How Shaina Nacion Uses ClickUp's Home to Plan for Success

If you’re a small business owner, you know how easy it is to get bogged down in the details when building or refining your brand.

Too often, designing a unique brand can feel like a checklist rather than an extension and expression of your passion. After all, you have to juggle building a website, maintaining a social media presence, creating marketing collateral, and keeping a consistent look and feel, all while still servicing existing customers and generating new leads!

And while there’s no one better than you to bring your business’ brand identity to life, the actual strategy, design, and execution is often best left to the guidance of professionals.

Enter Shaina Nacion, CEO of Shaina Nacion Design Studio. Shaina understands that a brand is greater than the sum its parts, and that a brand strategy is much more than just a list of items to be checked off.

Shaina’s spent years working to bring confidence, clarity, and authentic branding to small businesses built with purpose.

We had the pleasure of (virtually) sitting down with Shaina and ask her some questions about her studio, its ethos, and how she uses ClickUp to help business owners build sustainable brand strategies and assets.

Tell us about Shaina Nacion Design!

Shaina Nacion Design is a brand and web design studio that works with service-based small businesses.

Our goal is to celebrate passion and purpose by transforming small businesses and empowering other designers. We believe that the more we can help people embrace their identities and affect change, the more we can serve and inspire those around us. Simply put, our passion is helping you share your passion.

As an online business owned by a female, mixed-race, introverted, demisexual CEO, Shaina Nacion Design is all about encouraging others to embrace who they are and to tell their story in an authentic way.

What is your favorite ClickUp feature?

It seems like every time ClickUp adds a new feature, I fall in love all over again! But right now my favorite feature is the ability to time block my days using the new Home section with the integrated calendar.

I use the new Home section daily to time block and stay on track. Although I’ve tried various time blocking methods in the past, this is the only one I’ve found to be most effective for my particular work style.

Every morning, I check for tasks that are due that day and simply drag them onto my calendar. Then, I can rearrange things, delegate, reschedule, or just give myself more allotted time throughout the day! Now, instead of feeling lost or disorganized, I have one place to look to know what I’m prioritizing for the day.

What tools, if any, do you integrate with ClickUp?

I’ve integrated a lot of my Google Workspace tools into ClickUp. The two-way syncing between ClickUp and my Google Calendar is a life-saver. It helps me organize my day so much, since I can have all my ClickUp tasks right alongside my client and internal meetings.

The ClickUp Gmail Integration is another incredibly useful function! It allows me to create workflows and automations tailored to my studio’s processes. We’ve saved so much time building our sales pipeline directly in ClickUp.

Now my assistant can email the client directly from ClickUp depending on what phase of onboarding they’re currently in! No more switching back and forth between proposals, CRM software, project management software, and email.

And even being able to do things like embed Google Sheets, Docs, and Drives into ClickUp makes it so much easier to consolidate all my work in one place. I spend so much less time searching for things.

How do you use ClickUp to push your company forward?

Since last winter, we’re the busiest we’ve ever been. We tripled our revenue and gone from a “team” of one to a team of five.

Previously, we were using Asana to try and stay organized. But when my assistant introduced me to ClickUp last Thanksgiving, I knew it was going to be a game-changer. I set up our entire system that weekend and haven’t looked back since.

Now, we use ClickUp to organize everything in our studio, including client projects to internal operations, team training, and planning content creation. We use Custom Fields to tailor its functionality, and we use ClickUp to design the workflows we need for all areas of our business.

About how many hours a week do you save using ClickUp?

I honestly couldn’t say exactly how much time we save because we don’t always track our time super closely, but if I were to guesstimate, I’d say my team and I save at least 7 hours a week!

What do you do with that time back?

We’ve been able to scale more efficiently and collaborate more effectively.

Rather than being completely booked out at 3 or 4 projects, we can now handle the workload of 10 projects at a time.

How has ClickUp improved your work and life?

The biggest improvement is to my peace of mind as a CEO. I know what our priorities and goals are, what my team is working on, and how close we are to meeting milestones, both for our clients and for scaling the business.

I’m sure ClickUp has saved me a huge amount of time, even if I can’t put a number to it, but even more importantly, using ClickUp allows me to compartmentalize my work and not spend time worrying about whether I’m missing some crucial task that needs to get done.

What advice do you have for others looking to streamline their productivity?

Before you dive into a project management system like ClickUp, make sure you have an outline of all your processes.

When you know what tasks need to happen to keep your business running, the setup process for ClickUp transforms from “another piece of software that I have to learn” to true empowerment. Platforms like ClickUp are tools; you can either use them to your advantage or you can let them overwhelm you.

If you’re having trouble with this, talk to someone who’s accomplished what you’re trying to do. Learn from their years of trial and error so you don’t have to go through that learning curve alone.

Looking to follow along on Shaina’s journey? Check out the latest happenings with Shaina Nacion Design here and sign up for ClickUp today to discover how you can streamline your internal and customer workflows!