At a Glance

Industry: Social Media Agency
The Challenge: Systems that had become too manual + dependent on the founder as the agency grew
The Project: Implement HoneyBook + Asana to streamline the client journey and project management
The Goal: Prepare for hiring, elevate the client experience + confidently increase pricing
The Result: More time, less stress + a backend better equipped to support continued growth

When a Growing Business Starts to Require a Whole Lot of You

When Ashley, founder of Out of Office Social, first reached out to me, her social media agency wasn’t struggling. Actually, it was growing. Her clients trusted her and were getting results, and she was receiving steady leads. She was also getting ready to make some pretty exciting moves in the business, including hiring her first team member and increasing her pricing.

But behind the scenes? The business required a whole lot of Ashley to keep it working.

Like a lot of founders, Ashley had pieced together her systems as the business grew. She was using Notion as a client hub, following up with inquiries manually, and had processes for getting clients onboarded and managing their work. Technically, everything was getting done. But getting it done required a lot of her time, energy, and memory.

Nothing was necessarily broken. Ashley had done what most of us do when we’re building a business: she created what she needed when she needed it, adapted along the way, and found ways to make things work.

The problem was that the systems that had supported one version of Out of Office Social weren’t necessarily the systems that could support where she wanted to take it next. And when you’re preparing to hire your first team member, that becomes especially important.

Adding another person to a process that already requires you to remember every step doesn’t automatically make the process easier. If anything, it can create more work when you’re constantly explaining what needs to happen, where things live, and what comes next.

Ashley didn’t need to work harder or somehow become even more organized; she needed her business to stop relying on her to connect so many of the dots.

The Signs Her Business Systems Hadn’t Kept Up With Her Growth

When I started looking at how Out of Office Social was actually operating day-to-day, there wasn’t one giant glaring problem. Instead, there were a bunch of smaller things creating unnecessary work behind the scenes.

There wasn’t a centralized CRM guiding potential clients from inquiry through onboarding, so follow-ups and parts of the client journey still relied on Ashley. Onboarding wasn’t following one consistent process. Notion housed plenty of information, but it wasn’t functioning as a true project management system. And there wasn’t a clear distinction between where the client relationship was managed and where the actual work was managed.

Individually, none of those things sounds that bad, which is exactly why these kinds of problems can be so easy to live with. An extra email here, a manual follow-up there, five minutes trying to find something, another task you have to remember yourself —none of it feels like enough of a problem to stop everything and fix it.

But multiply those little inefficiencies across every client, project, week, and eventually another team member, and suddenly you’re spending a whole lot of time and mental energy simply keeping everything moving.

The agency worked because Ashley made it work. So instead of adding another workaround or dropping a new tool into the mix and hoping it magically solved everything, we took a step back and looked at what OOO Social actually needed its systems to do.

How We Built Better Systems for Out of Office Social

The goal of our work together wasn’t simply to “set up HoneyBook” or “build out Asana.”

Those were the tools we ultimately chose, but a tool is only as useful as the process behind it. We needed to create a clear structure for how someone moved through the client journey, how the actual client work got done, and how another person could eventually step into the business without Ashley having to personally explain every next step.

We landed on a pretty simple distinction: HoneyBook manages the relationship, while Asana manages the execution.

And then we built the systems around that.

Using HoneyBook to Create a More Consistent Client Experience

Ashley wasn’t using a CRM before we started working together, so we implemented HoneyBook from scratch and built it around the way Out of Office Social actually works with clients.

Inside HoneyBook, we created automated inquiry and follow-up workflows, branded proposals and welcome guides, questionnaires, contracts and invoicing, structured onboarding sequences, and follow-up systems to help make sure potential clients weren’t slipping through the cracks.

The biggest change wasn’t that Ashley now had a CRM. It’s that instead of having to remember who needs a follow-up, what needs to be sent next, or where someone is in the inquiry process, there is now a consistent client acquisition and onboarding system helping move people through that experience…and that matters for more than saving time.

Ashley was also preparing to increase her pricing, and raising your rates feels a whole lot better when you’re confident that the experience surrounding your work reflects the same level of quality as the work itself.

The goal was never to automate Ashley out of the client experience. It was to let the system handle the repetitive pieces so she could be more intentional about the places where her involvement actually matters.

Using Asana to Create a Centralized Project Management System

Next, we moved her project management out of Notion and built Asana into the central place for managing OOO Social’s client work.

