How Teamwork Spaces became collaboration HQ for Aidan Taylor Marketing

Aidan Taylor Marketing is a full-service marketing agency for small businesses, based in Phoenix, Arizona. With 34 team members and a diverse portfolio of services including lead generation, web design and customer reviews management, the agency has a high ratio of projects to team members. It’s good work has been rewarded with consistent 5-star Google reviews and an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

A project management platform fit for experimentation Experiments have been the key to success for John-Scott Dixon, the founder and CEO of Aidan Taylor Marketing.

John-Scott earned his spurs in the 1990s, when he spent his working days running multivariate tests for a pair of blue-chip companies: the telecoms provider Sprint Corporation, and the IT equipment seller Insight Enterprises.

“The volumes both companies worked with meant you could run all these different tests and learn so fast,” says John-Scott.

“You would run a test, and within an hour you could go “Wow. That didn’t work. Let’s try this instead.” We did that all day long, all the time.”

Over the course of a decade, this test-and-learn approach helped grow the clients’ websites from humble beginnings to turnovers of a little over a billion dollars each.

After enjoying great success in the corporate world, John-Scott decided to test his approach on an entirely different set of clients: small and medium businesses, from musical equipment brands to jewellers.

“I just thought it would be so much fun to try this out on all sorts of different companies, and that’s what we’ve done for the last 17 years,” says John-Scott.

Aidan Taylor Marketing launched with a remit for experimentation, but the company didn’t find the right project management provider to match this orientation for some time.

According to John-Scott, the agency quickly outgrew the Basecamp project management platform, and decided that Microsoft Project’s focus on allocations and charts was “too intense”. It wasn’t till 2012, when Aidan Taylor Marketing started using Teamwork, that the agency discovered a dependable project management solution that could become a testbed for new ways of collaborating.

Teamwork Spaces has become a self-contained, documented space of the client relationship The latest Teamwork product Aidan Taylor Marketing has explored is Teamwork Spaces, which provides digital workspaces where users can collaborate on content, both internally and with their clients. After adopting Teamwork Spaces, John-Scott realized he could use Spaces to create a ‘living agenda’ – a live web document used to organize collaboration – for each client.

“With our client agendas, we start with analytics, and we walk the client through three major dashboards. We go through awareness, engagement and conversion, and that’s the beginning of our fortnightly progress calls,” says John-Scott.

Spaces proved to be the ideal platform for bringing together these crucial dashboards, and the product began to grow central to Aidan Taylor Marketing’s collaboration with clients. As John-Scott puts it,

We have all of the scope of work that’s occurred, and in the same place we have the agenda, so it’s a self-contained, documented space of the client relationship. Everyone in the same headSpace, from onboarding to billing An inquisitive agency like Aidan Taylor Marketing was never likely to stop short at using Teamwork Spaces in its most basic form. In fact, John-Scott and his team have aimed to experiment with the full scope of the product’s functionality.

One of the agency’s innovations with Spaces has been to archive screen-captured client meetings within each Space.

Every time the team has a Zoom meeting with a client, they capture the call for future reference. The agency is now filing these recordings in a folder called ‘Meetings’ within each client’s Space. The recordings are accompanied with the meeting date, and a copy of the living agenda as it was at that time.

According to John-Scott, this clever use of Spaces has helped keep team members and clients up-to-speed on the status and history of each working relationship.

It is also integral for when John Scott or his clients onboard new members to their team.

“They may have to spend as long as a day watching a bunch of video,” says John-Scott, “but they’ll know all the voices, they’ll know all the issues, and they might even hear things that we forgot about, so they can say, “Hey, this seemed like a really good idea – what ever happened with that?”

The agency also uses Spaces as an archive of documents which evidence its claims of billable time and work delivered.

What sometimes happens with marketing agencies, is that clients pay for all this work, and then by the end of the year they might not even remember what the agency did for them. “It’s really important to have a place where you can walk the client through and say, “Look, we’ve done stuff. We’ve done analytics work for you, we’ve done things with personas and customer journeys – here are the interviewees,” or whatever else applies to the client.”

How Teamwork Spaces works with Teamwork When we created Teamwork Spaces, we knew the product would live or die by its compatibility with Teamwork project management. The two are built to work together.

Documents created in Teamwork Spaces can be linked to specific projects within Teamwork project management. Decisions and plans made in Spaces can be turned directly into Teamwork project tasks. And the integration works the other way too, as live project information can be accessed directly from a linked Space.

We’ve worked hard to achieve an integration this smooth – and we’re delighted to say Aidan Taylor Marketing has taken notice.

I think you’ve done a great job with Spaces in terms of the integration into project management, because those things are well connected.

Teamwork Spaces has helped John-Scott, his clients and his team stay up-to-speed on their collaborations, from onboarding to billing, while integrating effectively with their Teamwork projects. Based on what we know of Aidan Taylor Marketing, these gains will be just the first small steps in this stellar agency’s Spaces exploration.