Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as Professional Services Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Professional Services Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every quarter you spend a Thursday night pulling slides together from three different places: utilization numbers you half-remember, client wins buried in a HubSpot note, financials you're reconstructing from a QuickBooks export, and a headcount slide that's already out of date. You're running a 12-person shop, not a 200-person firm with a chief of staff and a comms team. Nobody owns the all-hands deck. It falls to you, the week is already full, and the result is a presentation that feels cobbled together because it is. Your team deserves better, and you deserve to spend that Thursday doing billable work.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Professional Services Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured all-hands deck built automatically from your live HubSpot pipeline, Stripe revenue, and Plaid cash data — no manual slide assembly, no copy-paste from five tabs

A repeatable quarterly template that pulls utilization trends, client wins, retainer status, and headcount into a consistent narrative your team can actually follow

An archive of past all-hands decks searchable by topic, so when someone asks 'what did we say about hiring last quarter?' you can find it in seconds

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 Stripe and Plaid data on a schedule so revenue and cash numbers are current when the deck builds. HubSpot deals and pipeline data are connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the presentation runs. Notion pages (meeting notes, project context) sync on a schedule. The finished deck is archived into Knowledge Management for future search.

Prompts to copy

Build me a 12-slide all-hands deck for Q2 2026. Include: revenue vs. target from Stripe, cash position from Plaid, pipeline summary from HubSpot deals closing this quarter, utilization rate estimate based on active projects, top 3 client wins from this quarter's closed HubSpot deals, 2 risks or open issues I'll add manually, and a 90-day priorities slide. Tone is direct and honest — this is an internal team meeting, not an investor pitch.

Summarize our Q2 financial performance in 3 bullet points: MRR, cash runway, and largest revenue change vs. Q1. Pull from Stripe and Plaid. Write it at a level my project managers can understand, not my accountant.

Archive this all-hands deck under 'Q2 2026 All-Hands' in our Knowledge Management wiki and tag it with: quarterly, internal-comms, financials, headcount, pipeline.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid as scheduled-sync providers in Starch — these update automatically so your revenue and cash balance are always current when you build the deck.

2 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries your deals, pipeline stage, and close dates live each time the all-hands deck runs, so the pipeline slide reflects this week's reality, not last week's export.

3 Connect Notion from Starch's scheduled-sync providers so any project notes, capacity plans, or meeting context you've written there are available to Starch when it drafts the narrative.

4 Open the Investor Reporting app to generate your financial narrative section first — burn rate, MRR, cash runway — so you have clean numbers to feed into the all-hands. Even though this app is designed for investors, the financial summary it produces is exactly what your team needs to hear too.

5 Open Presentation Agent and type your all-hands brief in plain language: slide count, sections you want, tone, anything you want to call out manually (a personnel change, a difficult client situation). Starch builds the draft in minutes.

6 Review the pipeline slide — HubSpot data comes in live, but you know which deals are real and which are stale. Annotate directly in the deck or tell Starch 'remove the Acme deal, it's dead' and it adjusts.

7 Check the financial slide against your own memory. If a number looks off, ask Starch to show you the underlying Stripe or Plaid data so you can verify before the meeting.

8 Add your 90-day priorities slide manually or dictate it: 'Add a slide listing these three priorities for Q3: hire one senior consultant, close two new retainers, and launch the new SOW template.' Starch formats it consistently with the rest of the deck.

9 Export to PowerPoint or a shareable link depending on how your team prefers to view decks. If you present on a big screen, the shareable link is cleaner.

10 After the all-hands, use Starch's Knowledge Management app to archive the deck and tag it by quarter, topic areas, and key decisions. Next time someone asks 'what was our utilization in Q2?' the answer is one search away instead of a Slack message to you.

11 Set a recurring reminder in Starch each quarter: 'Pull updated Stripe, Plaid, and HubSpot data and draft the all-hands deck skeleton one week before the meeting.' You show up to review a draft, not a blank slide.

