How We Used to Manage Tasks and Clients, and What We Did to Improve

As much as SEOmoz has been growing lately (both in success and in employees), we still have a long way to go before we become an optimal, efficient, streamlined business (this may involve racing stripes and a spoiler, but no spinning rims). However, though we’re still trying to attain the status of Grand Poobah Organizers, we have, believe it or not, vastly improved our business practices. Let’s take a look at where we were, where we’re at now, and where we’d like to be:

Before:

• Rand and Gillian were pretty much the only two people who knew our list of existing clients; the only time we’d find out about a new client was when Rand would come up to one of us and say, “Can you do keyword research for so-and-so?” At that point, we’d be all, “Who the heck is so-and-so and what do they do?”
• We managed our tasks in our head. This method of task management would prove problematic whenever we would forget about a deadline and scramble to rearrange our priorities in order to deliver to our clients on time.
• Nobody knew what anyone else was working on. For all I knew, Matt spent his days trolling MySpace for dates important networking opportunities.  It’s not like we wanted to be nosy; it’s just nice to have an idea of who’s doing what.
• Rand didn’t really check up on our progress as frequently as he could have. He’d delegate a task and, because he was so busy, wouldn’t really ask for updates a whole lot.
• Our attempt at keeping track of clients and tasks resulted in abandoned, half-finished lists on white boards that were scattered across the office. If you wanted to know what we were working on in March, you could check out the corner of the kitchen and read the white board. “Ah, launch Web 2.0 Awards…”

Obviously, we had a pretty crappy system of communication. To be fair, though, there were four employees when I started interning, and we were all crammed in a tiny office. At that time it was easy to delegate tasks by turning around and saying, “Hey, can you work on this?” Once we moved to the bigger office and expanded to seven employees (we have eight now), however, we were in dire need of updating our system.

After a visit from Andy Beal and a realization that we needed to tighten up our business practices in order to succeed, we decided to re-tool and change our laid-back management approach (though not too much–come into our office, see how we dress, listen to our conversations, and watch us throw junk at each other; you’ll see we haven’t completely abandoned our ways).

Present:

• We took an initiative in getting our shtuff together and hired Scott as our campaign coordinator. He manages a lot of communication between SEOmoz and our clients so Rand doesn’t have as much weight to bear.
• We have a huge white board in the “Think Tank” (the huge room where most of us Mozzers sit. We don’t really call it the “Think Tank,” though–that would be weird) that is broken up into several grids: active clients, pending clients, and a checklist of tasks for every employee. Now we can easily see who our clients are and who’s working on what.
• Rand does a great job of checking in with us every so often to see how we’re doing with various tasks and whether we’re struggling with anything or need clarification.
• We’re more aware of deadlines so we can prioritize our tasks ahead of time and devote the appropriate amount of time to what’s most important.

I know it seems really absurd that it took us as long as it did to fix our problems with communication and client/task management, but sometimes you can overlook the simple fixes that can make a huge difference. We’re all a lot happier with how much our professionalism has improved, but I do know that we still have a ways to go:

Future:

• Jeff mentioned that he’d like to have quick meetings in the morning so we can all know what we’re working on for that day (instead of having Rand visit us one-by-one throughout the day and talking to us about our tasks–it can get a bit distracting).
• We’ve tossed around the idea of implementing client logins so they can check on various task progresses online (this is a system that Fresh Egg has adopted, and it works beautifully).
• Likewise, we’re thinking of implementing some sort of project management software that we can all access (the whiteboard’s fine for now, but we are a tech company, damnit).

There you have it. SEOmoz may seem like the Hercules of SEO firms, but as you can see by our 2006 financial summary and by this blog post, we’re still a little fish(kin?) in the big business sea. Keep in mind that we are a young company (SEOmoz is only about 3 or 4 years old, and the average age of our employees [minus Gillian–sorry Pres] is 24), so we’re constantly learning how to be a better business. Still, I don’t think we’re doing too shabby now 🙂

I’ll close this by asking you if you’ve had experience with a similar process and what you did to finally get up off your arse and make some changes. Or, if you have any expert advice for this young company on how to make our company run like an efficient machine, feel free to share.