Small creative studio — portfolio/demo project
Apex Studio — Client Onboarding & Project Initiation System
A client onboarding system designed to take a new client from first steps to project-ready without relying on scattered messages, memory, or manual chasing.
Problem
The beginning of a client relationship contains many small but important steps: sending the welcome email, signing the contract, receiving payment, collecting information and assets, scheduling the kickoff, and creating the project. Without a clear structure, it is easy for one of these steps to be missed.
Situation
Apex Studio was modeled as a small creative studio managing multiple clients and projects. The system needed to give the team a clear picture of where every client was in onboarding, who was responsible, what still needed to happen, and when the client was ready to move into project delivery.
Diagnosis
The underlying issue was that onboarding was being treated as a collection of individual tasks rather than as a defined process. The solution was to model onboarding as a client lifecycle with clear stages, a repeatable checklist, ownership, and a direct connection between the client and the project that follows.
System designed
I designed a client onboarding system built around Clients, Team, and Projects databases. Each client has an onboarding stage, overall status, assignee, contract and payment information, kickoff date, project relation, and a repeatable onboarding checklist covering the key steps from welcome email through project creation. The dashboard provides an onboarding pipeline, an onboarding client list with ownership, and a view of clients ready to start their project.
Implementation
The system was designed manually first, with the onboarding process made explicit before considering automation. The client template provides a consistent starting structure for every new client. Once onboarding is complete, the client can move directly into project initiation rather than requiring the team to recreate information elsewhere.
Result
The finished system gives the team a visible client onboarding pipeline and a repeatable process from new client through project initiation. At any point, the team can see the client's current onboarding stage, assigned person, key information, and whether the client is ready to move into project work.
Lessons learned
A process does not need a complicated automation layer to become reliable. Making the stages, ownership, checklist, and handoff explicit is often the more important first step. Once the manual process works clearly, individual steps can be automated later. Here's the link to see it live: https://app.notion.com/p/mgbest/Apex-Studio-3c7050306e038001be63dcc94f309bf9?source=copy_link
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