The kickoff meeting we actually run
A walk through the first meeting on day one — the questions we always ask, and the two that catch almost everyone off guard.
If you hire us, the first meeting won’t look like you expect.
There’s no deck. Nobody presents. We’ve already read everything you sent, so we’re not going to ask you to walk us through your own website while we nod. The kickoff is ninety minutes of questions, some of which sound strange out loud, all of which exist because a project skipped one of them once and paid for it later.
Here’s the walkthrough, more or less in order.
“What does this look like when it works?”
Not what are we building. What changes if it succeeds. Sometimes the answer is concrete: more qualified leads, fewer support calls, a sales team that stops apologizing for the website. Other times it takes three follow-ups to get past “we just need a refresh,” because “refresh” is a word people use when the real goal hasn’t been said out loud yet. We keep pulling until we hit something measurable or at least honest. Everything else in the project hangs off this answer.
“Who has to say yes?”
Every project has a shadow org chart. There’s the team in the room, and then there’s the person who isn’t in the room but whose opinion arrives in week six like weather. A founder’s spouse. A board member with strong feelings about blue. The regional VP nobody mentioned. We ask for every yes the project needs, by name, and we ask who can veto after the yeses. This question has saved us more times than any other on the list.
“What’s been tried before, and what happened?”
Almost nobody hires an agency for a problem they just discovered. There’s usually a previous attempt: an old agency, an internal push, a freelancer who vanished. We want the autopsy, not to gossip, but because the last failure is a map of the landmines. If the previous redesign died in stakeholder review, the design isn’t your risk. The review process is.
“What are we not doing?”
We propose the not-doing list right there in the room and let people argue with it. It’s the fastest way to find the assumptions nobody wrote down. Someone always flinches at an item on that list, and that flinch is the sound of scope creep being caught four months early, back when it was still free.
“How do you want to get bad news?”
This is the first question that surprises people. There’s usually a pause, then a laugh, then a genuinely useful answer.
Every project generates bad news eventually. A timeline wobbles, a vendor slips, a beloved idea tests badly. The bad news is survivable; the surprise is what does the damage. So we ask up front: call or email? Straight to the top or through your PM? Do you want the problem the moment we smell it, or only once we’ve got two options and a recommendation? People know their own answer immediately, and nobody has ever asked them before.
“What should we know that isn’t in the brief?”
The second surprise, and we ask it at the end on purpose, once the room has warmed up. The brief is the official story. This question is for the unofficial one. The merger that might happen. The sacred cow. The real reason the last agency got fired. We’ve had entire projects reshaped by what comes out in the last ten minutes, said quietly, half as a joke.
The joke is always the truth.
We listen hardest right there.
What we don’t ask
We don’t ask what websites you like. Taste tourism produces mood boards, not strategy, and what a CFO likes on a Tuesday is not a foundation to build a brand on. We also don’t ask you to describe your brand in three adjectives. Every company on earth picks “innovative,” “authentic,” and “trusted,” which tells us exactly nothing except that the question is broken.
What you like matters less than what you need to be true. Our job is to figure out the second one, even when it argues with the first.
Ninety minutes, one page of notes that actually matter, and usually one sentence somebody says that ends up defining the whole engagement. We’ve learned we can’t predict which sentence. We can only build a room where it’s safe to say it.
That’s the real work of day one. The rest of the project is just keeping the promises the questions made.
