Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a team retrospective as Event Agency Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Event Agency Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

After every site visit, vendor call, or internal planning huddle, your notes live in three places at once: a voice memo on your phone, a half-finished Google Doc someone started, and a Slack thread nobody can find a week later. When a new coordinator joins mid-event-season, you spend two hours in a Zoom call repeating everything you already said to the last person. Retrospectives — if they happen at all — are a 30-minute chat where the same five complaints surface and nobody tracks whether anything changed before the next event. You lose institutional knowledge every time a freelancer offboards.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Event Agency Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured post-event retrospective workflow that automatically captures what was said, extracts action items by person, and archives them in searchable meeting history — so 'didn't we fix this last spring?' has an actual answer

A living team wiki where vendor lessons, venue notes, run-of-show improvements, and onboarding paths for new coordinators are auto-organized and flagged when they go stale

A task layer that turns retrospective action items into tracked, prioritized to-dos assigned to the right coordinator — not a list that disappears into a shared doc

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

Meeting Notes Knowledge Management Project Management

Data sources & config

Meeting Notes pulls from Google Calendar (Starch connects directly to Google Calendar on a scheduled sync) to pre-populate the event context before each retro. Google Drive is reachable from Starch's integration catalog and queried live so the agent can reference existing run-of-show docs during summarization. Notion is available as a scheduled-sync provider if your team already stores docs there; alternatively, Starch's built-in Knowledge Management app holds everything natively. Project Management is self-contained within Starch — no external connection needed.

Prompts to copy

Transcribe and summarize today's post-event retro call. Extract every action item, who owns it, and any vendor or venue decisions we made. Tag items related to catering, AV, and timeline separately.

Create a Knowledge Management page titled 'Lessons Learned: [Event Name]' and populate it with the decisions and recurring issues from today's retro summary. Link it to our Vendor Notes and Venue database sections.

From the retro summary, create project tasks for each action item. Assign them by name, set due dates based on our next event date, and flag anything that blocks the next contract signature as P1.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Install Meeting Notes from the Starch App Store. Connect Google Calendar so Starch syncs your scheduled retro calls and pre-fills the meeting context — client name, event date, attending coordinators — before the call starts.

2 Run your post-event retrospective as you normally would — Zoom, Google Meet, or a in-person huddle. Meeting Notes transcribes in real time. You talk; it captures.

3 After the call ends, Meeting Notes generates a structured summary: key decisions made, recurring complaints flagged, vendor performance notes, and a raw action-item list. Review it before it goes anywhere.

4 Prompt Starch to extract action items and sort them by owner. For example: 'Pull every action item from today's retro, assign them to the person named, and flag anything due before our next event in six weeks.' Each item becomes a task in Project Management with priority and due date set.

5 Open Knowledge Management and prompt it to create or update the event's Lessons Learned page. Starch auto-categorizes the content — vendor issues under Vendor Notes, timeline problems under Run-of-Show Patterns, client communication wins under Client Playbook.

6 If your team uses Notion for existing documentation, connect Notion from the scheduled-sync integration so Starch can pull and cross-reference existing pages when it writes new ones. No duplication — it reads what's there first.

7 Set a recurring retro template inside Meeting Notes. Define the standing agenda sections that matter to your agency: what broke, what the client noticed, what the vendor got wrong, what the coordinator nailed, what changes before next time. Starch pre-loads this structure for every future retro.

8 After three events, prompt Knowledge Management: 'Show me recurring issues flagged across the last three retrospectives.' Starch surfaces patterns — the same AV vendor cited twice, late linen deliveries from the same supplier — that you'd otherwise only notice when you're already annoyed on-site.

9 When a new coordinator joins mid-season, prompt Knowledge Management: 'Build an onboarding path for a new event coordinator joining a team of four. Include our vendor preferences, standard run-of-show structure, and the three most common client complaints.' Starch assembles it from archived retro notes — not from your memory.

10 Track task completion in Project Management across retro cycles. Prompt it weekly: 'Which action items from the last two retros are still open, and who owns them?' This replaces the follow-up Slack message nobody answers.

11 Before each new event kickoff, prompt Starch: 'What did we learn the last time we worked at this venue or with this catering vendor?' Knowledge Management searches archived retro summaries and surfaces the relevant notes — useful intel before the planning call, not after something goes wrong.

12 Set a stale-content alert inside Knowledge Management for any Lessons Learned page older than 90 days. If your standard operating procedures haven't been touched in a quarter, Starch flags them for review — keeping your wiki accurate instead of a graveyard of outdated notes.

