We Build Gold-Standard, Crazy Efficient Agency Operations
You'll boost profit margins with smarter decision making
Your leadership team will have the correct data and insights they need to make crucial decisions around staffing, pricing, service lines, and client strategy—leading to a much more profitable agency.
You'll slash client churn with better, more realistic expectations
Your project and account managers will have clarity into your team's workload, your clients' results, and a completely accurate, live view of every campaign, deliverable, and task for their clients to help them build better, more realistic timelines.
Your team will do better work, faster. Guaranteed.
Your individual contributors will have clarity into exactly what is on their plate every day and the gold-standard process to complete that work flawlessly without an endless cycle of revisions.
You'll give your clients the clarity they've been looking for
Your clients will love you because they'll have clarity into your exact roadmap and strategy for how you've helped and will continue to help them surpass their goals.
Delegating and creating work will be the easiest part of your day
You'll have a plug-and-play process template for everything you do—making work creation, setting timelines, and assigning tasks take seconds instead of hours.
And you'll have a scalable system that your team actually uses and loves
Best of all, your ClickUp Workspace will be easy for your team to use and adopt—ensuring you won't have to continue tool hopping and wasting thousands of dollars in lost productivity every month.
How We Do It
The Solution: The 1-3-5 Formula
Our methodology isn't just a theory; it's a practical, proven playbook for achieving clarity and efficiency across all levels of your organization. The 1-3-5 Formula systematically evaluates your processes, helps create a plan to reduce inefficiencies, and works with your team to implement an effective solution.
One Goal: Clarity for All
Let's start with the core objective: clarity. In our experience working with 3,000+ different firms, we've found that the root of most operational inefficiencies—and reason your project management system isn't working—can be traced back to a lack of clarity.
Whether it's confusion about business metrics, team performance, or individual responsibilities, clarity is the solution. Our goal with the 1-3-5 Formula is to eliminate these ambiguities, ensuring that everyone in your organization knows precisely what they need to do and how their work contributes to the broader objectives.
Now, to truly achieve operational clarity, you need to focus on three critical components: tools, processes, and habits.
Use the right tools
The right tools can dramatically enhance your agency's efficiency. All gold-standard operations have a core operating hub that serves as their single source of truth. And that hub is tied into the rest of their business tooling, and they have an intentional design to make it as efficient and effortless as possible for their team, while providing the key reporting that leads to better decision-making.
Execute the right processes
Consistent, well-defined processes are the backbone of any efficient operation. They ensure that work is completed in a standardized, predictable manner, leading to reliable outcomes and making it easier to scale your agency's operations.
A gold-standard operation is able to turn individual expertise into company knowledge. Their standard operating procedures (SOPs) are documented, up-to-date, and shared by all. And importantly, their team follows those SOPs because they've made the process live where work gets done. Nobody is chasing down a random Google Doc to try to find the process.
The adoption and execution of your tools and processes depend on the habits of your team. Cultivating a culture of excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement is essential. It's about ensuring that your team not only understands the tools and processes but also excels in utilizing them to achieve your agency's goals.
Gold-standard operations spend time setting crystal clear expectations and rules of engagement, training their team on exactly how work is done at their firm, holding their team accountable to those rules of engagement, and coaching and improving their most valuable assets - their people.
Truly world-class businesses excel at all three of these aspects. It's the magic combination of these three that enables them to build and maintain a great culture and great profits while scaling quickly.
Our structured, five-step process brings the 1-3-5 Formula to life:
Step 1: Design
Clarify your goals, decide on your behavioral standards, outline your necessary processes, and design a technical blueprint.
This stage is about ensuring everyone on your team can close their eyes and envision the same end state of operational excellence while also having clarity on how you'll get there.
Step 2: Build
With a clear vision and structure in place, you now need to construct the tooling and processes. This isn't just about setting up tools; it's about integrating them into a cohesive tech stack that supports your agency's unique needs and requirements.
Step 3: Train
Next, focus on training your team. Effective training goes beyond just showing how tools work; it's about instilling the right habits and behaviors, ensuring your team is equipped to utilize the new processes and tools effectively.
Train your team on the tooling, but also on the expectations.
Step 4: Launch
This phase is where the rubber meets the road. After launching your new system, you need to hold your team accountable to your new standards, fostering the development of healthy habits and ensuring that your new processes are followed.
