Founder and business owner SGEN onboarding guide
| Field | Value ||---|---|| Audience | public || Page type | guide || Area | _workflows/role-onboarding || Updated | 2026-05-25 |How to onboard as a founder or business owner in SGEN
This guide is your strategic operating playbook as the founder or business owner of a SGEN-hosted site. It is not a feature tutorial. It is a cadence — what to check weekly, what to review monthly, what to audit quarterly — so that you stay informed about your site without becoming the person who manages it day to day. Your job in SGEN is to own the outcome, not operate the controls. This guide shows you how to do that efficiently.
Before you start
Before your first session, confirm the following with the person who set up your SGEN account:
- Your account is assigned the Administrator role — you need Administrator access to reach the Dashboard, Users, Audit Log, and Backup areas this guide covers. If you see a restricted screen, your administrator needs to update your role using Add or edit a user.
- Your team members are already provisioned — at minimum your content lead, marketing manager, and any external contractors should have accounts at the correct roles before you start reviewing team activity.
- Your notification preferences are configured — SGEN can notify you of critical events only (recommended for founders) or all events (recommended for team leads). See Settings → Notifications and follow the steps in this guide.
- If you are running multiple sites, confirm that SG-Dashboard is enabled on your plan — cross-site visibility requires SG-Dashboard access. Check your plan tier under Settings → Billing.
If anything above is missing, share this guide with the person managing your SGEN setup. They can sort out access before your first review session.
Where to go
Your five primary areas inside SGEN as a founder or business owner:
| Area | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Site KPIs at a glance — traffic shape, active sessions, recent events |
| SG-Dashboard | Cross-site portfolio view — all sites on your plan in one screen (if multi-site) |
| Users | Team roster — who has access, at what role, last active |
| Audit Log | What the team did — creates, edits, publishes, deletes, settings changes |
| Backups | Insurance check — when did the last backup run, is restore available |
| Settings → Notifications | Control what alerts reach you and which go to the team |
You do not need to visit Theme Editor, Custom Codes, Blog, Forms, Popups, or Analytics → Event Logs. Those areas belong to your content, marketing, and technical leads. If you find yourself making changes there regularly, the team structure needs reviewing — not your access level.
What is this for?
This doc is a role-scoped operating guide for the founder or business owner of a SGEN-hosted site. It answers "what should I do in SGEN each week, month, and quarter?" rather than teaching individual features from scratch. Each section links to the relevant reference doc when you need field-level detail.
The cadence covers the full scope of a founder's site ownership: knowing how the site is performing (Dashboard), knowing what the team is doing (Users + Audit Log), knowing the site is protected (Backups), and making strategic decisions at the right intervals (monthly and quarterly reviews).
Good use cases
- You are the founder of a growing business and you want to establish a structured review cadence without becoming the person who manages content daily.
- You are onboarding as the business owner and you need to confirm your access, understand your team structure, and set up the right notification level before stepping back from daily operations.
- You are preparing a stakeholder update and you want to pull KPIs directly from SGEN rather than relying on a report from your team.
- You are reviewing a vendor or contractor's access before a project ends and you need to confirm their account is correctly scoped or ready to be deactivated.
- You are evaluating whether to add a new feature area — a blog, a popup campaign, an ecommerce section — and you need to understand what team capacity that requires before committing.
What NOT to use this for
- Do not use this guide to manage day-to-day content. Writing, editing, and publishing blog posts and pages belongs to your content editor. See Content editor onboarding.
- Do not use this guide to run marketing campaigns or manage popups and forms. That is your marketing manager's scope. See Marketing manager onboarding.
- Do not use this guide to handle SEO configuration, redirect management, or robots.txt. That belongs to your SEO specialist. See SEO specialist onboarding.
- Do not use this guide to do design or build work in SG-Builder. Theme-level and builder-level changes belong to your designer and developer team. See Developer onboarding.
- Do not use this guide if your role is primarily technical administration. Platform administrators have a separate playbook. See Platform admin onboarding.
