In this solo episode of the Founders Journal, Alex Lieberman shares a practical playbook for onboarding a first employee at his executive ghost‑writing agency, StoryYard (also called StoryArc). He begins by diagnosing why founders typically neglect onboarding—burnout after hiring and a lack of personal onboarding experience. He then argues that onboarding matters both selflessly (delivering on the implicit promise made to a new hire) and selfishly (reducing turnover costs and freeing the founder to focus on higher‑value work). Good onboarding, he says, should leave the new hire excited about the company’s mission and clear on what success looks like in their role. Lieberman structures onboarding into two buckets: the “why” (mission, purpose, and context) and the “how” (processes, tools, and hands‑on learning). The “why” bucket includes a scripted welcome video, a curated list of industry accounts to follow, and a shared Google Drive folder of past client kickoff calls. The “how” bucket consists of a detailed, numbered folder system documenting every activity the role entails (with SOPs, recordings, and Slack screenshots) and a “sponging” phase where the new hire shadows every client interaction and asks questions. He frames the employee as a customer whose first impression is paramount, and notes that effective onboarding lets the founder step out of the day‑to‑day role. The episode ends with a call for listeners to suggest future playbook topics via email.
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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Founders Journal, my audio diary made public for the world in 10 to 20 minutes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I try to do all that I can to make you a better business builder. Sometimes I share specific playbooks for running your business. Other times I'll break down fascinating companies and share lessons we can apply to our own businesses. And sometimes I'll talk about the emotional journey of being a founder. I'll talk about my journey with anxiety therapy, the loss of identity, imposter syndrome, and other topics like this. But today we're focusing on a playbook. I want to share my playbook for onboarding employees because it's something that often gets neglected by founders and managers, even though it's one of your most important jobs in building a company. Let's hop into it. Most people treat employee onboarding like it's a joke. I treat it like we're serving our most important customer. And before I talk through how I onboard employees, I want to just share my theory about why I believe leaders suck at doing this very important job. For starters, I think people get burnt out from the hiring process. Hiring employees takes a ton of work between writing a JD, figuring out how much you're going to budget for the role, marketing the role, deciding the steps in the interview process, giving offers, getting references, sometimes having to backstep because your top choice didn't accept an offer. It's a lot of work. And so once you've completed that process, you understandably feel relief. And unfortunately, I believe many people misinterpret this point in time as the end of the process, the time to just coast and enjoy the fruits of your work. Another reason that people don't give onboarding the attention it deserves is less about the process and more about the past. I think a lot of people treat employees the way that they were treated as they were rising the ranks. And I think a lot of these people probably never were onboarded properly either. I mean, when I think about my time at Morgan Stanley, which was my first job out of college, There was general training for every analyst, but there was zero onboarding once I actually got to my desk for my actual role. So those are two of my theories as to why onboarding is perpetually neglected. But let's talk about why it's so important and how I run my onboarding, no matter what company it's for. For selfless reasons, onboarding is important because you've just convinced someone to give up their livelihood or close all of their professional options because they trust you. And it just feels pretty shitty to me to not follow through in the implicit promise you've made them, which is giving them the tools that they need to succeed in their role at your company. But also for selfish reasons, onboarding is vital. Any time that is focused on replacing an underperforming employee or an employee that quit is time not focused on the priorities of your business, let alone thinking about how expensive it is when an employee leaves and Hypothetically, you have to hire a recruiter to hire the replacement, and then you pay that recruiter at least a month of that employee's salary. And of course, no matter how hard you try, people will leave your company. That's a given. But that just means it's even more vital to control the things that you can control, one of which is making sure that your people feel like they've been set up for success and that their first impression of the company when they start is a good one. So what does good onboarding even look like? I'm going to get into it right after this quick break. What does good onboarding look like? Well, very simply, it is whatever process leads to an employee feeling a few key things at the end of their onboarding process. The first is that they feel excited by the mission of the business and the role that they play in accomplishing that mission. And the second is that they feel like they understand what success looks like in their role, and