Callan Consulting | Monday.com Integration

Our Client:
San Francisco Bay Area‐based Callan Consulting has provided executive‐level marketing consulting
services to technology companies for more than two decades. The team has years of technology
marketing expertise and has delivered hundreds of strategic marketing projects for their clients.
With a strong focus on corporate social responsibility, the team also invests time into projects with
positive social impacts, largely in Sub‐Saharan Africa.

The Challenge:
Since founding the business in 2000, owner Ed Callan was still managing many of the firms' projects
on a daily basis when he contacted us. As the business was growing quickly, he was struggling to
manage multiple ongoing projects, and he needed to find better back‐office methods to track this
work. The team was relying heavily on spreadsheets, which led to confusion, cutting it close on
deadlines, and limited team cohesiveness and collaboration opportunities.

Ed needed to find a way to step out of this role to focus more of his time instead on strategic
business development activities. This was especially important because the firm saw a significant
growth in the number of clients it served and needed to take a longer‐term view to support its
resource planning and client management.

Our Solution:
Callan Consulting turned to us to streamline its back‐end operations and create a scalable project
management foundation to support the business. We recognized that this would require a
partnership approach with our CEO, Ayanna, working alongside Ed to interview the senior consulting
team. Discussions focused on the team's current pain points, requirements, and goals.

Coordination, collaboration, and knowledge sharing were identified as key issues. Once we
understood what the team needed, we created a Monday.com account for the team with Slack
integration and prepared to set up a file system management structure within Microsoft Office. The
initial setup and optimization of these tools, workflows, and automations took us three weeks.

The Results:
We delivered a complete back‐end project tracking and management system in less than a month
that ensured that the firm had clearly defined workflows and a tailored set of productivity tools. We
embedded automation to make overall project management more effective while encouraging
cross‐collaboration within the business to enable staff to deliver the best value results for clients.

As a result, Ed no longer felt under pressure to manage projects in a hands‐on way, freeing him up to
focus on business development. He was also reassured that he could confidently take on more
projects and manage these quickly and effectively, keeping up with client demand and new
opportunities using the latest knowledge infrastructure embedded within the firm's operating
model.

"Ayanna is not only organized, focused, and disciplined, but she is truly a joy to work with. Her
project management experience and willingness to jump in and get the job done are truly a winning
combination. She would be an asset to any team."

This work has provided the foundation for a long‐term relationship, with Optimize Management
Group now providing ongoing project management support.