We created standardized project templates for social media management, internal and client-facing workflows, recurring content processes, approval timelines, deliverable tracking, clear task ownership, and visibility across active client accounts. In other words, we went from simply having somewhere for information to live to having a system that actually helps the work move forward.

Ashley can now see what’s happening, what’s coming next, who’s responsible for it, and whether anything is holding up a project without having to reconstruct the answer from emails, notes, and whatever she happens to remember. And as she brings another person into the business, that structure becomes even more valuable. Instead of hiring someone and then continuing to hold the project management process in her own head, she now has a system they can actually step into.

What Changed After Implementing HoneyBook + Asana?

The transformation wasn’t that Ashley went from having “no systems” to suddenly having a fancy tech stack. She already had ways of getting things done. What changed was how much those processes depended on her to make them work.

Before working together, inquiry follow-ups relied heavily on Ashley remembering to do them. Now, HoneyBook helps guide potential clients through a consistent inquiry process. Onboarding varied from client to client and now each new client moves through a more intentional and repeatable experience.

Notion held information, but it wasn’t giving Ashley the structure she needed to manage execution across the agency. Now, Asana gives her one central place to see and manage the work.

And perhaps most importantly, a significant amount of information and next steps used to live with Ashley. Now, more of those processes live within the business itself, which makes it much easier for someone else to eventually step in and help carry them.

According to Ashley, two of the biggest differences have been pretty simple: she’s saving time and experiencing less stress.

But there’s another result that I think matters just as much. She also shared that she feels more confident in her systems and in the client experience she’s providing! Because when you’re confident in what’s happening behind the scenes, it becomes a whole lot easier to make decisions about what happens next.

Do You Need Better Systems Before Hiring?

If you’re preparing to hire your first team member, it’s worth looking at your existing business systems before you start delegating work.

That doesn’t mean you need every process perfectly documented or some massive SOP library before another person can enter the business. But if you’re currently the only person who knows how everything works, where everything lives, and what needs to happen next, hiring someone doesn’t automatically remove that responsibility from your plate.

The clearer your workflows, project management, client processes, and task ownership are before you hire, the easier it becomes for someone else to actually take ownership of their work without requiring you to manage every step.

That was an important part of what we were building for Ashley. We weren’t just solving the friction she was experiencing right now. We were thinking about what the business would need from its systems as it continued to grow.

What Systems Does a Growing Social Media Agency Need?

There’s no single tech stack or workflow that every social media agency needs, and I will forever be the first person to tell you that I don’t believe in building systems just because someone on the internet says you’re “supposed” to have them. But there are a few areas I almost always want to look at when a service-based business is growing: client acquisition, client onboarding, project management, client offboarding, and business operations. (Read more about those in this blog post.)

For OOO Social, the biggest opportunities were within client acquisition, onboarding, and project management, which is why HoneyBook and Asana made sense.

Another agency might need something completely different, which is the bigger point here: the tool isn’t the strategy. The goal is to look at how your business actually operates, figure out what’s creating unnecessary work or depending too heavily on you, and then build the right solution around that.

Building for the Business You’re Becoming

I don’t believe good business operations are about having the fanciest tools, the most automations, or a 47-page SOP for every last little thing that you do.

HoneyBook and Asana happened to be the right tools for Ashley. But the real work was figuring out where OOO Social was requiring more of her than it needed to, what would need to change to support the growth she wanted, and then actually building those solutions into the business.

The systems that got your business here aren’t always the same ones that will support where you’re going next. And sometimes you don’t notice that immediately because nothing is technically falling apart. Clients are happy, the work is getting done, and the business is growing. It’s working…but it’s working because you’re doing a whole lot of work to keep it working.

Does Any of This Sound Familiar?

Maybe your business looks a little like Ashley’s did — Things are working, clients are happy, and you’re growing. But behind the scenes, you’re starting to notice just how much of that growth still depends on you remembering, following up, checking in, piecing things together, and making sure nothing gets dropped.

Maybe you’re getting ready to hire and realizing someone can’t really take work off your plate until there’s a clear way for that work to happen. Maybe you want to raise your prices but know the client experience behind those prices could use some attention. Or maybe you don’t have a major growth milestone coming up at all, you’ve just caught yourself thinking, “There HAS to be a better way to do this.” (Spoiler: there probably is).

And that’s exactly the kind of thing we can tackle through a Business Intensive. We’ll look at how your business is currently working, identify what’s creating unnecessary work or slowing you down, figure out what would work better, and then actually build and implement the solution.

Because sometimes your business doesn’t need more from you, it just needs a better way of working.

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