Headline Metrics
- The client roster grew on the system from 200 accounts at kickoff to 400+ and beyond — with far less management overhead added than that growth would otherwise have demanded.
- An operating system for a PE-backed agency rollup — mid-rollup, one-list-per-client architecture, two-way CRM↔delivery sync, live revenue and capacity dashboards, demoed live within 11 weeks of kickoff.
- $141K total impact in year one — $111K/yr across ops unification, dashboards, and seat savings, plus a $30K specialist quote avoided.
The Challenge
A performance-marketing agency running paid-social, paid-search, programmatic, content, and outbound campaigns for 200 B2B clients was mid-rollup: acquired by a private-equity investor, which then rolled additional agencies into it — deepening a tooling mess a 65-person team had already outgrown. One ClickUp list held every client as a single task under a sprawl of inconsistent custom fields. Campaign specialists worked in separate spaces, so the service team checked three or four places to see one client's onboarding. There was no visibility into revenue by account or channel status, no capacity view, no time-in-status. The CRM (pre-sales) and ClickUp (delivery) were disconnected — the service team had zero CRM access — and 73 ClickUp members sat on paid seats with no logic for who actually needed one.
The Solution
- ClickUp architecture rebuild around one-list-per-client, replacing the single "everything" task-per-client model.
- Consolidated client record — each client's channel-specific delivery tasks visible inside the account-management space, while delivery teams kept their own spaces.
- Two-way CRM ↔ ClickUp integration — deal stages and won/lost mirror into ClickUp, and won deals move the client into onboarding automatically.
- Copy/design request workflow re-housed under each client record, doubling as an asset library.
- Dashboards: revenue (total, active, in-onboarding, cancellations, billing status), time-in-status per account, and capacity views by team, account manager, and campaign specialist.
- Onboarding automation — intake triggers a templated checklist and generates the client-record document.
- Seat audit across all 73 members — paid membership vs. guest access, cutting subscription cost.
The Results
- The roster grew from 200 clients at kickoff to 400+ and beyond on an ops footprint that grew far slower than the book.
- Core build and two-way integration live, with the revenue dashboard demoed to the client 11 weeks from kickoff.
- The specialist alternative quoted $30K+ for the same project without training; the build was delivered with training included.
- The relationship outlived the build: the CRM is still managed on an ongoing basis, and the client came back a year later to solicit a follow-on project.
Quotes
"Adoption and understanding seems to be coming along... I'm sure it'll still be a challenge over the next month or so, but everything's looking good from my perspective." — CEO
"We have settled into the new environment and wanted to re-engage you to talk about additional work. We are looking to create a more robust/mature project management system within our new environment and get help creating something our team can leverage across teams to improve our operations and oversight." — CEO
"We first reached out to [a specialist implementation firm]. They quoted us like something 30 plus K for the whole project without the training. That's too much for us... We're looking for somebody who was experienced who already did this willing to pay for the experience." — agency leadership