Why "done-for-you" ClickUp setup services don't work...

Last quarter, I'm pretty sure I turned away about $200,000 worth of client services work because I was unwilling to set up ClickUp accounts for people who did not already know ClickUp. And that kind of hurts to say that's not an insignificant amount of service revenue for my business. I knew I would do well in that space. We already had clients coming to us for that space and obviously I have a bit of a reputation in this arena. So why have we decided to say no? The fact of the matter is done for you services like this typically cannot fully deliver the promise that they are selling themselves by. I'm going to break that down here in a little bit. But the main disconnect and the main reason why I don't feel like done for you services work very effectively in the ClickUp space is because almost everything you're going to want to do with ClickUp is going to require more than just the done for you element. I'm going to be using a color code throughout this video. So just to keep this in mind, I'll remind you as we go. And if you see something that is green, that is something that a done for you service provider can do. If you're seeing something that's red, that is something typically you the client would have to do. As we go on, you'll also see one other color being introduced, which is the color of the strategist. You know, come to think of it, we should probably take a brief detour and let me just define these terms because we're using them quite a bit throughout the rest of the presentation. So let's just, let's take a brief detour into this. There are two main categories of service providers we're going to be discussing today. First, first, on the left is a doer, you're going to see them represented in green. And on the right is a strategist, you're going to see them represented in blue. These are two different people, two different skill sets. Even though they both work in ClickUp implementations or ClickUp strategy. The doer side of things is typically called a system setup provider, a tech va, a ClickUp setup VIP day host, or a done for you service provider, which again, we've already talked about that several times throughout the presentation today. Done for you service provider doer. All the same thing. They're primarily selling time. That is what you are buying from a setup provider. You are buying time back in your day. On the flip side, we have a strategist. You might see job titles like systems architect, process Consultant, efficiency coach, workflow designer. With strategists, we typically see pricing based on the value of the problem they are solving, typically a percentage of that. So for example, if I'm solving a problem that generates you money, say $5,000 or prevents you from losing money or time valued at say 5,000 doll, 10% of that total cost would be about $500. And that's probably what I should charge for that service if I was a strategist. Now, these are all just loose rules. But the key thing to remember here is a strategist sells solutions ways to solve a problem. Another way to think about it is a doer is going to take orders and give you what you order. A strategist is going to ask you questions, figure out what you should order, and order it for you. Okay, we should probably get back on topic here. The first marketing promise I want to deconstruct here in the done for you space is having everything in one place. I see this all the time on sales pages. It's probably on our own sales page. Bring everything together in one place. Now, when we go into something like this, the expectation is typically that the service provider is going to provide all of these things, right? It's on the sales page for the ClickUp VIP day. They're going to put everything in one place. The reality isn't quite so. The fact is a system service provider, a done for you setup provider, cannot pull information out of your head for you. They can try, they can interview, they can do a little bit here and there, but as you can see in red, there is a good chunk of the knowledge documentation process that you yourself are responsible for. Similarly, organize the data in a way that makes sense for your daily work, you'd think that a setup provider would be able to do that. And to a large extent, the majority of it they can do. But they still rely on you to understand how your brain works, how your business works, how your team thinks about work. For that reason, there is really no done for you option when it comes to setting up ClickUp because at one point or another you are going to have to do the work to get involved and get it finished to really actually work. As you can see here, the only real exception is the import of data, which is something that just about anybody could do and is something that you can definitely outsource to a done for you provider. If we were to incorporate a strategist into this role, which by the way, is the blue color that we talked about earlier, so doer you strategist we might get a little help on the importing data from people's heads, because perhaps that strategist has some really good ways for pulling information out of people's heads, some good exercises for defining processes. That's great. The last piece though. Still, we are stuck somehow getting involved in making sure that data makes sense and flows in a way that is logical to us. So even if we hired not just a done for you provider, but also a coach or consultant, we are still in a position where a good chunk of this work will need to be done by us. And quick break to remind you to like and subscribe this video because it helps this video show up to other people in the YouTube algorithm. Thank you. The next promise is the improve efficiency promise, which again, I see all over sales pages. You're going to reduce cost, improve output, you