Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as Event Agency Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Event Agency Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter — or before a big agency review with a hotel group, venue partner, or key corporate client — you stare at a patchwork of tabs: a Google Slides deck you're copying last year's slide into, a HoneyBook dashboard with revenue numbers, a Dubsado invoice list you're manually totaling, and three separate Gmail threads where you asked team leads what they worked on this quarter. Your all-hands isn't investor-facing, but it is the one meeting where your coordinators, vendor managers, and part-time ops people get context on how the agency is actually doing. Building that deck takes you four to six hours you don't have, and it's usually half-done the night before.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Event Agency Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A standing all-hands deck that pulls your live event pipeline, revenue-to-date, and team wins into a structured slide format — built from a description, not a blank slide

A searchable archive of every all-hands summary, decision made, and action item assigned, so 'we talked about this last quarter' has an actual answer

A repeatable prep workflow where Starch drafts the narrative sections — what we closed, what's in flight, what's slipping — before you ever open a slide tool

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 Meeting Notes Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Connect Gmail from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query email threads live when pulling vendor status context. Connect Google Calendar — Starch syncs your calendar data on a schedule — to surface which events are coming up in the next 60 days for the pipeline slides. Connect Notion — Starch syncs your Notion pages on a schedule — so the all-hands archive and team wiki stay current and searchable. Any vendor portals or event management tools that don't have a direct connection (Aisle Planner, Social Tables, HoneyBook) are reachable through browser automation — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build a 12-slide quarterly all-hands deck for a 9-person event agency. Slide 1: agency overview and quarter theme. Slides 2–4: revenue closed this quarter, top three events we executed, and one near-miss we learned from. Slides 5–7: pipeline — what's in proposal stage, what's contracted but not yet deposited, what's at risk. Slides 8–9: team shoutouts and a vendor performance recap. Slides 10–11: next quarter priorities and open headcount or contractor needs. Slide 12: Q&A placeholder. Tone is direct and honest — this is internal, not a pitch.

Capture today's all-hands meeting, generate a summary with the three decisions we made, extract every action item and who owns it, and save it to the agency wiki under 'All-Hands Archive > Q2 2026'.

Search our all-hands archive and summarize every action item from the last three all-hands meetings that was assigned to ops but hasn't been marked complete.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Two days before your all-hands, open Starch and type a prompt describing the deck you need — number of slides, sections, tone, and what quarter it covers. Presentation Agent drafts the full structure in minutes, not hours.

2 Review the drafted slide outline. Swap in your actual revenue number from HoneyBook or Dubsado (queried live from Starch's integration catalog if your tool is connected, or paste it in manually for a first run).

3 For the pipeline section, ask Starch to pull upcoming contracted events from Google Calendar — Starch syncs your calendar data on a schedule — and format them into a table by event date, client name, and deposit status.

4 Ask Starch to search your Gmail threads (connected live from Starch's integration catalog) for any vendor emails flagged as unresolved in the last 30 days, and add a one-line vendor risk summary to the relevant slide.

5 For the 'team wins' slide, prompt Starch to pull notes from your last three weekly check-in meetings out of the Meeting Notes archive and extract any coordinator shoutouts or client compliments mentioned.

6 Review every slide in the Presentation Agent interface. Adjust narrative tone, add photos or mood board images manually, and mark the deck ready to share.

7 Export the deck as a PDF or shareable link and drop it in Slack or email it to the team 24 hours before the meeting — first time you've done that consistently.

8 Run your all-hands. Starch's Meeting Notes app joins or captures the session, transcribes it in real time, and generates a post-meeting summary with key decisions and action items.

9 After the meeting, review the auto-extracted action items. Confirm owners and due dates, then let Starch save the full summary to your Notion wiki — synced on a schedule — under the All-Hands Archive.

10 Before the next quarter's all-hands, ask Starch to search the archive for all open action items from prior all-hands meetings. Use that list as the 'accountability' slide — what we said we'd do, what we actually did.

