Welcome back to ClickUp Weekly episode number 17. My name is Graham McKenzie. I am your host and I'm the founder at ZenPilot. And today we're digging into two big pain points that have particularly faced agencies. Um one of these is like really tied into the professional service use case. And one of these just impacts every team who's using ClickUp. So I'm super excited about uh ClickUp update that I don't think that they've pushed out that it's live yet other than through um their Canny change log. Uh but I'm sure that that'll get announced in the release. So I'm hitting this one a little bit early. And then the other one is not a ClickUp uh specific solution. This is something that we've been uh building and working on here for a while. So we'll dig into both of those and I want to start with the ClickUp side. So let's jump into ClickUp itself. Right now it's this is super common. Let's go in and let's just say that we are looking at maybe uh records and we're looking at clients. And every time a new client signs up, maybe we're using ClickUp as our CRM, but maybe we're not. So either way, there's um you know, let's say we aren't. And we're automatically then taking a deal from HubSpot or from Salesforce or whatever CRM you're using and we're creating a record in ClickUp uh about that. So we have a list of clients going on or maybe engagements specifically. Um hey, where are we in the process? What did they pay for? Billing information, all that kind of information. Clients might even go here. We might have a new client form that our team's filling out that's giving us some information when they come on board. That's creating a record for them in ClickUp. And that's great. But we don't want to manage all the work from this record specifically. But there are times where we just want to get a quick overview of all the data about that client or that engagement or that project. Uh and so having these as records is super helpful. But really what needs to happen is we also need a client folder to get built here under clients or let's say it's a new engagement for Dunder Mifflin. Well, we need a new list. I'll just expand this so you can see it. We need a new list for this, you know, branding project that we're working on or something. Well, uh ClickUp now has an automation. For the longest time, you've been able to use automations and you've been able to deploy templates natively in ClickUp for tasks. So, if you wanted that a new record to come in and automatically you pull in a template that you have pre- uh pre-set. It might have some task descriptions, some custom fields already set. Um you could you could create all of that from a template in automations natively in ClickUp. What we couldn't do is build a list from a template uh in ClickUp natively through automation. Does that make sense? I know that's a lot of like this plus this plus this plus that. So, uh this is now live in your workspace. Um so, you have access now to create uh lists via automation, which you've had for a while, but now including a template. And I'm going to show you how that works. So, if we go to our automations, maybe we'll go uh it's actually fine to do it here. We're in clients. Um so, we'll go here. We'll create a new automation. So, when a new task gets created, we might want some type of filtering uh event. Hey, there this specific stage, if we're there, you use whatever uh custom field we might want to go look at and say, "Hey, when they're here and active not inactive, you know, client stage is they're now onboarding. Then, I want to create a list. And you can see it's got the little updated badge right now. It may not have it by the time you're looking at it or it may still have it. I want to create this in clients. Now, this is still where you're going to run into some challenges is where does this go and how do we map it to the right place? Um so, I'm going to just give you an example though that we're creating it in this specific uh client space. This is actually going to be more useful uh and this is going to tie into a a feature request that's super obvious that that you're going to see here in a second. Um but I might want to take, you know, hey, here's the name of, you know, the engagement. I don't want to use the uh services that they bought or some other custom field to help name this as well. And now you can apply a template. So, this is the part that's new is you can now pick a template and apply it right here. So, I'm going to go grab a list template and say, "Yeah, here's my client onboarding template. Let's go ahead and use this." And then I can even pick, do I want to remap dates or not? If I do remap them, then you've got some options about how you want to pull those in and use it. So, you can see how this would be super helpful. You're onboarding a new team member. Like a classic example would be, heck, I'm bringing in a new team member and inside operations employee list, you know, I want to go build a new list here and now instead of using our client onboarding team, we're using our uh employee list. Pull that in and now I've automatically got all the work that needs to get done that's going to be shared with them as um to onboard somebody well, automatically created. In that example, I've got a folder that this always lives in. It's always living in this employee list. Uh but that may not always be the case. And so, there are times where uh like in the other example here where we're talking about clients, uh I want to be able to select the whole folder and deploy that. Well, right now you can go search for folder and you're going to be a little bit disappointed that you can't create a folder here natively in ClickUp. So, the good news is this is all possible. We've been able to solve for this uh for a while. We're just using uh third-party tools. So, Make or n8n um to go do this. Not a huge deal. We've built this for hundreds of teams. Uh you can do this. If