records. But I'm going to focus exclusively here on the deal side of things. We get each of these projects that are going on, each of these clients are a specific deal. We've got the status, whether they're onboarding, active or offboarding, who the account manager, the lead strategist leading the project is. I'll walk through the due date in just a second, what services they purchased, the health of that account. This is a score that gets Standardized and measured consistently. We use an integration internally to use a tool called Retently which measures our NPS and that gets pushed through to help calibrate. If I saw an NPS score that was a 10 for Webflow or for HubSpot here, but they're actually a 2 from our internal health score. Something's probably a little bit off. And so what's the disconnect there? What the target might be, where they stand from a billing perspective, start date, end date, who's taking point on what from a client services perspective, revenue. We'll track all this stuff and these are all custom fields that are put together. But once these are built out, what becomes really cool about any of this is then we can create different views to see if I wanted to see just our leads that weren't yet customers. If I wanted to track that, we'll have deals or deal boards. I want to see clients who've churned. I could go grab clients who have churned and calculate and quantify what's the primary reason that they churned from the agency. And we want to track that and look at that over time to figure out what do we need to be improving. We'll look at things like length. Obviously, as an agency, you've got a couple main triggers for how profitable you are, how much ultimate. You know what the lifetime value of an account actually is. You've got what's the amount they actually pay you. So if there's a way to create upsells or increase your value to the client and increase the value that you then capture in return, that's one way. And then the other way for any agency that operates on retainers or with reoccurring revenue, is to influence the length that they're with you. So that retention rate becomes really important. The account dashboard has been one of the tools that we use consistently with agencies to help optimize for that. So we've got clients here who are on a weekly meeting. We'll set up a calendar view. I'll show you a quick example of creating a view here. We'll just call this view Client Meetings. We'll do a calendar and we're going to change a couple things. Let's change this to let's just look at a week at a time. Let's go into settings and instead of coloring these tasks by status and change these to a custom field and choose health. And I'd probably make a handful of other changes to what gets shown here in this in the calendar view. But actually we'll go ahead and we'll add in a couple here. So let's add in who's the delivery lead on each of these. And there's a handful of the things that I would probably also add into this view. But what I'm trying to see is when are these calls coming up? I have it color coded here by client health. And so I can see this semrush call. I should probably jump on that one. If I'm managing a bunch of accounts, they have a low health score. Maybe we're okay with these ones. I don't know what the health is with each of these. Anyways, you can create these different views. One view that we use also internally, if you have. In fact, let's just click on one of these. Let's see if we have a custom field for address in here. So we don't have address in here, but let's say we did have. Let's go ahead and add an extra field. If we were going to create a new field, we'd pick location and we just say company address. Now in this case, this would actually live on the company level. But then we could create a map to go in and view where our clients live. So if we flip over to companies as an example, you can see we've got their address, we've got their URL, team size, all this information. And then if we want to visualize all those clients on a map, we can do that same thing. We could change our color here by if we had something that we were pulling through, we could recolor these as well. And then obviously the third piece is contacts. So each of these contacts, this is where we're pushing in NPS scores that are then getting rolled up and shown at other levels in the tool. But that's how we're managing and optimizing for each of our client accounts, staying on top of them. And then each week we have our account manager strategist put in an update on how the account went over the past week or how the last call went with clients. Cool. That's on the account dashboard side of things. The templating side of ClickUp. We build any, any client who we're working with. We want to build out all of the processes that power the services that they're delivering for clients and then eventually their internal processes as well. All that should get centralized. So here in our process library, this is where we keep the latest version of all of these processes. So let's just go into client management as an example. Go back to onboarding since we've already looked at that example, we will pre build. Here's the task, here's the person who's assigned to the role that's assigned and responsible for it, the estimated amount of time and the due date. Build out all of these steps, hook up the dependencies, make sure that we're ready to go in terms of the entire workflow there. Once that's all built, we can take any list, we can turn it into a template, we can take a task, but we'll take the entire folder. You can also do the same thing with spaces, but typically we'll build these all out into a consistent pre built client folder