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Frequently Asked Questions

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Hiring ZenPilot is the best thing I've done since my time at LegalZoom.

We function so much more smoothly now. We can accommodate more projects, and our general volume of work has increased significantly. It's been an absolute game-changer.

If you're on the fence about this decision and your team needs some organizational support, do it. You won't regret it.

Melanie Brook LegalZoom
Melanie Brook

Principal, Creative Operations
LegalZoom

How long does the process of working with ZenPilot take?

That depends entirely on your stated goals, but most teams will undergo a complete transformation using our 1-3-5 Formula in 5-6 months and will have recouped their investment in profit margin by 12 months.

To provide a more thorough breakdown, you can expect the timeline to look something similar to this:

Our goal is to provide you with continuous support, ensuring that your operations remain lean, efficient, and ahead of the curve. So while a complete operational transformation can be achieved within three months, many of our most successful clients choose to extend our partnership beyond two years. Operational excellence is an ongoing endeavor, and ZenPilot is committed to guiding your agency's growth and evolution every step of the way.

What results can we expect to see?

That depends on your goals and your plan, but it's not uncommon for us to see up to a 300% increase in efficiency for our agency clients (check out some of our client's stories here).

Additionally, we've had teams increase utilization by 29%, increase annual contract value by 42%, double headcount, and significantly increase profitability and client satisfaction.

We'll always spend time on the front end to define success. This is different for everyone, but we won't move forward together unless we see a clear path to achieving a 4-10x year-one ROI for you.

We'll always begin our journey together by defining success. This may look slightly different for everyone, but we won't move forward together unless we see a clear path to achieving a 4-10x year-one ROI for you.

When it comes to ROI, we've had clients who were able to take on 10+ new clients with the same headcount—significantly improving profit margins. On the other end (and not that this is fun to say), some teams have even reduced headcount once they got full visibility into their team's utilization. Not because their growth slowed, but because they realized they could serve the same amount of clients with less team members. They had no idea that their team's average utilization was below 50%. That's a problem. We're here to get you that visibility to save you money.

Additionally, we've had teams cut ties with 5+ SaaS products, helping them significantly reduce overhead costs.

 

What does the time investment look like when working with ZenPilot?

This all depends on the stage that your team is in.

If you're in the Blueprint phase, you should expect your implementation team to be spending 1-2 hours weekly. This time will mostly be allocated to calls with our team, but also a few assignments that we will have for your team in between calls.

If you're beyond the Blueprint phase, you should expect your implementation team to be spending 2-4 hours per week on the project. This work is grouped into a few buckets:

  • 1 hour weekly attending calls with ZenPilot
  • 30-45 minutes weekly consuming asynchronous course materials
  • 60-120 minutes weekly completing tasks related to building templates, migrating, and optimizing the workspace (depending on where in the timeline the team is)

We'd recommend batching "ZenPilot work." Our most successful clients spend one whole morning or afternoon each week dedicated to just working with ZenPilot—building processes, completing coursework, optimizing their workspace, etc.

Do you offer a completely "done for you" service?

The short answer - no, we don't.

There's the classic proverb of "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." We live by this.

Although there will be "done for you" components, most of our work together will be "done with you". We're here to coach, teach, and train your team for long-term success. If we did everything for you, you wouldn't have the internal expertise to be self-sufficient. We don't want that!

Our goal is to help you build a systems-minded team of ClickUp experts and a culture of accountability to help you develop the habits you need to create a more productive, profitable, and healthy business.

Yes, in our Implementation stage, we will build most of your ClickUp Workspace—hierarchy, views, custom fields, some dashboards, etc.—to save you months of work, but during our Project Management Intensives phase, we will be coaching and training your team to build your process templates. You know your process; we're here to help you systemize it.

Aside from us building out your initial ClickUp Workspace, most of your time savings stem from saving you the months and months most teams take with continuous trial and error. For more context, you should check out this amazing story from Melanie at LegalZoom.

Who is ZenPilot's ideal client?

We partner with agencies, internal marketing teams, and professional service firms that desire to improve visibility, reduce internal chaos, and get more clarity.

However, truly achieving gold-standard operations and clarity for all requires time, effort, and the willingness to buy-in, embrace, and love the process. The teams that are successful are the ones that:

  • Desire to reduce internal chaos and give team members more clarity.
  • Desire to be excellent at managing projects to deliver great client results on time and within budget.
  • Desire to improve visibility into team performance, capacity planning, and results.
  • Desire to be more systematic, process-driven, and organized.
  • And have a willingness to pay for expertise and listen to experience. They "want what works."

If you have the desire and motivation to spend the necessary time to eliminate chaos, you're a perfect fit for ZenPilot.

Do you only work with agencies?

Not exactly! We also work with in-house marketing teams (who often see themselves as an "internal agency")—one example is the marketing crew at LegalZoom.

And we work with businesses who do client work that may not necessarily see themselves as agencies, such as accounting firms.

While it's true that our expertise runs deepest in the agency space (and we have a library of 200+ plug-and-play process templates for that specific context), we have lots of advice and specific frameworks to share for any business that wants to put an end to chaotic project management and stop hopping from one PM tool to the next.

Book a free consultation with us and let's find out if we're a fit for you!

Do we have to use ClickUp?

Technically, no. You can work through our 1-3-5 Formula with whatever tool you currently use. In fact, we wrote a guide on how to choose the best project management tool for your organization. However, in our experience working with hundreds of agencies, ClickUp stands out as the most versatile and easy-to-use tools for agencies and professional service firms.

