Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write an exec brief 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

Writing an exec brief as chief of staff means pulling from six different places before you've typed a single sentence. You're tabbing between HubSpot to see if that enterprise deal actually closed, QuickBooks to confirm the burn number the CEO wants to cite, Notion for the strategic context doc someone updated three weeks ago, and your own inbox for the latest status emails from functional leads. Then you draft the brief in Google Docs, paste in numbers manually, hope nothing changed since you pulled it, and send it knowing the CFO will reply with a correction inside ten minutes. Every exec brief is a two-hour tax on the one person who already holds too many threads.

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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 connected brief-generation workflow that pulls live data from HubSpot, QuickBooks, Gmail, Notion, and Google Calendar into a single structured output — so the numbers in your brief match the numbers in your systems at the moment you send it

A repeatable template you describe once and reuse every cycle: weekly ops brief, pre-board snapshot, CEO pre-meeting pack — each with its own source logic and output format

An email-ready draft the CEO can read in three minutes, with key decisions, open items, and metric deltas already formatted — not a data dump you still have to write on top of

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

Knowledge Management CRM

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule (contacts, companies, deals, owners) and your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, payments, vendor bills, journal entries) so numbers are never stale when the brief runs. Gmail and Google Calendar are synced directly by Starch on a schedule, feeding email thread context and this week's meeting list into each brief. Notion is synced by Starch on a schedule, giving the agent access to your strategic project docs, OKR pages, and team wikis. Slack is available from Starch's integration catalog and queried live to deliver brief drafts as messages.

Prompts to copy

Build me a weekly exec brief generator that pulls open deals and pipeline movement from HubSpot, current cash balance and burn rate from QuickBooks, any strategic project updates from Notion, and this week's CEO calendar from Google Calendar. Format the output as a structured brief: a two-sentence company pulse, key metrics with week-over-week deltas, deals that moved or stalled, decisions needed this week, and a list of open action items from last week's meetings.

Every Monday at 7am, draft a CEO pre-meeting brief for each external meeting on the calendar this week. For each meeting, pull any prior email threads with that contact from Gmail, check if they're a HubSpot contact and include deal stage, and surface any relevant Notion pages tagged with their company name. Send me a Slack message with the draft when it's ready.

Set up an inbox triage rule: any email with the subject line containing 'update', 'status', or 'brief' from a direct report should be summarized in one sentence and appended to today's running exec brief draft in Notion.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot and QuickBooks as scheduled-sync providers. Starch will pull deal pipeline, contact data, burn rate, invoices, and cash position on a recurring schedule so your brief always reflects current numbers, not last week's export.

2 Connect Gmail and Google Calendar. Starch syncs your inbox and calendar directly, so the brief generator can surface relevant email threads for each meeting and pull this week's external commitments automatically.

3 Connect Notion. Starch syncs your Notion pages and databases so the agent can read strategic project docs, OKR trackers, and any context pages your team maintains — without you having to copy-paste them in.

4 Open the Email Triage app (founder-inbox in the App Store) and configure it to flag status updates, functional lead check-ins, and any message with an open decision. These become source material for the brief.

5 Describe your exec brief template in natural language. Tell Starch the sections you want — company pulse, key metrics with deltas, pipeline moves, decisions needed, action items — and specify the audience (CEO-ready, board-ready, or internal ops team).

6 Set the brief to run on a schedule — Monday morning pre-standup, Friday afternoon EOW summary, or 48 hours before every board meeting. Starch assembles the brief from live data each time it runs.

7 For meeting-specific pre-briefs, describe the logic once: pull Gmail threads with the contact, check HubSpot for deal stage and history, surface any Notion pages tagged with their company, and format it as a one-page meeting prep note.

8 Review the first brief output. Iterate by telling Starch what to change: 'drop the vendor payments section, add a headcount line from last payroll run, and lead with pipeline instead of cash.' The agent updates the template, not just the output.

9 Set up a Slack delivery automation: when the brief is ready, Starch posts it to a private channel or DMs the CEO directly. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the automation fires.

10 After three or four cycles, fork the template for different audiences. The board version pulls deeper QuickBooks detail and includes a cash runway chart; the CEO daily version is five bullets and a decisions box; the functional-lead version filters to their team's metrics only.

11 Use the Knowledge Management app to archive every completed brief as a Notion page. When someone asks 'what did we say about the enterprise segment in February?' you can search the brief history and find the exact language used.