template and have all of those pre built into a template. So what are the common things that we're doing when a new client comes on board? We're doing strategy where we're doing reporting and we do email marketing or we do HubSpot implementation or something along those lines. So all of that we want to have pre built into a template so that when we're adding a new client, new client signs on board and we're creating a new client folder, we're going to go into our templates and we'll grab a new client example, we'll use the template, we'll call it new client, whatever the actual client name would be. So this is Dunder Mifflin goes into delivery. We're going to import things. Here's where ClickUp's flexibility becomes really powerful. Allows us to remap dates so we can say, look, here's a start date that we want to start the project on. And when we're remapping, do we want to skip weekends, Keep weekends however it wants to work? Or we could go the opposite way and go to end date, use the template. It'll build out all of those tasks for us, it'll remap the due dates and then we can go through and set assignees. Fine. Tune anything that we need to. I want to talk a little bit more about assignees here in a second. But that's the power of templates and we can do the same thing. Let's say we're inside a client. I'll go into inbound for this specific client. I'm just going to hit the hotkey and click up for T, which is task. You can see it's got some of the different hotkeys in here. But I'm going to say blog post and I could go, I'm using a slash command and click up here to apply a template. Go grab My blog post template, apply it, create the task. If there's anything I need to change, hit command enter and go create that task from those templates. So templates super powerful in ClickUp. Happy to get into more examples of what that looks like and then the process library. I feel like I get asked about this a lot. What are the types of things in our process library? So we've got client management side of things. This is what you do regardless of service line, onboarding, strategy, reporting. Obviously there'd be some distinctions. Then you've got client services. So whatever your specific services are, you want to build out templates and workflows for each of those. Obviously we've got a bunch pre built since we work with agencies and tackling the same kind of thing over and over operations. What are you building out there? Same thing. If we were managing whatever tech stacks or team directories to build out what all this should look like. Cool. The next thing in here is native automations. So I'm going to skip over the external integrations that ClickUp has. Whether that's a direct one to one integration with a time tracking tool like Harvest, or with Google Drive and Dropbox, or Google Calendar or Outlook or whatever the platforms are. I'm just going to talk about automations in the platform. This is a powerful component in ClickUp. Let's just go back to onboarding to use as an example. So just like any automation tool, you've got a trigger and an event that happens. So if you go in and add an automation and ClickUp you've got this whole list of triggers you can pull from and we can do things like saying hey, have all subtasks been completed then for a parent task and I'll just show an example, we want to change the status to complete create and our automation is ready to go. And there's a whole bunch of different ways that you might, you might want to say hey, when a new task gets created and there's a condition that is this custom field is equal to delivery role and the value is the strategist, then I want to change the assignee and set Andrew as the assignee every time create that automation. So as an example, let's just go over to inbound again for a second and say hey, when this blog post it's assigned to somebody but there's no specific action. All the actions are laid out in our subtasks specifically already. So when all of these subtasks you get completed, somehow this needs to get completed as well. So that's where we use an automation to close out those types of things. Or we might look at something like from a CRM perspective, we've got an intake form, we're taking information from a client, they're filling out all this, all this information. Once we get a new form submitted, then we're going to go in and create, you know, here's who needs to do what. We're going to create a task over in delivery to go set up the client work. Whatever we need to do, we can use automations to build that out. And the last one is permissions and guest management. So this is one of the most flexible things about ClickUp. This is one of the reasons that we chose it was we can go ahead and be super customizable in terms of how we handle permissions. So I'm going to grab. Let's go back to SEO for a second here. Say I'm just running technical SEO analysis with a contractor. I can share anything in ClickUp from a task level with a specific guest and there are some things to be aware of. So ClickUp's pretty generous with their guest permissions. Inside of the tool, you can share as many as you want. In terms of, you can pull read only guests in for free. But for every paid seat that you have with ClickUp on the business plan you get five or enterprise plan, you get five additional guest seats to share stuff with as you need to work with folks. So if you're a team of 10 and you're working with five contractors, or you could work with 40 contractors and have them all pulled in and that'd be fun. Most frequently, rather than sharing individual tasks, we'll see these shared either at the list level or at the client level. If you're using guests now, you can do the same thing. You could take members and you could say, hey, I want to make. Actually I'll pull up a realistic example here, operations and say finance, I'm going to go ahead and make that private and that'll be private just to me and whoever else I may want. So there will be some permissioning that happens and we use permissions often in combination with automations. So we may create another list that's a client review list here and say, hey, when we get a task that gets to the client review phase, add it over to that list so they can actually see it at that point in time. ClickUp's got this cool feature. We can show tasks in multiple lists so those two get paired up. Now the other cool thing that you can do is you can Take just about any view in the platform and you can make that view a public view. So I'm going to go back up here. I'm going to go to this client view that's built here. And so you can see we've done a couple different things. We've hidden all the subtasks, we've grouped it differently. In fact, let's change this again. We'll just group it by none or sort it in a specific way or however we want to set up this view. And in this case, I want to show whatever I want to show. I want to show what list it's tied to and I want to hide the due date or I want to hide the priority, create anything that I'd like to here and then share that specific view as a public view. You've got expiration options depending on what plane you're on. Then you can pick and choose in terms of opening those tasks whether you're going to allow clients with that public view to be able to see anything inside of it, and if so, what they have access to see. I can do the same thing with other view types as well. If I'm on the calendar and I want to go share a calendar view, you can do the same thing. Often when we've got a client, an agency who's working, and they've been in Basecamp or in Trello, those tools have been around for a while. They're well established, clients are pretty familiar and so there's some concern about what's sharing with clients going to look like. Again, you can replicate. This is one of the highlights of ClickUp is you can replicate most of the same stuff. One thing I would definitely recommend, just as a pro tip would be make sure that all of those things you are documenting how you want clients to interact with you and you give that to clients as a resource so that when you're sending them something those first handful of times, they can get up to speed. And if their team changes over time, you can run through and walk through those changes. They can do that on their own, on their own time, and know how to use the tool. Cool. So I just ran through a lot there. When this gets set up correctly, agencies who are streamlining their ops on ClickUp are benefiting from a single platform. That's their single source of truth. When you need to go look something up, it's not asking what platform it's on, it's in ClickUp. By creating all that work in one place with the right hierarchy and structure, and then leveraging correct views to go see it, and using project management tools like dependencies, notifications, comments, that type of stuff. You're creating clarity for everyone, from kind of the individual contributor role to the team manager role, to the agency ownership and leadership. That clarity always turns into more profitable decision making. When you've got clarity in terms of what your profitability looks like in a specific area, you're able to make better decisions and ultimately allow you to deliver better work faster for your clients, which increases client retention, internal team happiness. It really creates two virtuous cycles at the same time. The first one is on the client side. We're getting better work out to clients. We're able to do it faster, we're creating better client retention. Better client retention leads to more referrals, leads to more client. That virtuous cycle is happening on one side. On the other side, we see it happening with the internal team as well. Less frustration, there's less stress around. All these things are all over the place now. It's not nirvana. There's still a lot of work that happens in any well run agency and a lot of things that need to get out the door. But when you give team members clarity, we've seen internal team retention numbers go up. More profitability in the firm obviously allows you to pay your people better, allows you to recruit better people. So there's a couple different virtuous cycles that happen off the back end of getting your operational infrastructure in place. So this is one of those things that when you get it right, the time that goes into optimizing it and building it out, it can feel like a lot. It feels like we're not making a ton of progress at the beginning. But that investment to get it right, whatever that is, is worth it if you can truly get to that point to streamline it. So I'm going to pause here. We've got 12 minutes left. I want to get into some Q and A and before we get to that, I've got one specific thing to help you streamline your apps. If you are using ClickUp, you want a second set of eyes on it. Or if you're not using ClickUp and you want to talk through what you're currently using and whether it even makes sense to move to ClickUp. There's some reasons why we'll tell people not to move to ClickUp or not to move to ClickUp yet for most agencies, most of the time it's a great fit. But that's not every agency. All the time you're welcome to go to zenpilot.com chat Brandon on the call here. John from team myself. We'll spend 20 minutes kind of digging into your current situation and help you streamline from there. So thank you for your time. I appreciate you watching.