Dan Mall and Nick discuss a kickoff strategy where the agency sends a questionnaire and mood boards before the formal meeting. Clients see half the visual direction already done, feel momentum, and buy in immediately. This early alignment makes the rest of the project run smoothly.
That's like the number one thing is actually getting on a call and having clients have confidence early. The sauce is in the beginning and in the mood boards. We send clients a questionnaire initially that gives me just enough. What we've started to do is we started to do pre-mood boarding, then we do the kickoff, and I found clients are like, wow, what a meeting. They've started saying that, whereas before it was like, yeah, that was well run. But now they're like, oh whoa, you've already done half the work. And we're like, yeah, we've actually done half the work. And if we miss I'm not upset, right? It's like, oh, we just had kickoff, we missed, at least we had the conversation. So only 2 days into the project, often I think there's extreme alignment now. It's very rare that there's not alignment. Now, actually, the second part of our projects are smooth coasting. We gotta get it right early, and if we get it right early, everything gets easier.
One of the patterns that I've seen with successful agencies is that you win the project at the very beginning of the project. And I'm not talking about winning the sale. It's when you win the client over. And Nick just said it, they show up to their first meeting and they're like, oh my gosh, we're totally sold. Like, we can't wait to see what you have next, but we already won. They're already bought in.
That's like the number one thing is actually getting on a call and having clients have confidence early. If people have an inkling that we don't know what we're doing or we're not meeting their expectations, even if we do good work, it's, it's setting ourselves up for failure.
