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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:01
Hey everyone, today I am joined by gray Mackenzie, grazie co founder and CEO at Sen pilot and they have helped 1000s of agencies systemize their businesses boosting efficiency and therefore, profit. At gray is my go to guy for anything around processes. So I was very excited to get his perspective on the future of agency operations. He's built an awesome team of process focus experts who crush it with clickup, and you are guaranteed to pull some nuggets from this one. In this episode, we discussed why having well defined processes is crucial for agencies, how AI can enhance and speed up processes, why you should separate strategy from implementation to avoid limitations in your business and more. It's fitting that Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot, there are a lot of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations. So your team can move from chaos to clarity, can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com. And now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome gray McKenzie. It's easier than ever to start an agency. But it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.
Why is it important for agencies to get processes right now more than ever?
Speaker 1 1:36
Yeah. So I think the natural buzzword here is AI. That's where a lot of the stuff comes back to. So that certainly is one of the big reasons that I think nailing processes matters just because you start building up. That database is like, Hey, here's how we here's how we do stuff. Here's the results of me do it this way, and especially if we're tracking it as well. So not just processes, but we're we're tracking what we're doing. That is creating the training data for your baselines and benchmarks and automations and improvements and optimizations down the road. So yeah, I think I don't know, like, there's a lot of reasons process will always matter. So I don't know that it's outside of the AI piece. I don't know that it's tremendously more important today than it has been at any point in the past. But But I think it's it's always had high level of importance. It's always been undervalued in a very creative professional.
Chris DuBois 2:41
I mean, it's one of the easiest ways to not only reduce your cost internally. But if you and this is something I've noticed with agencies that I've been working with, if you can get a great result, having the process that shows how you get there means you can replicate that result. But so frequently, I see agencies just create a process for the sake of saying I have a process, but it's like it was for a mediocre result. And now yeah, you have a process right as new hires to follow. But it's like, what they're kind of get mediocrity, right? Like,
Speaker 1 3:14
yeah, what have you seen work best for because this is something I'm constantly trying to preach it to our teammates in pilot, and I probably over preach this to a lot of clients as well, is how it feels great that you got a process written down documented, you get your template built and click up or whatever, that's awesome. But pay very little attention to the results. And what actually came from that. Have you found anything that works super well for getting the team to not just go along with it when you suggest it? Or remind them that hey, let's look, is this actually working or not? And let's go improve it. But to do that proactively on their own? So,
Chris DuBois 3:53
yeah, with it really comes down to or from my perspective, right? It comes down to picking what is that, like milestone or benchmark that we need for a result? Before we even consider making it a process? And so like, you guys have the prioritization, the process prioritization. Yeah, I think I called that framework. Yeah. Yep. And so like, that's a great way to list that like, Okay, this one's super painful. Like, we need to find a way to do this. For a lot of those processes. It's like, we're doing them so frequently, because they're just standard, like, it's not a creative output that we're looking for. It's just like to get us to that creative place. And so for those, it's like, yeah, let's make the process. But it's when when we say like, okay, let's make a great landing page, and say, Okay, well, can we model success first? Do we know what needs to go into a great landing page for it to actually deliver and it's not just us going, looking for some blog posts and podcasts that talk about what it is it's like, do we do it? Do we have the necessary skills and expertise To be able to deliver. And once we have that, it's like, okay, so we know we need to hit this mark. We've done it. Let's do it again. And now we create a process from that.
Speaker 1 5:10
Yeah, it's hard. Yeah. Yeah, I guess for your point, sir, like, the definition of done that's part of any process, like what is what is success here? And then everything's aimed at? How do we know? are we hitting that goal? And then how do we improve that?
Chris DuBois 5:26
It's almost like having a pre qualifier for like, you can't make this a process? Unless what? And then we just outline that from the start? And yeah, yeah, hopefully helps. Right. But the Yeah, I think that's going back to like, what you're saying AI is probably the the big. I don't know the right word is like modifier for the need for processes today. But it's also because you can do things so much faster. With AI. That's like, if you don't have the processes, it's really hard to keep up on other spots. And so how have you seen that? Influencing agencies?
