Illustrative scenario: a Moncton firm standardizing how clients start
A Moncton firm growing by referral onboards each client slightly differently, because each partner does it their own way. New Brunswick is Canada's only officially bilingual province, so client-facing materials often need to exist in both languages — which makes an improvised onboarding twice as expensive to improvise.
The firm in this scenario
An archetype, not a client. The figures below describe the shape of the practice being modelled — they are inputs to the scenario, never results.
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Archetype | Bilingual SMB firm standardizing onboarding |
| Location | Moncton, New Brunswick |
| Firm size | Four staff |
| Client profile | Small-business clients arriving steadily by referral |
- Client CRM
- Engagement letters
- Services to projects
- Branded email
The problem
Intake details arrive by phone and live in whoever took the call. The fiscal year-end nobody wrote down becomes a question six months later, at the worst moment.
Some clients start receiving work before an engagement letter exists, which produces the worst conversation in practice: pricing work that has already been delivered.
The workflow, step by step
- 1
Take intake into the record, not a notebook
Contacts, officers, fiscal year-end and program accounts are captured on the client record at first contact, in the fields a filing will later need.
Client CRM
- 2
Gate the work on a signed letter
The engagement letter is generated and e-signed before the first project opens. The gate is the point — it is what makes the standard hold.
Engagement letters
- 3
Assign services, which creates the work
Assigning the client's services generates the first projects and their cadences, so nobody has to build the schedule by hand.
Services catalogue
- 4
Run a branded welcome cadence
Scheduled emails on the firm's own branding replace the ad-hoc first-month messages, in the language the client works in.
Branded email
What this changes
Firms that gate work-opening on a signed letter typically eliminate the awkwardest client conversation there is. The standard holds because it is enforced by the sequence rather than by whoever is running the file.
About this scenario
Related reading
Where this applies
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