Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter you spend the better part of a week chasing the same five people for the same numbers. Engineering sends a Notion doc that's three weeks stale. Finance sends a QuickBooks export you have to reformat. The head of sales pastes HubSpot pipeline screenshots into Slack. You paste it all into a Google Slides template, manually update every number, and by the time the deck is done the headcount slide is already wrong. The all-hands is on Friday. It's Wednesday night. You're the only one who knows where everything lives, and that's exactly the problem.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live all-hands deck builder that pulls headcount, pipeline, burn rate, and OKR status from your actual sources — HubSpot, QuickBooks, Notion, Slack, Google Calendar — so you're not manually updating slides the night before

A reusable automation that drafts the deck narrative, flags metric changes since the last all-hands, and sends a pre-meeting summary to Slack so execs show up with context

A searchable archive of every past all-hands — decisions made, numbers at the time, action items assigned — so 'didn't we discuss this in March?' takes ten seconds to answer

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Presentation Agent Investor Reporting Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, journal entries, payments) and syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (MRR, charges, subscriptions). It connects directly to HubSpot on a schedule for deals, pipeline stages, and owner data. It connects directly to Notion on a schedule for OKR databases and pages. Gmail and Google Calendar are synced on a schedule for exec logistics context. Slack is connected on a schedule so the finished summary can be posted to a channel automatically.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for our May company meeting. Pull MRR and burn rate from QuickBooks and Stripe. Pull open pipeline and deals closed this quarter from HubSpot. Pull Q2 OKR status from Notion. Add a headcount slide using our current employee count. Format it so each section leads with a one-sentence headline before the numbers.

Every quarter, compare our key metrics — MRR, headcount, pipeline coverage, runway — to the prior all-hands and write a two-paragraph narrative that explains what changed and why. Flag anything that moved more than 15% in either direction.

Store this all-hands deck, the action items from the meeting, and the final metrics snapshot in our company knowledge base under 'All-Hands Archive — Q2 2026' so anyone can search it later.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks and Stripe so Starch syncs your financial data on a schedule — burn rate, revenue, and runway are always current without anyone exporting a spreadsheet.

2 Connect HubSpot so Starch syncs your pipeline data on a schedule — deals by stage, closed-won this quarter, and rep-level performance are available the moment you start building the deck.

3 Connect Notion so Starch syncs your OKR databases and planning docs on a schedule — instead of asking the engineering lead what's on track, Starch reads the database directly.

4 Connect Gmail and Google Calendar so Starch has context on exec availability, recent decisions made in email threads, and any scheduling logistics that belong in the all-hands.

5 Open the Presentation Agent and describe the deck you need: slide count, audience, which metrics to feature, and which narratives matter this quarter. Starch drafts the full deck in minutes.

6 Review the auto-generated metric slides — burn rate, MRR, pipeline coverage, headcount — and use natural language to adjust: 'move the headcount slide before pipeline' or 'add a chart comparing Q1 and Q2 ARR.'

7 Use Starch to generate a quarter-over-quarter narrative: what moved, what's on track, what needs attention. This becomes the script for the CEO's opening five minutes.

8 Set up an automation that posts the draft deck link and a bullet-point summary to your exec Slack channel 48 hours before every all-hands, so no one is reading the deck cold in the room.

9 After the meeting, capture action items and decisions in Starch using natural language — 'create a record of the decisions made in today's all-hands and the owners for each action item.'

10 Store the final deck, metrics snapshot, and action items in your Knowledge Management app under a searchable all-hands archive, so next quarter's prep starts from a real baseline instead of from memory.

11 Before the next all-hands, run the comparison prompt: 'compare this quarter's metrics to the Q2 all-hands snapshot and flag anything that moved more than 15%.' Starch reads the archive and writes the delta narrative for you.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 Company All-Hands — May prep cycle

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (Stripe sync)	412,000
Burn rate (QuickBooks sync, trailing 90 days)	187,000
Runway (calculated)	14
Open pipeline (HubSpot sync)	2,100,000
Deals closed Q2 (HubSpot sync)	340,000
Headcount (Notion OKR database)	152

