Real quick. The moment somebody agrees to work with you is the highest they'll ever feel about your business. And then what usually happens? Silence. Three days of nothing while you get to the paperwork. That's the exact window where the doubt creeps in, where their brother-in-law says "you should've gotten another quote," where a competitor's follow-up lands.
You didn't lose them. But you gave back every bit of momentum you spent weeks building.
The fix isn't complicated and it isn't software. It's knowing exactly what happens in the first 48 hours, in the same order, every single time, so nothing depends on you remembering. Same reason a checklist beats a good memory. It's not about being smart, it's about not having to be.
What you need
- Claude
- Somewhere to keep a checklist. A note, a doc, a printed sheet on a clipboard. Genuinely doesn't matter.
- 30 minutes
Setup
- Run the first prompt. It'll interview you about how a new customer actually starts with you today, mess and all.
- Run the second prompt to get the checklist itself.
- Run the third prompt to get the welcome message that goes out inside an hour of them saying yes. That single message does more than the rest of the list combined.
- Print the checklist or pin the note. New customer signs, you open the list, you work down it.
- Run it on the next three customers exactly as written before you change anything. You'll find the two steps that don't fit your world, and then you fix those.
The prompts
The interview:
I run a [YOUR BUSINESS TYPE] in [YOUR CITY]. My customers are
[WHO THEY ARE]. A typical job or engagement is [WHAT IT IS and ROUGHLY
HOW LONG IT LASTS].
I want to build a proper onboarding checklist for what happens the
moment somebody says yes. Right now it's whatever I remember to do.
Interview me first. Ask ONE question at a time and wait for my answer.
Find out what I collect from them, what I send them, what I schedule,
what they need to do before we start, what usually goes wrong in the
first week, and what people most often complain about or get confused
by early on.
Keep asking until you understand my process well enough to write it
down for somebody else to run. Then tell me you're done.Build the checklist:
Now build me the onboarding checklist.
Break it into these blocks:
- WITHIN 1 HOUR of them saying yes
- WITHIN 24 HOURS
- BEFORE WORK STARTS
- FIRST DAY OF WORK
- AFTER IT'S DONE
For each item:
- One line, starts with a verb, so it's obvious what the action is
- Mark who does it if it's not me
- Mark anything that has to happen before something else can
At the bottom add a short section called WHAT USUALLY GOES WRONG, based
on what I told you, and one line for how to prevent each one.
Keep the whole thing under one page. If it's longer than one page
nobody will use it, so cut the stuff that doesn't matter.Write the welcome message:
Same business. Write the message that goes out within an hour of
someone saying yes. Email, under 200 words.
It has to do exactly four things:
1. Confirm it's happening, in the first sentence
2. Tell them the next 3 things that will happen and roughly when
3. Tell them the one or two things I need FROM them, and by when
4. Give them one name and one number for anything they need
Rules:
- No "welcome aboard." No "we're thrilled to have you."
- No company boilerplate, no history of the business, no mission
- Written like a person who's already working on it
- Match my voice: [DESCRIBE HOW YOU TALK OR PASTE A REAL MESSAGE]What to check before you trust it
Run it on three real customers before you consider it finished. A checklist built in a chat window and a checklist that survives contact with an actual customer are two different documents.
Check every timing promise against what you can really do. If the checklist says "schedule within 24 hours" and you're booked three weeks out, change the checklist to match reality. A list you break constantly is a list you'll stop opening.
Make sure anything legal or financial on there is your actual paperwork. Contracts, deposits, disclosures, whatever your world requires. The checklist reminds you to send the thing, it does not write the thing.
If more than one person runs this, watch them do it once. You'll immediately see the two steps you wrote clearly in your head and vaguely on paper.
Delete steps aggressively. Every item that doesn't earn its spot makes the whole list less likely to get used.
— Jordan