Onboarding a Customer
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Open Teamwork, navigate to a customer project, and load the pre-onboarding checklist template into a task list. Review all 13 tasks so you know exactly what is expected before a kickoff call. Then find the welcome email template inside the checklist, read through the body and the guidance notes at the top, and identify the fields you would need to customize for a new client. If you have already been assigned a customer, send the welcome email within 24 hours of the signed agreement.
How a New Customer Lands on Your Desk
You will usually get a heads up from one of the partners — often Cam — before the deal closes. LeanScale keeps a close eye on the pipeline, so you will have time to mentally prepare before a new client officially arrives. Once the agreement is signed, you will hear something like "great news, we've got a new client on the dotted line."
Assignment is based on architect capacity: how many hours the engagement includes and whether you have enough bandwidth with your engineering counterparts to deliver a high-quality experience. The goal is making sure you can actually service the client well, not just fill a slot.
The Handoff Document
This is where the real preparation starts. The partner team pulls in all of the Firefly transcripts from the sales calls, the results of the diagnostic, any SOWs, and the signed order form. All of that gets pushed into VS Code and GitHub to produce a handoff document for you.
Cam showed a real example — a handoff doc for Ubik, a customer that started in February. It contained contract details, monthly hours, key insights from the sales process, stakeholder profiles, next steps for the architect, an executive map, the intake form from the diagnostic, tech stack details, customer goals, and full transcript overviews.
The handoff doc gives you a first-row seat to everything that was discussed before you entered the picture. After reviewing it, sit down with the partner who sold the deal. They can fill in gaps, answer questions, and provide additional context that may not have landed in the document. This is the same principle LeanScale teaches its customers — sales-to-customer-success handoffs matter. At LeanScale, it is a sales-to-architect handoff, and the standard is that you feel confident and informed before you touch anything.
Setting Up Teamwork
Once the deal is signed, you need to create the client's project in Teamwork. Cam walked through this live with a customer called Attuned Intelligence.
Start by adding the client as a new company. Then create a project — this first one will be their ad hoc and managed services project, which runs as an evergreen project for the life of the engagement. Name it with the client name in parentheses so it is easy to search. Set the budget type to time and materials, switch from financial to time, and enter their monthly hours.
If the customer starts mid-month, prorate the hours for that first budget period. When the next full month begins, create a new budget with the full monthly commitment. Set the budget to repeat monthly.
One thing that is easy to miss: add the entire LeanScale team to the project. Even if someone is not actively working with the customer, they need to be in the project to see workload views. If an engineer is working cross-pod or floating across accounts, they will not appear in the planning view unless they are part of the project.
The Pre-Onboarding Checklist
Inside Teamwork, go to the task list for the new project and add the pre-onboarding checklist template. It loads in with 13 tasks that cover everything you and the partner team need to execute before the kickoff call.
The checklist includes setting up a Google Shared Drive for the customer, creating Slack channels for both internal and external communication, scheduling the kickoff meeting, sending the welcome email, assigning engineering tasks like running systems through CLAWD, conducting a deeper systems audit if needed, and potentially creating a data dictionary before day one. That last one is a real advantage — having AI generate a data dictionary before the engagement even starts means you are already delivering value.
There are also items for the partner team, like building Teamwork automations. One automation pings the internal Slack channel when a task moves to LeanScale Review. Another pings the customer channel when something moves to Delivered — what Cam calls lighting up the scoreboard. That is the customer-facing signal that work is getting pushed across the finish line.
The Welcome Email
The biggest expectation is that the welcome email goes out to the client within 24 hours of the signed agreement. No long delays between signature and first contact.
The template lives inside the pre-onboarding checklist in Teamwork. It has a standard body with bold placeholders you swap out — your name, the client's information, and a few key items. The email covers scheduling the kickoff call if it has not already been set up during sales, sharing the agenda for the kickoff meeting, listing the initial projects from the engagement roadmap, and requesting admin access to the customer's go-to-market systems through your group email handle.
That admin access request is critical. Even if you ran a diagnostic, the customer may have cut off CRM access or you likely do not have access to connected systems. Getting permissions before day one means you waste no time once the engagement starts.
One more thing Cam highlighted: film a quick Loom video to include with the welcome email. Walk through the kickoff deck, introduce yourself, and talk about what the kickoff call will cover. This is a white-glove touch that gives the customer a personal first impression before you even meet on a live call. Cam referenced a strong example from a former architect and recommended putting this together within that same 24-hour window.
Google Shared Drive Setup
Creating the shared drive is straightforward. Go to your Shared Drives panel in Google Drive, right-click, create a new shared drive, and name it with the client name first, LeanScale second. Then add all relevant engineers, the partner team, and any other team members involved in the engagement. As the kickoff approaches, you will start inviting the customer's stakeholders as well.
Each checklist task has built-in guidance when you open it, so you can self-serve through the remaining items. All of this preparation feeds into one goal: having an outstanding kickoff call and making the best possible first impression.