Speaker 1 6:10
Yeah, I think that so actually, I was just done a great, you know, Jimmy rose at content snare kind of series, like intake. If you're working in client services, and you do any type of intake, data collection, whatever else, great platform, weirdly enough, is like a little tangent. And I'll get back to your question. But I've known Jimmy for a handful years, he was kind of focused on the agency space, originally this startup, then he started targeting accounting firms. And so our tax prep firm, they sent this 22 page long Google Doc that we had to fill out every year for the kind of stuff I was like, man, guys, there's a better way to do this than just in this doc, that's super painful. And we could probably keep some of this data save. So it's not we're not doing it fresh every single year. So you guys should check out conference here. They used it, they talked to him sign up, use it, the intake process was great for for me, and then I was like, Okay, we're gonna use that. So now we use that it's in pilot as you work with us. And one of the first things you'll fill out is the agency operations assessment. And so that'll all be done in contents there. There's not a plug for content scenario. And that's a great tool. But I was on with Jimmy last night, walking through how we're using content snare, and some of the results everything. And we got done. And he's like, Hey, we just recorded all that, would you be willing to leave a review of content snare, love that I do, too. And check that like, to me, I love you. If it's not too time intensive, I'd be happy to do that. But I don't have a whole lot of free time that I'm dying to go to review sites and have my eyes just bleed, looking at all the all the terrible UX of review sites. So don't worry about that we've got this Custom Prompt that takes the whole transcript of everything that you just said, and spits out the answers to everything that needs to go into GE to each of the questions that they'll ask you, from your words, it's going to take us five minutes at it, and then we'll send it to you. And then you can just copy and paste it in. So oh, that's a really good process. For you already had somebody do all this work, it's gonna be super painful to have to go start from scratch and try to type it all back into whatever these review sites are. But for using them, that makes a ton of sense. So all kinds of applications. Where would you be found before that worked for them? Was nobody fills it out? If we tell them to do it, what works for us is, we need to give them the answers to the questions that they're going to ask. And then we'll actually get the reviews that we want. And then because of the having that process that was like, Hey, how can we take AI and speed this up and move it there? And so we're there's really, there's so few processes that I look at with our clients, and don't see immediate applications of AI, somewhere along the line. And that's very, very difficult to do if they don't have anything documented or in place right now. But when they do have a starting point, there's so many opportunities, like they're almost everything, it's like, oh, here's, I'm not I'm not an AI expert. I'm not I'm not even like that great at process development. Like I've done a lot of it, but I'm not the world's premier process person. But I you know, so if I'm connecting this, like certainly your best people can connect a lot of this stuff super quickly. Yeah, I
Chris DuBois 9:27
think what's great about that, like testimonial process is that most people suck at leaving testimonials. And so if you can actually frame everything the exact way you want to be seen, and then just you just gotta get someone's blessing on it. Wait, yeah, adding the layer of AI building it for you because you know what you're trying to do and now we can just format everything. Right, right. So, you guys, you guys be exempt violet. partner will click up pretty early. And I think that's what's led to a lot of success for you as in being able to have that platform you can anchor to. Right, you kind of niche down. I guess I'm curious, what are some of the challenges that you found with have it being like a primary part like having a single primary partner that you work with? Yep.
