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.
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
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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