Finding the right project management software for your team with Alane Boyd

Hey everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign Agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

And then Agency Management Institute, all one word. Subscribe and search the existing video database for all sorts of actionable topics that you can implement in your shop today. Alright, let’s get to the show.

Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market with 25 plus years of experience. As both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Have a great guest here with us today that I’m super excited for you to meet and learn from. But first, I just wanna remind you, we have a lot of things going on and pretty much every month, but at least through the summer, you can count on three things happening every single month. Number one, Danielle and I are doing a live q and a where you can come on a Zoom call with a bunch of other agency owners and leaders and ask us whatever you want, and we will field your questions to, we’re doing what we’re calling, what is a MI or how can a MI help me. So it’s an informational session where I give you kind of a lay of the land of how a MI works alongside and serves agencies for about 10 or 15 minutes.

And then we just answer questions about all the different ways that you can interact with the folks at a mami. And then the third one is we are, as you know, probably we are in the middle of a series about how agencies are leveraging AI with Rice University adjunct professor Kathleen Hurley, agency owner and adjunct professor teaching the master’s level course at Rice about ai. So super smart, super knowledgeable, super accessible, but all those things are happening every single month. So you might be saying, Drew, how in the world do I, how do I attend those? How do I know about those? Here’s the easiest way.

You have two options. Number one, you can join the Facebook group. So you can go over to Facebook, search for Build, a Better, Agency, Podcast, and you’re gonna get to a private Facebook group. You have to answer four questions. They’re super simple. Email address, URL of your agency and a couple other things. And then we’ll let you in, or you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter. So if you go to agency management institute.com/newsletter, you’ll get to the signup form. So if you just give us your email address, your actually just your first name and your email address, we’ll get you signed up for that. And then every week you’ll get all the updates with links to all of those activities so you don’t miss a single thing.

We would love to have you with us for all of those activities. So either join the podcast group, sign up for the newsletter, or cover yourself. Do both and then you’ll be in the know. All right. Okay. Let me tell you a little bit about our guest. So Alane Boyd, former agency owner with her husband. And when they sold their agency, one of the things they realized was that they really had their ducks in a row when it came to understanding how to build systems and processes inside their agency, particularly around project management software. And so they quickly popped right back out of retirement and launched a company that works with agencies in specific around putting together a strategy and then executing against that strategy for your content, not your content, your project management software.

So what I we’re gonna talk about today is do you need project management software? How do you know if you need it? And then how do you figure out which one is the right one for you? And what are some of the functionalities that you should be looking for in a good tool? There are a lot of tools out there, and they all offer different benefits, different functionalities, and I’m gonna pick Elaine’s brain in terms of sort of how we can make sure we’re getting the right one for us. There’s probably not one universal right one, but there absolutely is a right one for your agency, and we’re gonna talk about how you figure that out. All right, let’s welcome her to the show. Alane, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So tell everybody a little bit about the work you do, the company you formed with your husband and how you serve agencies.

We, we work with agencies on implementing project management systems and integrating it with their other platforms. So our main ones that we work with agencies on is implementing Asana, Clickup in Monday. And how do those tools work with all the other platforms that they’re using?

And you came to this business, you didn’t just go, Hey, I know I’m an accountant and my husband’s a lawyer and we wanna create a company that works with project management systems. You came from this because you had an agency, right?

Yeah, we had an agency for 11 years. We did social media management, reputation management for car dealerships. And we got bought and we had to stay on for 18 months. And what we realized is the systems that we put, we used Asana there. And so we had put all these systems in place. The company that acquired us was larger and they had no project management system. It was complete chaos. And so we realized through that experience, we have a knack for operations that we didn’t realize that we had. We thought every agency ran like this. And after we exited and we retired for a little bit, we got bored and we thought, you know, maybe there’s other agencies like the one we merged with that could use our services.

And it turns out that there are, and there all over the world. So it’s, it exploded fast for, you know, what we, we weren’t even sure if businesses wanted what we, what we could do.

I have never met an agency owner who is giddy about implementing a project management system. Never. Hey, you, maybe you have, but I’ve never met anyone who’s like, this is gonna be awesome. In fact, when we’re coaching agencies and they’re ready to implement one, what I say to them is, for the first six months someone needs to walk whoever owns this project to their car because people will want to kill them.

Yep. And and I did it really slowly too. Yeah. Because, because I was an agency owner and Right. And I’m more the creative and sales and talking to people and then putting in structure for me gave me hives.

Right? Right.

