Business practice
Onboarding and offboarding.
The first ninety days and the last conversation, designed on purpose instead of improvised by whoever picked up the account.
By day ninety, a new client has already decided what working with your firm is like. The renewal conversation just confirms it.
In most firms, what those ninety days look like depends on who picked up the account. One partner's clients get a structured welcome and a clear plan. Another's get silence between the signature and the first deliverable. Neither of them designed it that way. It grew, one improvisation at a time, and now the client experience varies by luck of assignment.
The exit has the same problem in reverse. Clients rarely announce they are leaving. They go quiet, then they are gone, and the reason leaves with them. We design both ends deliberately: a first ninety days built around visible value on a schedule, and a structured exit that returns a usable reason instead of a guess. This is the work behind one of our own numbers, onboarding time cut in half, and it is where retention is actually won.
The approach
Three words we work by.
Early.
The first visible win is scheduled, not hoped for. A client who sees value in week two stops re-litigating the decision to hire you. A client still waiting at week six has already started comparing you to whoever they talked to before you, and that comparison happens without you in the room.
Same.
The standard holds whoever runs it. We separate the part of onboarding that should be identical every time, which is most of it, from the part that genuinely depends on the client. The identical part gets written down and owned, so the experience stops varying by assignment.
Ended well.
An exit is the most honest feedback your firm will ever get, and most firms let it leave in silence. A designed offboarding closes the work cleanly, protects the relationship and the referral, and returns a reason you can act on instead of a story you tell yourself.
The work
Four workstreams, in sequence.
Current-state map
The onboarding that actually happens, traced across your last several new clients: every step, wait, and handoff between the signature and the first delivered value. The map gets a baseline number, time to first value, that every later claim of improvement is measured against.
Ninety-day design
The future onboarding, built with the people who run it. Milestones the client can see, a first win placed early on purpose, communication at the moments clients go quiet, and a named owner for the whole arc rather than a relay of partial ones.
Offboarding design
A short, structured exit that runs every time a relationship ends, planned or not. It closes obligations cleanly, hands back what belongs to the client, asks the few questions worth asking, and routes the answer to someone who can act on it.
Install and measure
Both designs written into procedures your team drafted in their own words, assigned to named owners, and run against real clients before we leave. The baseline number tells you, in weeks not quarters, whether the new first ninety days is actually faster.
Related reading.
All insights
Retention
Six questions that find churn before it happens
Clients do not announce that they are leaving. They go quiet. The signal is there months earlier if you know where to look, and it usually starts in the first ninety days, in the gap between what the sale promised and what the delivery team was told
Operations
The handoff is where clients decide
The moment a client moves from the person who sold the work to the person who delivers it is the most dangerous moment in the relationship. Everything the client said in the sales process either arrives with them or it does not, and when it does not, the client starts over as a stranger in
Questions
Asked before, answered plainly.
The work you deliver differs by client. The way a client is welcomed, informed, and shown early value mostly does not, and pretending otherwise is how the experience ends up depending on who picked up the account. We standardize the large part that repeats and leave room for the part that genuinely varies. Your best onboarding already proves the standard is possible. It just is not written down yet.
Because the few you lose are the most expensive feedback you will ever receive, and right now it leaves the building unread. A designed exit also protects things a quiet one puts at risk: the referral, the return, and the reputation among the people the departing client talks to. Offboarding is small to build. It only feels optional until the client you did not expect to lose goes quiet.
No. The design comes first and it is process, ownership, and communication, most of which runs on tools you already pay for. If a small piece of software genuinely earns its place, usually a checklist or a scheduled reminder, we configure it. In many engagements nothing is purchased at all.
Time to first value, measured before and after. The current state gets a baseline from your recent clients: how many days from signature to the first thing the client could point at as worth paying for. The redesigned onboarding is judged against that number with real clients, not in a slide. Halving it is a realistic target. We have done exactly that.
The mapping phase draws on records and short interviews, a few scheduled hours across the team in total. The design sessions involve the people who will run the new onboarding, because a process built without them becomes a process worked around. The heaviest lifting, drafting and documentation, is ours.