you need help, uh we can help you with this. We can um shortcut that whole process and give you a bunch of process improvements uh as we work through that as well. Um but you've been able to do this for a while and you can still do this uh to go create folders just externally. And that leads to this that I'm going to encourage you to give an upvote to to follow along, which is, "Hey, can I apply a folder or space templates uh via an automation action?" So, this should be in the product. Uh I realize there's there's challenges to it, but um go give this I unvoted this just so I could do it live. There you go. Uh go give this an upvote. And um let ClickUp know, "Hey, this is something that we are looking for." And Danny is on the right. Oh, there's a familiar name, Devin. Good to see you on here. Uh it's always fun to see friends in the um in Canny here for ClickUp. But, um anyways, you know, third-party tools are the way to go right now, and looks like Danny's already using exactly what I would recommend as well. All right. So, hopefully that's helpful. Uh that is the first pain that uh ClickUp is making much easier. Obviously, we've got task templates. We use them really extensively through automations. Now, I can do list templates as well, and there's some cases where it will make sense to do it. A word just of experience to share with you is most of the time um this is going to be a little bit of an argument against using ClickUp for it. Most of the time you have things that you want to do when you're creating this. So, we're creating that automation. And if we just think through, "Hey, what are the different things that we'd like to do?" Let's say that that new employee is starting, and we'd like to bring in a list, and we want to use our template for that, right? Um so, we're pulling this in. Most of the time there are other things that we'd like to be doing at the same time. Um it's like simple stuff. I'm going to put them on a spreadsheet, uh but it's also more complex stuff. Hey, I want to deploy a new um Google account for this Like, I need to go do uh tool setups. Um I need to create integrations. I need to give them access to specific things. I need to add them to this folder in Google Drive or need to give them access to, you know, whatever whatever it is. I need to enroll them in a training center. All of those actions or a number of those actions are outside of ClickUp. And so there's one path, which is hey, just create tasks for each of those in ClickUp and that's kind of like a tier one that's not even a tier one. Tier one, most companies don't have this. Like they it doesn't exist. They don't automate most of this. They're trying to remember it and they're making it up on the fly. I realize that. Tier two, and if you're watching this, I'm guessing you're here or at least you're working on it already. You're that type of person who's got all those lists. You've got a checklist for everything that we're going to do every time. And you can build this into ClickUp and now you can deploy it automatically and save yourself a little bit of time in that process of getting it set up. But tier three would be Wait, couldn't we just build this using a third-party tool that connects to all these other tools to do all of it? So couldn't I just use Make or n8n and tie all of these together? And maybe not every single thing, but couldn't we check off eight of those checklist items right away as this is happening anyways? Or at least start the process and have somebody hit approve. You know, to to push that forward. So that's just something to think about is there's probably a ton of opportunity in everything that you're doing, whether that's onboarding new clients, starting new contracts, onboarding new team members to automate a lot of this and save a bunch of time. And that's where we're seeing a ton of wins for clients. Just saving a ton of time and creating a lot of bandwidth for their team to put back into doing great work on growing the business and making clients super happy. Okay, that's the first one. That bandwidth thing feeds right into the second big problem, which is ClickUp Scott. We've talked recently about the time tracking improvements that ClickUp has, you know, uh from timesheets to the time reporting, but we're still missing the financial piece of the puzzle. And so, in the overall reporting on utilization is still missing ClickUp natively. So, I've seen so many different ways that people tackle this. We have had for a while, uh ZenPilot reports. Um we have had a version of this built on Power BI that goes through, you know, we're taking all the data for how your team is uh set up and working with clients, we're pulling uh native ClickUp time tracking data. And so, you're able to have a solution here for all of this um to be able to see where is time going, what is the profitability of clients, can we take on more work, how do we think about forecasting what we have. And this is a super cool solution. You can see uh some of the overview of it, how this works, all that kind of stuff. Here's the challenge is the Power BI side and the customization of adapting it to each team setup um has made it, depending on the team, for small teams, it's been cost prohibitive. Uh you know, if you got a team of five to 10 people, uh this is relatively expensive. It's It's not crazily expensive, and for many teams it's much cheaper than using a Harvest or a uh you know, another tool like that to go try and get that data. Um but it's still relatively expensive. So, what we've been trying to tackle is, "Hey, how do we make this more accessible to market? How do we make it easier to set up?" Right now, we are doing a a lot of work uh to get teams set up and using the tool. Uh and this is just one route that you've got in the market. But, if you want to use what I think is the way to go, which is, "Hey, it does make sense for my team to natively be in ClickUp, you