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 — June 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (Stripe)	87,400
Cash on hand (Plaid)	312,000
Open pipeline — deals closing Q3 (HubSpot)	240,000
Utilization rate — billable hours / available hours	74
Retainers up for renewal in 60 days	3

It's the Tuesday before your quarterly all-hands. In previous years you'd cancel two client calls to build this deck. This time you open Starch and type: 'Build me a 12-slide all-hands for Q2 2026 — revenue, cash, pipeline, utilization, client wins, two open risks, and 90-day priorities. Tone is honest and direct.' Starch pulls $87,400 MRR from Stripe, $312,000 cash from Plaid, and your open HubSpot pipeline of $240,000 closing in Q3. It flags that three retainers — Meridian Group, Cornerstone Advisory, and the Harwell account — are up for renewal in the next 60 days, pulling that from HubSpot deal dates. Utilization came in at 74% for the quarter, which you know is slightly soft; Starch surfaces it without editorializing and you add a two-sentence comment in the risk slide. The whole draft took 8 minutes to generate. You spent 25 minutes reviewing and editing. The team got the clearest all-hands deck they've seen, and you didn't cancel anything to build it.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Billable utilization rate (billable hours / available hours, by consultant and by month)

Revenue vs. target — MRR or project revenue against the quarterly plan

Pipeline coverage ratio — open weighted pipeline vs. next quarter's revenue target

Retainer renewal rate — percentage of retainers renewed on time, no gap in engagement

Deck-to-meeting prep time — hours spent building the all-hands vs. prior quarter

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual data pull

Free and familiar, but every slide is a manual copy-paste job from HubSpot, QuickBooks, and Stripe exports — the process takes half a day and the numbers are already stale by the time you present.

Beautiful.ai or Canva

Makes the design look better faster, but has no connection to your actual data — you still spend Thursday pulling numbers manually and pasting them in.

Kantata / Deltek / Projector

Purpose-built for professional services reporting, but priced for 200-person firms, takes a quarter to implement, and requires dedicated admin time your 12-person team doesn't have.

Notion + manual assembly

Works well as a knowledge base and your team probably already uses it, but Notion doesn't generate slides, doesn't connect to Stripe or HubSpot, and the all-hands still ends up as a Google Slides doc someone builds by hand.

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

We use HubSpot for pipeline but our financials are in QuickBooks, not Stripe or Plaid. Does this work?

Yes. Starch connects directly to QuickBooks as a scheduled-sync provider — it syncs invoices, bills, payments, and vendors on a schedule. One honest note: QuickBooks report views like the P&L summary are temporarily disabled while an upstream connector fix is in progress, but entity-level data (invoices, payments, vendor records) syncs normally. If you need a full P&L narrative in the deck, you can pull the underlying invoice and payment data and have Starch calculate it directly, or connect Plaid alongside QuickBooks for cash position.

Presentation Agent is listed as 'currently in development.' How do I build the deck today?

Fair question. Presentation Agent is in beta and you can request early access. While you wait, Starch can generate a structured narrative outline and all the financial summaries through the Investor Reporting app and Knowledge Management — you'd paste that content into your existing slide template. It's more manual than a one-click deck build, but the data assembly and narrative drafting are still handled by Starch. Request beta access for Presentation Agent and you'll be first in line when it launches.

We track utilization in Harvest and capacity in Float. Can Starch pull from those?

Harvest and Float are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, and the agent can query them live when your all-hands deck runs. You'd connect them from the integration catalog in Starch, then tell the agent what utilization calculation you want — for example, 'pull billable hours from Harvest for Q2, divide by available hours from Float, and show me utilization by consultant.' If the integration catalog connection doesn't cover every field you need, Starch can also automate through your browser — no API required — to pull data from either platform's web interface.

Is our financial data stored by Starch? I'm cautious about syncing Plaid and Stripe to a third-party tool.

Starch stores scheduled-sync data in its own database to power your apps and dashboards. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified, which is worth knowing if your clients have strict data handling requirements. If that's a blocker, the live-query approach — where Starch queries your tools when the app runs but doesn't maintain a persistent copy — is worth discussing with the Starch team as an alternative configuration for sensitive data.

Can this actually replace the manual effort, or do I still need to write the narrative myself?

Starch drafts the narrative — the financial summary, the pipeline commentary, the wins section — based on your live data and what you tell it to say. You'll still spend 20-30 minutes reviewing it, adjusting for context only you have (a client relationship that's complicated, a hire that's in progress but not announced), and adding the qualitative color. Think of it as showing up to edit a well-researched draft instead of starting from a blank slide. The time savings are real; the judgment calls are still yours.