11 Over time, the Knowledge Management app becomes the institutional memory for your agency: new coordinators can search 'how do we handle vendor payment disputes' and get an answer from past all-hands notes instead of asking 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 All-Hands — 7-person agency, June prep

Sample numbers from a real run

Revenue closed Q2 (5 events executed)	187,000
Pipeline — contracted, deposit pending (3 events)	94,000
Pipeline — proposals out, not yet signed (4 events)	136,000
Vendor invoices outstanding (AV, florals, catering)	28,400
Q3 forecast if all contracted events close	310,000

It's June 9th, two days before your quarterly all-hands. You type into Starch: 'Build a 12-slide all-hands deck for Q2 2026. We executed 5 events totaling $187K in revenue, have 3 contracted events depositing in July worth $94K, and 4 proposals out worth $136K. Highlight the Meridian Hotel gala as the team win. Flag that our AV vendor for the June 28th conference still hasn't sent the final invoice — $28,400 outstanding.' Presentation Agent returns a full draft in under four minutes. Slides 2–4 have the revenue table, a one-paragraph Meridian recap, and a bullet on what you'd do differently on the hotel room-block negotiation. The pipeline slide shows the three contracted events pulled from Google Calendar — Starch synced your calendar that morning — organized by date with a column for deposit status. You add the vendor risk flag to slide 9 manually, export as a PDF, and drop it in Slack by 5pm — a day early. The all-hands runs 40 minutes. Meeting Notes captures it, and the post-meeting summary shows four action items: ops lead to chase the AV invoice by Friday, coordinator to send Q3 onboarding checklist to the new hire, you to decide on the Chicago expansion by July 15th, and everyone to review the updated vendor scoring rubric before the next check-in. All four are saved to Notion automatically.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Revenue closed per quarter vs. same quarter prior year

Proposal-to-signed-contract conversion rate across the active pipeline

Number of events in execution vs. agency coordinator capacity

Outstanding vendor invoices as a percentage of quarterly revenue

Action item completion rate from prior all-hands to current all-hands

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides built manually each quarter

Full design control, but you spend four-plus hours copying last quarter's deck and hunting down numbers from three different tabs — every single time.

Notion meeting notes + manual action item tracking in a shared doc

Works fine for a two-person team, but action items fall through as the team grows and no one is responsible for the archive being searchable six months later.

Loom quarterly update video instead of a deck

Low prep time and personal, but your coordinators can't search a Loom for 'what did we decide about the vendor scoring rubric in March' — and you lose the accountability layer entirely.

Canva for deck design

Beautiful templates, but Canva doesn't know your pipeline numbers, can't pull from your calendar, and won't generate the narrative text — you still have to write everything yourself.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, meeting notes, 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

We use HoneyBook for our pipeline — can Starch actually pull numbers from it?

HoneyBook is reachable through Starch's integration catalog for live queries if the connector is available, or through browser automation — no API needed — for portals you can log into and navigate. For a first all-hands, many agency founders paste their revenue and pipeline numbers directly into the prompt; Starch builds the deck around whatever data you give it. As you use it more, you can wire the live connection so the pull is automatic.

Is the Presentation Agent app available right now?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Starch can draft the full narrative content and structure for your all-hands in the agent interface — you'd paste that into Google Slides or Canva to finish the visual layout.

What happens to the meeting notes if my all-hands is in person, not on a call?

Meeting Notes works best when it can join or capture a recorded session. For in-person all-hands, you can record on your phone and upload, or type a rough notes dump into Starch after the meeting and ask it to extract decisions and action items from that. It's less automatic, but the archive and action item extraction still work.

Will Starch store my agency's client data, revenue numbers, and vendor contacts?

Data you connect through scheduled-sync providers (like Google Calendar or Notion) is stored in Starch's database and refreshed on a schedule. Data queried live from the integration catalog is not stored in Starch — it's pulled when you run an app and stays in your source tool. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, so if your agency handles contracts with enterprise clients who have strict vendor security requirements, that's worth knowing upfront.

Can I use the same setup for a client-facing event recap deck, not just an internal all-hands?

Yes — you'd write a different prompt describing the audience and what the client needs to see (event timeline, budget actuals vs. estimates, photo highlights, next steps). Presentation Agent and the same Starch workflow handle it. The Meeting Notes archive also means you can pull in exact quotes or decisions from your post-event debrief with the client, which makes the recap feel specific instead of templated.

We don't have consistent data anywhere — our numbers live in spreadsheets and email threads. Can Starch still help?

Yes, and this is actually the most common starting point. Connect Gmail from Starch's integration catalog and Google Sheets through the integration catalog as well — the agent queries both live. You can also paste numbers directly into your prompt. Starch builds the deck around whatever data you give it; the more you connect over time, the less manual the prep becomes. Start with one quarter of manual input to see the output quality, then wire the connections.