Signs you need help
Most founders hire later than they should, because the business still works, just with more strain. The signs tend to appear in this order.
- Replies that used to take minutes now take hours, and you notice clients chasing.
- You turn down requests or new clients because you can’t fit them in.
- You have not had a day completely off your phone in months, and a holiday feels impossible.
- Admin, such as invoicing, chasing vendors and reconciling expenses, happens late at night or slips.
- Small mistakes creep in: a forgotten preference, a confirmation not passed on.
Choosing your first hire: lifestyle manager or assistant
Your first hire shapes the firm, so decide what gap you are filling. There are two common choices, and they solve different problems.
A lifestyle manager owns client relationships. They take requests directly, make judgment calls and become a client’s main contact. Hire one when you have more clients than you can serve well and want to grow further. Look for someone from luxury hospitality, private households or executive support who already knows how wealthy clients expect to be treated.
An assistant or coordinator takes tasks off your plate while you stay the client’s contact: researching options, booking, chasing confirmations, handling invoices. Hire one when your clients want you, specifically, and the problem is volume of work rather than number of relationships.
Whichever you choose, introduce the new person to clients early and explain their role. Clients who meet a colleague while you are still there accept them far more easily than one introduced during a crisis or your holiday.
| Consideration | Lifestyle manager | Assistant or coordinator |
|---|---|---|
| Owns client relationships | Yes | No, supports yours |
| Best when | You need capacity for more clients | You need time back for existing clients |
| Typical background | Luxury hospitality, private households, EA | Coordination, events, office management |
| Risk | Clients may follow them if they leave | You remain the bottleneck for decisions |
How many clients per manager? Track your own
You will hear rules of thumb about how many clients one lifestyle manager can serve. Be cautious with them. A family with three homes, school-age children and constant travel can need more time than many corporate members put together, and service levels vary widely between firms. We have not found a reliable published benchmark, so this guide does not give one.
Measure your own instead. For a few months, log the requests each client makes and roughly how long each takes, and note response times. You will quickly see which clients and request types use your time, what your real capacity is, and how your pricing compares with the hours involved. That is the number to hire against, and it feeds straight into your pricing (see our guide to concierge pricing).
Document client knowledge so it survives turnover
In a solo firm, the client file is your memory. The moment someone else serves your clients, that knowledge has to exist somewhere they can read it. It also protects you: if a team member leaves, what they learned about a client should stay with the firm.
Before your first hire starts, write a profile for every client: family members and household staff, how they like to be contacted, allergies and dislikes, favorite restaurants and hotels, important dates, loyalty numbers, standing instructions and anything that went wrong before. Note where each fact came from, so a colleague knows whether the client said it or you observed it.
Then make updating it part of every request. If a preference changes and only the person who heard it knows, you are back where you started.
The shared inbox versus personal phones problem
Clients text the person they know. In a solo firm, that is fine. In a team, it means requests live on individual phones, nobody else can see them, and when that person is off, ill or leaves, the history goes with them.
A shared inbox solves part of this for email, but clients will not stop texting their lifestyle manager, and asking them to use a new app or number often meets resistance. Common workarounds include company phones, forwarding rules and asking staff to copy messages into a shared log. Each helps, and each depends on people remembering to do it.
- Decide which numbers and inboxes belong to the company, and say so in employment agreements.
- Agree a rule that every request ends up somewhere the team can see, with an owner and a status.
- Plan cover for holidays: who picks up which clients, and how they see the history.
- Agree with each client who may make requests on their behalf and how.
When to move off spreadsheets
Spreadsheets and a shared inbox are a reasonable way to start. Many good firms run on them for years. They stop working when the same information has to be in several places at once: a client’s preferences in one sheet, their open requests in another, the vendor booking in an email and the texts on someone’s phone.
Honest signs it is time: you can’t answer “what is open for this client?” without asking someone; a colleague covering a holiday has to read through weeks of messages; invoicing pass-through costs means hunting through receipts; or you would struggle to show a client what you have done for them this year.
A CRM built for concierge work keeps profiles, requests, vendors and billing together, and can sync email and texts from your team’s own Gmail or Outlook and phones to the right client, so conversations stay with the firm without clients changing how they reach you. If you are at that point, a walkthrough is the quickest way to see whether it fits how you work.