Is every client project different? Here's what to do!

Managing custom projects without a clear structure is like cooking without a recipe—chaos, frustration, and a whole lot of guesswork. Just because every project is different doesn’t mean your process has to be. 

Think about it, if you took on twice as many custom projects next month, would your workflow hold up? Or would everything spiral into confusion? If that second option sounds way too familiar, this episode is for you. 

Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson are unpacking the secret to handling custom projects efficiently—without losing flexibility. They’re breaking down how to create adaptable structures, leverage templates, and keep projects moving smoothly in tools like ClickUp, Asana, and Monday. 

Here’s what you’ll get: 

💡 How to balance structure and customization without slowing down. 

💡 The power of templates—even for custom projects. 

💡 Why Kanban boards and statuses are game-changers for visibility. 

If scaling is on your mind, make sure to check out Episode 40: "The Scalability Test: Could you double your team tomorrow?" for even more insights on building sustainable systems. Listen here: https://spoti.fi/3QYrRAs

If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who’s juggling chaos, and let’s bring some order to custom project management together!

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. Custom projects Micah. How in the world, when you have every client that you work with doing something different, how do you still utilize a project management system like ClickUp or Asana or Monday?

0:00:33 - (Micah): Well, this will be a short episode because the answer is you can't.

0:00:37 - (Alane): No, that's not true.

0:00:39 - (Micah): Yes. Just kidding. There are definitely solutions for this.

0:00:43 - (Alane): It's probably one of the most common things that I hear whenever I'm on calls with potential clients is they have this fear. First. It's a fear, you know, that it can't be done because everything in my business is customer and it just cannot be documented into a project management system. The second thing is that they're using it in a hodgepodge kind of way where they have some project management happening in the project management system, but then a majority, majority of it in a Slack or other chat system.

0:01:19 - (Micah): Yeah. Or they don't have a project management system and it's spreadsheets.

0:01:23 - (Alane): Oh, yes, yes, thank you. Because I forgot about that one. But that is very true.

0:01:29 - (Micah): Yep. So I'll be the prospect.

0:01:33 - (Alane): Okay.

0:01:34 - (Micah): And I, I have come to you, Alane, and I have said there. I don't. I think ClickUp or Monday or Asana looks awesome, but everything is custom. I have no idea how to get this structured. What, what do I do? What can I.

0:01:50 - (Alane): Don't worry, don't stress. We're going to build out a plan together. Okay. So number one is there has to be some commonalities between each client. And we're going to start there because.

0:02:02 - (Micah): That is, you're going to have.

0:02:05 - (Alane): You're going to have some basic things and that can look like initial template. So if you start working with a client, you're going to have certain things that you have to get. Maybe it's brand colors, maybe it is login information, maybe it's software tools that they use. You're going to have these basic 10, 15 things that need to get done initially and then you're going to have a project plan. Well, that project plan could have come from the initial contract. You had to have scoped out the work at some point.

0:02:34 - (Alane): Well, you already did the work of scoping it out. Let's transfer that to the management team that's going to be managing it and we can create that into the project management system that can look like a backlog. That. Because you might have to prioritize things that can look like a Gantt chart, that can look like dependencies, but you've already have that information and it just needs to get put somewhere. Otherwise it's sitting there behind a curtain that nobody is looking at.

0:03:01 - (Alane): How do you even know if you're on track or not if you're never looking at that information again?

0:03:06 - (Micah): I don't. That's the problem. No. So, I mean, what, what I'm visualizing as you're saying this, Alane, is almost like a container. A container, right. So we're going to do the initial steps. I'm going to get a bunch of information about the custom aspects of it. Then I can put those. Those things in the cont. In the project container. We, my team, can do those. I can see the accountability happening from that. So we got our initial steps done.

0:03:38 - (Micah): We're executing the custom steps that we identified through discovery or any other phase of this project. And then the rest of the project is my standard. What happens to close out the project after these custom steps are done?

0:03:55 - (Alane): Yeah. And I'm going to give it. I'm laughing at myself. I'm going to give a terrible example of this, but maybe it'll resonate. I don't know. Think about every time you go grocery shopping, every single time you go, you are getting something different. It is not going to be the same items every single time. Sometimes you need other items, sometimes you might be trying a new recipe, whatever it might be, but the things that stay the same is you're going grocery shopping, you bring your own grocery bags, you've got money on you, whether it's a credit card or however you're paying. And you are also going to walk through the grocery store to get your items.