Speaker 1 10:22
Yeah. So the, that decision came about, we were looking, we were migrating off of building our own VM tool for agencies. And so we were looking for the standard than in the standard now is still like, we want to service agencies on top of what we think the best fit tool for most agencies, most of the time from a project management perspective is. And so it was Asana Monday and click up in the top three, I think Teamwork was four, when we originally ran through it, we still run through that exercise every year. And try to figure out, hey, what do we think is the best, we know that we want to be super deep on one tool. So I can say not just, Hey, you should have processes live where the work gets done. And you should have visibility to these metrics, by actually take your whole setup and plug it in and say, look, and here's what it should look like, very tactically, and you've got this hard edge case, like, we can solve that for you very, very quickly. So no, I knew I wanted to deep expertise. At the time, we picked a cool girl, nobody knew about him, like 90% of our clients, we were, they're coming to us for agency ops help. And we were saying, hey, use us clickup and introduce him to the platform. And today that looks different. So it's clickup has taken off. What we've figured out from marketing perspective, is that everybody tries to solve their operations problems with another software, like it's this tool, it's that tool. And the reason for that. One, it sounds like the magic bullet, like off I just had, I just saw a post this morning, like, Hey, if you're drowning in work management stuff. Project management tool is what you need, check out Asana for whatever it was like, why so you can poke around with the word like, your problem is you're not getting the work done. It's not it's not the tool. But that's where all the marketing dollars go, the millions and millions of marketing dollars go towards the SAS tools. So we've switched our marketing to be very much focused on what people think is the solution. I'm trying to get trying to figure out how to run EOS and click up I'm trying to figure out how to set up click up for my agency and make it work, I'm trying to figure out how to do this process templates or these automations are hooked up these two tools up. And that is not the full picture. But it's a part of how people try to solve it. And so that's relatively effective from a marketing perspective. But what that then creates is a lot of eyeballs, but a perception that you are the click of monkeys, you the people know, click up super well. And what I want to the business that I want to grow and build is, we know how agency should operate. We can walk your team how to deliver exceptional client outcomes profitably over and over and over and increase team health at the same time along with your productivity and profitability. That's the business we're building clickup It's just one of the tools that we deploy towards that with with a ton of expertise. So I'd say that's one of the biggest challenges is then trying to reset the frame. When folks come in with with a single perception, and there's all kinds of other, you know, you guys are exactly what I am looking forward to do this on Osama. That's what we're running on. Nope, we won't. And so that's, you know, you lose deals because of that specificity. And that trade off totally offended me. Because for every one of those deals that you're losing, you're winning other deals, because I've got other people who I could talk to about operations as well. But you guys are super deep on this one tool. And I've demonstrated expertise there. So there's pros and cons.
Chris DuBois 14:00
Yeah, probably worth licensing your your model to some other agencies, so they can do it on the other tools. You don't even have to worry about it.
Speaker 1 14:09
I've thought many times. So I've got some friends who run like very niche notion consultancies or whatever else in you know, there's definitely that entrepreneurial scheming that goes on mentally of we should take all the same exact stuff, same exact principles and have, you know, Zen Monday and then Asana, whatever it is,
Chris DuBois 14:33
on top of that, yeah, something I was I've been reading a lot about lately, just separating the strategy from implementation and realizing that Yeah, so the strategy is going to stay the same regardless. Right. It's the same overall concept, just how do we plan to actually get this done tactically through the implementation? And so yeah, it's an option. But the Yeah, going back to what you're saying that people think and the tool is always there. It started. I mean, this was like a reframing for myself years ago. But anytime I'm trying to learn something new or work on a new project, I approach it with mindset, then skill set, then toolset. And so because if you're not the number of times I would get in a conversation with someone to sell HubSpot, and they're like this against solve everything, like no, it's not. Yeah, I promise you, it won't. End. But when you get back to like a step back from the tool service, do you have the skills to actually be able to use this tool? Like do you know, you know, how to how to market how to set up set up workflows, then step back from that? Do you understand why you're doing it? The mindset piece, like, is this completely different if you're approaching it from one direction from another. And so I think just framing it like that has really helped with getting people on the right track much faster. And realizing that right tool won't, won't solve their problems.