It's the Tuesday before the May all-hands. Normally this is the day you send four Slack messages asking the same four people for the same four numbers. This time you open Starch and type: 'Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for Friday. Pull MRR and burn from QuickBooks and Stripe. Pull pipeline and closed-won from HubSpot. Pull Q2 OKR progress from Notion. Lead each section with a one-sentence headline.' Four minutes later you have a draft. MRR is $412K, up 18% from Q1. Burn is $187K per month against $2.6M in the bank — 14 months of runway. Pipeline is $2.1M, 6.2x coverage on the Q3 target. Headcount is 152, two ahead of the Q2 plan. The OKR slide shows engineering at 70% on the platform migration, sales at 85% on the bookings target. Starch flags that burn increased 22% quarter-over-quarter and drafts a one-paragraph explanation for the CEO to deliver. You adjust the headcount slide order in natural language, export to PDF, and post the link to the exec Slack channel with the auto-generated bullet summary — all before Wednesday morning. Friday's meeting runs on real numbers. Nobody asks where the data came from.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time from 'all-hands is in one week' to 'deck is drafted and reviewed' — target under 4 hours of active work

Number of data sources required zero manual export (QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot, Notion all synced vs. pasted in)

Action items from the all-hands that have a named owner and due date captured within 24 hours of the meeting

Deck version count — how many rounds of 'can you update the burn slide' you send after initial draft

Time the CEO spends on deck prep vs. on the content itself

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Slides + manual data pulls

You can build a beautiful deck, but every number has to come from someone or somewhere manually — Starch replaces the three-hour Wednesday night update cycle, not the slide format itself.

Notion as the all-hands doc (no deck)

Notion is great for async updates but doesn't generate a presenter-ready deck or pull live financial data; Starch connects to your Notion databases and builds on top of them rather than replacing them.

A BI tool (Looker, Metabase, Tableau)

BI tools give you dashboards but not a narrative deck; they require a data analyst to maintain and can't draft the CEO's opening remarks or archive action items.

Gamma or Beautiful.ai

These tools make slides look good from a prompt, but they don't have live connections to your QuickBooks, HubSpot, or Notion data — you still paste the numbers in by hand.

Hiring a chief of staff coordinator or EA

A coordinator adds capacity but still depends on you knowing where all the data lives; Starch makes the data accessible to anyone who can describe what they need in plain language.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, investor reporting, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch actually pull current financial data from QuickBooks, or do I have to export it myself?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries are all available directly. One honest note: QuickBooks report views like the formatted P&L and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable while an upstream fix is in progress, but entity-level data syncs normally. For most all-hands decks — burn rate, vendor spend, payment timing — that's everything you need.

What if one of my data sources doesn't have an API? For example, our OKR tracker is a custom spreadsheet.

If it lives in Google Sheets, Starch can connect to it from the integration catalog and query it live when the deck runs. If it's a web-based tool Starch doesn't have a direct connector for, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API required. Connect the spreadsheet from Starch's integration catalog or describe the web source and Starch will reach it.

How does this handle HubSpot pipeline data? Our deals are in multiple stages and owned by different reps.

Starch syncs your HubSpot contacts, companies, deals, and deal owners on a schedule, including deal stage and ownership. When you build your all-hands pipeline slide, you can describe exactly how you want it sliced — by stage, by rep, by close-date cohort — and Starch assembles the view. No exporting, no pivot tables.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're careful about what touches our financial data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your company's security policy requires SOC 2 before connecting QuickBooks or Stripe, that's a real constraint worth raising with the team. Starch is transparent about this rather than burying it.

Will this replace the Investor Reporting app, or are these separate?

Separate workflows, shared data sources. The Investor Reporting app is purpose-built for external investor updates — polished narrative, emailed on a cadence, investor-facing tone. The all-hands deck is internal-facing, audience is your 150 employees, and the framing is different. You can run both from the same connected data — QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot all synced once, used by both surfaces.

What about the Presentation Agent — is that available today?

The Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Starch can generate structured draft content — the narrative, the metrics, the section-by-section breakdown — that you drop into your existing slide template. The workflow above works today; the polished one-click deck export is coming.

We use Slack for everything. Can Starch post the deck summary there automatically?

Yes. Starch connects directly to Slack on a schedule and can post to any channel as part of an automation. Describe the trigger — '48 hours before the all-hands calendar event each quarter' — and Starch posts the summary and deck link automatically. Google Calendar is also synced on a schedule, so the automation knows when your all-hands is.