know, logging our time here as we're working through tasks. If we really want to make ClickUp our single source of truth, then that's where our team ought to be able to input their time. They shouldn't have to jump back and forth and go start a timer in Harvest and go work in ClickUp and then go update this in ClickUp and go back to Harvest and then have that get pulled into a Google Sheet somewhere like we're sending people in all these different directions. So, we have been building out uh up um over the uh the first half of this year um ZenPilot Reports 2.0, basically the a whole new overhaul like built as a full um software app. So, I'm going to show that to you um for two reasons. One, obviously if this would help solve a problem for you, I'd love for you to join our waitlist to get access to it. This is um obviously we've been using it internally. Uh this is going through uh our current clients um have the first opportunity here and then um we've got other folks as well who will be uh jumping in and helping us build it. Two, I'd love to hear from you in terms of, "Hey, what are the big pain points? Um what are the challenges? What are the things that you've tried?" And so, that feedback is also super helpful for us. So, let's just uh go here and I'm going to take you inside it just for for a second. This is um in beta right now. Like this is, you know, it's it's uh real ClickUp data, real like this is all um running, but it's uh this is not the final finished product There's no final finished product in software, as you know. Um but this is not the ultimate end state of where this will be. So, uh take this with a grain of salt. But I just wanted to pull you into it so that you could see how we're thinking about it because I believe exposing our thinking um is super valuable. It is so cool to get on calls uh with folks who um go to the ZenPilot website, book a call, talk to us and say, "Hey, we've been running on the ZenPilot methodology for the last year." Or, "Hey, we implemented ClickUp uh 3 years ago and followed all your resources, and those were the most useful things for us. And I think boy, exposing our thinking is the best way for us to get critical feedback. Hey, this doesn't work the way that it seems like it works for you. So, what's different in our um environments? That's great uh feedback for us to know, oh, like hey, we're constantly evolving and we're learning and growing as well. Um and then it helps, obviously, everyone else out as well to share it. So, when I'm thinking about utilization and profitability reporting primarily, I'm thinking about utilization in terms of our capacity being our inventory. So, if we have uh you know, 4,000 or 3,300 or 3,400 hours to sell, then I don't really want to wind up with uh 3,200 of those being available. I want to sell as much of the inventory as I can in any business. And that leads us to our our utilization number, right? So, most of how much how what total percentage of the time that we had available uh did we sell to clients? Um where we're actually servicing them. There is the theoretical uh like optimal place to be, if it wasn't humans, would be we'd sell 100% of our inventory. In fact, if we could get our people to work more than they've agreed to work for us, and we could go over 100%, uh that would be theoretical theoretically the maximum place, assuming a constant billable rate at the same time. So, obviously, we've got to take into consideration what our billable rate is. That is not the right way to build a team uh in my experience and from what I've seen. Uh there is internal stuff that is totally worth doing, whether that's building software like this, um putting our development capabilities um and product insights like to good use for larger broader impact. Um there's internal development, there's training your team, there's team building, there's like just the natural human interactions. We spend a huge percentage of the time that we uh have professionally uh working with other other humans who are awesome people who are super cool to learn from and there's got to be some time for fun and for enjoyment and for creativity. Um And so we've we've got all this internal stuff that we need to do as well. So for most teams, they should be sitting between 70 and 80% utilization. So we'd look at this and say, "Hey, this is largely problematic." Now, you've got the other side of the coin though, which is what's your margin. So there are cases and I think of um artists sometimes for this. You know, if you're a musician or if you're a painter or something. You have all these hours and hours in the practice. Your utilization time, the time that people are actually paying you for or think that they're paying you for. They go to a concert, uh be there for 2 hours and you're working, you know, once or twice a week. And so someone in my seat as someone who's worked with a bunch of teams might look at that and say, "This doesn't make any sense. You got 167 hours in a week. Uh you're only selling four of them right now. Boy, if we could just 10x that to 40, you could make so much more money." Well, that's not the right way to think about their world because the amount of time that it takes to prepare for it. There might be some thinking in that that's valid. Um but there are uh worlds where hey, our utilization number is not the huge one. It might be okay to be utilized at 5% because the amount of money, your billable rate for those 4 hours a week that you are working is so incredibly high. And so um if we were looking at just how do we maximize profitability here? What we look at is that could we bump it from 4 hours to 40 hours and could we maintain that is there enough demand to maintain that same billable rate? You're making a million dollars for every hour that you're working. Um so if we went from four a week to 40, would there still be the demand to sustain that and is that sustainable for you? And is