Venn Digital Marketing is a 2-year old marketing agency providing email marketing, PPC, and SEO services to a variety of small businesses in the legal, coaching, consulting, and SaaS spaces.
As a HubSpot partner, Venn Digital helps small businesses design, develop, and streamline a full customer lifecycle program to drive revenue growth.
Despite their success and continued growth, the agency was dealing with a chaotic project management system that lacked standardization, processes, and scalability - leading to missed deadlines, a lack of visibility, and a dip in client satisfaction.
Up to this point, they had built their business on a specific niche. They thought these clients were the best in the world.
They had great connections, plenty of business, and healthy relationships, but they would soon find out some surprising news..
The Challenge
Disjointed systems led to missed deadlines and looming profitability issues
As a young, fast-growing digital marketing agency, Venn Digital was struggling to scale up efficiently. With little to no standardized processes or clarity into projects and profitability, work was often dropped or repeated and important tasks fell through the cracks because they weren't properly documented.
Read Venn Digital's Full Story
Read how Venn Digital Marketing saw their profits soar after gaining full visibility into their profitability.
And aside from standardization, the project management system they were using, Basecamp, didn't provide the structure or scalability a growing agency needed.
Without a centralized system to track work, Venn Digital experienced:
- Poor execution on client work. Tasks were missed frequently, leading to mistakes and quality issues.
- Repeated tasks and wasted time. Lack of documentation meant work was often duplicated.
- Client satisfaction issues. Missed deadlines and unmet expectations strained client relationships.
- No visibility into profitability. With no time tracking or task management, there was no data on client costs versus revenue.
Venn Digital knew they needed to find a new solution to fix their project management woes. And according to Matt, the turning point came when a coach gave him eye-opening feedback about the current state of his agency.
This was an eye-opening moment. Matt founded Venn Digital a few years back after acquiring more clients he could handle in his freelance work, but to become a legit agency and scale successfully, Venn Digital had to get strategic about their operations.
Venn Digital began searching for the best tool for the job. After discovering ClickUp, and loving its promise for helping them achieve the visibility and productivity that they needed, they later realized that although ClickUp was the right tool for the job, they needed a partner to help them take full advantage of the platform.
Venn Digital searched for an expert that knew the platform, understood agency processes, and offered the training to help their team build healthy habits in the system.
After having a brief conversation with ZenPilot, Matt and the team decided it was a no-brainer to make the investment and work with ZenPilot to lead them through their ClickUp implementation.
The Solution
A carefully designed ClickUp hierarchy, well-defined processes, and a cadence for reporting
From day one working with ZenPilot, Matt was extremely impressed with ZenPilot's process.
ZenPilot began by building out VennDigital's ClickUp hierarchy - spaces, folders, lists, custom fields, and views - to get them started.
This fast forwarded their time-to-value and provided the structure they needed to track and understand work across their clients and agency departments.
Additionally, Venn Digital received:
- A pre-built process library - providing them with the tools and resources they needed to customize their own process templates.
- Custom dashboards for visibility into client work, time tracked, timelines, and team performance.
- Pre-configured views for different agency roles - leadership, account management, project management, and individual contributors.
- An internal knowledge base to centralize their SOPs and agency information.
- A CRM space to track client health and relationships.
- A training course to guide them through the implementation process.
- And a project management certification to onboard and certify their team in ClickUp.
From here, Venn Digital spent the next few weeks building out their processes and turning their "3 guys who do marketing" into a top-notch marketing agency.
After Venn Digital documented their processes, ZenPilot assisted the team through the launch process.
- Deploying new folder templates into their Delivery space to host client work. These folder templates were armed with standardized lists, views, and documents.
- Deploying new process templates into their client folders, adjusting timelines, and assigning work out to the team.
- Training their team on the software and the expectations.
- And hosting a launch party to celebrate their hard work.
Venn Digital followed ZenPilot's proven framework to pair the right tool, with the right processes, and the right habits.
With these three elements in place, they were able to take the chaos out of their project management environment.
The Results
Eye opening visibility, soaring profitability, and a significant increase in head count
Shortly after Venn Digital launched the brand new system, they started experiencing improvements in productivity, team adoption, and eye-opening visibility. All of this helped expand their business and double in size.
Shortly after launch day, the Venn Digital leadership team established a healthy rhythm for evaluating their new ClickUp dashboards to see which clients were the healthiest and most profitable.
After a few months of analysis, the leadership team slowly realized they connected themselves to a niche that wasn't profitable. In fact, in some situations, they had clients outside of their main niche that were 400% more profitable.
Guess what happened next?
Venn Digital made the switch and saw their profitability soar.
With ZenPilot's help, VennDigital now has the systems and visibility needed to profitably scale their agency as they continue growing.
In addition, they have also seen:
- A significant reduction in wasted time and confusion.
- A team that uses their project management system consistently, and is bought in.
- Improved team alignment.
- 2x in employee count - from 3 FTEs to 6 FTEs.
- And significantly increased profit margins after dropping unprofitable clients.
The team is now experiencing a much more profitable, productive, and healthy team after streamlining their operations in ClickUp.
And for any agency looking to scale up efficiently, Matt suggests making operational processes a priority.
Next Steps: Let Us Lead Your Last Project Management Implementation
We’ve worked with thousands of agency teams like Venn Digital Marketing to help them streamline their processes and project management in ClickUp.
We’d love to do the same for you and to get started, you can schedule a call with our team here.
Turn Chaos Into Clarity.
We're your agency operations pilot.
You can build a happier, more productive, more profitable team with ClickUp. We'll show you how.
