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Last year, I interviewed my client Miish Grixti, and we talked about how she uses ClickUp to manage her business.

Miish is a copy coach and launch strategist behind multiple-6-figure launches of some of the biggest and the brightest in the industry. She also has depression, anxiety, and an autonomic nervous system disorder called POTS.

Miish supports coaches and creatives to communicate the brilliance of their offers so they can do good, make money and have a shirt-load of fun along the way. 

Miish and I connected in 2019 during an online challenge. I loved Miish’s energy and hired her as my copy coach for three months. After our coaching series, we stayed in touch because we connected over our approach to running our businesses, including our love of ClickUp. Miish hired me as her online business manager in January 2021.

Before delving into that and how we set up ClickUp so Miish can run her business with ease, let’s wind back to the beginning when Miish found ClickUp.

Watch the interview or keep reading.

How Miish discovered ClickUp

Miish first heard about ClickUp through a free course on how to scale your business. The funny thing, though, is that this training was about Asana, not ClickUp!

However, the training included a bonus for businesses that had grown beyond the $100K milestone. This bonus was all about ClickUp. The view of the training provider was that you didn’t need ClickUp functionality and flexibility until you reached $100K. 

But Miish, being the savvy business owner she is, thought: “Why would I invest my time and energy into learning this thing (i.e. Asana) that I want to outgrow?”

Investing in a tool more suited to where you want to go than where you currently are isn’t always a good idea and can easily backfire. But in this case, and when it comes to project management tools in general, this was a clever approach. 

Work management platforms are such a foundational and essential tool in your business that it’s something you want to avoid having to replace later. Plus, ClickUp works for beginners as well as advanced business owners. It can grow with you.

Getting started with ClickUp

One day, Miish and I discovered that we were both using in ClickUp to run our respective businesses. Since we both loved it, we often found ourselves talking about the new features that were released weekly at the time and how we could use them in our businesses. 

As a systems strategist, I often got very excited about those conversations and all the new processes and setups I’d been trying. One day, I shared how I’d been experimenting with my content management process and how I was replacing my CRM (Client Relationship Management) tool with ClickUp. This led us to talk about how Miish could also leverage ClickUp to manage her content and her client management process.

Miish’s dilemma: hire a VA or invest in systems

At the time, Miish was working with many one-to-one coaching clients. She’d already streamlined a big part of her client management process, thanks to Dubsado. However, there were still some things Dubsado workflows couldn’t do for her, and she had to do them manually.

Although these manual tasks didn’t take a lot of time to complete, Miish was spending a lot of energy trying to remember the next step in her process and where each client was at in their coaching journey with her.

She felt very frustrated. It sucked all her energy – her brain juices were going there instead of creating for her business or serving her clients.

She was faced with a choice to get her energy back:

• Should she hire a VA or personal assistant to help her, OR
• Should she invest in creating systems and setting up tools to support her and work with her brain?

Integrating ClickUp with existing tools

The challenge Miish faced is widespread among business owners.

Part of this conundrum could have been solved by establishing standard operating procedures that would tell Miish what the next step was. However, the problem was deeper. Miish also needed better automation and her platform to talk to each other to have all the information she needed in one place.

Miish’s a visual person – she thinks in pictures and shapes – so she needs her platforms to display the information in that way so her brain can instantly understand it and she knows what needs to be done next. And that’s precisely what we did by integrating Dubsado and ClickUp.

Optimising ClickUp

This one-off project was just the beginning of our journey together. A few months later, in December 2020, Miish reached out again to work together to systemise her whole business.

At the time, Miihs felt she was juggling too many balls and trying to hold too much information at once, which made it hard to focus.

From to-do list to business hub

Although this work wasn’t just about ClickUp, we spent the first few months reviewing, organising and optimising ClickUp as Miish wanted it to become her second brain:

• A place where things are organised in a way that makes sense to her brain
• A place that’s intuitive for her to access, use and navigate
• A place where she can store things instead of having a gazillion notebooks everywhere, and even more Google Docs making it hard to find things 

Essentially, we wanted to make ClickUp work for Miish rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, business owners often overlook this critical step of understanding what they need and how they work. They jump into solution mode by investing in a platform that doesn’t always suit them.

