Running a company on Clickup probably increases efficiency by at least 30%-100%
This is based on helping drive the implementation of Clickup into all departments of a $200m+ valued company and then several others after
I love Clickup. Folks that know me know that I try to use it for everything.
But there is a very good reason for this. I think it is amazing how efficiently and transparently a team operates when everyone uses it in a consistent way.
And several folks have asked me in the past…. “Ken… the same could be said for Asana or Monday.com no? I mean they’re like all the same.”
To which my view was… no. They are not the same. I’ve tried implementing similar to what I write below on both Asana and Monday.com and came up against structural impediments that prevented me from having even half the effect of what I have seen consistently with Clickup.
My first experience with Clickup was with an FBA Aggregator called Branded in early 2021
There was a guy who loved using Clickup named Joel and he kind of persuaded the tech team to use it. So I grudgingly tried it as it meant changing some of my standard processes.
But after awhile I loved it. And I began operating under the philosophy that pretty much everything I do (within reason) should be represented in Clickup.
When you get in this habit I consider it amazing…. because you have full transparency on pretty much everything you’re working on and you have a priority, a due date, etc. No more trying to remember what you should work on, etc.
Also I began to realize how you could scale how much you could manage. For awhile I had a greenlight on hiring contractors (via upwork, fiverr, etc) and so I’d engaged something like ~20 contractors at one point to do a variety of things from engineering to product work to data stuff, etc. All directly managed by me.
And I set up a system that allowed me to give them clear responsibilities and then manage them with relatively little effort via Clickup. I’d basically just create a clickup task, assign it to them, set a due date, and i’d be following the card for all notifications.
So if they got blocked, i’d unblock. If they changed the eta, i asked why? If they didn’t do anything and they should have, I asked them what’s up?
We used a couple of Clickup ‘consultants’ to tailor the processes of each department
At some point I evolved into a massive fan of Clickup, but to be honest I wasn’t the only one. There were other folks in the Branded org that were also becoming religious users. In tech, in marketing, in legal, etc.
And so I started getting requests to help tailor Clickup to the workflow of the departments better. So i fished for some Clickup 'experts’ on a freelance website (Fiverr I think) and found a couple. And we started creating customized flows for departments like legal, marketing, and new product development.
Now you might think… well if they were using it already then why do they need that? And to be honest i was a bit unsure myself at the outset. But I found myself very impressed by the work of these experts as they did some things with Clickup forms and automations that I wasn’t even aware you could do.
For example…. if a Brand manager had a few new products that he needed content for he’d fill out a form that would be converted into a ticket on the Content Kanban in Clickup and would automatically get a priority and target eta. Plus the requester would have visibility in the form of notifications of all the work that subsequently got done on their request.
And they had some great dashboards for seeing the velocity of a team.
The Company was getting to closer to what I call “Ultimate transparency”
Now this wasn’t just how the Content team worked…. pretty much the entire organization began to evolve to work like this. To a level of transparency that i quite honestly had never seen before. Not even close.
Which to a company that is complex like a ‘FBA brand aggregator’… having this type of structure and efficiency is key. Because you’re acquiring 10-20 or even more companies…. each with their own products, processes, and people. And you need to quickly homogenize things but without losing speed.
But i’m pretty sure if you achieved this type of efficiency and transparency in ANY company it would be extremely powerful.
I implemented “Ultimate transparency” with my side hustle startup, Therapada
In late 2021 I launched my side hustle startup, therapada. And i’d already implemented Clickup in a few different clients like Wasoko and Shipper and was getting better and better at it.
So with Therapada my idea was to use it for pretty much EVERYTHING. Meaning that anything that took at least 20 minutes to do should somehow be reflected as a task. And that task should be structured into the right list in the right folder in the right space.
So after almost 1.5 years of operating the company like this I can confidently say that with a few clicks I could easily find pretty much anything we had ever done plus i’d know:
Who did it?
Why was the decision made?
When was it completed?
In the early days the cofounders even used this to divvy up equity so that equity would accurately reflect who did the work.
I’ve also helped some clients in the past couple years that did things the ‘old school’ way
By old school I mean the traditional way of doing things, eg.
You manage projects in Google sheets and need to just remember to check the sheet to see if anything has updated
You comment on a Google sheet and hope someone responds to you
You ping people on Slack to request stuff, ping them again to ask when its gonna get prioritised, ping them again to get a status update, ping them again to ask why the due date has passed and it’s not done
You sit on update calls for an hour per week to listen in for the 1-minute update on your project, which you could have easily just gotten and read as a notification.
You miss the update call because you had a conflict and therefore you have no update for that week.
etc
And i’d say the difference between working in this way vs. a Clickup-driven org is just like night and day. There is no comparison in terms of what is more efficient, what is more transparent, what system motivates you more, etc.
Almost ANY company would improve by at least 30% if they achieved ‘Ultimate transparency’
Using Clickup in the way i am proposing is like being a battle general and having perfect clarity on how each part of the battle is evolving. And you have a real-time communication mechanism with all of your field generals to react to the changing situation.
Would you have a better chance of winning the war? HELL YES.
I’ve now used Clickup in like 5 different clients, my own startup, and several other hobby projects. And I’ve seen its impact consistently. So much so that it astonishes me why all companies are not using Clickup or an equivalent.
I would say 30% improvement is the minimum you can expect if you implement the SOP i refer to at the end of the article.
Ask yourself these 4 questions here:
Is Slack only used for casual messaging and not as an active tool to manage projects?
Do you have a standardized project management process in place or everyone does what they want?
Do you have visibility on the current eta of your important projects and is this updated in a systematized way?
Do you have clear visibility on exactly what each of your team members did in the past month?
If you answered NO to even one of these i’d say you should consider testing out what i am saying.
Want to see how I run tech teams with Clickup?
Interested in potentially implementing this in your tech team or company? Comment on this post or message me and I will send you my Clickup SOP notion doc, which details out exactly:
how i set up Clickup
how i manage standups and sprints with it
the rules that I apply to the teams i manage with it
