Field notes › Running the business
Onboarding a new client site without a fire drill
Winning the work is the good part. The two weeks after it are where labour hire firms lose money, because a new client site has to be stood up properly and there is never quite enough time to do it properly.
The failure is predictable. Crews get placed before the requirements are written down, the requirements live in the email thread from the tender, and six weeks later somebody is turned away at the gate for a ticket nobody knew was needed.
Get the requirements in writing, in their words
Start with the list of what this site requires of anybody who walks through the gate, and get it from the client rather than assuming it matches the last site you set up.
Ask for the exact names they use. If their paperwork says a particular induction and a particular licence class, record those names, not your internal shorthand. When there is a dispute later, the argument is settled by whose wording matches the site's own documents.
Then ask the question people forget: what is required by role rather than by site? The medic, the operator and the trades assistant usually do not carry the same paper, and a single site-wide list either over-qualifies everyone or misses something.
Find out who at the site can say yes
A site has a person who approves crew, a person who runs the gate, and a person who gets the invoice, and they are rarely the same person. Names, roles and contact details for all three, before the first shift, saves a specific kind of 5am phone call.
If your system has a client portal, this is also the moment to decide who gets a login. In Mustr each client site gets its own logins scoped to that site, and the site can invite its own people, which means you are not maintaining their staff list for them. Do it during setup, when they are engaged, rather than three months in when nobody remembers agreeing to it.
Check your bench against the requirements before you promise
The most expensive mistake is promising numbers you cannot compliantly fill. Run the site's requirements against your existing crew and count how many people actually qualify today, not how many could qualify after a course.
If the honest answer is short, you now have a training plan with a deadline attached, which is a much better position than discovering the gap in week two. Book the renewals and the new tickets before the roster is built, and record those days as unavailability with the reason.
Set the logistics expectations early
For remote sites, flights and accommodation are part of the shift, not a side arrangement. Who books them, how far ahead, who confirms, and what happens when a shift moves after a flight is booked. Getting that agreed in week one is worth more than any process you can build later, because the answer is a negotiation rather than a configuration.
Then put it where both sides can see it. In Mustr flights and accommodation live on the shift itself and the client can tick them off in their portal, which removes an entire category of email.
Do a dry run before the first swing
Build the first week's roster a week early, against the real requirements, with real people. What you are looking for is blocked bookings, and you want them now rather than on the Sunday night before start.
Every block is information: a missing induction you can chase, a ticket that expires mid-swing, a role requirement that turns out to be wrong. A dry run that produces no blocks either means you are genuinely ready or that the requirements have not been entered properly, and both are worth knowing.
Write down what you learned
Every new site teaches you something about your own setup process. Keep a short internal note per site: what they require, who approves, what surprised you. After four or five sites the pattern is a checklist rather than folklore, and the person who does the next setup does not have to be the person who did the last one.
The two week version
Week one: requirements in writing in their words, split by site and role, contacts for approval, gate and invoicing, portal logins agreed, bench checked against requirements, training booked for the gaps. Week two: requirements entered, crew records updated, dry run of the first roster, blocked bookings chased, logistics process agreed and tested once.
None of that is complicated. It is just easier to skip than to do, and the cost of skipping it arrives later, at a gate, with a client watching.
The setup guide covers the import side, and the client portal page shows what the site sees once they are live.