Creative marketing agency · Marketing & Creative · Build 01
A creative agency's client lifecycle, made self-running.
The agency runs everything on ClickUp. We turned the manual work between 'a lead fills out the form' and 'a client project is live' into a self-running system — ~20 automations, one-click onboarding from 60+ service templates, and AI-written performance reviews leadership actually reads. Since October 2026 the team works it all from its own portal.
0.
Manual steps from lead to launched project
60+.
Service templates, auto-scheduled
~20.
Automations across the lifecycle
16.
Plain-English wiki pages for the team
The brief
Everything between the form and the project was a person retyping things.
The problem
Everything between a website form submission and a running client project was manual: re-typing form data, hand-building folders and task lists for every new client, copying fields between records, remembering to schedule reviews.
ClickUp relationship fields don't survive list moves, so relationship data couldn't follow a lead through the pipeline — and there was no systematic performance review of client accounts at all.
The solution
Automate the whole client lifecycle inside ClickUp — intake, won-deal handoff, onboarding, account review — and write it down so the team runs it without me. Every step became a trigger; every trigger became a documented page.
01 · Lead intake
A form submission becomes a linked lead, a contact, an email, and a Slack ping.
Website form → ClickUp lead task → auto-created contact record with bidirectional linking, a branded HTML notification matched to their editorial brand, and a real-time Slack alert. Nobody retypes anything.
- Bidirectional lead ↔ contact links
- Branded HTML email, on-brand
- Slack alert the moment it lands
zapier + apps script — lead intake
Website form submitted
a new lead arrives
Lead task + contact record created
bidirectionally linked
Branded HTML email sent
matched to the editorial brand
Slack alert to the team
real-time
leads processed, zero re-typed
823
raw API values resolved to human-readable text on the way in
02 · One-click onboarding
Mark it won — the project builds itself.
Marking a deal signed moves it to the Projects pipeline, builds the delivery folder from a template, and re-links contacts through a plain-text 'bridge field' we designed to carry relationships across the list move ClickUp doesn't survive. Selecting services then assembles complete task lists from a 60+ template library — assignees, dependency chains, custom fields — anchored to the start date.
- ~600-line onboarding engine
- 60+ template library
- Every dependency and assignee set
apps script — the onboarding engine
Services selected on the CRM record
Task lists built from 60+ templates
assignees, dependencies, custom fields
Schedule anchored to start date
weekend dates rolled to Monday
tasks created for this client
0
one click — a complete, scheduled project plan
03 · AI scorecards
The flagship: account reviews that score themselves.
Account managers rate each client across 14 metrics in 4 pillars — Integrity, Delivery, Quality, Hospitality. Code computes pillar averages, an overall score, and a status tier; Claude writes the narrative review. Monthly, systematic, comparable.
- 14 metrics · 4 pillars
- Score, tier, and narrative — automatically
- Reviewed every month, not never
claude api — monthly account review
Integrity
8.4
Delivery
7.9
Quality
8.8
Hospitality
9.1
Overall
8.6 — Healthy
Claude writes the report and posts it to the account — every third review triggers a quarterly trajectory analysis
04 · The wiki
Then we wrote it all down.
A 16-page automation wiki — one plain-English page per automation: what it does, what triggers it, how to troubleshoot it — written for non-technical staff and published to ClickUp Docs programmatically. The system stays theirs.
- 16 pages, one per automation
- Written for the people who run it
- Published via the API
clickup docs — published via API
Lead intake — what it doespublished ✓
The won-deal enginepublished ✓
The onboarding enginepublished ✓
Review schedulingpublished ✓
Troubleshooting — common fixespublished ✓
16 plain-English pages, one per automation — the team runs the system without the studio
05 · New: the team portal
Then the whole system got a front door.
In October 2026 the agency moved onto its own team portal, reading the same ClickUp live. Leads, projects, retainers and the scorecard are sidebar pages anyone on the team can work from — and the agency got the reporting, meetings and planning layers on top.
What the portal adds
Team lists
Leads, Projects, Retainers, Scorecard, Team and the service-template index as sidebar pages — search, filter, list or board, and tiles for open, late and due this week.
CRM
Every client from Projects and Retainers in one table: open and late work, hours, last and next meeting, emails waiting.
Reporting + Hours & cost
On-time rate, cycle time and late work over any period, hours and value per client against its cap — exportable to Excel or a branded PDF.
Executive reports
A plain-English weekly or month-end update per client, written by AI from the work itself, sent as a branded email.
Meetings
Every recorded call becomes a recap in ClickUp — summary, decisions, action items — shown next to upcoming calls.
Planner
Each person's day hour by hour, meetings from the calendar and tasks fitted into the gaps; AI sizes and slots unestimated work.
Correspondence + Assistant
Gmail matched to clients with plain-English summaries, email → task in one click, and an Ask panel that answers from ClickUp, mail and meetings.
Roles + client reminders
Account managers and team members each open only their pages; must-know notes about a client appear whenever anyone opens that client.
The outcome
Zero manual data entry from lead to launched project. One click onboards a client with a complete, scheduled plan.
Zero manual data entry from lead to launched project. One click onboards a client with a complete, scheduled project plan.
Leadership gets AI-written monthly and quarterly reviews they actually read — and the plain-English wiki means the team runs the whole system without us.
Want a system like this one?
A 30-minute call to map what you have to what you need. Fixed-fee where the scope is known, $100/hr beyond it, and everything documented so your team runs it without me.
Demos are illustrative recreations; company names withheld out of respect for client privacy.
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