How to Effectively Manage the Chaos of Agency Life featuring Gray MacKenzie of ZenPilot

Aug 11, 2021

Gray MacKenzie is the CEO and founder of ZenPilot, which is an agency training business that gives digital agency teams the structure they need to grow quickly and sustainably. As they grew their agency (GuavaBox), they helped other agency owners accelerate their journey. Today, Gray MacKenzie and his company, ZenPilot, have helped over 1,800 agencies grow sustainably.

Through testing 71 project management tools, they ended up finding ClickUp to be by far the best project management tool, which helps agencies centralize their applications and streamline their process, allowing everyone to work together seamlessly.

In this episode, we are going to learn how Gray helps agencies streamline their operations by using ClickUp for project management, the reasons why larger and smaller agencies struggle when it comes to streamlining, systemizing business operations, and why value-based outcomes are more important than output when estimating business success.

This Cast Covers:

  • What Gray does in helping agencies streamline operations (01:20)
  • Using ClickUp as the main project management tool to centralize agencies' apps (01:34)
  • Growing GuavaBox agency is a challenge that helps them accelerate their journey (01:43)
  • A quick recap of how Joey and Gray got connected (01:53)
  • Gray's 11 years journey into the agency space and how ZenPilot was born (03:40)
  • Gray’s going through 71 different project management tools before arriving at Clickup (05:36)
  •  Naval Ravikant's “Get rich without getting lucky” – A breakdown of 4 types of luck (06:11)
  • ClickUp’s successful raising of 100 million dollars at a billion-dollar valuation in December (08:06)
  • Asana vs ClickUp for agencies: Why these two tools are fairly comparable today in terms of features (08:30)
  • What challenges do bigger and smaller agencies face when it comes to streamlining, systemizing business operations? (12:06)
  • A bit more challenging with bigger teams: Gray's experience with a large agency of 120 employees (17:40)
  • The most valuable assets that you can create in your sales process (20:39)
  • The strategies and future of ZenPilot for assisting agencies in achieving sustainable growth (25:50)
  • Addressing agency owners who trade a lot of time for money and the importance of value-based pricing than output-based pricing in business (29:14)
  • Paying for Output vs. Outcomes: What's more important? (31:17)

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