Unknown Speaker 15:53
I don't think we've ever heard that framework before we go, I think
Chris DuBois 15:57
it's one of those things where I'm pretty sure I made it up. But someday I'm going to like read something from like the 60s and someone will have said it was helpful. And I had a story I like to use maybe for listeners, this can be helpful for you guys, too. I decided I want to learn how to juggle once. And I don't know why I just like popped in my head. And so I grabbed some socks, right? And I'm just like practicing. And I would do it after my kids went to bed. And so when I moved to upgraded to like potatoes, and I was doing it over the couch, they want to make a lot of noise. But my wife came downstairs was like, What are you doing? Like I'm learning how to juggle? And she's like, Why? Why not? Right? But she said, Well, the kids actually bought you juggling balls for Father's Day. And so now I have like some urgency, right? I got to learn how to juggle. And so I figured it out, like actually pretty quick. It's way easier than you think. But then I opened this gift for my kids take out juggling balls and just start juggling and their little eyes were like boom, like, what? What is going on? Then they picked up the juggling balls, and couldn't do it. Right. They thought the tool was what? What helped me do it? And it's like, no, I've actually spent time building up the skills. The only reason I had the skills, it's because I watched, I think it was Jim quick as a great documentary, like a tutorial on on YouTube, how to juggle and so like it completely shifted how I was doing it. Then I went got the skills and then had the tool. And it's like, oh, man, perfect. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1 17:30
that's a great, that's a great illustration. I do think in any other context. You've got, like, pickup, or rec league sports for adults. And anybody who's actually any good or serious, they see somebody come in with all the like, all their stuffs completely brand new, they just bought all this stuff. And right away, everybody recognized like this is an impostor. This is not a real, like, they don't have the skill set. We all get it there. But then none of that, like, you know, in the work in the workplace, like we all do the same thing that we do, when we don't know how to play sport, when you'll get all the gear and like, show up like a complete rookie. We did the same thing was like, Oh, if I just had that tool, like that's gonna solve it. It's so easy to recognize another context and to apply it. Yeah.
Chris DuBois 18:26
So you guys are anchored pretty well with clickup. But one of the, I think awesome benefits of that is that your entire team understands clickup? And seems like yes, I'm doing a much bigger push on the team creating content around clickup. Because I mean, it's popping up all over my feed, you know, on LinkedIn, and everything. And it's like, great value, because you're getting it from different perspectives, but it's all like really promoting this. Like, it's separate from just marketing and having the ever the entire team talking about this and pointing people back design pilot, like what other benefits are you seeing from just having a team that's so like, they are the experts in this. And so, right.
Speaker 1 19:11
Going back to the mindset piece, I think that's maybe the biggest hidden benefit is there's the through and through mentality across the team, that if we can't figure it out and cook up, nobody in the world is gonna figure it out and click up. And that is like click UPS largest global customer got pulled to us for help designing how their workspace needed to get architected. And so there's all kinds of like clients stuff that reinforces that. But the fact that everyone has a chance to participate in putting out there perspective what they're learning, I guess, probably the biggest hidden benefit of it is it creates that environment where there's a lot of pride in the work and the craft. There's a downside to that too. And it's like, Whoa, let's not get lost in the sauce in terms of, hey, this, we've figured out this crazy thing and click up to other people in the world care about like, that's that I think then that creates the problem of, hey, we need to figure out how to simplify this for the average company and have success with it. But it does create a, like humble and hungry is our first core value. And so it's not a, we're not a BS, get degrees kind of team. It's very much like everyone owns their craft. There's an element, and this is we have a whole conversation about why this is bad from an efficiency or profitability perspective. But there's an element of a lot of perfectionism on the team, and like, we're gonna be, you know, the craftsmen who can nail this stuff in the most elegant, refined way. And there's a lot of times where it's like, Hey, guys, we got to take that hat off. And we just got to brute force out the, you know, here's the, here's the quick and dirty version of this, that's good enough for right now. But I would rather be having to remind the team that, hey, this doesn't have to be perfect right now in the one inch infected can't be perfect. In the one. Then the other way around, we're constantly trying to push people to, hey, we care a little bit about what we're doing. I really think for most of life, there's not a perfect there's not a perfect balance, like it's very hard to keep the teeter totter completely level, I think every business is either growing a little bit too fast, or they're growing a little bit too slow. And you kind of make a decision about which way do I want to over index. And so I'd rather over index on the perfectionist that needs to be told, Hey, hustler up little bit. And And here's where you can actually narrow it out than the other way around. Yeah,
Chris DuBois 21:55
I think it there's probably some benefit as well, where like, once you've made it one, even if you've made it for like a single client, right, learning how to do that with your team, saving it in your own account. That's like a template to be able to refer back to probably leads to some other like innovations and faster development for like different problems that you're facing. Some point to, for sure.
