What was going wrong
Tasks got lost in chat threads. There was no single view of workload, priorities, or delivery status, and there were constant arguments about who owned what. As the team grew, tasks were missed and timelines slipped.
The founder was the one everybody asked, and that does not scale past a certain point.
What I did
I compared tools against how the team actually worked, not against feature lists. HubSpot was a good CRM but too heavy for delivery. Jira was built for software and too complex for creative teams. Trello was too simple at scale. monday.com had the best balance of simplicity and visibility.
The rollout ran in four phases: the Islamabad delivery teams first, to prove the workflow; then Ops took over board upkeep and the written procedures; then the Dubai project and account managers; then the wider teams and boards the clients could see. Along the way came role-based boards, briefs built from set procedures, automations for handoffs, and dashboards that show who is carrying what.
What changed
monday.com became the one place the agency trusts for delivery, operations, and HR: six workspaces across departments, with dashboards for each role.
Work in progress is visible, there are fewer follow-ups, planning is stronger, and the founder is far less involved in day-to-day delivery. The team grew from 10 to 50+ users without the chaos that usually comes with that kind of growth.
How I picked the tool
I had used HubSpot for two years on an NDIS project for an Australian client. That gave me a practical benchmark before I compared anything: the tool has to fit the workflow, not the other way around.
monday.com won because the interface clicked, and it supported the written procedures, automations and dashboards the rollout was built on.
Change management was the real work
The biggest pushback came from account managers and project managers. monday.com asked for clearer briefs, consistent statuses, and disciplined handoffs. For the first time, work became visible, including the delays and the missing inputs.
The teams doing the work adopted it faster, because they got clarity, a record of what they delivered, and less guessing.
How I handled the pushback:
- Wrote the procedures early and kept improving them
- Trained people by role (account and project managers vs. the teams doing the work)
- Used their feedback to refine statuses and templates
- Kept ownership with Ops at first, then handed it to the teams
Key learnings I'd carry into the next rollout
- Adoption beats features. Pick what teams will actually use.
- Start with clarity: roles, statuses, and procedures before automations.
- Roll out in phases and prove the value with one team first.
- Dashboards only work if the data underneath is clean.
- Tools don't create accountability. Ownership does.
What's next
AI is now being added to briefs, updates, and content work, to cut manual steps without taking ownership away from people.
If I set this up again for a similar agency, I'd still pick monday.com for this kind of team. I'd just move faster, with the lessons above.
