The Low Down

Catarina Mello is committed to bringing her massive audience the most insightful travel advice. All the while helping aspiring influencers achieve their dreams of doing what they love for a living. With an extensive background in digital marketing, her business has since taken off. And caught the attention of various publications like Bloomberg and Business Insider; with no signs of slowing down. Due to her exponentially expanding business and a severe lack of internal operations systems, Catarina invested in SystemsUp. Together, we built systems that allow her to run her business and foster team collaboration from anywhere in the world.

Our goal in building out ClickUp for Catarina was to systemize her internal business management operations. This included a highlighted focus on two major pain points: a streamlined backend and organization that allowed her team to easily collaborate. We focused on building a backend that allowed each team member to confidently manage their individual responsibilities, whether Catarina was there or not, and organized their team resources in a centralized hub. This not only allowed Catarina to easily run her business on the go without worrying if things would break down without her, but she now has the time to focus on needle-moving projects that continue to expand her reach.

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About Catarina Mello

Catarina Mello (@professionaltraveler) is an award-winning luxury travel content creator, photographer, entrepreneur, and online educator.

Since escaping the office and swapping her digital marketing career at Google for a life as a travel creator – 55 countries and counting! -, Catarina has grown her audience to over 800K followers across platforms and has worked with major hospitality and lifestyle brands. Her trajectory has caught the attention of the media, and she has been profiled by publications such as Business Insider and Bloomberg.

Catarina turned her passions into a career, and now she’s on a mission to help others do the same with over 1,700 students enrolled in her online course for aspiring content creators: the Influencer Mastercourse.

Catarina lives in San Francisco, CA, but is originally from Brazil. When she’s not traveling, she spends time at home with her husband and their many indoor plants.

Centralized Team Collaboration

Prior to working with us, Catarina and her team did not have the operations in place to allow them to smoothly and effectively work together. They found themselves caught in an endless cycle of putting out fires and hunting down lost information.

Each team member lacked the resources they needed to be able to complete their responsibilities without heavily relying on Catarina or other senior team members. This led to bottlenecked projects and stalled deadlines. Catarina recognized this moment when she realized, “I was getting less done with more people.”

The lack of operations and a centralized hub where the team could share information and collaborate meant they were constantly asking each other for status updates, doing repeat work, and hunting down the same information on an almost daily basis. This halted the ability of Catarina’s business to expand. Catarina describes this experience as such, “I was so overwhelmed answering questions for the whole team the whole day that I wasn’t getting anything done.”

With ClickUp, we were able to systemize and organize all the backend operations of her business. This organization makes sure her team has the resources they need to complete their tasks without Catarina’s constant supervision.

Another big piece of this systemization was creating a centralized hub where the team could store information, collaborate, and communicate about current projects. With everything now consolidated in one place, Catarina’s team drastically cut down on the time they spend searching for information and catching each other up on projects. Now, they complete projects more efficiently and effectively.

These updates have given Catarina’s team the power to be proactive instead of reactive. They allow them to stay on top of their responsibilities. While also helping them to complete their tasks efficiently and prevent details from falling through the cracks.

Streamlined Content Creation Management

Before their ClickUp setup, Catarina’s team did not have any systemization of processes surrounding their content creation workflow. Her team had to ‘recreate the wheel’ each time they created content. Communication about edits was scattered between a variety of chats, texts, and threads. Her team struggled with lost deadlines, misplaced images, and missed updates.

Catarina explained their situation like this, “Lots of recurring tasks and processes were being forgotten or we were doing them late and or were stressed about it because we didn’t have reminders and we didn’t have automations to help us stop doing everything manually.”

Using ClickUp, we were able to completely remodel and revitalize her content creation workflow. We pulled all elements of the content creation process into a custom Clickup space that was solely dedicated to content creation management.

Catarina’s team now has one place where they are able to plan, edit, and communicate about their outgoing content. On top of this consolidation, we also introduced reminders and automations to offload unnecessary manual tasks from their plate.

In addition, we built a personalized travel calendar so Catartina’s team can easily see and plan around her travel dates. This ensures tasks are completed on time and that Catarina reviews any projects necessary before she is out of office.

The Results

Since working with us, Catarina and her team have been able to streamline their backend operations, centralize their team communication and collaboration, and systemize their content creation process. Overall, these updates have allowed her team to seamlessly and collaboratively work together to effectively accomplish all their projects!

Now, Catarina has peace of mind while traveling knowing that all details of all projects will be completed without her direct oversight! She describes this newfound systemization like this:

“I think, overall, just because collaborating now is so much easier, I love when I am gone for a week and I come back and I see all of the tasks and things that happened without me there because now they can talk to each other and figure out what the status of tasks are and collaborate so much better. And again, find a lot of information that before they were relying on me for. The business can run without me being online or being in the same time zone all of the time. That has helped immensely.”

When asked how specific features of her project have made a difference for her team, Catarina says, “The travel calendar alone was this one simple thing we did that has allowed the team to plan so much better and know what they need in advance before I go on a trip…It has helped the team plan around so much like if they need specific approval or if they need to meet with me before I go or to make sure they have everything they need for the next 2 weeks if I’m gonna be gone.”

Because of Catarina’s busy travel schedule, we built a clear and simple way to communicate availability with her team. Using this travel calendar, her team is can see deadlines, availability, flights, out-of-office dates, and even Catarina’s Wi-Fi availability in one easy glance! With ClickUp, they can easily be proactive about the way they plan and accomplish projects.

Building off of that, one of our goals was to create a centralized workspace overview for Catarina. This workspace allows her to easily get an overview of all current projects and content statuses while on the go. With this in mind, we created the content management system and centralized team hub in a way that allows Catarina to easily keep a pulse on the internal workings of her business without sifting through irrelevant details.

Of her experience working with SystemsUp, Catarina says, “I can’t express how much this has helped the business and helped to free up my time so I can focus things…It has paid for itself multiple times over for sure!”

Overall, Catarina and her team now have the capacity to expand their business. Including keeping up with their ever-growing audience and building their team. This is thanks to their foundation of solid internal management systems that are ready to grow right along with them.

Are You Ready To Streamline Your Systems? If you’re ready to see these kinds of results, apply for our ClickUp Setup service today!

Apply For Our ClickUp Setup Service Today!