Sustainably Growing Your Agency Through Standardized Processes with Gray MacKenzie
Key Takeaways
- Without a standardized process, client results depend on whether an A player or a B player is running the account. Gray saw a lot of variance in one paid ads agency's results for exactly that reason.
- Gray frames structure as guidelines people operate within so their creativity has more impact, and he pushes back on the idea that it makes the work robotic.
- The agency had already tried to fix ops on its own, including a six-figure CFO-type hire that lasted seven or eight months and never got adopted by the team.
- Gray quotes 8 to 12 weeks for an implementation and pushes back on four-week requests: the team is still running an agency day to day.
- Expect a trough of sorrow for the first week or so after launch. People are asked to do more, because the rule is if it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen.
- Once a couple of influential account managers said they were sleeping through the night again, the rest of the team came along. Capacity and client retention followed.
Gray MacKenzie is the founder and CEO of ZenPilot, which helps agencies build their operations in ClickUp. He hosts Agency Journey, but this episode flips the script: Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25, who has done thousands of interviews with entrepreneurs and CEOs, interviews Gray. They walk through one paid ads agency’s path from inconsistent client results and a failed internal ops hire to a guided ClickUp implementation, and what changed once it was live.
Client results depended on who was running the account
Jeremy asked what pain points the paid ads agency showed up with. Sales was never the problem; the founders had a strong network and won deals easily. The trouble was what happened after the deal closed, and Gray described the gap between an A player account manager and a B or C player on the same team.
There’s such a disparity in terms of the outcomes that clients were getting because there’s no standardized process. If they had someone who was great at running Facebook ads or Google ads on the account, the account did well. And if they had somebody else, there might be things that were missed. There was just a lot of variance in the client results.
Jeremy compared it to McDonald’s, where the fries taste the same in every city, and asked whether the goal is to take the human element out. Gray didn’t love that framing.
That can feel a little bit robotic. I don’t want to remove people’s creativity. We’re all creatives here in this space. But I think of it as giving people the guidelines to operate within, where they can exercise their creativity and maximize the impact of that creativity once they have the structure that they need to operate within.
The account dashboard, and where ClickUp isn’t the right tool
Asked how agencies use ClickUp in ways they hadn’t thought of before, Gray described the one build that’s new to almost every agency ZenPilot works with.
We call it our account dashboard, and it’s what’s the profile of each client account that you’re managing right now. On that account we’ll have who’s the team who’s assigned to it, what services are they paying for, what’s the billing status, what’s the health of the client, what’s the feedback scores that they’re giving… the one home base of your client accounts.
From there the agency can compare health by account manager or by service line (Facebook ads vs. Google ads vs. CRO), and Gray noted you could build the same thing in most tools. Jeremy then asked what he tells people not to run in ClickUp. CRM came first: Gray’s default recommendation is HubSpot, sometimes Pipedrive or Copper, with ClickUp only for very simple setups where it simplifies the tool stack. The other is money. Labor rates, billable rates, cost analysis, and invoicing integration belong in a third-party tool: Harvest or Everhour for time tracking, QuickBooks Online or Xero for invoicing.
The internal hire that didn’t work
Before calling ZenPilot, the agency had tried to fix this on its own. First a block of time to build out processes in Asana, the tool they were on at the time. Then a hire.
Then went and hired somebody internally in a leadership capacity to come in in the CFO type role and build it out. And that lasted for seven or eight months. They were paying a pretty healthy six-figure salary to somebody and just did not get very far in terms of the current setup, having it actually be adopted by the team.
Jeremy asked what Gray tells owners who are debating an in-house hire. If you trust the person’s experience and they’ll be around long term, Gray said, hiring internally can make more sense than hiring outside. The setup he sees work best, though, is an internal champion plus an outside expert who has seen it hundreds of times and brings a playbook customized to the agency. The champion isn’t always a new hire; sometimes it’s upskilling someone already on the team.
Why it takes 8 to 12 weeks, and the trough of sorrow that follows
The most common pushback Gray gets is on the timeline.
One thing that we get a lot of pushback around is the timeline. So I told them, look, you’re biting off a lot here. This is somewhere between an 8 and 12 week engagement if we’re going to move fast but get this done right. And they, like most agency owners… nope, let’s make it a four-week engagement.
Gray’s answer was that even if ZenPilot could dedicate all its time to one client, the team is still running an agency day to day and already has a lot on its plate. The agency chose ZenPilot’s middle tier, a guided implementation where ZenPilot plays quarterback and the agency’s own people click the buttons so they learn the system. Even with that, launch day isn’t the finish line.
Most teams that we work with go through a little bit of a trough of sorrow for the first week or week and a half after implementation.
The team is being asked to do more than before, because most agencies never had real expectations in the first place. “No overdue tasks” is easy to satisfy if you never add the task. Gray’s rule is “if it’s not in ClickUp, it didn’t happen,” and that only works if the inputs are good.
Sleeping through the night, then the numbers
Jeremy asked what outcome stood out. Gray started with the team.
They had multiple account managers on the team say, I used to wake up in the middle of night thinking about, did I remember to do that thing, or did I write it down somewhere? And now I’m sleeping through the night because I know that all my stuff is in here. I can let it go at the end of the workday because it’s all centralized… And once a couple influential people on the team had that experience, that was the switch that flipped for the whole team.
The business results came behind that. Once processes were standardized and junior team members knew the time allocated to each account, efficiency went up, which meant more accounts per account manager and better profitability. Where Gray says it shows up most is client retention, which drives agency LTV and, for a retainer business, enterprise value. The full episode also covers ZenPilot’s three engagement tiers, how indecisive teams stall a process build, and how agencies frame the changes to their own clients.