Hello, hello, hello, friend!

And welcome back to First Class Operations!

This is your Captain Kuba speaking.

Let me hit you with a question this time.

What have you got going for yourself lately?

No matter the turmoil in our lives, there’s always something we can point to and say “at least I’ve got X going for me, which is nice”.

For me, no matter what’s been happening lately, at least I’m better than ever in terms of my fitness journey.

Seeing progress in the mirror every week is a serious boost to the ol’ self-esteem. Not to mention, major motivation to continue to stay on track with healthy eating and stuff.

So, what have you got going for you?

In the meantime, what I’ve got for you are some fresh insights to improve your operations. Let’s dive in!

The soundtrack for this edition of First Class Operations is Mighty Mighty Pisces by The Sylvers. I just discovered this one today when I mentioned I’m a Pisces to a friend on a call. It’s nice; light and catchy; perfect for today.

Captain's Address

⏳ 13 thoughts on time tracking

Today’s Captain’s Address is stolen from a recent LinkedIn post by our CEO Gray.

A ton of agencies have got their mindset backwards when it comes to time tracking.

At ZenPilot, we’ve led over 3,000 agency ops makeovers. The issue of time tracking came up in every single one of them.

Here’s what I [or in this case, Gray] wish I could say to every agency owner about time tracking:

1. Time tracking isn't about babysitting your team. It's about collecting data to make smarter business decisions.
2. Forget about team members hitting 40 hours/week. Your most diligent project manager probably can't accurately track 40 hours a week—and that's okay.
3. Instead, make the goal to track as much of your time as possible, accurately, whether it’s 30 hours a week or 50 hours.
4. Time tracking should feel more like a Fitbit for your business and less like a prison ankle monitor.
5. For many agencies, even if they do time tracking, their efforts are wasted because they don't do anything with the data.
6. If you're not regularly reviewing time tracking data with your team members to help them invest their time better, you're missing a massive coaching opportunity.
7. If you’re not using your time tracking data to improve your processes (ideally, shortening the time to value)—then your time tracking is just digital busywork.
8. If you can't see which clients are the most/least profitable based on your time tracking, your system is broken.
9. If you're not using time tracking data to reshape your offerings and pricing, you're leaving money on the table.
10. In fact, your time tracking data should inform most of your major business decisions, from hiring team members to firing clients.
11. Agencies that don't time track are flying blind and probably overworking their best people.
12. Your time tracking process should be dead simple, and ideally consolidated alongside your project management data in a single tool like ClickUp. Otherwise, you’re making things needlessly complex and slow.

And finally…

13. Your utilization rate is probably way lower than you think, and that's costing you big time.

If you want to improve your time tracking and utilization, grab an agency ops therapy call with us. We’re passionate about helping agencies get this right.

Any of these points feel particularly important to you right now? Reply to this email and let’s discuss.

In-Flight Announcement

🗻 My Agency Guy Summit presentation

We’re being featured on a very special event next week!

[Event invite, July 30-31] My Agency Guy Summit (for Amazon agencies)

If you're running an Amazon agency, you should sign up for the My Agency Guy Summit, happening next week on July 30-31.

Our very own Jeff Cypher will be there, speaking on streamlining your operations to double productivity + profits.

Other speakers include:

➝ Atay Mehmet is going to be speaking about reporting systems to retain your clients and reduce overwhelm.

➝ Steven Pope is going to be speaking about how you can build a multiple 8-figure Amazon agency.

➝ Mina Elias is going to be speaking about how you use YouTube to generate clients.

Whether you're just considering starting an Amazon agency or want to scale an existing one, you're not going to want to miss this.

👉 Sign up here.

In-Flight Magazine

🛫 New from ZenPilot

Here’s our latest content for you to enjoy.

Podcasts:

• [Agency Journey] Niching Down, Planning for Digital Marketing Success, and Adapting to AI with Corey Morris
• [Agency Journey] The Keys to a Profitable Podcast: Niching, Formats, and Production Tactics with Hector Santiesteban

Videos from our YouTube channel:

• [Jeff video] 5 Habits Your Agency Needs To Scale
• [Jeff video] Our Exact Process To Streamline Your Agency Operations (Used by 3,000 Agencies)
• [Webinar replay] 5 Tips To Successfully Implement Project Management Software

On The Radar

🧠 Content from the ZenPilot network

Here’s some inspiration from our Pilots on social media. And by social media I mean LinkedIn.

🧑‍🏫 From our Productivity Professor Jeff:

• On the importance of involving your team—and how to do it—to find the root causes of your project management issues.
• 7 lessons on what high-performing agencies do differently in their project management.
• Sharing a cool new integration between ClickUp and Xero that our team has built to make invoicing easier.
• A super easy way to track and manage your org's tech stack of tools within ClickUp.
• 10 tips to get your team to do time tracking right.

⚾ From our CEO Gray:

• Agency owners should focus on creating clarity for their teams. Here are 8 questions you should ask yourself to measure if you’re creating clarity or chaos.
• “Here’s what I wish I could say to every agency owner about time tracking.” (This is the one I stole for the Captain’s Address today.)
• “Entrepreneurs' greatest strength is also our greatest weakness.”
• On scaling expectations towards team members: “For a given role, do you want people who are hungry and willing to grow or not?”

🎸 From yours truly:

• Probably the most important post in this whole section: my lovely princess Odi almost made me miss one of our recent webinars.

And that's it for this edition of First Class Operations!

And how have you been? What would you like to see more/less of in this newsletter? Let me know in an email reply. Or add me on LinkedIn and let’s chat.