they've been given the tools and training to do some of the key tasks that lead to success. That's it. It's simple, but people always neglect it. So I'm going to quickly take you through the steps that I am taking to onboard our very first employee at StoryYard, which is my executive ghostwriting agency. But I want to be clear that these steps aren't law. They are just the steps that I believe will allow us to accomplish the 2 goals of onboarding that I just mentioned. Employee number 1 at StoryArb is a content strategist, which means they are part relationship builder with our executive clients and part creative mind helping to inform and execute their content strategies on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I view their onboarding in 2 buckets: the why and the how. The why part of the onboarding process is focused around why StoryArc exists as a business, why we are even solving this problem in the first place, and why our solution is the right one for our clients. By creating steps focused on why, it allows me to accomplish the first goal of this employee feeling excited by the mission of the business and the role that they play in accomplishing that mission. The first why activity is a welcome video. I scripted and recorded a video that welcomes this employee and future employees to StoryArc. I'll link to it in the show notes so you can literally copy it for your business. But basically the outline is what StoryYard is, what problem we're solving, why it's an important problem to solve, how we're solving it, and how we think you, the employee, are a key catalyst in solving it better and faster. The second why activity is a list of accounts to follow on Twitter and LinkedIn. This is specific to our business, but I want our hire to get a sense of the incredible power of having an audience online and how that audience is leading to millions of dollars in business value to those people who focus on it. The third why activity is sharing a Google Drive with all of the kickoff calls with StoryYard's clients so far. Now, this has a dual purpose. The most obvious is getting to know who our clients are since our content strategist will be working with them. But the most important is this person seeing how all of these clients are world-class execs who have crazy stories and valuable lessons that haven't been shared with the world because they haven't had the capacity to do so. Next up are the how activities. By creating steps focused on how, it allows me to accomplish the second goal of onboarding, which is making sure that our first employee feels like they understand what success looks like in their role and they've been given the tools and training to do some of their key tasks that lead to success. The first how activity is documenting every single activity that this person can expect to do in the role. That's also why I personally have acted as the content strategist prior to hiring this person. So I know exactly how to do the job. I know how to do it well, and I know what to expect of someone else doing the job after me. The way that I'm documenting each activity is through a folder system in Google Drive. So the first folder is the welcome video that I described a minute ago, and then the remaining folders are numbered by basically where in the client journey the activity happens. So folder 1 is preparing for a new client. Folder 2 is client kickoff call. Folder 3 is content interview. Folder 4 is day-to-day tasks, and folder 5 is reporting. Within these folders, I have a combination of different resources to help educate the employee. Some will have recordings with clients that demonstrate actual interactions like kickoff calls or content interviews. Some will have SOP or standard operating procedure documents. Again, I hate that word. We did a past episode about this. We'll link to it in the show notes. And these documents will break down exactly how a more involved activity is done, and some will have screenshot images of interactions in Slack with our clients to demonstrate the way in which we work with them on a daily basis. If this sounds very thorough, it is. But going back to my original thesis on onboarding, if you view your employee as your customer, which I think you should, This is literally the most important objective you have for your customer, which is creating a great first impression. And then the second how activity is what I call sponging. For the first few weeks after employee number 1 joins the company, I will have them join every single client call, observe every single client interaction, and ask questions constantly. This is basically how I onboarded myself in my first finance job, absent of a true onboarding process. And I think it's the best way for folks to ramp up quickly. So that is the onboarding process, why most people suck at it, why it's actually wildly important, and my playbook for doing it well at all of my companies. And the beautiful thing about when you onboard an employee well is that you can officially fire yourself from the job you were doing without worrying at all. And what a relief that is. Before we hop, I have one ask of you, and that's for episode recommendations. Today's playbook-style episode was about onboarding, but I want to do a bunch more of these. What other playbooks would you like for me to talk about that would help you build or run your business more effectively? Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and I will pick the best ones to use for future episodes. Thanks so much and I'll catch you next episode.