0:04:36 - (Alane): Now, there's a chaotic way where you're just bouncing around randomly going, oh, I need this over here. It's not very efficient, but eventually it gets done and you're going to leave and you might forget things.

0:04:47 - (Micah): I feel seen right now, Alane.

0:04:49 - (Alane): Do you? Then, okay, let's improve that. That custom process with an improvement on it. Well, maybe you have a grocery list and you put it in order of the way that the grocery store is laid out because you're going to go through and you're going to get every single item and you're going to get it through the most efficient way possible and you're going to remember everything on your list and when it gets times to be done with that, AKA project slash, grocery store Visit and you go pay.

0:05:20 - (Alane): You've done everything and you did it on time and you optimized your. Your whole walkthrough of the grocery store. You pay, I like it, and you're out. Think of that in your project management system. You still have those core things that you have to do for the project. It may be different, but it can be mapped out so that the team can follow. It could even be delegated so that somebody else could go to the grocery store for you if they have this whole layout.

0:05:46 - (Micah): Yeah. And what you're saying is, even though it's different every time, we're still following the same process. We're just getting different things, you know?

0:05:56 - (Alane): Yes.

0:05:56 - (Micah): I have to admit, this did make me think of a food analogy to all of this grocery shopping talk. Yeah. Is if you take a burger, Right. I like, start with your bottom bun and your top bun, but inside those two buns, sky's the limit. You can do burger, black bean burgers. Does. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that you can't train anybody on how to make a burger or to make the different types. There's enough similarities to get it through there.

0:06:33 - (Alane): I love that analogy, Micah.

0:06:35 - (Micah): Okay, good. Thank you. Appreciate that.

0:06:37 - (Alane): So. So we talked through. Okay, a couple of things that just came to us. So we hadn't been dwelling on those ideas. But when it goes into your project management system, if we get back on track, is one way to do this as well, is how you're getting information. So in the task itself, having a core system for what information needs to go into that so that the team can execute on it, that is the same every single time for a team member.

0:07:06 - (Alane): And the objective or what the outcome needs to be also needs to be listed. If you need the dimensions of the wall for a light show going into. Every single time you do a light show, you need dimensions of a wall so those outputs can be a part of that individual task. That can also be a part of dependencies. The other thing that I like utilizing, you know, everything we do, maika as I mean, I know you know this, but everything we do is custom.

0:07:35 - (Alane): Every client's workflow is a bit different. Yes. We have core things, which is how I know this can be done. And so one see that thing that I see that we utilize that I really like is statuses. Where are we in the workflow for that particular piece of a project? So I can see instantly where we are and the team knows too, where we are on things.

0:07:59 - (Micah): Yeah. Statuses for those that are listening, if you're familiar with a board like a Kanban board, or just a Monday board or a Trello board. Right. That's a very popular structure these days. The columns are your statuses. So I think, you know, when you see a typical project set up for something like this, you might have very minimal statuses you might have like to do in progress, in review completed over the years.

0:08:32 - (Micah): Alane, we have expanded that and I think some people might look at some of what we do, and even in some of our demos where it's like, wow, you know, we don't have hundreds of statuses, but I think we have about 10, maybe 12 off the top of my head. But each one of them communicates something. So a status might be roadblocked, it might be on hold, it might be completed, it might be defining requirements. There's enough breath across the statuses that anybody can look at a task and know exactly where it's at.

0:09:07 - (Alane): Yeah. And I'm, I'm not a big Kanban view person. Only do I like looking at that view when I want to see stuff by status. I actually prefer looking at things in the list view. And if you're looking at stuff in a list view, you can look at it still by status. It'll just be in a list where it's grouped by basically. But I do like that Kanban view for looking at status. And. But every single task in there, if you dig in, has the same core pieces for every client.

0:09:39 - (Micah): Yep. Here's another, I think, quick pro tip on how to structure a project management system for very custom projects. One is, we've already got the basis of maybe a project template that would have your fundamentals, your hamburger buns, so to speak, your, you know, go to the grocery store, check out from the grocery store kind of situations. But within there, you can create templates for tasks, different tasks, and that can. Right. You, you do have a finite number of the types of things that you're doing, most likely.

0:10:17 - (Micah): So you can even go down one granular level and say, all right, how do I get the fundamentals? What are the hamburger buns of each main process or phase that we're doing and build that out. So when you're building out these projects, it's more like Legos and assembling the right pieces together to create the project than it is starting from a blank project and trying to figure out every single step.