But, but once we really started adapting it, what I saw, I saw a transformation in myself and I went all in. I went from being a goldfish and people asking me for something, my team or clients, and then I would forget. And I went from that. Having the project management system in place and being able to file away the most important things and be able to pull that out on a meeting and people, it, it transformed my life so much that at that point I was like, I’m a thousand percent in, right? Like, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do it the best we can. And then our team got on board and it really was the ability for us to scale and exit.

Well, I, I do think that although agencies go into it grudgingly and normally something horrible has happened, there is a pain point or a moment of pain that forces them to acknowledge they are at a size or their work is at a sophistication level that they can no longer afford to keep it all in their head or in a Google sheet or an Excel document or on post-it notes stuck all over their monitors or however they were managing before. I, I do think you get to a point where it’s like, okay, I, we have to grow up enough to embrace this. I get that it’s gonna suck, but I get that we’re, I, I understand the benefit of it.

So one of the things that you said is that you sort of evolved into it slowly ’cause you self-administered and you are an agency owner. I think that’s actually one of the things that makes it so horrible is that it takes forever and there’s no sunny day in sight for months and months and months when you self implement and you do it kind of as a side hustle on top of all your other side hustles while you’re trying to do your day job.

I, I mean, you hit it perfectly and, and it is slow and you don’t know the best ways to use the tool at first. You know, you’re trying to learn whichever project management system, you’re just trying to learn how to use it at the same time. Get all of your projects in there and your workflows in there. So you’re not doing either one very well in the beginning.

And, and I, I was just on a coaching call this morning with an agency that’s just implementing Workamajig and the woman who’s owning this project said everyone is frustrated because it’s taking them twice as long to do everything. And so every day I hear it was so much faster before we had this stupid system. And, and living through that part of the process, especially if you’re the one, you’re the champion of the system and you’re the, you’re like the sole supporter of making this shift. it is really hard.

Yeah. And it is, it feels taxing in the beginning. And you know, when you’re, and when you’re smaller, it is more weight that each person has to carry because they’ve, at that point, they have everything in their head. Yep. And you’re not, you know, it is dependent on you to get it out. And it is, it does take you longer. But imagine like for an agency that’s struggling with that idea is you’re never gonna be able to move past that If. That’s the place that you’re in. Right?

Right. it is. And it’s a

Horrible place to stay in. it

Is. it is the scale issue. I think that for most agencies they finally sort of accept they have to do that. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What are some signs that an agency owner or leader could look for to see if perhaps it is time for them to surrender to the idea of needing a project management system? Like what, how do they know it’s time?

The, the most common thing is I want it, I want things to work like it used to. If you start saying that to yourself, why isn’t it working like it used to? Then it’s time because it’s no longer you and a team of two or three people. Yes. You’re now saturated with questions. You’ve got enough people on your team and the ball’s dropped. You’re no longer doing client onboarding anymore. Now you might have an assistant or somebody else coming in and helping you, Hey, how do I do this? How do I do this? Can we jump on a quick call? You’re getting burdened by that. And so your mindset is, man, why can’t it be easy like it used to when it was just me That’s your son. Yeah. It’s time to move.

Yeah. You, you become the bottleneck because you as the owner or leader are the keeper of all of the tribal knowledge.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, they, you, you get to where you can’t run your company and do the things that you’re good at, which is, you know, people say that all the time, like you need to do the things you’re good at, but you’re, it’s because you’re answering questions all day. Right. And you are the holder of everything. So you can never answer all the questions you have and move your company forward. Right.

Right. So probably in the, in the, we have a private Facebook group for podcast listeners and agency owners. No vendors in there at all. And probably the most common question, and it happens I bet once a month ’cause you know it’s Facebook so that scrolls and people don’t see the old questions. Oh yeah. At least once a month. Somebody’s like, we are about to, I, we know we need a project management system. What’s the best one? And then the flood of answers comes. And I think you and I would agree that there is no one that is the best one. But how does an agency begin to think about how to assess? ’cause there’s a million of ’em out there, right?

There are,

How does, how does an agency begin to assess, let’s say they put together a short list of 10. How do they begin to weigh those against each other? How do they, what questions should they be asking themselves to figure out how they as an agency are going to use the tool so they can pick the right tool? ’cause there’s nothing worse than picking, and I have seen this and I suspect you have too. Agency picks a tool, implements it for three to six months. Tool is dumb. Tool is broken tool, it, it, it doesn’t do any of the things the sales rep told us it would do. New tool three to six months later, two tool two is dumb. It doesn’t do any of the things we were told.

Tool three. Right. And on and on until they finally go, you know what, forget it, we’re going back to Google sheets or whatever. Right?