the quality of what you're producing over an extended period of time match up with where we're ultimately going? So um all of that factors into the equation obviously but just to point out that the other side of this is our margin. So if we're making 250 grand in revenue and we're spending 25 grand in expenses, that's highly profitable. So the question mark is why does that exist? And then you know, can we close this gap? That'd be amazing if so. But if you if we drive utilization to 75% and we drive our delivery margin down to 5%, we come up on the other side of this and we are worse off even though uh you know, your classic business consultant is going to look at it and say yes, your utilization's in a much more healthy place. Like this is great. This is not great is the reality. So uh just be aware of that. Um so anyway, we're we're obviously trying to just get a high-level overview. There's different views for different folks here. So time reviews literally every single is distinctive to your ClickUp workspace. Um so we're pulling in live ClickUp data. All the time entries are coming in. We can filter through all of them. We can search. We can select by time ranges. Those are tied into our clients. We have a couple different views here for clients whether we're looking at kind of a financial perspective where we are and we're ranking these or sorting these in this case uh by profitability, by raw profit here uh in this specific case which looks like actually this would be pretty atypical. Oh, it doesn't doesn't quite line up. Almost lines up with our marginal percentages. Um every client's going to have a series of budgets similar to that thing, you know, hey, they may have multiple engagements with us. We can log external resources. So, obviously, the big part of our expenses is going to be our uh team members and what's their billable rate, what's their cost rate. But, we also have a component of our expenses that might be uh hey, we're paying for software, we are traveling, we've got contractors that we're using, you know, whatever those uh expense sets maybe. So, just be aware uh of that as well. Um and we could you know, click in and look at individual performance. There's There's a bunch of places that we can go. Um but I'm super excited to bring this to the market and help folks get the data that they need really simply and easily from live ClickUp data. Um so, you don't have this What so What the majority of teams are doing realistically, the majority are not doing anything. They're just not looking at it and they're saying, "Hey, my P&L looks okay, so I'm happy. My P&L doesn't look okay, I'm unhappy. We got to make some changes." Uh they're very uh react like at the one of the spectrums totally reactive. Then, you got a team that's a little bit more proactive, but what they're doing is spreadsheets. This is the majority of the market right now is saying who are using ClickUp for time tracking. They're pulling their ClickUp time tracking data. That's going into a spreadsheet. Someone's spending, you know, a couple hours sorting through that and trying to get it straightened out. Um and I've lived that life uh for sure. 2020 like this is me managing a team of 25 people uh pulling those reports, sorting through all the dumb time entries. This is one of the cool things that uh time review and that having this built here allows us to do is go look at uh somebody left it running like I know very well if I see a 64-hour uh time gap or 70-hour time entry, uh somebody left this running over the weekend. Then, they hit stop on Monday morning, they go start something else. They forgot to go clean it up, and now all our numbers are thrown out. So, then there's like a data clean up perspective. Um, and then after that, there's comparing it to what was the revenue side of what we had. So, how much revenue are we earning from this? What's the expense side? What is that person's uh, labor rate? What's their, you know, their fully loaded labor rate? What other expenses do we have? How do we compare all this? Um, and so, we've got a bunch of people in spreadsheets. Then you've got the chunk of folks who are trying to uh, pair ClickUp with uh, another tool that'll ingest this or use time tracking from another tool that'll that'll make that simpler. We've done stuff with Rise. I love Rise and I'm with what they're trying to do. So, we've got Rise on one hand, how do we get the data back into ClickUp uh, easier um, without all the manual time entry. And then you got folks who are jumping to Harvest or a Toggl or a third-party time tracking system or a Forecast or um, any of those tools. And then you got a a handful of folks who are going to like whole new tools altogether to combine this stuff. So, those are people who are looking at PSA tools like Scoro um, or Accelo or some of the other, you know, Teamwork. Um, some of the tools that have some of this stuff natively built in. And what's bothering me about that is we're making a trade-off where we're saying we don't want to spend all this time on the admin side. Those tools have better this reporting built in natively. There's still gaps, in my opinion, between those tools and what we're building here. Otherwise, we wouldn't be trying to build here. We'd just say like, go use this. Uh, I won't bore you with all the details of what those are now. I'm sure at some point that'll that'll come up. We'll spend a lot of time on what's our specific POV on uh, you know, what does this in what is this industry getting wrong about it? But, the challenge there is we're making life easier on the admin side, but we're inflicting a much worse UI and end user experience than somebody working through their list of tasks each day and saying, you know, hey, let me go through my tasks and as I'm working through them, let me just enter my time in here super quickly and easily. I spent 30 minutes on this and it's done. Um they're going through