Speaker 1 22:19
Yeah, all of those all the hardest problems then can turn into because of this super niche, super tight focus. That all becomes part of the asset that everyone's gonna benefit from down the line. Yeah, that's probably a huge one.
Chris DuBois 22:35
Excuse me. So speaking of this, like being able to create the processes and things like that internally to be able to use later at the roundtable last week. So AI and agency operations roundtable hosted by Zen violet, for everybody who didn't attend, I strongly recommend you guys check those, those roundtables out. But I entered I was presenting, I introduced a concept of mine called the the efficiency innovation continuum. That seemed to resonate quite a bit with people like most of the people who followed up with me after we're just talking about that. And it was the idea that like, you can be either really efficient, and sacrifice some innovation, or you can be really innovative and sacrifice efficiency. I didn't think it would like I would use that when I was running an agency right to know, where do I need to move my team on this, this scale right now based off our goals based on what we have going on? And it really helped me like focus, like maybe we move away from efficiency, because we're trying something new, and I need them to get the craziest idea out there. Yeah. But this seems like something like because I got so much feedback from it. It seems like there is a huge piece to this that agencies really care about. I guess from your perspective, what do you see in that, as far as the efficiency and innovation on this continuum? How are how are they treating that?
Speaker 1 23:58
Yeah, I'd say there's so there's a common mistake. Totally agree with that principle. I think Blair ends call it the inefficiency. Principle with the Oh, instead of an E. So it sounds like it's an actual word, but he's making up a word. It's another one where someone creative my idea already, is, it's already
Chris DuBois 24:21
fine. Well,
Speaker 1 24:23
so that's the like, That's it, you know, exactly the right. Those two things are at odds with each other. For sure. The common mistake that I see is a lot of teams are trying to be efficient, that I mean back to the point from earlier like they're trying to be efficient before they actually figured out the right innovation to make something work better. And there's also teams who are trying to be innovative when the solution and this is like the common mistake that we make it's Impala and that I feel like we're We're constantly correcting for is trying to be innovative when the solution is already so much better than what's out there. And now it's like, hey, let's be efficient. And let's get it into people's hands efficiently. So that they can they can go use it. So I think it's just knowing like, what's the context? And that's a whole skill, like juggling, like, what's the how do we identify what situation? Are we in? Do we need to be more innovative? Or do we need to be more efficient, but the solution right now to serve our own business to serve our clients and to serve the broader market best?
Chris DuBois 25:33
Yeah, I think that, okay, so I know, I didn't make this one up. I've heard multiple people talk about I don't know who to credit, but it's the idea of doing more than better than new. And so like, once we have something that works, now, we're just gonna do more of it. And with doing more, we're collecting more data to be able to understand what works, what doesn't, and then we can make it better. And really hone in on that, then let's do something new. And I think that's also something that you see a lot of agencies will do one thing and then move right to doing something new. It's like, it gets more reps on that, right? Like you have this benefit, he has an agency to get reps really fast. So why don't we lean into that? Be the best at this understand this better than anyone? And then move on?