Yeah. Oh my gosh, this is like speaking to my soul right now. Yeah. Because we see this constantly and you, you also hear we’ve tried this one, this one, this one. We can’t get things moving forward in any of ’em. And so what we started to do is we’ve worked with hundreds of agencies now implementing project management tools. And so after we had all of this information from working with so many and helping them move from one to another, we said, alright, what are the things that we see are the triggers that agencies say this tool is not working, I need one that does this. So we distilled all of our information down, all of the clients we had and it comes down to 11 main things.

And it, it seems like it shouldn’t be that simple, but it really is because we’re agencies, right? How do you need to run your agency? It’s very common threads that we see throughout. And so there is a better fit for how you as an owner, what kind of information you look at how you wanna run your team, all the way down to how you also manage your clients and how you wanna disperse information to them.

Alright, so let’s, let’s talk through some of those 11 critical questions. So give me the one that you think would surprise us the most

Capacity planning for your team.

So I, I will say I think a lot of agencies don’t know how to decide if somebody’s plate is full and you know, your plate’s super full and I’m sitting around twiddling my thumbs or playing Scrabble or whatever. So I would think that surprises me that that is not one that everybody’s asking. ’cause I would think that that’s like a business critical question to no, like these are my most expensive and valuable assets. I want to use them. Well I don’t wanna abuse them by giving them more than they can do. So talk a little bit more about capacity planning.

You know the, I think they know that, that they want that but they don’t know that it’s something you can use a tool to do. You know, it’s kind of disconnected in the beginning and once they start using the work management tool and they get in there and it usually takes a couple years and they’re like, hold on a minute, now I can see all the tasks that are assigned to my team. I can actually move capacity around based on right workload skillsets. You know, if you’re an agency, you might have somebody that’s really great at a couple of different ad formats design. So you can kind of give them a couple of different things and then you have another one where there’s some overlap but they have another one so you can move things around. And so capacity planning and teaching agencies how to look at their team and how to do it quickly.

You know, you don’t wanna spend four hours of your day looking at capacity planning. You wanna do this in minutes and be able to distribute work across the board within those minutes. And so that’s one that I think with a project management system, which one you select is very important because not all of them can do it and not all of them do it well.

So I think capacity planning is both a short term and long term. So the, the ideal is for the next two weeks I can look out and I can see what’s on everybody’s plate and I can see that we’re in good shape. Nobody’s gonna have to work overtime, we don’t need any freelancers or I can see the train coming at me on day 10 when everybody has 12 hours worth of work. There’s no way we’re gonna get it all done. So that’s the long-term value of it. But the short-term value is, Drew’s assigned four hours today to do this thing, but last night the AE gets a call from the client that says, yeah, we’re not gonna have those revisions back to you. So we’re not gonna have those back to you till next week. So just heads up, we’re gonna have to push the schedule.

Yeah. So now Drew’s got four hours on his calendar today and he has nothing to do and most agency employees don’t raise their hand and go, Hey, I’m kinda light today. Right? Somebody throw me a ball. Yeah. But if somebody’s looking at that, they can go, oh you know what, if Drew doesn’t have to do that today, I can move this thing that so-and-so was gonna do tomorrow over to him today and now we’re ahead of the schedule.

Yeah, I mean it, it’s a lot. It’s a game changer and, and depending on which project management tool you use, we went from doubling our ability to get work. Like we went from, we doubled our ca capacity without upping our team. Mm. By switching work project management tools and having that visibility within minutes we could move things really fast and we were able to get work done so much faster with our same team. So we doubled our time getting things done with the same amount of people.

Which you think about the that from a billability and utilization point of view is huge. So when you think back to that moment when you realized you were using the wrong tool, what was that blindness if you will? Like what were you, what were you doing wrong that the new tool was sh shone a light on and you were like, oh shoot, we’re doing that, we can fix that.

Yeah, so we, what we were running into is it was taking us too long to do that. You know, as an owner every minute of your time counts and if you’re spending a couple hours trying to bubble everything up and see everybody across projects and if that’s taking you too long, that’s when we started exploring other options and we had to play around with it before we rolled it out to anybody else to make sure that that was gonna work. Right. And, and I’ll say one of the project management tools that does that really well also works perfect for agencies on a number of other levels. So it also alleviated some other issues that we were having by moving. And that in itself I used, as I mentioned, I use Asana.

So once we sold, we started this one, we were using Asana again and, and I love them but it wasn’t working as well that now that newer tools came out. And that’s the thing, newer tools come out and they focus on maybe some of the holes that the other ones had and then you’re able to make a shift. But that change management right there is not easy and I do not like adapting very fast. Like I hold on because of the amount of work that it takes to move.