Do you have a "demo" of your ClickUp setup?

Yes, we do!

We recommend you check out our YouTube channel for all of our ClickUp content, but you can watch our ClickUp for Agencies demo here.

You may also want to read through our ClickUp for Agencies guide.

Why do you recommend ClickUp for Agencies?

We often tell most people to go try out and test a variety of tools themselves (with a clear idea of what they need to accomplish), and we believe the choice becomes obvious.

We recommend ClickUp for agencies specifically because:

  1. ClickUp’s hierarchy is uniquely well-suited to agency needs (managing work across clients, in addition to internal projects).
  2. The customizable views allow your team to see and work with the data that is most relevant to them, in a visualization they prefer, while still engaging with the same underlying data.
  3. The native time tracking makes reporting much simpler and more accurate than tying together separate tools.
  4. ClickUp’s product development velocity is unmatched, and they pair the ability to execute with a strong vision for the future.
  5. Pricing-wise, ClickUp is very friendly for scaling agency teams.
But don't forget, the tool is only one part of the formula.

If you're trying to actually get your project management system to click (no pun intended) for your team, you need to build well-defined processes and establish healthy habits across the organization.

If you want a more thorough breakdown, you can read our full guide on how to choose the best PM tool for your agency here.
What makes ZenPilot different than any other ClickUp consultant?

Great question—most teams actually find us through our ClickUp content so that may be why you're evaluating how we can help.

We do provide "ClickUp Consulting" per se, but we go way beyond the tooling.

If you've reviewed our 1-3-5 formula, we exist to help agencies cancel chaos and replace that chaos with clarity. And clarity is driven by operational excellence, not technology.

And operational excellence is driven by a combination of technical excellence, procedural excellence, and behavioral excellence.

The most souped-up, expensive tech stack in the world can't overcome bad processes & bad habits.

So yes, we're here to get ClickUp humming for your team, but in order to do that, we're going to lead you through our 1-3-5 Formula—designing your system, building out your processes, training your team, and getting launched in a brand new system that'll actually solve your pain points, not just put a band-aid on the problem.

We've had plenty of clients work with us after being disappointed with a previous consultant. So yeah, we're not here to put "Flex Tape" on the problem by tweaking a few things in ClickUp; we're here to build a brand-new tub to solve the underlying issues that are causing chaos. 🙂

FLEX TAPE | Super strong waterproof tape animated gif

What kind of reporting can ZenPilot provide?

After working with ZenPilot, you'll have a lot of unlocked visibility in ClickUp natively—workload, time tracking, client health, project progress, team performance, etc.

However, we also provide external profitability reporting for teams. We'll combine your financial data (cost rates, billable rates, etc.) with time tracking data and build you a dashboard to help you make better decisions. You can learn more about our profitability reporting here.

How much does it cost to work with ZenPilot?

Costs of client engagements depend on several factors.

First, we require a minimum of a 4x return on investment (ROI) in the first year of the project. For most teams, this comes from a combination of increasing efficiency, achieving a healthy utilization rate, and using data to improve pricing, packaging, and client relationships.

When you have a conversation with ZenPilot, we'll walk through your situation, your goals, and the best path to achieving the outcomes you want.

Engagements depend on your team size, situation, and goals, but we won't move forward if we can't all see a clear path to achieving a 4-10x year one ROI.

 A full transformation can be 25-75k, but most of our clients can get started for as little as $5,000.

Booking a call with us is completely FREE, so let's start there and see what your team needs.

Why does ZenPilot use points to scope projects?

Over the past decade, we've served more than 2,700 businesses. We collect feedback after each client project and refine our methods. We've learned that operational transformation is complex; every company has its own pace and specific needs. Therefore, we've designed our point-based subscription model for three main reasons:

1) Maximize impact. We use points to ensure clients get the full value of every dollar spent, regardless of how much time it takes to deliver. Points allow us to maximize impact for you while providing extreme pricing transparency.

2) Provide flexibility. We also use points to create flexibility. This flexibility is important because priorities can and should change—the fundamentals don't change, but the application should look slightly different, and true experts know exactly what changes to make and when.

3) Help you continue to pursue operational excellence. Lastly, your work towards operational excellence will never end, but we'll significantly elevate your capabilities in an extremely short time period, and our role will likely phase out as you become more and more self-sufficient. We have teams we've served for years and others who work with us for six months and then have the internal champions to succeed from there.

Who gets to determine how points get allocated?

It's our job to make the best recommendations for you, but it's your job to push for what you need. Together, we'll determine the plan you need to create clarity for your team.

Typically, this begins with our blueprint process, where we'll spend 2-3 weeks identifying your current operational inefficiencies, documenting your goals, and designing a technical blueprint and implementation plan for you.

But from there, your ZenPilot coach will work with you and your leadership team to allocate points based on our recommendations and your priorities.

Do you offer any other plans for startup agencies with a smaller budget?

The short answer - yes, we do!

We suggest visiting our products page to explore some of our templates. Additionally, for agencies just beginning their journey, our ClickUp for Agencies Playbook is designed to help you set up ClickUp correctly from the start. It's available starting at $2500.

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Hiring ZenPilot is the best thing I've done since my time at LegalZoom.

We function so much more smoothly now. We can accommodate more projects, and our general volume of work has increased significantly. It's been an absolute game-changer.

If you're on the fence about this decision and your team needs some organizational support, do it. You won't regret it.

Melanie Brook LegalZoom
Melanie Brook

Principal, Creative Operations
LegalZoom

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