People & HR

How to offboard a departing employee as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

When a consultant leaves your 12-person firm, the offboarding falls on you — between client calls and proposal rewrites. Their project notes live in a Notion page nobody else can find. Their email threads contain half-finished client commitments. Their Harvest timers are running on three active engagements. Their Google Drive folders have deliverables the next consultant needs by Monday. There's no HR department, no IT ticket queue, no offboarding checklist — just you, a spreadsheet you made two years ago, and a calendar full of other things. Miss a step and a client finds out their account manager is gone when they email someone who no longer exists.

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People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated offboarding checklist that fires the moment you mark someone as departing — covering email handoff, active project documentation, access revocation reminders, and final timesheet reconciliation

A knowledge capture workflow that pulls the departing consultant's open threads, active client notes, and project context into a searchable team wiki before their last day

A task queue for yourself and the successor consultant so nothing falls through: pending invoices, client introductions, retainer renewals, and in-flight deliverables all tracked with due dates and owners

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Email Agent Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so the Email Agent can surface open client threads and draft handoff messages. Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule so Knowledge Management can pull existing project pages into the departing consultant's handoff doc. Harvest and Google Drive are connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when building the task list or checking open project assignments. Calendly is connected from Starch's integration catalog so the successor's booking link can be queued as a task to share with inherited clients.

Prompts to copy

When I mark a team member as departing in our system, create an offboarding knowledge capture page in our wiki. Pull their active project names from Notion, list their open email threads from Gmail, and generate a handoff doc template with sections for each client engagement, pending deliverables, and key contacts.

Monitor the departing consultant's Gmail for any client replies that come in during their notice period. Flag anything that needs a response within 24 hours, draft a handoff reply introducing the successor consultant, and remind me if I haven't approved a response by end of day.

Create an offboarding task list for [consultant name]'s departure on [date]. Include: notify each active client by email, reassign Harvest projects to [successor], archive their Notion pages into the team wiki, cancel their software seats, reconcile their final timesheet, and confirm final invoice to clients for their hours. Set due dates working backward from their last day.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail and Notion as scheduled-sync sources in Starch — this gives the agent access to the departing consultant's active email threads and all project documentation without you having to hunt anything down manually.

2 Connect Harvest from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query live which projects are assigned to the departing employee, what hours are unbilled, and which engagements need immediate reassignment.

3 Open the Knowledge Management app and type: 'Create a handoff wiki page for [name]'s departure. Pull their Notion project pages, list their active clients, and generate a template with sections for pending deliverables, key client contacts, and open commitments.' Review and fill in anything the agent flags as missing.

4 Open the Email Agent and set it to monitor the departing consultant's Gmail during the notice period. Configure it to draft handoff replies — introducing the successor and reassuring clients — for any thread that gets a new reply. You approve before anything sends.

5 Use the Task Manager to generate the full offboarding checklist. Prompt: 'Build an offboarding task list for [name] leaving on [date] with P1 tasks for anything client-facing and P2 tasks for internal items like software access and final timesheets. Assign due dates working backward from their last day.'

6 Walk through the client notification tasks first. For each active engagement, the Email Agent drafts a short, specific note to the client introducing the successor and confirming no work is disrupted. You edit and send; the task updates to complete.

7 Reconcile the departing consultant's Harvest timers. Ask Starch: 'Show me all open time entries for [name] across active projects. Which are unbilled? Which projects have hours logged this week that haven't been invoiced yet?' Use this to queue a final invoice review task.

8 Archive the departing consultant's Notion pages into the team Knowledge Management wiki. Starch syncs Notion on a schedule, so you can prompt: 'Organize [name]'s Notion pages by client engagement and add them to the team wiki under an Archived Staff section, flagging any pages with content that looks like active work-in-progress.'

9 Review the access revocation task list. Starch can automate checks through browser automation for any SaaS tool your firm uses that doesn't have a direct catalog connection — prompt: 'Open [tool URL] in my browser and check whether [name]'s account is still active.'

10 Hand off calendar ownership. Starch connects to Google Calendar on a scheduled sync — prompt: 'List all recurring meetings [name] owns. Create a task for each one: either cancel it, transfer ownership to [successor], or flag it for my review if I'm not sure.'

11 Do a final thread sweep three days after departure. Prompt the Email Agent: 'Check [departing consultant's Gmail] for any new client messages in the last 72 hours that I haven't responded to. Draft replies from [successor]'s perspective for any that are still open.'

