Customer Support

How to run customer qbrs as Event Agency Founders

Customer SupportFor Event Agency Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You run a corporate events agency where QBRs with your best clients should feel like a strategic conversation, but they end up being a scramble. You're pulling invoice totals from HoneyBook or Dubsado, copying headcount and spend numbers from a shared Google Drive spreadsheet into a slide deck you built last quarter, and hunting through Gmail threads to reconstruct what was promised versus what was delivered. By the time the call starts you've spent four hours on prep that should have taken forty minutes. There's no single place that shows a client's full event history, outstanding invoices, delivery notes, and next-year pipeline. You go into the room hoping they don't ask a question you can't answer off the top of your head.

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Customer SupportFor Event Agency Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A per-client QBR package that pulls together event history, invoice totals, and open action items from your existing tools — generated in minutes, not hours.

A meeting notes capture that transcribes the QBR in real time, extracts action items, and archives every commitment in a searchable record tied to that client.

A slide deck auto-built from your actual client data so you walk into every QBR with numbers you trust and a presentation that looks like your brand.

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

CRM Meeting Notes Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so email threads with each client and vendor are available inside the CRM. Connect Google Calendar from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to pull confirmed event dates into your client view. Google Drive is reachable through Starch's integration catalog for pulling timeline and budget documents. HoneyBook and Dubsado are automatable through your browser — no API needed — so Starch can pull invoice and proposal status directly from those platforms.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM view for QBR prep: for each client, show total events run in the last 12 months, total invoiced, total paid, any open invoices, last contact date, and a notes field for what we committed to at the last QBR.

After every client QBR call, transcribe the meeting, generate a summary of decisions made, and pull out every action item with an owner and due date. Archive it under the client's name so I can search it later.

Build me a 10-slide QBR deck for Hartwell & Byrne: include our event delivery summary for 2025, a breakdown of spend by event type, three wins we want to highlight, and a proposed event calendar for Q3–Q4 2026.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Install the CRM starter app and tell Starch how your agency pipeline actually works: describe your event stages (inquiry, proposal sent, contract signed, deposit received, event delivered, invoiced, closed), the fields you track for each client, and how you distinguish corporate retainer clients from one-off bookings.

2 Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule, so every thread with a client — venue confirmations, vendor quotes, change-order emails — attaches to the right contact record automatically. No manual tagging.

3 Two weeks before each QBR cycle, open the CRM and ask: 'For each retainer client, show me events delivered in the last 12 months, total invoiced, any open invoices, and the last date we had a substantive conversation.' Starch queries your Gmail history and returns the list.

4 For clients using HoneyBook or Dubsado, Starch automates those sites through your browser to pull current invoice status, proposal stage, and contract sign dates — so your CRM view reflects live numbers, not whatever you last copied over.

5 Open Presentation Agent and describe the deck you need for each client: event count, spend breakdown by event type, delivery highlights, and a proposed calendar for the next two quarters. Starch builds the slides from the data already in your CRM.

6 Review the draft deck, swap in your brand template if needed, and export to PDF or a shareable link. The whole build takes under ten minutes per client.

7 On the day of the QBR, open Meeting Notes. It transcribes the conversation in real time so you're not splitting attention between listening and writing.

8 When the call ends, Meeting Notes generates a summary: decisions made, risks named, commitments given on both sides. Action items are extracted with owner and due date.

9 That summary gets archived under the client's record in the CRM. Next quarter when you're prepping the follow-up QBR, you search for it and see exactly what was promised at the last one.

10 After the QBR, update the client's CRM record with next year's projected event count and any scope changes. Ask Starch: 'Which of my retainer clients haven't confirmed a Q3 event yet?' — and follow up before the pipeline gap becomes a revenue problem.

11 At the end of each QBR cycle, ask Starch to generate a summary across all clients: total events delivered YTD, total revenue collected, average events per retainer client, and which clients are up for renewal in the next 90 days.

