The kickoff call checklist for every new client
Forty minutes, nine questions, and a project that starts with both sides knowing who decides, what done looks like and when the money moves.
The kickoff call is the cheapest meeting in the whole project and the one most studios improvise. Treated as a friendly hello, it skips the questions that matter. Run as a structured forty minutes with nine questions, it catches most of what would otherwise send a project sideways. Book it inside both sides’ working day, never at the edge of someone’s evening, and with a client abroad the time zone meeting planner shows which hours overlap.
The nine questions
- Who signs off on each deliverable, by name?
- Who else will see the work before that person does?
- What does the finished project let you do that you cannot do today?
- What has already been tried, and what did you dislike about it?
- Which dates are real deadlines, and which are preferences?
- How do you prefer feedback to arrive: a call, a document, comments on the file?
- Who sends us assets, and when?
- Who receives the invoices, and does their process need a purchase order number?
- What would make you describe this project as a disappointment?
The two that matter most
Question one prevents the most expensive failure in client work: discovering in week six that the person giving feedback is not the person who decides. Question nine sounds gloomy, but it is where clients tell you the truth. “If it looks like the last agency’s work” or “if it slips past the trade show” are the real constraints, and they rarely appear in the brief. Question eight pays off at the other end of the project: an invoice that explains itself gets paid without a purchase-order chase.
The brief tells you what the client wants. The kickoff call tells you what they are afraid of. Plan around the second one.
Write it down the same day
The answers go into a one-page summary that is sent back to the client within a few hours, with a line at the top: “Reply if any of this is wrong.” Most clients will not reply, which is the point. From then on it is the shared memory of the project, and when a new stakeholder appears in week four, it is the first thing they read. It also fills most of a scope of work template: the deliverables, the approver and the dates are already agreed.
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