12 Mark the offboarding complete in the Task Manager and note the date. Keep the handoff wiki page live — the next time a client asks about historical context on their engagement, the successor has a searchable record instead of going back to you.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Sarah Chen Departure — March 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Active client engagements requiring handoff	4
Unbilled Harvest hours at departure	31.5
Open Gmail threads with client replies	9
Notion project pages archived to wiki	14
Tasks completed before final day	22

Sarah managed four client accounts — a regional law firm on a monthly retainer, two project-based engagements mid-delivery, and a new client three weeks into scoping. When she gave two weeks' notice, Starch pulled her Gmail threads and surfaced nine open client conversations, two of which had replies she hadn't answered yet. The Email Agent drafted handoff messages for each — introducing Marcus, her successor, with a note that confirmed no deliverables would slip. You approved and sent all nine in about 20 minutes. Starch queried Harvest live and found 31.5 hours unbilled across two projects; the Task Manager flagged these as P1 with a due date two days before her last day so you could invoice before she was gone. Her 14 Notion project pages — meeting notes, scoping docs, client briefs — were organized into the team wiki under each client's name. When the law firm's managing partner emailed Marcus three days after Sarah left asking about a deliverable from January, Marcus found the answer in the wiki in under two minutes without calling you.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days from departure notice to completed handoff documentation

Unbilled hours recovered before consultant's final day

Client-facing threads responded to within 24 hours of handoff

Retainer clients retained through a consultant departure (vs. churned)

Time spent by founder on offboarding coordination (target: under 3 hours total)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Notion + manual checklist

Notion holds the docs, but someone still has to manually pull every thread, write every task, and chase every access revocation — that someone is you.

Gusto or Rippling offboarding flow

Good for payroll and benefits termination, but they don't touch client email handoffs, project documentation, or billable hour reconciliation — the parts that actually put client relationships at risk.

Kantata / Deltek / Projector PSA

Built for 200-person firms with a dedicated ops team; implementation takes a quarter, and offboarding is one module among fifty you'd need to configure before it's useful.

ClickUp or Asana task template

A good checklist tool, but it has no awareness of your actual Gmail threads, Notion pages, or Harvest projects — you still populate every task manually from memory.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, email agent, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually read the departing consultant's Gmail, or does it just work on my inbox?

Starch syncs Gmail on a schedule — it reads the connected Gmail account. If you want to monitor a departing consultant's inbox, you'd need to connect their Gmail account to Starch directly (usually done with their credentials before departure or via a shared Google Workspace inbox). One honest note: Gmail's OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector's name rather than Starch — that's on the roadmap to fix. It works fine; it just looks a little technical during setup.

What if we use Harvest for time tracking but it's not one of Starch's synced providers?

Harvest is available through Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your app runs, so it can pull open timers, unbilled hours, and project assignments on demand. It's not a scheduled sync like Gmail or Notion, but for offboarding tasks where you're doing a one-time audit, live query is exactly what you need.

We use Google Drive for client deliverables. Can Starch see what files the departing consultant owns?

Google Drive is available through Starch's integration catalog and can be queried live. You can prompt Starch to list files owned by a specific person or shared with specific clients. For automating the actual transfer of Drive file ownership, Starch can walk through that via browser automation if the admin console doesn't have a direct API connection — no API needed on the target side.

Is this secure enough for client data? We're a professional services firm with confidentiality obligations.

Honest answer: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If your client contracts require you to use only SOC 2-certified tools for handling client communications, that's a real constraint worth checking before you connect Gmail or project docs. For most small consultancies, Starch's data handling is more disciplined than the duct-tape stack it's replacing — but you should evaluate it against your specific obligations.

Can Starch send the client handoff emails automatically, or do I have to approve each one?

You approve before anything sends. The Email Agent drafts replies — it does not send autonomously unless you configure it that way. Given that these are client-facing messages during a sensitive transition, the default is draft-and-review. You can adjust that if you want more automation, but for offboarding, most founders want to see the message before it goes.

We don't have a formal HR system — just a spreadsheet. Does that matter?

No. Starch doesn't require a formal HR system to run an offboarding workflow. You describe the workflow in natural language — 'when someone is departing, do X, Y, Z' — and Starch builds the task list, triggers the email drafts, and pulls documentation from whatever tools you actually use (Gmail, Notion, Harvest, Google Drive). The spreadsheet can stay. Starch just makes it stop being the system of record.