A Client Onboarding Checklist for Podcast Agencies

Retention is mostly won or lost in the first two weeks. A messy onboarding makes a client anxious and makes your team improvise; a clean one makes the whole engagement feel like the client made the right call. Here's a checklist you can run every time.

1. Kickoff and goals

Agree on what success looks like — downloads, LinkedIn presence, lead gen — and which platforms actually matter to this client. Not every show needs all seven formats.

2. Brand and voice intake

This is the step most agencies rush and later pay for. Collect what the client sounds like before the first episode: a few examples of posts they love, their tone, and their hard rules ("no hashtags on LinkedIn," "never say synergy," "under 200 words"). Capture these as explicit rules, not vibes.

3. Access and feeds

Hosting, RSS, social accounts or scheduler, brand assets, and any style guide. Get it all once, not piecemeal over three weeks.

4. Cadence and deliverables

Spell out exactly what ships, when: which formats, how many per episode, and the turnaround. Clear deliverables prevent scope creep.

5. Approval process

Decide who approves and how. A defined approve/reject flow keeps content moving and — if your tooling learns from approvals — starts training the client's voice from day one.

6. First episode as the calibration run

Treat episode one as a calibration. Expect a little more back-and-forth, capture every edit as a lesson, and lock the voice rules. By episode three the reviews should be quick.

7. Reporting

Set up the simple report the client will actually read, and agree how often they get it.

Make it repeatable

The point of a checklist is that onboarding client number twelve feels the same as client number three. Turn this into a template your whole team runs — it's the difference between scaling and scrambling.