Venn Digital Marketing Sees Profitability Soar After a Pivotal Business Decision With ZenPilot

Challenge: Missed Deadlines, Duplicated Work, and No View of Profitability

Venn Digital was two years old and growing - email marketing, PPC, and SEO for small businesses across legal, coaching, consulting, and SaaS. Work was coming in. But the operations underneath it were a mess. There were no standardized processes, no consistent way to run a client engagement, and no visibility into whether the agency was actually profitable on a per-client basis. Tasks fell through the cracks. Repeated work wasted time. Missed deadlines strained client relationships.

Their project management tool at the time, Basecamp, wasn’t built for what they needed. There was no way to track time against client work, no data on costs versus revenue, and no structure that could scale as the team grew. Matt Guevara, the founder, knew something had to change - but the turning point came from outside the agency.

“We had hired a marketing/operations coach and walked them through how we do things. And their response to us was, ‘you’re not an agency. You’re simply three guys doing marketing who get paid for it. An agency has clear positioning and a proven process to execute strategy, which brings results to their clients.’” — Matt Guevara, Founder, Venn Digital Marketing

“After hearing this I realized we needed to grow up,” Matt said. “If we really want to grow and be a real agency, we need to change how we do things.”

Solution: Hierarchy, Process Library, and Weekly ClickUp Time

Venn Digital found ClickUp and quickly recognized it could give them the visibility and structure they needed. What they also recognized: they needed a partner who understood how to set it up properly for an agency. After a conversation with ZenPilot, it was, as Matt put it, “a no-brainer.”

ZenPilot built out the full ClickUp hierarchy from scratch - spaces, folders, lists, custom fields, and views - giving Venn Digital a structure designed around how they actually delivered work. They also received a pre-built process library, custom dashboards for visibility into client work, time tracked, timelines, and team performance, role-specific views for leadership and individual contributors, an internal knowledge base for SOPs, and a CRM space to track client health.

The team dedicated weekly “ClickUp time” sessions - two-plus hours every week in a room together, writing out their processes step by step. “Yeah, they weren’t perfect right out of the gate, but we built everything we needed to get ClickUp launched,” Matt said. ZenPilot stayed available throughout, answering questions quickly and sending custom video tutorials for specific use cases.

After documentation was complete, Venn Digital migrated their active client work from Basecamp into the new system, deployed process templates into client folders, assigned work to the team, and launched.

Result: The Data Revealed What the Team Couldn’t See

The operational improvements were immediate - better execution, less wasted time, consistent task tracking, and a team that was actually bought into using the system. But the most significant outcome came from the dashboards.

A few months after launch, Venn Digital’s leadership team started reviewing their ClickUp dashboards on a monthly cadence to evaluate client health and profitability. What they found was unexpected: the niche they had built the agency around - the clients they had the best relationships with - were their least profitable. In some cases, clients outside their main niche were 400% more profitable.

“After using ClickUp optimally and consistently we realized that our least profitable clients came from our main niche,” Matt said. “This niche was actually hurting our business and we realized we had connected ourselves to a niche that wasn’t profitable. We’d be much better off if we made a switch.”

Venn Digital made the switch. Profitability soared. The team doubled from 3 FTEs to 6 FTEs. Profit margins increased significantly. “This new level of visibility led to a pivotal moment in our business. Because of the switch we made, our profitability soared. Without this adjustment, we would never have been able to expand in the way that we did. And that’s thanks to ZenPilot and ClickUp.”

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