How this connects to other features
- Site Dashboard — the KPI overview your weekly check starts from; shows traffic shape, recent events, and current site status at a glance.
- SG-Dashboard — the cross-site portfolio view for multi-site plans; surfaces per-site status, last backup date, and team activity across all sites in one screen.
- Manage users list — your team roster; use it to confirm roles, review last-active dates, and identify accounts that should be deactivated after a contractor engagement ends.
- Add or edit a user — used when you need to adjust a team member's role, reset access, or onboard a new hire; the action your administrator takes on your behalf if you are not making this change yourself.
- Audit Log — a timestamped record of every administrative action on the site — publishes, deletes, settings changes, user additions — so you can see what the team did without asking them.
- Create and restore backups — confirms your site has a recent recoverable state; your monthly insurance check before any major campaign, launch, or team change.
- Settings → Notifications — controls which system alerts reach you directly and which route to your team; critical for keeping your inbox clean while staying informed on what matters.
What success looks like
After one month on this cadence, a healthy founder practice in SGEN looks like:
Weekly: You open the Dashboard and can describe the site's performance in one sentence — "traffic is up, last backup ran yesterday, no critical alerts" — without opening Analytics or reading every log entry.
Monthly: You can confirm your team is active (Users list shows recent logins), the site is protected (Backups shows a current restore point), and there are no unexplained configuration changes (Audit Log shows nothing you didn't authorize).
Quarterly: You can answer the four founder questions — Is the site performing? Is the team functional? Is the platform reliable? Is the plan still right? — using data you pulled yourself, without a report from your team.
Operationally: You have never had to make an emergency content edit yourself. Your team can run without your daily involvement. When something needs your attention, it reaches you through a configured notification — not a frantic message because someone had to hunt you down.
A representative weekly snapshot for a growing business — clean site status, active team, recent backup, no unreviewed alerts — looks like this:
What to do if it does not work
Dashboard is not showing the KPIs you care about. The SGEN Dashboard shows the metrics the platform surfaces by default — traffic events, active sessions, and recent admin actions. If the numbers you want (lead volume, revenue, conversion rate) are not visible, they may live in a different area — Forms → Reports for leads, or your payment provider's dashboard for revenue. Ask your marketing manager or platform administrator to confirm which reports map to your KPIs. See Site Dashboard for the full list of available tiles.
Too many notifications are reaching you. Go to Settings → Notifications and review the notification level. Founders typically set notifications to critical events only — security alerts, backup failures, and billing events. All other system notifications — page publishes, blog drafts, popup updates — should route to your team leads. See Settings → Notifications for the alert category settings.
You cannot tell what your team is doing. Go to Audit Log. Filter by the past 7 days. Every administrative action — page publishes, user changes, settings edits — is timestamped with the user who performed it. If you see actions you do not recognise or did not authorise, flag them to your platform administrator. See Audit Log for the filter and search workflow.
Site performance is regressing and you have no visibility. Go to Dashboard. Check the traffic trend tile. If events are trending down, go to Analytics → Reports (or ask your marketing manager to pull the report) and look at which pages are losing traffic and whether 404 events are rising. A traffic regression with no team action usually means a redirect broke, a page was accidentally trashed, or a campaign link stopped working. See the Marketing manager onboarding guide for the 404 audit workflow — that is the right person to action it.
Surprise billing or a plan limit you were not expecting. Go to Settings → Billing. Check your current plan tier and usage metrics. If you have hit a site-count or user-count ceiling, you will need to upgrade your plan or deactivate unused accounts to make room. Your platform administrator should handle the account-level change; you authorise the plan decision. Contact SGEN support if you need to understand what a plan upgrade includes before committing.
Weekly check — your 10-minute site pulse
Once a week — many founders do this on Monday morning before the team starts — open SGEN and run three checks. The whole routine takes 10 minutes. It is designed to give you the information you need to answer "how is the site doing?" without opening every section or asking your team.
