How Clockwise handed 20 hours a week back to the team

The result in one line

Within six months, the founder went on leave overseas for three weeks, and we did not have to contact her once. Issues did arise, and they were managed appropriately by the team.

Where we started

Client retention was the core problem. The agency was losing about as many clients as it won, with no operating infrastructure to support retention or growth. Work and reporting were spread across several tools, the founder was the escalation point for everything, and day-to-day operations leaned heavily on one person. There was no single view of churn, time or invoicing.

What Clockwise delivered

• Protected revenue. Built a monthly churn measure, renewal-date flags that prompted clients to review their ROI, and advice on moving to rolling contracts.
• Cleaned up and consolidated. Retired two overlapping tools and more than 4,000 out-of-date tasks, so the team works from one source of truth.
• Migrated the whole team from Asana to ClickUp. Planned rollout and change management, with a clean cutover.
• Made the numbers visible. Founder, business health and invoice reconciliation dashboards, with contractor invoices checked against logged time.
• Put AI to work. Nine live agents, doing the repetitive work across the business, detailed below.
• Built new product lines. Identified and built new kinds of product offerings for the business.
• Built the team's playbook. 13 documented processes and 9 account manager SOPs, each with a named owner. Ran hiring end to end, from job ad to signed contract, and onboarded a senior account manager.
• Mapped the client journey. Every client touchpoint across the first 90 days, with client communications rewritten.
• Set the operating rhythm. A simple weekly leadership meeting and a fortnightly red/amber/green review of every client with the whole team, backed by clear decision rights and escalation paths.

Results

• Retention turned. In one 30-day stretch the agency won 6 clients and lost 2, a net gain of four with the same team.
• Seamless system migration, no incidents. The whole team moved from Asana to ClickUp.
• More than 20 hours a week handed back to the founder and team through automation.
• Audit turnaround cut by an estimated 70%, with about 6 hours a week saved on quality checks.
• Founder uncontacted for three weeks of leave. Billing, access and team issues did come up, and each was handled without interrupting her.
• Margin leaks found. Validating hours against packages led the founder to change the hours allocated per package.
• New product lines identified and built for the business.
• Access tightened so everything now runs through company accounts.
• Less dependence on any one person, with a named owner for every process and client outcome.

How Clockwise uses AI

Agents draft, check and flag. A person makes every decision that affects a client, a payment or a contract.

What each agent does, and what it achieved:

• Inbox triage. Sorts the founder's inbox into ClickUp tasks with context. Outcome: the founder works from a task list instead of an overflowing inbox.
• Daily summary. Pulls the founder's day together from her inbox and ClickUp. Outcome: she starts each day informed without chasing anyone.
• Meeting recap. Turns meeting next steps into tasks assigned to the right person, with client items filed in the client's list. Outcome: every action has an owner.
• Churn tracking. Calculates logo and revenue churn on the 1st of each month and answers questions live. Outcome: a live view of retention instead of a surprise.
• Invoice reconciliation. Checks each contractor invoice against logged time and allocations, and flags differences for a person to approve. Outcome: invoices are verified before they are paid, and over-allocation is visible.
• Client email drafts. Drafts account managers' client replies and never sends them. Outcome: faster, more consistent client communication, with a person always in control.
• Client sentiment. Scores client sentiment from call notes and flags at-risk accounts to leadership. Outcome: risk surfaces early, while there is still time to act.

Two further agents support the new product lines.

In the founder's words

“Bringing Megan in as our Fractional COO was one of the best decisions we made this year.

Over six months, Megan helped us move The Search Republic onto ClickUp, streamline the way our team works, and put proper systems and SOPs in place so the business no longer relies on me holding everything together. She also introduced AI automation into our operations, which has saved us real time and made our processes far more consistent.

What stood out most was her commitment. Megan went above and beyond, stepping in with daily check-ins while I was overseas and giving up a Saturday to get our ClickUp transition over the line. She felt like part of the team from day one.

I have no hesitation in recommending Clockwise to any business that wants to streamline its processes and take the founder out of the day to day.”