Client Onboarding for Advisory Firms: The First Two Weeks
Most engagements that finish late were already late by the end of week two, and nobody noticed because nothing had visibly gone wrong.
Mobilisation is the phase with the least visible output and the greatest leverage. Nothing is delivered, so nothing appears to be at risk. Meanwhile the decisions that determine whether the engagement can run at pace are being taken or deferred: who the client contacts are, what access exists, what data will arrive and in what form, and who is allowed to say yes.
The failure is almost always deferral rather than error. Each item is left because it seems minor next to starting the analysis, and the accumulated delay surfaces in week six as a schedule problem with no single cause.
Days one to three: the commercial and legal foundation
- The engagement letter or contract is signed. Starting work on an unsigned letter is common and it removes every protection the letter contains at the moment it is most likely to be needed.
- Acceptance is complete and recorded, including conflicts, independence and any safeguards imposed as a condition.
- The billing arrangement is set up on the client side, including a purchase order if one is required. A purchase order raised in month three delays the first invoice by longer than anyone expects.
- The engagement is created in the firm's systems with its fee model, budget and team, so that every subsequent record attaches to something real rather than being reconciled later.
Days two to five: people and access
Name the counterparts, not the roles. An engagement that lists "finance team" as a dependency has no dependency; it has a hope. Each workstream needs a named client contact with a stated availability, and the sponsor should confirm those names rather than the team assuming them.
Access is where mobilisation most often stalls, because it depends on a client function with no stake in the engagement. Request it on day two, request all of it at once, and state precisely what is needed: which systems, at what permission level, for which named people, and by when. A request that arrives in pieces gets processed in pieces, each with its own queue.
Set up client-side visibility at the same time. If the client is to have a portal, invite the contacts during the first week while the engagement is a novelty, not in month two when it is one more thing to log in to.
Days three to eight: the plan and the request list
The plan agreed at proposal was built on assumptions. Mobilisation is where those assumptions meet the client's calendar, holiday periods, board dates and reporting cycles. Rebaseline once, deliberately, in the first two weeks, and state what changed and why. A plan that is quietly out of date from week one is a plan nobody trusts by week five.
Issue the information request list in full, in one document, with a named owner and a date for each item. Partial lists teach the client that more is coming, which encourages batching on their side, which is the most common source of delay in the whole engagement.
Days five to ten: governance and the first report
Agree the governance schedule explicitly: who is on the steering committee, how often it meets, what the status ladder means, who can approve a change and up to what value, and what happens when the approver is unavailable. Doing this while the relationship is comfortable is far easier than doing it during the first disagreement.
Then issue the first status report in week two, even though there is little to report. Its purpose is to establish the format, the cadence and the expectation that the section headed "needed from you" is answered. A first report issued in week five never establishes that expectation.
The omissions that cost the most
- Nobody confirmed who can accept a deliverable, so the first acceptance takes three weeks to obtain.
- The data was requested without specifying the format, and arrives as a report rather than an extract.
- Client holiday and reporting periods were not mapped, and a milestone lands in the client's year-end close.
- Security or vendor onboarding on the client side was discovered in week three and takes a month.
- The team began work before access existed and burned budget on preparation that had to be redone.
A mobilisation exit check
Treat the end of mobilisation as a gate with conditions rather than a date that passes. The conditions are short: the contract is signed, access is granted and tested by a named person, the request list is issued and acknowledged, the plan is rebaselined and agreed, the governance schedule is agreed, and the first report has gone out.
If any condition is unmet at the end of week two, that is the first status item, and it should be raised while it is still a mobilisation problem rather than after it has become a schedule problem.