Steps — weekly checks
1. Open the Dashboard for a site status snapshot
Go to Dashboard. Read the summary tiles. You are looking for three signals: is traffic holding steady, is the site status showing healthy, and are there any critical alerts. A clean Monday snapshot for your business — steady traffic, last backup within 24 hours, no alerts — reads like this:
If Site status shows a warning or error, open Settings → Status and read the detail. Most status warnings are transient — a backup job that took longer than expected, a connection that briefly dropped. If the same warning persists for more than 24 hours, escalate to your platform administrator. See Site Dashboard for the status tile and what each state means.
2. Check the Audit Log for the past 7 days
Go to Audit Log. Set the date filter to the past 7 days. Scan the action types — you are not reading every row, you are checking that the volume of activity looks consistent with what your team is doing this week. A healthy week for a site with 6 team members running a content calendar and two active campaigns reads like this:
If you see a Settings action you did not authorise — a billing change, an email credential update, an integration modification — flag it to your platform administrator immediately. Settings-level changes have site-wide consequences. See Audit Log for the action-type filter and the user-attribution column.
3. Confirm the team is active and correctly scoped
Go to Users. Scan the list. You are confirming that the team members you expect to be active are logging in, and that no accounts are sitting unused with elevated access. A contractor who finished a project two weeks ago and still has an Editor or Administrator role is a loose end — move their account to Trash via your platform administrator.
A healthy user roster for a six-person team with two active contractors reads like this:
If a contractor shows Last active: 3+ weeks ago and the engagement has ended, ask your platform administrator to move the account to Trash. See Manage users list for the bulk-deactivate and trash workflow.
Monthly review — site health and team check
At the start of each month, block 30-45 minutes. This is the session where you look at the prior month with enough distance to see the trend — not the day-to-day noise. It covers four areas: site health, team structure, backup status, and notification hygiene.
Steps — monthly review
1. Pull a month-end KPI snapshot from the Dashboard
Go to Dashboard. If your Dashboard shows a configurable date range, set it to the prior month. Note the three numbers that matter for a founder: total events (traffic volume), any critical alerts in the period, and backup frequency. These three numbers answer: did the site run, did anything break, and is it protected?
A clean month-end snapshot for a growing SMB running one site with a content-led acquisition strategy reads like this:
If Critical alerts shows any count above zero, open Audit Log and filter to that period to identify what triggered them and whether they were resolved. If Backups run shows a count significantly below the number of days in the month, your backup schedule may have gaps — escalate to your platform administrator.
2. Review the team roster for the month
Go to Users. Look at Last active for every account. Anyone who has not logged in this month despite being listed as active is either no longer using the platform or using a shared login (which breaks your audit trail). Either deactivate the unused account or confirm with the team member that their access is still needed.
A clean roster at month-end has no gaps: every active account shows a login within the past 30 days, and every contractor engagement that ended has been closed.
3. Check backup health
Go to Backups. Confirm the most recent backup was created within the last 24-48 hours. Confirm at least one restore point exists from the prior month — if something went wrong with a major page change or a team error, you need a restore point that predates the change. This check takes 90 seconds and it is the single most important insurance action you can take as a site owner.
A healthy backup screen for a site running automated daily backups reads like this:
If the most recent backup is more than 48 hours old and your schedule should be daily, escalate to your platform administrator — do not attempt to modify backup settings yourself unless you have been briefed on the consequence of changing the schedule mid-month. See Create and restore backups for the backup schedule and manual backup workflow.
4. Review notification settings for signal-to-noise ratio
Go to Settings → Notifications. You should be receiving critical alerts only — backup failures, security events, billing changes. If your inbox is full of notifications about page publishes, popup updates, or blog drafts, your notification level is too high for a founder role. Update it now. Your team leads should handle operational notifications; you handle the ones that require a decision.
Quarterly strategy check — four founder questions
Once per quarter, block 2 hours. This is not a feature review. It is a strategic audit. You are asking four questions:
1. Is the site performing at the level the business needs?
Pull the Dashboard for the quarter. Look at the traffic trend across 90 days. If traffic is flat or declining, your marketing manager and content lead need to explain why and propose a plan. If traffic is growing, confirm it is the right traffic — not volume for its own sake.