Step 5: Optimization
Finally, you enter a continuous cycle of optimization. Using real-life data (now that you have lots of it!), refine your operations and make iterative improvements to further enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
This process is never over. And this is where the real fun begins!
By focusing on clarity, leveraging the right combination of tools, processes, and habits, and following a disciplined, step-by-step approach, your agency can not only overcome operational hurdles but also set a foundation for scalable growth.
We’ll Guide You Through Our Proven Process to Help You Cancel Chaos and Create Clarity for Your Team
Step 1: Blueprint
We begin by working with you to uncover the hidden operational bottlenecks that are hamstringing your business. From there, we'll design a technical blueprint and implementation plan that will make your agency an incredibly efficient, well-oiled machine. This includes:
Diagnosing underlying issues
We dive deep into your operations, identifying inefficiencies through comprehensive team surveys, leadership insights, and auditing your current systems and workflows.
Goal setting and success measurement
Together, we'll also define and document your key success metrics, whether it's boosting productivity, enhancing team collaboration, or improving project delivery.
Customized system design
Our experts will then design a tailored technical blueprint for your agency—showcasing the appropriate ClickUp hierarchy, views, custom fields, processes, automations, and integrations to streamline your workflows and enhance visibility.
Strategic implementation plan
You'll then receive a detailed implementation plan, crafted to unite your team around a shared vision for operational excellence, ensuring a seamless transition to new workflows.
By the end of this short process, you'll have a comprehensive blueprint that not only identifies areas for improvement, but sets a clear, actionable path forward.
Next, we'll take the Blueprint we designed together and build this exact structure inside ClickUp—saving you hundreds of person-hours and months of work. After your system is live, we'll train your team on how to use it and get you fully onboarded in just a few weeks.
Fully configured ClickUp workspace
We'll bring your Blueprint to life and equip you with a ready-to-use, fully configured Workspace populated by ZenPilot, saving you hundreds of people hours and months of work.
Your ZenPilot configured Workspace will include spaces, folders, lists, views, custom fields, automations, and a few dashboards to help get you up and running quickly.
ClickUp dashboards for reporting
We'll build you a few out-of-the-box ClickUp dashboards for time reporting, individual task management, client management, and managing your workspace.
Custom views for every user
Views are the most exciting but also the most daunting features in ClickUp. That's why we'll build custom views for every role on your team—making it much easier for them to navigate the workspace and do their jobs.
Process library creation
We'll build you a repository for creating and storing your SOPs and process templates, making best practices accessible to all team members.
Support and training
You will have a dedicated ZenPilot coach and access to our ClickUp certification course, ensuring that your team is well-prepared to excel within the new setup.
By the end of this process, you'll have a fully operational, custom-configured ClickUp environment and a fully trained team ready to elevate your agency's productivity from the get-go.
Next, we'll help you turn your entire business into plug-and-play, reusable templates that make creating and managing work simple and stress-free. Then, we'll train your team on how to use them and get them thriving in the new system. Throughout this process you'll have access to:
1-on-1 Coaching and training
Your leadership team, entire organization, and in-house ClickUp Champion receive tailored support and training to systemize your business, manage your ClickUp Workspace, and uphold accountability. We'll take you through key phases of building efficient operations:
Process Building: We'll collaborate with your experts to document SOPs and convert them into ClickUp templates, ensuring consistent processes and deeper insights into project management.
Migration preparation & execution: We'll guide your team through the configuration and deployment of client work within the new system.
Workload management training: We'll equip your project managers and team leads with the skills to leverage newfound workload visibility for informed decision-making.
Communal workshops
Along with 1-on-1 coaching, you'll be able to attend weekly community training workshops for insights from both ZenPilot experts and peer agencies.
On-demand training courses
Your entire team will gain access to our extensive library of tutorials covering the ins and outs of ClickUp, building and deploying templates, migrating client work in to the system, and managing workload.
Process template library
You'll get access to our massive library of 200+ agency-specific and operational templates designed to streamline your workflows.
Throughout this process you'll be building a finely-tuned operational system that not only boosts efficiency but fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement within your agency.
Lastly, we'll continue to help you leverage the full power of your newly implemented system for reporting, ongoing optimization, and strategic decision-making—providing advanced reporting and continuous workflow enhancements, automation builds, and custom solutions to improve team productivity.