Right, right. So everyone who’s listening will kill me if I don’t ask that. So what tool do you believe manages capacity management best? Because you said some one tool does it better than most. So which one is that?

It’s Clickup Clickup. The way that you can bubble everything up into, there’s already a tab, it’s called everything. You click on it, you can see your whole team, all the tasks that are assigned to them in a pie chart in any dashboard that you want. So within few seconds and then you can click on them, move things around. Yeah. So that, that just made everything so much easier.

I think sometimes for the tools it’s not what they do but it’s how they present the data too. Right? Yes. I mean, you know, I, I think agency owners and, and in many agencies the agency owner isn’t the one who’s owning the tool. You have a project manager or someone else who’s sort of owning the moving all the puzzle pieces, moving things, making sure everything. But nonetheless, whoever it is that’s doing it, it is how the information is presented as well. That really does, again, I would think for different kinds of learners and different kind of brains matters.

It does. And you know, I wanna mention one thing. ’cause you mentioned, you know, a lot of agencies have a project manager that are moving things around and and that’s what we see across the board. And and that’s what we love to work with too. You know, the founder needs to do their thing and if they have a project manager, that’s great. And, and one of the things that we’ve found with project managers is they are great at moving things around. That’s their job. But that doesn’t mean that they’re an expert in the tool that you’re using. No,

For

Sure. And they may be, you know, they may be having basic or a little bit better than basic knowledge. And so a lot of times we will end up having to train the project manager on internal automation into the project manager. There’s already automation built that they’re not utilizing. Right. And so we love working with a project manager but also keeping that as a founder in mind is that there’s some learning that still needs to happen with them on the tool itself a lot.

No, no doubt. And and every tool has tutorials and videos and support. But I will also say a common theme that I often hear is, was not as robust as I wanted it to or it wasn’t as real time as I needed it to be, or I had to wait for them to have a class or a Zoom or a thing. And I spent two hours in their library trying to find the answer. So I again acknowledging that this no one, unless they’ve worked at another agency that already had the tool, nobody is just innately born knowing how to work this stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And they’re, they’re all different and all complex on how they, how they solve the problem.

Right. So what’s another question on the question of 11 that we have to answer to think about what kind of tool would make the most sense for us?

I, I think one of my favorites is recurring tasks. Things that you want to recur and, and that you don’t wanna have to remember to create a task for. And so for an agency, let’s say you do reputation management for a client, getting Yelp reviews is a a negative, getting negative Yelp reviews removed is something that your agency likes to do because the clients love getting negative reviews removed. Well for your team you could have a task once a month assigned to the reputation manager that says, Hey, skim their page for negative review. That goes against the terms and conditions. Nobody had to remember to do that. It’s all automated or for your accounting team for them every month on the first to get a task for pulling billable time reports.

Now you’re going, well my account, my accounting team already knows to pull those. But do they know which clients to pull it for? Are there notes associated with that client? So you can fill out the descriptions in these recurring tasks so that it has information. Nobody has to remember anything. You’re not relying on them on their memory. It’s already spelled out. All the notes are there and it’s recurring. So that’s my probably my favorite in a work management system. Not all of them do it.

I wanna talk more, ’cause you said the accounting and I was like, yeah, we always think about this for the client work. Mm. But we don’t really think about it as often for like running the agency work. So I wanna ask you more about that. Okay. First let’s take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and talk about how agencies should think about project management tools from an internal process point of view. Okay. We’ll be right back. I promise I’m only gonna keep you a minute before we get back to the show. But I wanna remind you that the Build a Better Agency Summit, the annual conference where we bring 350 agency owners and leaders together is coming up May 21st and 22nd. May 20th is a MI Family day or member day.

But whether you are a member or not, we would love to have you with us May 21st and 22nd to read more about the conference, see who the speakers are, or register head over to agency management institute.com and the very first button on the nav is BABA summit. Click on that and all the information is right there. And we would love to see you in Denver in May. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back with Alane Boyd and we are talking about choosing the right project management system. And right before the break she said something that sort of piqued my interest and was a good reminder that the project management system could and should be used as much for internal things that have nothing to do with the work product as the client facing stuff.

So let’s talk a little bit about how do you see agencies, because you gave the great example like full billing reports and you’re like, well yeah the accounting person knows that well A, what if they’re on vacation B, what if they quit C, what if they get hit by the proverbial bus? You know, there are a lot of reasons that take someone out of, you know, what if they just had a baby and they still have baby brain, whatever, right? Like there are a lot of reasons why we are not at our game, at our A game on any given moment that impact the rest of the agency. So how do you see your clients using project management software or non-client work?