2. Is the team working without my involvement?
Open Audit Log for the quarter. If you see a gap — a week or two where almost no actions were logged — the team paused for a reason. Ask. If the pause was planned (holiday, sprint boundary), fine. If it was unplanned, the content calendar needs attention.
3. Is the platform reliable enough for the business?
Open Backups. Count how many times in the quarter the backup ran on schedule versus missed. Any miss is worth a conversation with your platform administrator — not necessarily a crisis, but a data point. Check Audit Log for any Settings-level changes in the quarter that were not part of a planned initiative. Unplanned settings changes are the most common source of silent site regressions.
4. Is the plan tier still right for where the business is?
Go to Settings → Billing. Review your current plan limits — number of sites, users, storage. If you are consistently bumping against a limit, upgrade. If you provisioned capacity for growth that has not materialised, consider whether you are paying for a ceiling you do not need. This decision is yours. The technical execution is your platform administrator's.
Steps — quarterly review
- Pull the Dashboard for the full quarter and note the three founder KPIs: total traffic trend, critical alert count, backup success rate.
- Open Audit Log for the full quarter and confirm the team maintained consistent activity — no unexplained gaps, no unauthorised settings changes.
- Open Users and confirm the roster reflects your current team — no stale contractor accounts, no role mismatches for staff who changed responsibilities during the quarter.
- Open Backups and confirm the schedule held — every planned backup ran, at least one manual backup was created before any major launch or change.
- Review Settings → Billing and confirm your plan tier still matches your current usage and near-term growth.
- Produce a one-paragraph quarterly summary for any stakeholders who need it — investor updates, board slides, partner reports — using the KPIs you pulled directly from SGEN.
What your team does — and what they escalate to you
Your role in SGEN is ownership, not operation. The table below maps each area of the platform to who runs it, so you know where to direct questions and who to hold accountable for results.
| Area | Who runs it | What you review |
|---|---|---|
| Blog and pages | Content Editor | Monthly: post count, draft pipeline status |
| Analytics, forms, campaigns | Marketing Manager | Monthly: lead volume, channel mix, popup freshness |
| SEO, redirects, technical search | SEO Specialist | Quarterly: organic traffic trend, 404 count |
| SG-Builder, design, Custom CSS | Designer / Developer | Per-launch: visual QA passed, mobile verified |
| User management, SMTP, billing | Platform Admin | Weekly: team roster clean, no stale access |
| Backup, restore, site health | Platform Admin | Monthly: backup schedule holding, last restore tested |
| Your escalations | You | Decisions only: plan tier, team hires, feature investments |
The escalation path is the critical one. When something needs a decision — not an action, a decision — it comes to you. Your team should be able to handle every routine operation in the table above without your involvement. If they cannot, the team structure or the role assignments need reviewing.
Things you should NOT need access to
As the founder or business owner, you own the strategic outcome. The following areas are your team's operational territory. If you find yourself making changes here regularly, something in the team structure has broken down.
You should NOT need to:
- Write or edit blog posts and pages — your content editor owns this. If you are editing copy directly, you are filling a gap that should not exist. Hire or reassign.
- Configure popups, forms, or campaigns — your marketing manager owns this. If you are setting up an overlay or a lead capture sequence, you are operating below your role.
- Modify SEO settings or manage redirects — your SEO specialist owns this. If you are editing meta descriptions or adding redirect rules, the SEO function is under-resourced.
- Write Custom CSS or edit Custom Codes — your developer owns this. These changes have site-wide consequences and require technical context you should not have to carry.
- Respond to individual form submissions — your marketing or sales team owns this. Your job is to review lead volume trends, not process individual entries.
