In a 1–5 person firm, the principal can credibly own every onboarding decision. Above 10–15 people, that ceases to be physically possible. The delegation that follows is where firms drift from a tight program to a porous one.
The three transitions to plan for
- Single approver to multi-approver workflow — every reviewer needs documented authority limits.
- Centralised onboarding to office-level onboarding — consistency suffers without a strong platform.
- Manual escalation to triggered escalation — once a firm runs more than ~20 onboardings/week, manual escalation routinely misses cases.
What to insist on from your platform
Reviewer/approver controls with role-based limits, mandatory comment fields on all overrides, and a senior-management dashboard that shows aggregate decisions by office and by approver. Without these, growth multiplies risk.