Planeolo is a tool that will make your life way easier. Creative agencies and project managers can save time on repetitive tasks such as project updates, emails, and follow-ups, reduce manual project audits, improve client interactions, and get analytics during and after projects in one place. However, such a powerful platform like this doesn’t happen overnight.
Jeff Galea is the founder of Planeolo, a creative agency owner who has been working in the creative industry for more than 15 years. Over the past ten years, he has been involved mainly in creative operations and project management. He couldn’t find a product that gathers all the features creatives need when managing a project, so he decided to do something about it. What was the process of creating Planeolo? Which problems were meant to be solved? Keep reading to find out the answers to these questions and more in this interview.
When did you start thinking of creating Planeolo?
The idea of coming up with a solution came when we realized that we were over-servicing and going over budget on most of the projects. This was not because we were managing or scoping projects incorrectly but because of the rounds of revisions that clients were asking for. So first, we wanted to find a way to keep track of these revision rounds, and we found it. This was a reviewing platform that allows you to track what you’ve presented so far; however, this brought another challenge: keeping track of what you have executed versus what you have agreed upon.
Then, we realized that keeping track was not enough. A project manager needs to communicate with the client from an early stage of the project and constantly remind them in which stage the project is, and how many rounds of revisions are left. So that got me thinking, how can we centralize and streamline this process? For that reason, we created Planeolo. To centralize client communication, automate and reduce repetitive tasks while keeping track of all client interactions.
In the beginning, what was Planeolo’s mission?
When we first started conceptualizing Planeolo, we had two missions. The first one was stopping the losses and improving our clients and team satisfaction. And the second one streamlining the project management process and increasing the overall efficiency. We have seen project managers trying to keep track of everything, jumping from one tool to another to bridge what is happening with the internal team and clients. And that was something that needed to be fixed.
And what’s the mission of Planeolo now?
Planeolo is being used by a few beta users who have been giving us very useful feedback that also shaped our long-term mission: First, to help streamline the communication between the agency and the client and to have that communication transparent as much as possible. The second is to provide in-depth analytics on client interactions during projects. Agencies or businesses must capture and analyze data on how their team manages their clients or what’s happening during the production on the client side. We have not found a tool yet that allows project and account managers to examine what happens on the client-side. And the third one is offering a better customer experience by providing clients with their own client portal where they can view a simplified version of the production process and access all their deliverables.
Which issues of the creative business is Planeolo helping to solve?
If you have to go through multiple email threads for a particular project, then Planeolo is a tool for you. If you are a project manager that manages multiple clients or multiple projects, and you feel that everything is all over the place, it means you need to streamline and centralize your processes.
The second is having a detailed events timeline. Clients may give you approvals on WhatsApp, but you don’t have it on email. If you lose that conversation, what can you do? What about if you want to assign the project to another project manager?. Planeolo solves this issue by keeping track of all client interactions available in one place.
Who did you have in mind when creating Planeolo?
Planeolo was created for those agencies and production studios with well-defined SOPs and workflows, and their projects typically follow the same production processes. For example, video production studios, web development agencies, and graphic design studios. We created Planeolo with project managers, producers, and service delivery managers in mind. They are the people that gave us ideas and feedback from day one, and we will keep on consulting them for production improvement and new feature development.
How does Planeolo help creatives save time during projects?
When dealing with clients, there are many repetitive tasks that, funnily enough, waste time. For example: sharing a preview with clients, updating them on where the project stands, follow-ups, etc. And project managers usually face a lot of unresponsive clients, right? so they tend to deal with overdue feedback constantly. Typically a PM goes to their email, searches for the contact or project threads, writes an email, sends it, and waits for the response. With Planeolo, projects with overdue feedback are highlighted, and a reminder can be sent with just two clicks, as shown in this video.
What’s the most exciting part of creating Planeolo?
That we created something that we, as a creative production agency, are using and that it is doing the job way better than we imagined initially. We designed a tool that fits our workflow and addresses all the aspects of how we operate as an agency. Now, we are helping other agencies improve their production efficiency. Like most agencies, we follow similar workflows, and Planeolo can be fully customizable to every agency’s SOPs.
How can agencies and creatives start using Planeolo?
Getting started with Planeolo is very easy. The first step is to try it for free and see if this truly works with your existing workflows. This early access will allow businesses to explore its features and benefits firsthand and experience how you can save time and money and improve client experience with our platform. Just visit our website and click on the “Try it for free” button to create an account.
To learn more about Planeolo’s features and benefits, visit www.planeolo.com