the task list, they're building this out like this. So so we're trading the ease of use for end users for simpler reporting for admins. And what kills me about that is like the data cleanup side. So it's awesome to have the reporting that Accelo gives you and it doesn't matter how high the quality level is if the data going in is wrong because the end user hates the user interface and they cannot wait to get off of that tool. So there's trade-offs in all this stuff. Where I land personally is I want to take um all the friction out of it for our end users or as much friction as we reasonably can. Um and I want to eat that as a as a leader. Um I'm willing to to do the work to solve for that. So that's my personal perspective. There are teams that uh have different views. I feel really strongly about that. So you could get me on a soapbox about why like this is the thing that great leaders do. Um but not everybody does that and there are teams who have who have scared like I'm not saying that only the only teams that ever get to you know hundreds of millions of dollars or um billions of dollars in in revenue are teams who take my approach. There's there's large teams who go the other way and they inflict like really tedious practices on their end users. So uh I realize there's not one way to get there. I just have a strong feeling about hey, here's how here's I think makes way more sense. All right. Uh that is it on the uh like the the problem and the solution that we're trying to bring to the market. For some of you this going to be super relevant, for other folks this is not If this is relevant for you, then go to uh zenpilot.com/reports and join the waitlist here. It's kind of funny that we just get a little picture of Zeb's hair on this landing page. Uh all you need to do put in your first name and put in your email. And can you please give me some feedback on hey, what are you using right now? And if there's any other feedback you would be willing to share around where we are um what we like, that is all super helpful. I've been able to have dozens of conversations um with leaders of professional service firms, a ton of agencies and accounting firms uh and some law firms as we've been going through the development process for this and that has been super super helpful. They have really strong partners there. Um So anyways, join the waitlist. Uh you will hear from us. We're sending out uh weekly updates. Um and if you uh have specific questions, anything else, just hit reply on those and let me know. Okay, enough about that. I've got two other things I wanted to highlight here uh today as well. Actually, we covered one of them, which was the I wanted the feature request for folder instructions. Um adding custom instructions to ClickUp AI that is persistent across all uses. Now, ClickUp is already building this. I'll let you know if you don't go actually upvote this one. This one won't bother me as much cuz this is already in a know that Dean and the crew are working on this. Um but Ben, shout out to you for uh highlighting this one. And having custom instructions uh that are saved in specific super agents, that works really well. Uh but if you're just searching for something and you want to ClickUp AI to remember, "Hey, this is always uh the way that I want this to to come back." That would be super helpful and and potentially helpful across the team uh as well. So, I thought this was like this uh bonus feature idea. Uh I can go back and forth. I We could We could debate through, "Does that make sense to do this globally or not?" I think it probably does. Allow me as the owner of my company to say, "Hey, here's some context that I always want you to remember. Whenever anybody asks anything, remember that we never say utilize. We always say use." Uh you know, "We never say this word, we always say that." Like, "We don't call them customers, we call them clients cuz we're in a services busi- I mean, if you're super picky about" Like, there could be tiny details like that. Um it could be brand, style, or voice uh type things. It could just be data to remember. It could be, "Here's the type of stuff that we reveal publicly and we don't." Every organization makes decisions about, "Hey, what do they share publicly and what do they keep uh internally?" Um It could be context that everyone Yeah, everyone should have access to or you want uh Brainly works. So, I think both of those on an individual level, I've definitely felt this um piece. And so, this would be huge. And then, I think the second feature is almost like a second feature request. But that Obviously, they're they're tied together. Um don't have to be tied together, but same thread of thought at least would be, "Hey, as a workspace owner or admin, should I be able to upload stuff that would influence AI's responses to other team members?" And I think uh probably yes. And that would have to be surfaced then. So, if um being or if anyone else is watching this and thinking about how this would happen, all that context would have to be shown. I think should be shown to whoever's interfacing with it. Hey, your workspace owner or admin has uploaded, you know, this context, and so the reason that I can't give you uh a different design than this or I can't write using the word that you're saying is because I've been told not to do it by this set of instructions. Um so, anyways, just thought. All right. That's a lot to cover. Uh thanks for sticking with me here on episode 17 of ClickUp Weekly. If you would like to join the show, go to zenpilot.com/clickupweekly and then /guest. Again, you can apply to be a guest. Um we've got some great interviews recorded and lined up. Those are coming out here um shortly. Make sure you subscribe. Leave a comment on YouTube. Love to hear from you. Join the waitlist for ZenPilot Reports, and we'll see you next week for another great episode of ClickUp Weekly. Thanks for being here.