Work?

We’re gonna need more time. Drew.

Okay, we’ll stop. I mean there’s, we’ll make a sandwich. We’ll come back.

Yeah. So I, I think one of the biggest ways internally that agencies use it is new hire onboarding. What is everything that you need to remember? Hmm. From the paperwork to software accounts that need to get created to training that person. Yeah. And so there’s a template. If you’re using a project management system, you can create a new hire onboarding template. We have one for our HR team and then you have one for what team they’re going on with all the training that they need. They need to know how to use the software you’re using. They need to know how to do your processes, right?

And so that one, and I love this one for triggers, automation triggers. You know, a lot of times people start their first day and they’re just like, Hey, I’m here. You know, everything’s just in disarray. It’s chaos. Like there’s nothing to say welcome. This is who’s gonna be on your team. And so if you can build out just a little bit of automation that welcome e email, even the day before they show up, Hey, welcome to the team, your manager’s on here. This is gonna be where you’re gonna be and I’ll have it all automated. That way you’re not having to recreate the wheel every time. So new client, our new employee onboarding, one of my favorite things to do internally.

Well and especially you know, your first day is like drinking from a fire hose, right? I mean you’re just getting hit with everything. Yeah. So again, to to think it through and then automate it so that, you know, even the first six months it’s reminder messages, it’s, Hey will you schedule your 90 day check-in with your manager? Yes. Hey, don’t forget the DEI training is, you know, something you do two months after you’ve been here. Like whatever, whatever your cadence is, you can bake that all out. And one of the things I do, I will admit as an agency owner and a creative, I don’t, I don’t love this stuff Don, I don’t love it, but I, I get the value of it.

But one of the things I like about it is, is when you’re building out like these automations, it allows you to think bigger about what’s possible. So the employee onboarding’s a great example. You know, most people do the very basics they have to do ’cause they’re super busy. Everybody’s busy, you waited too long to hire the person. You need to get them to billable work as quickly as possible. Fill in the blank, fill in the blank. But if I thought about it like how would I want this new employee’s experience to be for the first six months that they’re with the company and what do I want to have happen? You know, do I want them to get like a, you’ve been with, you’ve just passed your probationary period, you get a hat with the agency logo on it. Like whatever I want to do, if I could think that through in a big system and then load it somewhere where I never have to think about it again because it just happens.

How amazing could and would that experience be both for the agency in terms of sort of retention and having somebody feel good about it, but that employee feeling really welcomed, cared for? Never left an lurch, never left alone. They know who to go to. They’re constantly getting, you know, we had one agency that the owner recorded a little video about each value they had, but then she had to remember to send the video. Right. So, but if you stuck it in a system, you said, okay, every Thursday this person gets the next video, you know, the next value video. Yeah. And they get all of them for the six, six weeks and then they’re, and the last one they’re told, here’s where these all live.

If you wanna go back and review them again, you know that it, it just solves a lot of problems.

Yeah, it does. I mean I was thinking about, you know, when you mentioned employee retention, when you’re an agency, I mean every company wants to retain employees. Yeah. But an agency, because so much knowledge is held in people’s heads, it’s so important. And so when, when we had our agency, our average employee was with us seven years, which is long. And our company was only, which is a very long time. And when we got acquired and we had to stay on that, their employee retention was six months. Cool. And it shows you what the difference is between having these processes in place and training early in the beginning and having it so you don’t have, it’s not dependent on you, you know, it is already outlined in there.

So Yep. They feel good in the first 30 days. They feel like they can take on that job and hit the ground running rather than somebody feeling like they’re always just trying to like spaghetti code, you know, pulling like, yep, I got a little bit here. Got a little bit here. That gives people anxiety. Everybody likes feeling like they’re doing a good job and they know what they’re doing.

Yep. For sure. And feel like they matter enough that you’ve thought about them and helping them be successful. So yeah, we think about new employees but there’s probably all kinds of things we can do for all our employees inside a system like this. Right,

Right. Yeah. ’cause and you think about when you have account managers and you want them to share success stories with each other. Right. But you know it, you don’t always just want it to be on a call in real time because you’re gonna have new hires and so Right. Or somebody missed a call, well you can use your project management system if somebody was gone ’cause they were sick that day, they missed the account management weekly call then put the recording in there, assign it to the person and then they can watch it when they’re back at work. Yeah. On two x speed. So it’s faster that

That’s right. The same way people are listening to this podcast probably, which I don’t mind by the way. You people tell me on the time. Well I listen to you, you, you talk a little slower in person. Yes, I do. When, when you speed me up and it’s fine. As long as you don’t make me sound like a chipmunk. I don’t care. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s go back to the evaluating of systems. What are, what’s another critical point of how you should be evaluating one system over the other that is gonna make or break success for you?