You DO need access to:
| Feature | What you do | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard | Review site KPIs at a glance — weekly | Site Dashboard |
| SG-Dashboard | Cross-site portfolio view — weekly (if multi-site) | SG-Dashboard |
| Users | Team roster review and contractor deactivation — monthly | Manage users list |
| Audit Log | What the team did — weekly spot check | Audit Log |
| Backups | Insurance check — monthly | Create and restore backups |
| Settings → Notifications | Notification level control — set once, review quarterly | Settings → Notifications |
| Settings → Billing | Plan tier and usage — quarterly | Settings → Billing |
Examples
Example 1: Pre-campaign site check before a major product launch. Your founder has a product launch planned for next Tuesday. On the preceding Friday, she opens SGEN and runs through three checks: Dashboard shows no active alerts, Backups shows a restore point from today at 02:14 (good), Users shows the contractor hired for the launch copy has an Editor role scoped correctly. She messages her platform administrator to create a manual backup before the campaign goes live on Monday — so that if anything breaks during the launch week, the restore point predates the change. She does not touch the campaign itself. That is her marketing manager's scope. See Create and restore backups for the manual backup workflow.
Example 2: Monthly review flags a stale contractor account. During the May month-end review, the founder opens Users and notices that a contractor engaged for a six-week design sprint has not logged in for 19 days. The sprint ended on May 3. The account is still active with Editor access. She messages her platform administrator: "Marco's account at marco@agency.com should be moved to Trash — the engagement ended May 3." Her administrator makes the change within the hour. The Audit Log the following week shows no actions from that email. See Manage users list for the bulk-trash workflow.
Example 3: Quarterly review drives a plan upgrade decision. At the end of Q1, the founder runs the quarterly four-question check. Dashboard shows traffic growth of 18% quarter-on-quarter. Settings → Billing shows 4 of 5 available user accounts used — one short of the plan limit. Two hires are planned for Q2. Without reviewing this, the limit would surface only when trying to onboard the second new hire. Instead, she contacts SGEN support now, upgrades to the next plan tier, and the onboarding happens without friction. See Settings → Billing for the plan-tier review workflow.
Day-one and first-week path
Use this table on your first day to confirm access and establish the baseline before stepping back from daily oversight.
| When | Action | Expected outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 — morning | Open Dashboard | Site status shows healthy, traffic tiles populate |
| Day 1 — morning | Open Users | You can see the full team roster and confirm roles are correct |
| Day 1 — afternoon | Open Audit Log, set filter to past 7 days | You can read what the team did this week without asking them |
| Day 1 — afternoon | Open Backups | At least one restore point exists from the past 48 hours |
| Day 1 — afternoon | Open Settings → Notifications, set to critical-only | Your inbox will filter to security events, backup failures, and billing changes only |
| Day 2 | Run the weekly 10-minute check solo | Dashboard, Audit Log, Users — all three in under 10 minutes |
| Week 1 | Identify one contractor account that is due for review | Note it as the first deactivation candidate for your platform administrator |
| Week 2 | Confirm your team can run a full week without needing your direct involvement in content or campaigns | If they cannot, the team structure needs attention before you step back |
Other roles on this site
Each role on a SGEN site has its own onboarding guide. Use the table below to understand who owns each surface — and who to direct questions to when something is outside your scope.
| Role | What they own |
|---|---|
| Content Editor | Blog posts, pages, media library, comment moderation |
| Marketing Manager | Analytics, lead forms, popup campaigns, blog publish schedule |
| Ecommerce Manager | Orders, products, coupons, and fulfilment cadence |
| SEO Specialist | SEO audit grid, redirects, robots.txt, Search Console |
| Developer | Custom CSS, Custom Codes, tracking scripts, SG-Builder Additional CSS |
| Support Agent | Read-only admin lookups, ticket triage, escalation paths |
| Platform Admin | Site provisioning, user management, billing, SMTP settings |
| Partner / Agency | Multi-client delivery, white-label, reseller billing |
Related reading
- Site Dashboard
- SG-Dashboard — multi-site portfolio view
- Manage users list
- Add or edit a user
- Audit Log
- Create and restore backups
- Settings → Notifications
- Settings → Billing