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

Post-Event Retro: Hartley Corporate Dinner, March 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Action items extracted from 47-minute retro call	11
Items assigned to lead coordinator (Dana)	6
Items assigned to freelance AV contact	2
P1 items (blocking next contract)	3
Vendor notes archived to Knowledge Management	4
Minutes to generate full summary + tasks after call	4

The Hartley Corporate Dinner for 180 guests wrapped on a Friday night. Monday morning, your team did the retro on Google Meet — 47 minutes, six people, everyone still a little tired. Meeting Notes had pre-loaded the event name, date, and attendees from Google Calendar. The transcript captured everything, including the part where your lead coordinator Dana said the linen vendor confirmed a 4pm delivery but showed up at 6:15. Starch generated the summary in about four minutes: 11 action items total, six assigned to Dana (update the preferred linen vendor list, draft a new delivery window clause for vendor contracts, revise the day-of timeline to add a 90-minute buffer before doors), two assigned to the AV freelancer (provide cabling specs two weeks out, not the day before), and three flagged P1 because they had to be resolved before the agency could sign the next contract with a returning corporate client. Knowledge Management auto-created a Lessons Learned page for Hartley and filed the linen delivery issue under 'Vendor Reliability — Delivery Windows,' a category that already had two entries from prior events. Six weeks later, when a new coordinator asked about linen vendors, Starch surfaced the Hartley note unprompted.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Action item completion rate per retro cycle (what percentage of retro tasks are closed before the next event)

Recurring issue frequency — how many complaints appear across more than one event retrospective

Time from retro call to documented action items (target: under 10 minutes with Starch)

Onboarding time for new coordinators (measured in hours of founder-led explanation replaced by Knowledge Management search)

Vendor incident recurrence rate — whether documented vendor problems actually decrease after being logged

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Notion + manual meeting notes

Notion stores the docs, but someone still has to write them; action items don't auto-extract, and nothing flags stale pages or surfaces patterns across past events.

Otter.ai or Fireflies for transcription

Good transcription, but the summary lives in a separate tool — you're still manually copying action items into a task tracker and nobody connects last month's retro to this month's vendor complaint.

Aisle Planner or HoneyBook

These tools manage client-facing workflows well but have no retrospective or internal knowledge layer — team learnings stay in your head or a shared Google Doc that nobody updates.

Google Docs + Asana

You can make it work, but there's no connection between the meeting doc, the task tracker, and the knowledge base — three tabs open, three tools to update, and the retro notes are orphaned from everything else within a week.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — meeting notes, knowledge management, project 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 don't run formal retros — just a quick debrief call. Will this still work?

Yes. Meeting Notes captures whatever format you run. If your debrief is 15 minutes and informal, it still transcribes, still extracts decisions and complaints, still creates tasks. You don't need a structured agenda for it to be useful — though Starch can help you build one if you want to get more consistent over time.

We use Notion for all our internal docs. Do we have to move everything into Starch?

No. Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule, so the Knowledge Management app can read and reference your existing Notion pages when it writes new ones. You can keep Notion as your primary doc store and use Starch as the layer that organizes, surfaces, and flags stale content across it.

My team is mostly freelancers who join for one event and leave. How does this help with that turnover?

That's exactly what Knowledge Management is built for. Instead of your institutional knowledge walking out the door with every freelancer, Starch archives retro summaries and vendor notes in a searchable knowledge base. New freelancers get an onboarding path built from your actual past events — not a generic checklist you wrote once and forgot to update.

Is my meeting transcript data stored securely? We sometimes discuss client budgets and vendor disputes on these calls.

Starch stores your meeting data in its database. One honest limit to name: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If you're handling enterprise clients with strict data compliance requirements, that's worth knowing upfront. For most independent event agencies, this isn't a blocker — but it's a real answer, not a dodge.

Can Starch pull in our post-event client survey responses to include in the retro summary?

If your surveys come in through a tool like Google Forms or Typeform that's web-accessible, Starch can automate reading and pulling those responses through browser automation — no API needed. You'd prompt it: 'Pull the client feedback form responses for the Hartley event and add a summary to the retro notes.' If survey data lives in a connected tool like Airtable or Google Sheets, connect it from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when you run the retro workflow.

We tried project management tools before and nobody used them after week two. Why would this be different?

Fair question. The difference with Starch's Project Management app is that tasks are created by prompting — 'create a task for Dana to update the vendor list, P1, due in two weeks' — instead of someone manually logging into a tracker and filling out fields. The friction of task creation is why trackers die. When the retro summary auto-generates the tasks, they actually exist in the system before anyone has to remember to add them.