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

Q1 2026 QBR Cycle — Hartwell & Byrne Corporate Events

Sample numbers from a real run

Events delivered (Q1–Q4 2025)	7
Total invoiced (2025)	184,500
Total collected	171,200
Open invoice (Jan 2026 holiday event final payment)	13,300
Proposed 2026 contract value	210,000

Hartwell & Byrne is your largest retainer client — seven events last year ranging from a 60-person offsite in March to a 300-person company anniversary in November. Before Starch, QBR prep meant opening four different tabs: HoneyBook for invoice status, a Google Drive folder for event recaps, Gmail for the thread where their procurement lead pushed back on the November AV overage, and last year's QBR deck to remember what you promised. This time, the CRM view showed all seven events with dates, headcount, billed amounts, and a flag on the $13,300 outstanding from January. Starch automated HoneyBook through the browser to confirm that invoice was still open, not just forgotten in a spreadsheet. Presentation Agent built a 10-slide deck in eight minutes: delivery summary, spend breakdown by event type (team offsites vs. client entertainment vs. all-hands), three wins including the November event NPS score, and a proposed 2026 calendar anchored around their fiscal quarter-end dates. The QBR ran 45 minutes. Meeting Notes captured it, extracted four action items — including their request for a venue proposal for a 150-person Q3 offsite in Austin — and archived everything under Hartwell & Byrne in the CRM. When their procurement lead emailed three days later asking what was agreed, you sent them the summary in thirty seconds.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

QBR prep time per client (target: under 30 minutes from data pull to finalized deck)

Retainer renewal rate at QBR — percentage of annual retainer clients who confirm next-year scope during or within two weeks of the QBR

Open invoice value at QBR time — how much is outstanding per client before the conversation starts

Action item close rate — percentage of QBR commitments resolved within the agreed timeframe, tracked in Meeting Notes archives

Revenue per retainer client YoY — are accounts growing, flat, or shrinking

Comparison

What this replaces

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

HoneyBook or Dubsado alone

Great for proposals and contracts, but neither gives you a cross-client QBR view or generates meeting summaries — you're still manually compiling data before every call.

Google Slides + Sheets built by hand

Costs two to four hours per client per quarter to update, is always slightly out of date, and breaks the moment a colleague edits a linked cell.

Cvent or Social Tables

Enterprise platforms priced for large agencies with operations teams — not practical for a small agency that doesn't need a dedicated admin to configure them.

Notion as a client wiki

Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule and can pull from it, but Notion alone won't generate a slide deck, transcribe your QBR, or query Gmail threads automatically.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, meeting notes, presentation agent 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

My clients are in HoneyBook and my finances are in QuickBooks. Can Starch pull from both?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, payments, and vendors are available inside your CRM and QBR prep views. For HoneyBook, Starch automates it through your browser since HoneyBook doesn't publish a public API. You get invoice status and proposal data pulled directly from the platform, no copy-paste required.

Is the Presentation Agent 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 generate a structured written QBR summary from your CRM data that you can drop into your existing slide template in a few minutes.

My client's event history lives across two or three different email threads, a Google Drive folder, and a shared HoneyBook account. Can Starch actually make sense of all that?

Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule and can connect Google Drive from its integration catalog so the agent queries documents live. For HoneyBook, it uses browser automation to pull status data. You describe to Starch how to assemble the per-client view — which fields matter, what the hierarchy is — and the CRM is built around your actual structure, not a generic template.

Will Meeting Notes work on a Zoom or Google Meet call?

Zoom and Google Meet are both reachable through Starch's integration catalog. Meeting Notes is designed for exactly this — real-time transcription during the call, summary and action item extraction when it ends. You won't need to record, download, and upload a file manually.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My corporate clients ask about this.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If a client's security review requires it, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap — but it's not accurate to say it exists right now, and we'd rather you know that than find out during a procurement review.

I have eight retainer clients. Can I run QBR prep for all of them at once, or is this one-at-a-time?

You can ask Starch for a cross-client view — 'show me QBR prep data for all active retainer clients' — and get a summary table across the whole book of business. From there you can drill into any individual client to build their specific deck and agenda.