know, just get more done. And to make this promise a reality, there really are three steps. Identify what your workflows actually are today. Measure the efficiency using ClickUp and any other tools you have, and implement strategies to reduce cost or improve throughput. In the ideal world, we would expect our system service provider to deliver us this promise, right? It's on their sales page, after all. Of course they could deliver on this promise, but they can't. Not because they don't have the skill, but because it is realistically impossible in the constraints of the done for you model to achieve these things. In reality, efficiency boosts aren't something that can really happen inside the container of a done for you ClickUp model because improving efficiency is an extremely personal process. It's talking about your own personal habits, your team's personal habits, your virtual assistants, actual habits, how they get work done. That's not something that can be done in a VIP day or done in isolation while, you know, on your laptop in a closet. Like, it doesn't work that way. It needs to happen collaboratively. And once again, the done for you by implying that you're buying time and you can just hand it on off, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot if you think that you don't have to be involved in this process. Now back to the reality here, identifying what your workflows are. A pretty savvy system service provider could probably help you at least a little bit to pull that information out of your brain. But without a lot of time with you and observational time and expertise in this area, they're probably just going to write down what you tell them versus knowing what to ask to get to the truth, right? To get beyond what you think you should tell them to, what they actually need to know. It's pretty hard to get that on the system setup side of things. When it comes to measuring efficiency using ClickUp and workflows, this is almost impossible to do in a done for you. Capacity measuring by itself is something that requires collaboration to know what questions are you trying to solve and measure based on those actual questions, again, cannot be done in a bubble. Finally, we have implement strategies you decide inside ClickUp. So once we design our workflows, figure out how exactly we want to change them. Absolutely. That system setup provider can take our order and put it into ClickUp. But have you ever been to a restaurant with a type of food you've never had before? You look at the menu, everything just in a foreign language. Maybe it is in a foreign language and you're looking at it thinking, what should I order? You just kind of go through the menu till you eventually touch something and say number 12. Then your order shows up and you just have to pretend that that looks really good. Even though you're a vegetarian and you just ordered pig's heart. That's the kind of stuff that can happen when you're just telling someone to implement a strategy that is kind of created in a silo. So what's the alternative? Incorporate that strategic partner and you can lighten the load on yourself a little bit by incorporating a strategist to help you identify your workflows and help you measure the efficiency. That can be a very nice value add there. But. And this is a big but, notice there are still red elements. You still have to be involved. If you're not getting the punchline by now, done for you doesn't really exist. If you're looking to get the full end result, partial end results, be my guest. Full end promises, you're not going to get them in a done for you avenue. So back to the presentation. Let's go through a few other promises here. Increasing team member accountability. To make this happen, you'd probably want to decide how you're going to measure good accountability, set expectations and communicate them, and create views in ClickUp to help you monitor your team's success. I'll just jump right to the punchline here. You might expect that a system setup provider can handle all of this stuff. In reality, they can handle only the implementation part once you decide exactly what your strategy is and communicate with your team accordingly. So much of process work needs to happen in a community as a movement, as a collective decision that done for you. Order taking just tends to not work very well outside the actual hands to keyboard time. Now if we go in here and we actually add in the strategist again, the strategist can help lighten the load on certain elements, but they really work on the opposite side of the spectrum of a done for you service provider. Next up we have manage your day to day capacity and to make this possible. And by the way, capacity in this case means how much you can handle doing how much can you really do, I guess your workload. With this one we've got three steps once again, decide how to measure capacity. Create a system for defending that capacity, which is something that we teach inside. Clickingup. If you're stuck on this and create a ClickUp structure to reflect this strategy, I feel like you kind of know where this is going by now, but I'm going to show you anyway. Here you go. Expectations versus reality. We think that the system setup provider can handle all this stuff, but in reality they are in a position to take orders because of the depth of relationship. And that's an important distinction here because a strategist and a setup provider can be of equal skill. They're just working in a different container, right? Lastly, automate your workflows. First of all, you need to create a workflow that is so very good that you actually should automate it because you know, they say about automating a terrible process, you just get a lot more terribleness quickly. So we want to not automate things that are not, you know, tip top shape. After that, we