Every user has one role: Owner, Admin, or User.

Owners sit at the top of the account. They can do everything an admin can do, and they are protected in ways a regular seat is not. You cannot delete an owner. This is the role for the people who own the workspace itself, usually the partners who opened the Frontline account. Keep the owner list short. Two or three is plenty for a wealth firm.

Admins run the workspace day to day. They invite and remove users, create user groups, change object schemas, and set permissions. They can reshape People, Deals, and views when the process changes. Give this role to the person who will actually maintain the CRM: a COO, a head of operations, or a tech-forward advisor who owns the tool. Admins see across the account the way owners do. They are not limited to their own book.

Users do the work. They open records, move deals, log calls, talk to Max, and live in the views you set up. They do not invite the firm, and they do not redesign the data model. Most advisors, associates, and client-service people should be users. If everyone is an admin, nobody knows who is allowed to change the pipeline.

Role is not the same as a group, and it is not the same as being assigned on a record. Role is the seat. Groups, in the next lesson, are how you grant access in finer pieces. Assignment on James Harrington is who owns that household. A user can be assigned to James without being an admin.

Inviting someone into Frontline does not turn Max on for them. The CRM login and Max are two different things. If they should use Max, an owner or admin still has to assign them a Max seat, once the account has seats to hand out.

Seats are bought at the account level, in billing. Then you assign those seats to people. Buying five seats does not give five people Max. It fills a pool. You pick who gets one. If the pool is full, free a seat from someone who no longer needs it, or buy more. You cannot assign more seats than the account has paid for.

Assign a seat to anyone who should keep Max after their trial: the advisor who will log calls from a voice note, pull James’s timeline before a review, or let Max draft on their mailbox. Skip the seat if they only need the CRM. Client-service might live in Tickets and never need Max. That is fine. Do not spend a seat on a login that will not use the assistant.

Meeting Intelligence, the notetaker, is an add-on on top of a Max seat. A person cannot have the notetaker without a seat. If you take the seat away, that license goes back to the pool too.

Every person in the workspace has their own Max trial. It is not one trial for the whole firm. It is seven days per user, and the clock starts when that person activates Max, not when you send the invite.

Until they activate, Max is ready but not running. Activation happens in the dashboard, or when they connect something Max needs, like Gmail, WhatsApp, or Google Calendar. From that moment they have seven days to try sync, chat, and the work Max can do on their records. When the seven days end, Max stops for them unless a seat is assigned.

Two advisors invited on the same Monday can start on different days and expire on different days. James’s advisor might activate on Tuesday and need a seat the following Tuesday. Another teammate might wait a week. Plan the assignments around when people actually start, not around the invite date.

The trial is the on-ramp. The seat is how they stay on. If someone should use Max for real, assign the seat before day seven so nothing drops mid-week. If they were only looking, let the trial end and leave the seat for someone who will use it.

A good invite lands in a workspace that already has a model. People, Companies, Deals, and Tickets are named the way the firm talks. Lead and Contact exist. Pipeline is the default on Deals. Sharing on email and WhatsApp is decided. If you invite first and design later, new users will invent their own fields and private views, and you will spend a month cleaning up.

Tell them, in one sentence, where to start. “Open Contacts, star your book, and put James Harrington’s review on a to-do.” Max can help them find records from day one. He cannot fix a workspace that has three versions of the same person because nobody was invited into a shared model.

Next we will set up user groups, which is how those roles get more precise permissions on objects, the activity timeline, and Max.