They wind up having to adapt and compromise, resulting in a less than optimal solution and feelings of overwhelm and frustration. They often surrender by buying templates – thinking that someone’s already done the thinking and problem solving and all they need to do is start using these templates.

And Miish was no exception.

How to use templates to customise ClickUp

Before we worked together, Miish bought a few courses with ClickUp templates thinking they’ll help her get started. However, she quickly realised that they weren’t built for her brain. They were built for whoever created those templates and didn’t make sense to her.

And so, even though Miish loved ClickUp and was excited to use it to run her business, she wasn’t getting much use out of it because she was relying on templates and setup that weren’t personalised to her business or how she likes to work.

This isn’t to say that all templates are bad, and you shouldn’t use them. These templates were a great starting point because they gave me an insight into what Miish wanted instead of starting from scratch. They allowed us to dive deeper into what Miish needed and what these templates – and other templates I provided – were doing well or were missing for Miish. They helped her visualise what was possible and articulate what she needed without worrying about how it needed to be set up.

After adapting the templates to suit her and how she thought she wanted to work, Miish was able to use ClickUp more in her business. This was the opportunity to see if the templates and the changes we’d made worked for her or if she needed additional tweaks. Discovering and understanding the way you like to work isn’t a quick endeavour. It’s an iterative process.

Processes and systems aren’t fixed. Unfortunately, business owners often feel like they have to stick to what they have created because we’re being told that change is bad. Change for the sake of change is, of course, unnecessary and a waste of time. But changing something because it no longer suits you is OK and even necessary to avoid frustration.

Using ClickUp every day

ClickUp’s now an integral part of Miish’s business life and routine.

When she turns on her computer in the morning, the first thing she does is open ClickUp, and check the Home. It shows her the list of tasks due on the day, so she instantly knows what’s going on and what her focus is.

She also uses the Notifications tab since we use ClickUp to communicate. This means that she doesn’t spend time in her inbox or slack. It’s all easy and streamlined.

If she has an idea (while eating breakfast, for example, like the morning of this interview), she opens the app on her mobile and creates a new task in the content space. Easy!

The 3 ClickUp features Miish loves

Here are 3 ClickUp features that made a difference for Miish:

1. ClickUp Docs

Miish used Google Docs for all her client work and, therefore, didn’t think she’d use ClickUp Docs. However, she’s found this functionality very supportive and uses ClickUp Docs for professional development. It helps her keep tabs on what she’s learning and spending her focus and time on.

I use Docs in a similar way – replacing Evernotes, Notes, and Google Docs. It’s made it easy to know where to put my notes when I attend a webinar or masterclass and even easier to access them later as they’re all in one place. No more wondering, “where did I write my notes?”.

I barely use Google Docs anymore. I’ve found that when I’m in Google Drive, I constantly click and look for things. I don’t use the search; I prefer to have folders. But that makes it very clicky. I’ve realised that this clickiness creates a lot of resistance to using Google Drive, as it does for Miish. Whereas in ClickUp, I feel I can access the information more easily.

I had noticed this resistance in myself, primarily when documenting my processes. Obviously, this is something I knew I had to do and actually wanted to do. But the thought of having to use Google Docs or another app was getting in the way of doing it. Whereas with Docs in ClickUp, everything’s contained within the app, which means I simply go to my SOP doc and update it as needed. This allows me to stay focused as I’m not switching apps.

2. Dashboards

Miish has created a dashboard (called “This Week”) that gives her an instant visual take on what’s happening. She can customise her dashboard and update her self-care checklist each week to suit her needs.

3. Spaces

Spaces are one way to organise your work in ClickUp. Miish has a few spaces: business as usual, client care, offerings, my content marketing, and a library, which contains her professional development stuff. 

It goes beyond organising your work, though. Miish likes the fact that she was able to personalise each space and set each one to suit her needs based on its content. It makes ClickUp easy to navigate. All her tasks are easy to access, and she can quickly decide where to create new ones.

Miish was surprised at how quickly things changed in her business. Only a few months earlier, she felt overwhelmed by all the small things piling up and by trying to stay on top of what was going on in her business.

ClickUp has freed up so much of her energy, and her business feels very different. She didn’t think this was possible. And yet, here she is! 

This blog post is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or directly affiliated with ClickUp. All content in this post is created by Emilie Gomez. For official ClickUp information, check out their website at www.clickup.com.