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

Q2 Kickoff Exec Brief — April 7, 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Pipeline added (HubSpot, week of Mar 31)	340,000
Deals closed-won (HubSpot, Q1 final)	1,120,000
Cash balance (QuickBooks, as of Apr 4)	2,870,000
Monthly burn (QuickBooks, Mar actuals)	310,000
Runway at current burn	9
Open vendor invoices due this week	47,200

It's 6:45am Monday. The CEO has a board pre-call at 9am and needs a brief in the next hour. Last quarter the chief of staff would have spent 90 minutes pulling this by hand. This time, Starch ran the brief at 7am automatically. It pulled $1.12M in Q1 closed-won from HubSpot, confirmed $2.87M cash and $310K March burn from QuickBooks (9 months runway), flagged $47.2K in vendor invoices due this week, and surfaced two deals that moved backward in stage last week — the Meridian Group opportunity dropped from 'Proposal' to 'Needs Analysis' and Thornfield SaaS went dark for 18 days. The Gmail sync caught a Friday afternoon email from the VP of Sales flagging both; the brief quoted it directly. The CEO walked into the pre-call having read a two-page document instead of receiving a five-tab spreadsheet at 8:58am.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time from trigger to CEO-ready brief (target: under 5 minutes of human editing)

Data freshness at brief generation time — are HubSpot deals, QuickBooks cash, and Notion docs all synced within the last 24 hours?

Number of manual copy-paste steps required per brief cycle (baseline vs. after Starch setup)

CEO or board correction rate — how often does a stakeholder respond with a number correction that reveals the brief had stale data

Action item capture rate — what percentage of decisions and next steps from exec meetings make it into the brief vs. falling through

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Docs + manual tab-switching

You own the format completely, but every number is a manual pull — one stale figure and the CFO loses trust in the whole doc.

Notion AI

Good for summarizing content already in Notion, but it can't reach your HubSpot pipeline or QuickBooks actuals, so the financial and sales sections still require manual input.

ChatGPT or Claude with copy-pasted data

Fast once you've gathered the data, but gathering the data is the 90-minute problem — pasting doesn't fix the collection step.

A BI tool (Looker, Metabase, Tableau)

Excellent for structured metric dashboards, but they don't write prose, don't read your inbox for qualitative context, and require an analyst to maintain the data models.

Your previous analyst's spreadsheet

Already tuned to your business, but it breaks every time a HubSpot field changes, doesn't pull Gmail context, and leaves with the analyst when they go.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — founder inbox, knowledge management, crm 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

Will the brief pull QuickBooks P&L report views directly?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries all sync normally. QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable pending an upstream fix. For a brief that needs a P&L summary, Starch assembles it from the underlying transaction and journal entry data rather than pulling the prebuilt report.

My CEO uses Outlook, not Gmail. Does that break anything?

No. Starch syncs Outlook messages, calendars, contacts, and events on a schedule — the same way it handles Gmail. The meeting prep logic and inbox triage work identically; just connect Outlook instead of Gmail during setup.

Can I build different brief templates for different audiences — board vs. CEO vs. functional lead?

Yes, and this is one of the most common patterns. Describe each template separately: the board version might go deeper on runway and include a fundraising pipeline section; the CEO daily version might be five bullets and a decisions box; the sales lead version filters to HubSpot pipeline only. You can run all three from the same connected data, on different schedules, delivered to different Slack channels.

What if a functional lead's update lives in a Google Doc or a Slack message, not in Notion?

For Google Docs, Starch can reach Google Drive through its integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the brief runs. For Slack updates, connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog and the agent can pull channel messages or DMs as part of the brief assembly. If a key update lives in a tool that isn't in the catalog, Starch can automate the browser-reachable version of it — no API required.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm pulling compensation data and board-level financials.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your security review requires certification before you can connect QuickBooks or HubSpot in a production environment, that's a real constraint — worth flagging to your IT or compliance team upfront.

How long does the brief take to generate once it's set up?

The scheduled-sync providers (HubSpot, QuickBooks, Notion, Gmail, Google Calendar) keep their data current in Starch's database throughout the day. When the brief runs, Starch is reading from already-synced data, not making live API calls in real time — so generation is fast. The slower step is the first sync after you connect a new provider, which can take a few minutes depending on data volume.