Profitability reporting setup
We configure detailed reports to provide deep insights into key performance indicators like profitability, resource utilization, budget pacing, timelines, and team efficiency.
Your leadership team will now have the correct data and insights they need to make crucial decisions around staffing, pricing, service lines, and client strategy.
Custom automations & workflow improvements
We'll continue to work together to identify operational bottlenecks and provide you with advanced automations and workflow enhancements to continue to ramp up team productivity—saving you time and money.
Advanced ClickUp builds
We'll continue to build advanced solutions in ClickUp to continuously improve your operations and build a more productive, profitable, and healthy team.
Continued training & support
We'll provide ongoing training, education, and coaching to help your team excel in their respective roles.
As we continue our ongoing partnership, we'll be building a culture of data-driven decision-making and continuous optimization that keeps your agency competitive and agile.
Since becoming our first partner in 2018, ZenPilot has stood out as the go-to solution for agencies who want to get the most out of ClickUp.
Their commitment to truly solving for the customer and providing the best customer experience is perfectly aligned with our mission at ClickUp - and it shows up in their results and the feedback we consistently hear about ZenPilot.
The real game changer of working with ZenPilot was the visibility it gave us into our whole business. I can now feel peace knowing where projects are at, see blocks coming ahead of time so we can proactively communicate with clients, and plan out work accordingly with my team.
There is no way I could’ve built out all the top-tier processes we did in such a short amount of time without ZenPilot—or train my team on healthy project management habits.
ZenPilot is hands down one of the best investments we’ve made as a business. They help us live up to our value of excellence. If you have any doubts, leave them at the door and jump in!
Rebecca Nash Beam Content
ZenPilot Testimonials
Our team is more efficient, productive, and healthier. I was always wary of how much of our work could be put into processes, but this has completely changed my mind. If you want to take your agency to the next level, ZenPilot is a must!
Kyle Harms
Digital Hot Sauce
They provided the tools, processes, and in-depth knowledge to allow us to successfully migrate our entire business to ClickUp in just a few weeks. We would recommend ZenPilot to anyone considering a move to ClickUp.
Andrew Cole
Fat Earth Media
They saved us a lot of time and trouble, and we've had many amazed comments from clients and colleagues about how organized our process is now.
Arianne Foulks
Aeolidia
Since following ZenPilot's strategy and best practices,our team is saving hours per team member every week. Communication has improved across the team and we're able to give our clients better visibility in their campaigns. Margins have increased because of the efficiency as well.
Chris Dubois
Lean Labs
Leadership now has a clear view of bandwidth and capacity, the staff understands exactly what is expected of them when they sit down every morning, and our clients have improved visibility into their deliverables.
Kevin D'Arcy
ThinkFuel
We are more efficient than ever and have streamlined our communication so it's organized and on task, vs having a huge Slack channel or Slack mess.
Josh Crouch
Relentless Digital
ZenPilot has been the most impactful agency operations investment we’ve ever made. They understood our situation, know ClickUp inside out, and led our team to a successful implementation. If you’re serious about scaling your agency, you need to talk to ZenPilot - they transformed how we work and led a 300% improvement in efficiency.
Michael Lisovetsky
Co-founder JUICE
ZenPilot came in with a framework, implementation, and training resources to move our agency through a lot of change in the way our 30 member team does things....change management that is super hard like task and time tracking! They really know ClickUp, and we do some crazy complicated things in there. If you need help scaling and measuring operational performance in your agency, ZenPilot is a great partner to get it done.
Ben Labay
CEO, Speero
Our agency has tried many project management tools over the years, but when we migrated to ClickUp we finally felt like we got it right. But hiring ZenPilot to help us implement it was an even better decision -- easily the best investment we made in our agency's growth. In the year since implementing ClickUp, our business has doubled, and our project management systems and structure have been able to adapt and scale with us
ZenPilot employs a monthly subscription model broken into three tiers: Economy ($4,000/month), Business ($6,000/month), and First Class ($9,000/month).
Each of these subscription tiers is fully points-based and is crafted to offer unparalleled flexibility and to ensure our services align perfectly with your agency's shifting needs over time.
For a detailed overview of our pricing structure and to better understand the comprehensive benefits of partnering with ZenPilot, check out our pricing page.
We've guided thousands of agencies to successfully increase their productivity and profits. Book a call to see how we can help you navigate the 1-3-5 Formula.
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