By client number four the onboarding lives in three places: a document you wrote for client two, an email thread from client three, and your head. By client six the document is out of date and the thread is unfindable, so each new client gets a slightly different start from the last one.
Sean Donahoe, our founder, said this on a coaching call in September: "When you get a new client, you set up a new project for that client, get it through its onboarding process, then tell it: help me create a duplicatable project. Boom, done."
Inside Murage that is three moves, and the third one, "duplicatable", needs a little translation.
The project
A project is a channel with a written goal, its own files, its own chat and a lead. Make one per client, named after the client. The goal, up to 2,000 characters, is where the onboarding brief goes: what they bought, what you need from them in week one, who signs off on their side, the one thing they said on the discovery call that must not get lost. Every bot in the project follows that goal on every turn, so you write it once.
Put the signed proposal, the questionnaire answers and the kickoff notes in the project's files. Memories captured in the project belong to the project, so the next client's project starts without them.
Then the onboarding runs in the project's chat. "Draft the kickoff email." "Write the first-week checklist from the proposal." "Turn their questionnaire answers into a one-page brief for the team." Each draft waits for you. Sending to the client stops and asks, because the client is someone new to that bot.
The team
The bots that do the onboarding are the part you keep. Build them once, under one team heading: a Sales bot that reads the enquiry and the call notes, Copy for the kickoff email and the brief, Ops for the checklist and the dates, and a Quality Gate that checks nothing promised in the proposal got dropped. Give the team its own instructions (the book icon next to the team's name), the standing brief every bot on it reads: how you talk to clients, what you never promise, how long a kickoff email is allowed to be.
Or start from the library: Win the Client takes a new enquiry through to a reviewed client kickoff pack, which is most of this job already written down.
Duplicatable
In Murage you make a fresh project each time and keep the team and the procedure. The same team joins every new project; you don't need a copy per client.
The procedure is the part Sean means. Once the onboarding has run cleanly twice, type /learn how we onboarded this client and the bot writes the steps down as a skill. Teach a skill is on by default; the skill lands switched off and only goes live after you've read it and pressed Enable. From then on "onboard Harbor Dental, proposal attached" runs the same 11 steps it ran last time, exceptions included, and client five is: New Project, paste the goal with the new details, add the team, drop in the proposal, ask. An afternoon, most of it reading the drafts.
The copy you do make is for other people. Choose + in the sidebar, then Export bots…, pick ZIP package, tick the team with Select team, tick its skill instructions and routines, Preview selection, download. Send that file to the person who's taking over onboarding and they import it on their own machine (+, New Team, Open a file…). It arrives as a separate copy, every bot on Ask, skills off and routines paused until they switch them on. When you improve the team later, export again; on import they see a Package version comparison of what changed.
What never travels is the client's logins. Each person connects their own apps and signs in to their own accounts, up to 5 labeled accounts per app, and credentials are never in the file. Conversations and memory don't travel either, so client four's history can't end up in client five's project.
For a one-person shop with two clients a year, a document is fine. This pays off at the point where you can't remember whether client six got the checklist.
The proposals use case covers the step before this one, from discovery call to proposal, and questionnaire answers handles the security questionnaires some clients send first. The page for agencies has the rest. Download Murage and set up the project for the client you signed most recently. The next one starts from there.