Speaker 1 26:15
Yeah, that so there's like four habits. So we try to teach every internal agency like click of champion slash ops, head of delivery, whatever, folks in general, the daily Spacek weekly, round up monthly analysis quarterly review. And for most teams, that quarterly review should be the cycle where we look at, what are the types of tasks and deliverables that we're doing most consistently. And then let's find the delta between what we had estimated what we actually like, were what's driving a lot of our costs. But those rhythms and that don't, you know, if you're a super early stage agency, you don't have data every quarter to make those to go innovate necessarily, might be, hey, every six months or something, and if you're a fortune 500 person agency, there's probably tons of data that comes in every month, and you can, you're gonna have a faster cycle of iterating iterating, because of what you said, which is how many reps do we get added to these things? So it's not necessarily the core for most teams quarterly is the right frequency, but totally fine if it's a different frequency. But there's got to be some rhythm about when we actually look at this. And there's some like you're saying, there's some time to just say, Hey, forget it, we're just doing more. And then we'll figure out how to do it better, and then make it right.
Chris DuBois 27:37
So we talked about this a bit earlier, but I'm curious for some of the other ways you're seeing AI kind of revolutionize the project management space. Like either within Tools or just within how people are thinking about things.
Speaker 1 27:51
Yeah. The like, the Cyclops got their brain feature. I think notions is just called notion AI for now. Everyone's got, like, a lot of the same features, and give me a quick digest. Or whatever it is. Some of the things that I'd say there's like to get in there as though what what is working? And so the summary type information is generally working pretty well. That's obviously dependent on a team having habits of actually, do you close out your tasks, when you're done with them? Do you update stuff on time? Do you add the right stuff in, but if it's in there, they're doing a pretty good job of giving you a summary of hey, here's the It's basically your, your daily standup, or your weekly standup or whatever. Here's what got done. Here's what stuck in the process. Here's what, yeah, what's coming up next. So some of that reporting stuff is going well, I think, both notion and clickup. Actually, I use a journaling tool called reflect that does this well, as well. But you can interface with a document or a wiki or something and ask whatever questions, you know, feeds it based on that like very, very standard stuff. But that is really useful for a lot of teams. And there's the flip side, which is the stuff that I think everyone's hoping works better, and hasn't really played out yet. But it's exciting to anticipate working better. And that's things like automated time tracking. Everyone's after automated time tracking. And no one's no one's nailed that yet, despite a lot of promises. automated task scheduling. So motion is maybe the like the most well known one today for their implementation of it. And even that is like in a one off environment, like in your situation, Chris, I can see that working super well. And then you plug in a team and you've got different priorities, and there's just not enough of that. Like it's just not far enough along in its implementation to make it work super well on the team. So there's stuff like that, that I'm super excited about coming up in the AI and pm space. It's not really paid off yet. So
Chris DuBois 30:13
I do use motion for myself. But we also set it up with a client who is using clickup. And just we use his app to when a task is created, which task pushes it to motion, and then we'll just organize it for them. They weren't actually using like the time tracking project management inside motion. But a team member could sit down and see their task list for the day, based off priorities and write all those other numbers and, and so that I think was helpful as far as just getting people to sit and go to work. And really wishing I interviewed Chris Dreyer from rankings.io this morning. Yeah. And, and he talked about an awesome time tracking tool that was like, automatic and stuff. And just, I don't know, it's looking at what you're doing and knows where to Bill and everything. Yep. And I already forgot what the name of it was, I wrote down.
Speaker 1 31:01
Was a timely, timely is the one that I hear get the most, I don't know, most common love. Yeah, I'll follow up. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes for this one.
