I recently had the absolute pleasure of interviewing two ZenPilot clients, Emily and Melanie.
Super nice conversations. Talking with clients always fills my cup.
I think you should hear what they had to say. It could be the first step towards making your business more productive and profitable by way of superior project management.
Especially if you’re not sure about the value of working with an ops consultancy like ours—or if you’ve been on the fence about finally booking that first call with ZenPilot. (Which you can do here.)
Let’s start with Melanie, Principal Creative Director, leading an in-house Branding Creative Team consisting of copywriters, graphic designers, web designers, video editors, and some freelance animators.
This is all housed within a larger organization of 1200+ people.
Melanie’s main challenge was a lack of processes:
"When I look back on it, I am really stumped as to how the team accomplished as much as they did without any processes. It was just kind of a free-for-all."
ClickUp presented itself as a solution to put processes in place, but Melanie was grappling with something that is ClickUp’s biggest strength and biggest weakness—its flexibility.
"ClickUp is a little bit unique in the sense that it doesn't come up with a generic template of: here's how you use it. It's really a blank slate. You have to set it up how you want to use it.”
“But it feels like the chicken and the egg thing because you're like, I don't know how I want to use it because there's nothing here to guide me."
So Melanie, like many operators, worked on setting up ClickUp on her own. But it left her wanting more.
“I set it up with the foundational things. I got our team all adjusted to using it. And I feel like I was just barely scratching the surface. Sure, everything was more organized. But I just felt like ClickUp had all these bells and whistles that I didn't know how to use because I was so unfamiliar with the tool. And I didn't have anybody internally that I could really lean on for support."
That’s when Melanie sought out your friendly neighborhood team of ClickUp nerds at ZenPilot.
With our help, Melanie managed to forge a clear path forward and eliminate trial and error. And most importantly, to get her team on board with the change.
“The nice thing about ZenPilot is they're like, listen, we've tried all the ways and here's the best. And so what was great about that is that [it gave] me the confidence to go to my team and say, guess what? Everybody's gonna look at their to-do list the same way."
"I just feel like I was given the best in class standards of operating. They're like, we've tried it a million ways. You don't have to go through the hassle of trial and error. We've already done it for you."
"Once we got ZenPilot in there and we really organized everything— where every single step of the way, there was a best practice like ‘here's where you put this piece of information’ and ‘here's how you log this’—there was a noticeable change."
In the end, instead of being lost in the jungle of everything ClickUp has to offer, Melanie followed a clear path—which made all the difference:
"I just loved that it gave me a clear path. It eliminated the fluffy other options that might work half the time, but not all the time. And ZenPilot were like: no, here's the best way to operate. Here's how you need to do it."
It’s all true, by the way. There is a best way to operate in ClickUp—particularly for service based businesses and creative departments that work like an internal agency.
And we’ve done more trial and error than any other team in the world in order to find this best way—and eliminate all the other inefficient, wasteful ClickUp workflows.
Book a chat with us here and we’ll tell you about the best way to use ClickUp—and the ROI it might have for your team.
One last word from Melanie about working with ZP:
"If you have the budget to do it, do it. Because in our work life, we're so in our tool and in our team, we forget to look outside and ask: is there a better way to do what I'm doing right now?"
Look forward to hearing Melanie’s full story—as well as Emily’s—in an upcoming edition of First Class Operations.
And on that note, let’s move on to the rest of the newsletter with a fresh batch of operations insights for you.