So there’s, there’s two of them. They kind of go together and it’s, you know, do you want to have some of these automation capabilities within your project management tool? So what are the capabilities of within it? And then externally what type of integrations do you want to have happen outside of it? And so what, you know, what you feel as people a lot is, God there’s so many systems and I wish they could all talk together. And when you have a project management system that is your core, that is right. Once you’re really in there, you know, so you start wanting, man, if I could have this work with this and you know, having everything kind of moving together. So that’s a, that’s another big one because not all of them have great APIs for external hooking things together.

And then not all of them have great automation within the tool itself. And so that becomes a really important part when you have, when you’re an agency that uses close or panda doc or you know, some kind of proposal software and then you’re using maybe HubSpot or Pipedrive, you know you’re using Right. You know all these different systems. Then you’re going, man I’m gonna be inundated with moving things around. How can I automate some of this? So Right. That’s gonna become important with what tool you decide to use. ’cause some are better and have more stable APIs than other ones.

Yeah, I think that would be a critical one today.

And that one, that’s where, so, and when we’re working with an agency, we always start with the inside stuff. You know, what needs to happen just internally to get your workflows moving and, and then from there we can start building on that and working with the integrations because you do want those systems. I mean my favorite one to do is client onboarding. I mean where agencies we’re onboarding new clients is, there’s so many things that have to get done. Well when you close them as a one deal in your CRM that automatically kicks off the new client project in your project management tool with all the sub tests that need to happen to do client onboarding. Then when your project manager moves them to welcome packet, then the email automatically gets sent to the client welcoming them on board.

So it’s co you can see how it’s coming from outside, right. The project management system inside the project management system back outside of it. And that’s what, those are the scenarios that as an agency I like to see and then what we help the clients do because you don’t wanna have to manually do everything.

Right. And you also wanna do it consistently. So how you, how you onboard a client may be different. Even though there’s a, there’s an agency way and it’s in a document somewhere, in a Google doc, in a folder, in somewhere. How you onboard the client and how I onboard the client may be very different. You may be, you probably are super buttoned up, very detail oriented, you know, and I’m more fly by the seat of my pants, do it at the last minute. Think about it at two in the morning, send the email. So having a way that is the agency way. Yes. That delivers at a consistency and quality level that feels really good and feels like the agency way.

I think this is another place where I think we know when it’s time to do a project management system. When you look out outside your agency and you go, oh there’s Elaine’s way, there’s Drew’s way, there’s Bebe’s way, there’s Mary’s way. They’re all good, but they’re all a little different. That’s one of the warning signs I think for agencies. Like, oh you know what I didn’t hear there’s an agency way to do this.

I mean Drew you took the words right out of my mouth. ’cause as you were saying that, I was gonna say that is exactly one of the other warning signs that we see is we get on a call with an owner and they say, we just don’t have consistency. And so Right when you’re, if you’re feeling like that then there needs to be an agency way, just like you said. Yeah.

Alright, so let’s say an agency is like, I concede we need a project management system. Is there a methodology or a way that you think I, so I do wanna, I do wanna mention the fact that you have an assessment on your website that helps people think through these questions. So while, while I’m saying that now, tell everybody how they can get to that and then I’ll go and ask my question ’cause I just don’t wanna forget that you have that assessment.

Yeah, it’s workday ninja.com. Just scroll down to the bottom under resources. It’s right there. Just click on the tools to figure out which one is the best work project management system for you. Okay.

So is there a methodology, like is it a narrow down to three interview? The three, like how should someone go through the process of beginning to narrow the field and figure out which tool is best for them?

If you wanna save yourself some time, use the tool that we have and it’ll help pop the best one up and it, it’ll give you a rating so you’ll see okay, like this one is the best one for what, how you answered, but then here’s the percentage of the other ones. So you might have two of them that are really close and you wanna try out both. And it’s, we distilled it down to 11 questions ’cause these are the things that we see most common. But there’s also a piece that some people just like the u ui of one of the platforms better and it just comes down to that. Yeah, it is that easy. Doesn’t matter if all the function on all the functionality isn’t there, they just like the way it looks better. Well they’re gonna use that because they like it the way they like the way it looks. So I do recommend, you know, you can use the free tool, figure out which one’s the best fit for how you answered the questions.

But also I do recommend go in there, create a free account and just dabble in there a little bit because you are gonna find some people that just gravitate towards one just at the end of the day just because.

Yep. In fact it’s really interesting. I will hear many agency owners when they’re explaining why they are shifting, why they’re doing that three month, six month. Nope, we tried, it didn’t work. Often it is my team hates the UI and they won’t consistently use it. So you’re right. We cannot underestimate the power of I like using the tool or I don’t like using the tool. I like the way it works. I like that it’s dials versus buttons versus whatever may not be the most logical reason for choosing one. But you do need adoption.

Yeah. You need people using it. So nothing wrong with that either. Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, if you’re using one of them, I, that is the goal, right? That you are an agency using a project management system and that your team is using it and the rest of it is just, you know, do you wanna be doing it better? Do you want things to be a little bit easier? But if your team’s using it, great, you just got 20 steps ahead of another agency that is still floundering. Right?

Right. When we pick the wrong system, what’s the most common reason why we got it wrong?

Well it, well it really does come down to a, a few different things and it, it usually comes down to functionality. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do and, and one of them is really popular and it, and it does lack a lot of key features that agencies need. And so what we tend to see is a lot of agencies are in this one but then need to move out of it. And it’s, and it’s usually a number of factors, the visibility of it as an owner, the visibility that you need is really important a lot of times. Whether it’s capacity or being able to manage a client projects. And so that visibility piece, I would say is probably the most common. They need to be able to see what’s happening in their agency without spending hours digging.

Yeah. And again, especially as an agency owner who may or may not be north of 50 who may not, may or may not be super comfortable with software and technology, it has to be pretty simple, right?

Yeah. They, they, they are and they aren’t like, as far as like just getting in there and creating tasks, I mean that’s as easy as it is. But then like when you think about project hierarchy and how you wanna organize your clients and we, we’ve came, come up with our own methodology for managing clients and we have backlogs for each, then we have client request boards for specific projects within that client. So that gets really nitty gritty on how we do things. It’s really complex but another agency that might be not how they wanna do things and that they just wanna create a project and throw a bunch of tasks in there and, and that’s gonna work for them for a while. Right. And so, you know, at at its surface it is really easy. Go, go create it, start putting tasks in.

You can’t go wrong there.

Well, and I think from the owner’s point of view, their interaction with it has to be super easy because they’re not gonna be in it every day. They’re in most cases they’re not the project manager, but that visibility that you’re talking about, they have to be able to know how to log in, see the things they need to see, understand what the data is telling them and then get back out. Right.

Yeah. And, and that’s how I run my team. I’m not in there every day. I, I am in Clickup every day, but I’m not in each project every day. I just need to know high level if you need me for something or for my own stuff that I wanna move forward but I’m not in there. I just need to see that high level. Are our projects moving along? Are there roadblocks? But I don’t need to be in every single client seeing that. I just need it bubbled up.

Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so to sum up what we’ve been talking about, you need to assess specifically what your agent, so I think one of the dangers is, one of the things I love about the a AMI community is we take a lot of counsel from each other and this, the podcast Facebook group is a great example of that. But that it works great for my team does not mean it’s gonna work great for your team. So all of the tools have pros and cons and pluses and minuses. They all do some things really well and other things not as well. So be careful number one about taking counsel even from agencies that look like you or sound like you or are your size, don’t assume that their tool is the right tool for you.

Alane and her team have built a tool for you to kind of assess the most important things for you. Which seems to me like that would be a great place to start. Like I need to figure out what we need to be able to do. And once I do that, then I can start to look at the tools that are best at that and I have a better shot at picking the right tool and then implementing it properly.

Yeah, I mean I, the that’s perfect and you know, there’s, there’s certain tools that you can just, you don’t even know what you don’t know when you haven’t been using a project manage management system. So get in there and start using one and start figuring out what is important to you. ’cause you might not know yet.

Right. Well, and I, and I suspect you probably know the things you want it to do, but you don’t know all the things it could do. Right. Mean I, I would guess that when you get in there, it starts expanding your capacity to think about how you could use the tool.

Yes. Yep. And you don’t really know those experie, especially for those

Internal things. Right, right. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and you know what’s interesting too with, when you start really going all in on using one as an agency owner, I don’t want to have to come up with all the ideas, right? Right. I want my team to, and so what, when you’re, you have this culture of no, we use our project management system, put it in there. If you need something, put it in there and you build it, then your team starts going, Hey, you know what, I’ve been having to do this every week. I could build, like, I’m gonna start putting it in here. And then it starts evolving on its own. Right? And it’s not up to you to put everything in there. They start getting their own ideas, then you can feel the weight started lifting, starting to lift off of you. Yeah. Which for me is huge.

Like I can’t carry any more weight on me. You know, I need other team members and, and that’s where the project management system can come in, is you no longer have to carry it all

Well or remember it all. I mean we all have a capacity in our own brains for details and you know, I have room for like nine things and if I have to put a 10 thing in, one of the other nine has to go. Right? Yep.

It goes away.

Yeah. So I think this is also a way because while it’s great when you have, you know, seven years of retention or five years of retention or 20 years of retention, nobody but you is guaranteed to stick around forever. And the more you get out of their brain and the more you automate and put into systems and processes, the easier it is to onboard their replacement, whoever that is. And for the clients or the internal team not to feel the, the pinch of that change. And what, you know, when you think about, especially today, how often somebody gives notice and you haven’t, you, it takes you longer than those two or three or four weeks to find their replacement.

So you have no overlap at all. Now how in the world do you onboard that new person? Right.

It’s so draining. It’s, it’s so stressful. And if you have any pain

For mistakes,

Oh gosh, yeah. So many balls dropped, things fire that you have to put out. And so it’s this revolving stress load that you have and, and if you’re an agency owner that’s ever been dreaming about an exit, having the systems in place makes you pretty nice for an acquisition. ’cause you’ve already got everything laid out.

Yeah, no, that’s a really great point. So we do valuations for agencies and we do a lot of m and a work. And I will tell you one of the things that absolutely increases the value of the agency is define systems and processes. Absolutely. Because, because it can

Run without you.

Right. Well and in theory you’re selling it ’cause you’re not gonna be there anymore. Yeah. So it has to run without you.

Exactly.

Yeah. So yeah, great points. Hey, this has been a great conversation. I’m excited for people to be able to go and use your assessment, tell them again where to find the assessment and also where to learn more about the work that you guys do if they’re looking for someone to kind of guide them through this process.

Yeah. Workday ninja.com, that’s our website. You can scroll down the bottom, you can find the free tool and then you can always find me on LinkedIn, Alane Boyd. I’m very active on there. I’d love to connect with other founders.

And for those of you that are on a treadmill or walking the dog, Alane is not spelled the way you probably spell it. So it’s A-L-A-N-E. So if you’re, thank you Drew, if you’re gonna go look for her on LinkedIn and you’re not jotting all this down, just that’ll make it a little easier for you.

I appreciate that.

And of course all of this will be in the show notes as well. So Alane, thanks so much for hanging out and for sharing your expertise. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Bet. Alright guys, so if you are in a project management system and it’s working well for you, you should be feeling pretty good about yourself right now. You just listened to an hour of all the pain points that you used to have, that you have solved. So bonus for you, if you are an agency owner that has a project management system that despite bribes and carrots and threats and all the other things you can’t get your team to use, it may be time to think about if the tool is the right tool. And maybe you need to make a change. And if you are like many agency owners who are thinking, you know, like Alane said, gosh, I wish this was easier like it used to be. I wish it used to, it worked the way it used to work.

Maybe it’s time, maybe it is time for you to take advantage of some software that takes things out of our brain and puts them into something that will catalog them. Nudge everybody, remind them, save you from dropping balls. All of those things. and if so, a great place to start is to head over and do that assessment so you can make sure you get the right tool. So lots of action items in this episode, starting with, if you already have this figured out, pat yourself on the back. That’s your action item for This week. For the rest of you, it may be doing a little bit of homework, a little bit of soul searching, maybe a little gnashing of teeth, and accepting the fact that you’ve grown a business that is sophisticated enough and big enough that you can’t keep it all in your brain anymore.

That is not the worst problem in the world to have. And maybe it’s time to find a solution for you and your team. Okay. All right. So go forth, do that homework. Wanna say thank you to our friends at White? Label IQ, as you know, they are the presenting sponsor of the podcast. They come alongside agencies who need help with web dev design and PPC work with lots of agencies all over the world actually, and have been a part of the a i community for over 20 years. Good human beings, good people, very customer service oriented. So check them out at White Label IQ slash aami. And as you know, ’cause I try and tell you every week they’ve got a deal where if on your first project you can get some free hours built into that project ’cause you listened to the podcast.

All right, many thanks to you as always. I am grateful that you’re out there. I am grateful that you shoot me emails and pop into the Facebook group and let us know that the podcast is helpful to you. That makes it a lot more fun to do every week. So I’m gonna be back next week with another guest. I hope you will join me. Until then, you know how to get a hold of me. All right, see you next week. Thanks for listening.

That’s all for this episode of AAMIs Build. a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agency management institute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-size agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.