Chris DuBois 31:13
But yeah, there's definitely like I think with, with AI, being able to get the, get a task in front of the right person at the right time, based off where it is, and the process and the flow. And like, even just if it knows the process, and says, Hey, you just finished this, like, now we gotta go present it to the client, right? For a first look, or something like that, where it's, it's even kind of coaching you through the next steps in a way that yeah, like, you could go build all of that out. Or I can do it for you. And just like, explain that thing. It's a it's going to remove some need for project managers in general. Um,
Speaker 1 31:53
have you seen Do you know who Peter levels is, like, as bootstrapper builds a lot of developer nomadic, kind of like indie hacker buildings project right now called therapist.ai. And so it's, you know, AI generated, talking 10 that you can talk with, and it's transcribing what you say ingesting it in its own processing, and then giving you the answer is trained on whatever. And so I was watching this demo that he put together yesterday, I was like, man, we are not far away from somebody making like pm.ai or whatever, like, Hey, I've got these four clients that have these issues. And yeah, these three things I need to push across the finish line, like what order should I do these in? Right, and I hate talking heads as an interface. But if, you know, there's got to be some better faster interface that happens there. And yeah, it'll definitely be able to also
Chris DuBois 32:53
even like I, when I was delivering web projects, we would use you know, Gantt charts and everything in English, to be able to, to show kind of the flow, like, Okay, once we have this stage of the outline of this page, and we're gonna move into the wireframing. And the client had visibility, and we could just show where everything is, but like, if I could have aI generate that, for me, all I have to do is feed it the scope, right, everything else and it just like here, yo, alright, business. Yeah, we have the, the therapy side. So I've mentioned this on different podcasts, I was using a tool called wave.ai. That's a business coach for like 20 bucks a month. But I found the issue is that because I knew it wasn't a person on the other end had no accountability. And so I just didn't care. And I started skipping, skipping weeks. And then next thing you know, I'm paying 20 bucks to for nothing. And so I'm gonna let's cancel this. But I think there for certain things are still the value of a person being there because you may never be accountable to robots until they actually take over and you know, Skynet, the thing, right? Yeah, I think pm.ai certainly was my voice. pm.ai is probably Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna get that right after this. So let's, I guess, what's the 8020 for project management? Right, like, what is the one thing that an agency could be doing today and they get this right. Everything else is going to have there's gonna be like a lasting impact.
Speaker 1 34:27
Yeah, that's a good one. I have I have a couple different thoughts on what the 8020 of project management is. The first place that put a lot of people is like, hey, just get all your work down somewhere, like the amount of hidden work in most agency teams is wild to see how much happens that doesn't ever get tracked, talked about documented and Are the end in the conflicting or conflicting but like if I could pick a couple of things. Just getting everyone working on the same way, like in the same methodology is huge. It's wild how many teams there are, especially the teams that have grown through acquisition. So this is like 100 600 700 person agencies who we're working with. And they're like, man, we don't even try, like this team can go work on whatever system they want this team to work on whatever system they want, like, Oh, really? Like, why is that is that because designers do better in this tool, and developers do better in this tool? And, you know, creatives do better over here? No, it's just whoever's leading the department and cared enough about a tool like there's no rhyme or reason or piece about it. And it's like, we will show me how you roll up all the data. And so will everyone's got their own p&l, and there's just a lot of inefficiency there. And in the cases where you've had the chance to get in and work with them, and bring that all together, it's the most profound, like, ROI. Results, one, because such such a large scale, there's no really big outcomes that are available because of that. But just because getting everybody on the same page. And working off of a unified system, creates way more alignment. In everything that happens, and it's way easier, someone's out and someone who's pick something up, or someone needs Chai, like so, so many, the reduction meetings by itself is like the biggest impact. And in some of those cases, that's what a really, really simplified, hey, we're not going to try and do, you know, time estimates for everything. And we're not going to try to have every aspect of the process like scoped out or anything, we're just gonna get like, to the 8020 point, we're still at the core pieces in here and make sure that everyone's got it and everyone's working off of out of the same view every day. So I think that's the, that one by itself is not that's kind of cheating, like, hey, get everyone working in the same way. Because that's like 14 Different things for I need to come together to make an app. Right. But I'd rather have a team, this will obviously resonate with you based on your background. much rather have people executing a plan altogether than have the perfect plan. That's, yeah, no one's actually executing definitely
Chris DuBois 37:34
value in just going and doing. Yeah, I think even like, when we implemented clickup, even through your guidance, there were a couple of like, we don't have we didn't we focus on 10 clients at a time, Max. And so like, kind of restructured clickup, just based off that, because we didn't, we weren't going to run out of workspaces or, or anything. And so it kind of shifted how we were looking at it for campaigns and everything. But we wanted to figure that out, unless we jumped in and just started doing it. So yeah, yeah, you in there. And again, two more for you. The first being and I've modified this one specifically for you. What is the best operations book, you would recommend agency leaders?