need to set up our ClickUp and actual automation tools like say Integromat. Link above this video on my tutorial for Integromat. Once we actually have that set up, there is an ongoing maintenance requirement of automations. We need to manage them just like a human employee and updating those automations every single time your process changes, which in a small business environment tends to be about once a month. And if it's a newer process, it could be much more frequently than that. Now we like to think that the setup provider again can do all this for us without us having to lift a finger, but it's physically not possible for them. They could be so good. And I'm sure many of the service providers out there are so fricking good, but they aren't mind readers. So when it comes to design a workflow that's so good that it's worth automating, they have very little buy in from you and authority in the business to make something that good. When it comes to Setting up ClickUp or setting up that automation tool, sure, technical question, they can take your order and create that for you. But when it comes back to the ongoing maintenance, unless you actually are going to have them contracted on your team on an ongoing basis, for every little word you want to change in that automated email, they're not going to be able to help you with it. That's either a very expensive ongoing contract or you're going to have to learn the tool. And again, if we incorporate a strategist here, we can get a little bit of help along the way. But eventually you are still left alone with your automations for the most part. And even though I've said it before, I'm going to go ahead and say it again. While you can outsource things like setting up ClickUp, maybe you can even outsource writing SOPs, sort of. You can outsource all these little elements, but at the end of the day, the most important stuff in your business you can't outsource. This means things like you learning the system, it means you believing in the system, you deciding on what system is right, what strategy is right, and you committing both yourself and your team to actually work the system as nice it is to think that we can just pay some money and buy some time and get things taken care of for us. There's always going to be a element that we need to contribute and it's much bigger than what you're going to think it is. It's much bigger than comparable software. ClickUp. Specifically, being in the project management space and being so all encompassing, it is going to be one of the most complicated setups you might experience. More complicated than say your website or your blog or any of those other elements that you might have in your business. This is something that you are living and breathing. It's basically like your virtual office and you need to make sure it is just right. But when it comes to done for you services like setting up ClickUp on behalf of someone someone else, unless that person is already expert level with ClickUp, in which case delivering done for you will fully complete that circle, right? It'll be all green and I'll be taken care of because they've taken care of all of their work. But for the vast majority of potential done for you clients, you don't have your workflows figured out. You don't have a workflow that is so good that it's ready to be automated. You don't have your process clear, you don't have buy in from your team. You don't have these elements that someone else you would have to bring to the table in order to make the done for you actually deliver the promise. And if something is not giving my clients results, even if they want to buy it, I don't want to sell it. It's not worth it to me. Done for you services, in my humble opinion, are highly effective for a high skill ClickUp user. Counterintuitive for many of you, but someone who strictly needs to buy time done for you is great. That's who I would hire. Right? But if you're not a ClickUp expert, if you don't know what to order on the menu, if you will, you can partner with a strategist and a setup provider. That can be a good pairing or join clickingup. That's one of the main reasons I started a membership community is because I wanted every single business owner, business leader, manager, ops manager, VA obm. I wanted them to know enough to be dangerous when it comes to ClickUp so they know what to order on the menu if they do need a done for you provider. But so often I see folks hire done for you providers who set up something that just isn't at all useful because it's half complete with half the amount of input it needs. And the expectations versus reality for those service providers is not fair to the service providers and is not fair to the client. It's just a no win scenario. So to the service providers, what do you think? I refilmed this video several times making sure I wasn't too harsh because honestly, I don't think this is your fault. I think you are set up to fail in a lot of ways of the client expectations versus the reality of what you can deliver. And the more we can get those expectations anchored to reality, the better of the job you're going to be able to do. The more the client's going to get out of their own way and overall everyone will be happier. Leave me a comment below. For those of you who are looking to work with a system service provider, what do you think? Was this too technical? First of all, I hope it wasn't, but I know there's a lot of jargon in this space. If you have questions about kind of who's the right choice for you, feel free to leave it below. Or if this was helpful to you, I would also love to hear that as well. Thank you guys so much for joining me. For another video here on the channel, please do leave a comment like and subscribe. All those things help us in the YouTube algorithm. And until next time, enjoy the process.