0:10:44 - (Alane): Yeah, you know, having those automations and those templates helps so much with this too, because even just thinking about an internal process where you might have Marketing. Well, marketing could be email marketing, it could be video editing, it could be writing copy. You know, you have all these different pieces. Well, each one of those pieces, if you add it into a marketing project, then can have its own templates. So you could say, this is our bigger project and then I want to add work for this bigger project. We're going to do these five things for this client, and these are the five templates we're going to pull from.

0:11:22 - (Alane): And again, you have core things you're offering. You're not a digital agency that is also mowing people's lawns. You know, you've got some type of consistency on what you're doing and offering.

0:11:35 - (Micah): If you are, please reach out to us, because I would love to meet you. So the other, the other thing on this, that fills in the gaps. So we've got this project template, we've got these task templates, gets down to SOPs. So that is. Now you've got a project, you've got your tasks, you've got your statuses to fill in the gaps, write up how to do specific things, link them in the tasks, link them in the project, and you have got yourself all the elements that you need to build these custom projects in a standardized way.

0:12:17 - (Alane): Yeah, I think one of the biggest obstacles that I do see when a company decides to really commit to taking a project management system on and really using it and not just saying, oh, we're going to kind of keep using it and we're going to kind of keep doing chat and we're going to keep kind of doing this, whatever it might be, is overcoming not doing things the old way, but also starting to see the standardization now. We had an episode previously about this, but this is a big piece of it because you have to start thinking not on what is custom, but what is standard, what is your standard of doing business for every service that you offer. And when you think of it in that way, then you can start seeing it. And that is actually a hard part for people to do, and it has been a hard part for me to do. When I think about 15 years ago, Micah, when we started using Asana initially with our previous company, and you would get frustrated with me because I didn't know how to take what was in my head when it came to billing clients. We were billing 200 clients, and everything was in my head on every nuance possible.

0:13:30 - (Alane): And obviously we needed to get that out of my head and to the person that we hired to do that. But I couldn't see it could not see it. And you're like, no, Alane, this. We're going to do this. And you're going to start to see what is standard first. Number one, what is the standard way of doing it, and then what are the custom scenarios? Because we can build a process to that first standard, then custom.

0:13:52 - (Alane): And we did it, and we had somebody for 10 years being able to take what I was doing and do it. And that's a hard thing for somebody that's in it to pull themselves out of. So having somebody like a business partner or an outside company like us help you to start defining that, because it is almost impossible to see when you first start.

0:14:15 - (Micah): Yeah. And it's that. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think in the situations that I've been like that, Alane, it's that fear of letting go. It's that fear of if I don't do it because I know all these things, then it's going to get done wrong and it's going to be more of a pain in the ass than me just doing it. But you can't scale it.

0:14:36 - (Alane): Yeah, I mean, definitely fear of somebody else not doing it right, of course. But it is a bit of a block in. In your own mind of how to articulate this into a process. I think there is a block there.

0:14:49 - (Micah): Yes.

0:14:50 - (Alane): That. That you're just not able to see, because how you've been the one doing it for four years, 10 years, 15 years, however long, how. How do you take and unwind all of that? So definitely one side is just the actual piece of undoing it. But also, of course, the next step is letting go, which is a whole nother, you know, fear, I think, that people have. And, you know, you start to lose value, too. Like, what's my value if I let go of this and I see people.

0:15:21 - (Micah): I think there's a lot of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, so to summarize all of this together, what you're going to want to do is think about what's the same, not what's different. So you have the big picture of the project level going. What are the hamburger buns? What's showing up to the grocery store? What's leaving the grocery store? What are the same things we always want to do?

0:15:43 - (Micah): And then for the custom pieces, what's the micro level? So what are the LEGO building blocks that you can use to construct your custom projects? What are the statuses that you're going to work these projects through? There's enough in all the software out there between Asana ClickUp and Monday that allows you to really run custom projects, but in a standardized, productive way.

0:16:09 - (Alane): So if this sounds really exciting because you've been struggling with it, we would love to chat with you. This is what Micah and I love doing and helping companies overcome this idea of my my business is too custom. I'm not sure how to do this and we will work with you on fixing that. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate youe Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review.

0:16:38 - (Alane): Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at BiggestGoal.AI for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business. Bye for now.