Speaker 1 38:21
Oh, that's a good one. I had a really adverse reaction when I first read traction. So that's one that comes to mind just because EOS has gained so much traction in the agency space. If someone's not running on a system like EOS. That's probably one of the most helpful things that you can do. Operationally. I actually think this is not at all a like Built to Sell sticks in my mind. Not at all an operational book, but a helpful mindset tweak for me, you've got all the all the output side, and then you get the input side. And if you can simplify the inputs to the 8020 rule, like if we can make the inputs a lot more similar. A client's look like this. We're specialized in this area, we offer our services in these couple of ways. Everything that happens downstream of that operationally becomes so much easier. So I think that's not at all on an operations focused book. But that principle really gets driven home through Built to Sell. That might be one of my recommendations to an agency owner specifically to say, hey, let's tighten up what we're allowing people, what are the parameters around engaging with us? And that will simplify everything downstream. Right?
Chris DuBois 39:50
I had heard a piece of advice that you should have your your business valued every like one to two years. Purely not to sell but just Have someone else look at it and say this is how much we would like probably pay for it right? This is what someone on the market thinks this is actually worth. And it gets you to shift how you're actually thinking about your business to make it more valuable to someone else, not just yourself. However, if you're building a lifestyle, business and stuff, then by all means, go ahead. I
Speaker 1 40:22
went through that process a year and a half ago, and tried to apply that was like, Hey, how does this? What insight do we get about how we're building this? And like, what are we actually building in terms of enterprise value, and parts that were really helpful to go through, I felt like other parts were sweet and interesting to do with somebody like I would do it with somebody else. Next time. Because you're competent is, Hey, your business is worth somewhere between 5.1 and $7.3 million. Alright, that's great. Now like showing the comps that that data is coming from I understand the multiple range here is somewhere between three and six. But what are the like, show me the comps, show me what moves got me here and there. And so who you're working with, it's certainly part of it. But it was really helpful in shaping some of the thinking.
Chris DuBois 41:20
I also like the idea of the one chart business, where it's like, you could just have that single chart that shows you everything you need, right to really know if you're on track like that. That's the dream. Yeah, to simplify life like that. But Alright, last question. Where can people learn more about you?
Speaker 1 41:43
Yeah. zampella.com. And LinkedIn are the two best two best places for sure. The newsletter is great. That pm benchmark has been helpful to a lot of teams from the website. And then my LinkedIn, I'm always happy to connect with people in the agency space. Awesome.
Chris DuBois 42:00
All right.
Speaker 1 42:03
Can I ask you one question on the flip side of the theme, one chart businesses. How much of that do you think is HubSpot? HubSpot? It's Google Search Google volume. Google Trends click out like in our business the same way? I don't know that totally applies. But like there's a lot of agencies that have grown purely off the back of hub spots growing popularity. Yeah. I think those are one chart businesses. They're still they're still Yeah.
Chris DuBois 42:36
I guess if they're if I was a like HubSpot onboarding agency, and that was purely what I did. I could easily get that down to probably through a single chart with a couple different axes playing into the chair and right, left and right. But I could definitely get that in basing HubSpot growth versus the number of people coming on to HubSpot shows how many people I can potentially work with. Yeah, I could see that getting getting there. Yep. Yeah, it's a fundamental exercise to figure out what's what's that critical number for your business that if you could just get that mapped out, would look, you know, paint the picture of everything you need to see simply as meetings again, so. But a gray, I appreciate you coming on. I love everything you guys are doing this empire that I get super excited when I do see all the content and like everything else you guys are doing and just testing out new stuff, new marketing approaches, and yeah, I am a I'm a fanboy. And so I'm gonna keep following you guys. I'm looking forward to seeing everything keep growing. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 43:33
appreciate that. Well, thanks for the opportunity commodity, Chris. It's good.
Chris DuBois 43:41
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai