People & HR

How to onboard a new hire as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Hiring your first two or three consultants after years of flying solo is exciting until you realize your onboarding 'process' is you spending a half-day walking someone through Notion, forwarding them seventeen emails, and hoping they find the client file structure on their own. There's no HR department. Paylocity or ADP handles payroll but nobody's wired it to the rest of your stack. The new hire needs access to HubSpot deals, the project tracker, the standard proposal templates in Google Drive, and the billing cadence in Stripe — and right now you're the connective tissue for all of it. A week in, they're still pinging you for passwords, context, and 'where does the timesheet go.'

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People & HRFor Professional Services Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A self-serve onboarding knowledge base that new hires navigate on their own — client context, process docs, tool access checklists — without you being in the room

An automated task list that fires the moment you add a new hire, assigning day-one, week-one, and month-one actions with due dates and owners

A structured email workflow so the new hire's first client introductions, internal Slack announcements, and follow-up check-ins go out on schedule without you drafting each one from scratch

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 Task Manager Email Agent Scheduling

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule to power the knowledge base with existing process docs. HubSpot is connected from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live to pull active client names and deal context for intro emails. Starch syncs your Google Calendar on a schedule so the scheduling app knows your real availability. Starch syncs Gmail on a schedule to give the email agent thread context for drafting introductions. Paylocity or ADP — whichever you use — syncs on a schedule so new-hire records can trigger task creation automatically. Google Drive is reachable from Starch's integration catalog for live-querying proposal templates.

Prompts to copy

Build me an onboarding knowledge base for new consultants. It should have sections for: how we run client engagements, our proposal process, the tools we use (HubSpot, Notion, Google Drive, Slack), billing and timesheet procedures, and a first-week checklist. Pull the existing process docs from Notion and surface them as searchable pages.

Create an onboarding task list template that triggers when I add a new hire. Tasks should include: complete system access checklist (day 1), shadow a client call (day 3), submit first timesheet (day 5), review top three active proposals (week 1), complete first solo deliverable review with me (week 2). Set P1 for day-1 items, P2 for week-1 items.

Draft a new-hire announcement email to the team Slack channel and a separate introduction email from the new consultant to our three active clients. Pull the client names and project context from HubSpot. Make the client emails warm but professional — one paragraph on who they are, one on what they'll be handling.

Set up a 30-minute onboarding check-in meeting type on my booking page. Label it 'Week 1 check-in — [name]' and block it for the new hire's first Friday. Sync with Google Calendar so it doesn't collide with client calls.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Notion (scheduled sync) and Google Drive (live query from Starch's integration catalog) so Starch can read your existing process docs, proposal templates, and client file structure without you manually copying anything over.

2 Tell Starch to build a Knowledge Management app structured around your consulting workflow: client engagement process, proposal assembly, tools and access, billing procedures, and a first-week checklist. It will index your Notion pages and make them searchable from day one.

3 Connect Paylocity or ADP (scheduled sync) so Starch sees when a new employee record is created — this becomes the trigger for the onboarding task chain.

4 Build a Task Manager template with the full onboarding sequence: system access (P1, day 1), shadow client call (P1, day 3), first timesheet (P2, day 5), proposal review (P2, week 1), first deliverable check-in with you (P2, week 2). Tell Starch: 'when a new hire is added in Paylocity, create this task list and assign it to them and to me.'

5 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. Tell the Email Agent: 'draft a client introduction email from [new hire name] to each of our three active clients — pull the client name, project name, and engagement lead from HubSpot deals.'

6 Review and edit the drafted intro emails inside Starch, then send with one click through the Email Agent's Gmail integration.

7 Use the Scheduling app to create a 'Week 1 check-in' meeting type — 30 minutes, blocks on the new hire's first Friday, synced to your Google Calendar so it never double-books a client call.

8 Set up an automated Slack message (via browser automation through your Slack workspace) that announces the new hire to the team channel on their start date, pulling their name, role, and start date from the Paylocity sync.

9 Tell Starch to flag any knowledge base articles that haven't been updated in 90 days so your onboarding docs don't drift out of date as your process evolves.

10 Two weeks after the start date, trigger an automated Email Agent task: 'draft a check-in message to [new hire] asking how onboarding went, whether they found what they needed in the knowledge base, and what was missing.' Review and send.

11 After three onboarding cycles, ask Starch: 'which knowledge base articles did new hires search most in their first two weeks, and which tasks were most often completed late?' Use the output to tighten the template.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Onboarding Maya Chen, Senior Consultant — April 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Notion pages indexed into knowledge base	34
Active HubSpot client deals queried for intro emails	3
Onboarding tasks auto-created on hire record sync	11
Intro emails drafted and sent via Email Agent	3
Hours founder spent directly in the onboarding loop	2

Maya joined on April 7th. The moment her Paylocity record synced overnight, Starch fired the onboarding task list — 11 tasks across her first two weeks, all with P1/P2 priorities and due dates, assigned to both Maya and you. By 9am on day one, the Knowledge Management app had indexed all 34 relevant Notion pages: engagement methodology, proposal templates, the HubSpot deal stage guide, and the timesheet process. Maya found the client file structure herself without pinging you once. The Email Agent queried HubSpot live and drafted three client introduction emails — one to the CFO at Meridian Partners, one to the ops lead at Clearfield Group, one to the founder at Tillside Ventures — each pulling the right project name and your name as engagement lead. You edited two sentences in the Meridian email and sent all three in under ten minutes. The Week 1 check-in booked itself on your Google Calendar for April 11th. Your total direct time in the onboarding loop: about two hours, mostly on the client emails. Previous hire: you spent a full day and a half.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time-to-first-billable-hour: how many days from start date until the new hire logs their first client-facing work

Founder hours spent on onboarding per new hire (target: under 3 hours of direct involvement)

Knowledge base self-service rate: percentage of new-hire questions answered without pinging the founder

Onboarding task completion rate by week-one deadline

Client introduction email send time: hours from start date to first intro email sent to active clients

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Notion + manual task assignment

Notion holds your docs but won't auto-trigger a task list when a hire is added in Paylocity, won't draft client intro emails from HubSpot context, and won't surface stale pages — you're still the orchestration layer.

BambooHR onboarding workflows

BambooHR's onboarding checklists are solid for HR compliance tasks but don't connect to your client-facing stack — HubSpot deal context, Gmail drafts, and Google Calendar availability aren't in scope.

Gusto + Google Docs templates

Gusto handles the payroll and basic onboarding paperwork cleanly, but the knowledge base, client intro emails, and meeting scheduling are still fully manual — you're copying and pasting from three places.

Rippling

Rippling has strong device provisioning and app access automation for teams with IT infrastructure, but at 12 people in a consultancy you're paying for features you won't use and it won't draft client-specific intro emails or search your Notion docs.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, task manager, email agent 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 connect to Paylocity and ADP, or do I have to use one specific payroll tool?

Starch syncs both Paylocity and ADP on a schedule — employee records, pay data, org units. If you're on a different payroll provider that's web-accessible, Starch can automate it through your browser with no API needed. If you use Gusto or Rippling, those are reachable from Starch's integration catalog.

What if my process docs are split between Notion and Google Drive? Will the knowledge base only pull from one?

No — Starch syncs Notion on a schedule and connects Google Drive from its integration catalog to query live. Tell Starch to build the knowledge base pulling from both, and it will index pages from Notion alongside documents from Drive. You can also add Confluence if that's in your stack.

Can Starch automatically grant new hires tool access — like adding them to HubSpot or Notion?

Starch can automate web-based actions through your browser — so if adding a user in HubSpot or Notion is something you do through a browser, Starch can do it. For tools with admin APIs in the integration catalog, the agent can trigger provisioning actions directly. For anything outside that, it creates a task reminding you to do it manually and flags it as P1.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I sometimes need to tell clients what tools have access to their account data.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified. That's worth knowing before you wire in client-sensitive data. For onboarding workflows that stay internal (task lists, knowledge base, your own calendar), this is typically fine. If you're pulling HubSpot deal data that includes client financials, make your own call about what's in scope.

The Task Manager app — is it actually live or is it still being built?

Task Manager is currently in development; you can request beta access. If you need onboarding task tracking right now, Starch can build a custom task-list app against your existing data in Notion or Asana while Task Manager ships. Describe what you need and it builds it.

How do I keep the knowledge base from going stale after six months?

Tell Starch: 'flag any knowledge base article that hasn't been updated in 90 days and send me a weekly digest of stale pages.' It will track edit timestamps from the Notion sync and surface the list automatically. You can also ask Starch to detect when a HubSpot deal stage changes and flag any onboarding docs that reference the old process.