A good client meeting is decided before anyone joins the call. Prepare the materials, send the agenda, and schedule the next meeting before this one starts, and the conversation runs itself. Skip that work, and even a friendly client meeting turns into a status update nobody remembers.
That is how Andy Milligan runs kickoffs at MMG Studio, the Columbus web and SEO studio he founded in 2022 after being laid off from his first full-time design job. In the video at the top of this page, recorded about an hour before a client kickoff, he splits the morning into roughly 30 minutes of outreach and 30 minutes of meeting prep, then walks through exactly what he puts on screen and what he says. This guide turns that walkthrough into a repeatable process for marketers and freelancers who run their own client work.
If you are still working toward that first kickoff, start with how to get your first client and come back when the contract is signed.
"Scheduling meetings in advance keeps you accountable for having things ready for them." Andy Milligan
Why the client meeting matters more than it looks
The kickoff sets the tone for everything after the sales call. In Forrester's State of Business Buying, 2024, 81% of B2B buyers said they were dissatisfied with the provider they chose. A kickoff that shows you listened, and a cadence that keeps the work visible, is how you stay out of that group.
Buyers also want judgment from you, not just deliverables. A June 2025 Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers found that while buyers prefer self-service for basic information, they still want a seller's input on questions that need context, such as whether something fits their needs. Your meetings are where that input happens.
There are two kinds of meetings in Andy's day. The kickoff with a signed client is the focus of this guide. The other is a prospect call, like the noon meeting on his calendar that day with someone who "did express interest" but may not have budget. That second meeting is a sales conversation, and it has its own process: see how to qualify leads and the full sales call playbook.
Before the client meeting: build the room in advance
Andy's prep starts with one rule: the client should feel heard before you say anything new. Everything he prepares supports that.
Collect answers before the call
New MMG clients fill out an onboarding form before the kickoff. It captures the sites they like, the ones they dislike, and the basics of their brand. Andy reviews the submissions and has them open during the meeting "to show that I'm receptive to everything that they talked about" (36:41). The form also means the kickoff starts with their words, not your assumptions.
Prepare a small set of visual materials
For a website project, Andy brings two things to the first meeting:
- A low-fidelity site map. It shows how the site will grow, links to the existing pages, and is color-coded by idea so the client can react quickly.
- A technical site map. It lists every original page with its page data, so nothing gets lost in a migration.
He also builds a lightweight design system from the client's fonts, colors, and logos, but holds it for the next meeting. One meeting, one decision is easier for a client than five.
Organize one folder for the whole relationship
Every MMG client gets the same Google Drive structure, with four main folders: administrative, strategy and design, website development, and migration and launch. Inside the administrative folder sit contracts, proposals, invoices, agreements, logins, meeting recordings, and the project intake and brief (38:15). Andy also connects that folder to an AI project for the client, so research and presentation prep draw on the same files.
The payoff is speed. When a client asks about an invoice or a decision from three weeks ago, the answer is one click away.
Schedule the next meetings now
This is the habit Andy recommends most. He puts weekly check-ins on the calendar before the kickoff happens. "When I know that I'm meeting with a client on Wednesday, I know on Monday I need to have everything ready to meet the next phase," he says (40:50). The calendar becomes the project manager.
During the client meeting: set the frame in the first two minutes
Andy opens every call the same way, and each step has a purpose.
- State the purpose. "The purpose of this meeting today is to cover XYZ," then confirm what the client needs to have done before the next call (42:23).
- Thank them for the work they already did. If they filled out the form early, say so. Andy's reasoning is simple: reinforce the behavior that you want them to continue doing.
- Name the time. Andy opens with "I know we have 30 minutes of the calendar today," then lays out how he wants to use it. He says it sets a clear boundary, and that people tend not to cross it once it is set.
- Walk the agenda in order. For a kickoff, his list is the form submissions, the competitor sites, the recommended site map, and a first look at keyword research.
- Show the baseline. He runs an SEO audit before the kickoff and shares the biggest areas for improvement and what the site ranks for today, so the client can see the progress after launch.
Walk the project calendar honestly
Andy shows the client a project calendar: today's kickoff, next week's check-in, and the approvals that happen asynchronously between meetings. Then he adds a caveat most freelancers skip. Deadlines in real projects tend to bleed into each other, and he says he will always "emphasize on being early rather than late" to keep the schedule honest (40:19).
Be direct about blockers
Projects stall when a client is waiting on themselves, often without realizing it. Andy does not avoid that conversation.
"Don't be afraid to not be confrontational, but say to them, hey, we need this done. This is stopping our progress," he advises. Saying it plainly shows the client you take the project seriously, and it protects the timeline you just promised.
After the client meeting: keep the work visible
The meeting ends, but the relationship keeps moving between calls. Andy's follow-through has three parts:
- A shared channel for small updates. MMG keeps a Slack channel with the client so quick approvals, like a thumbs up on the site map, do not wait for the next call.
- Short asynchronous video updates. On some Fridays he records brief walkthroughs of progress, so that "we overcommunicate rather than undercommunicate" (41:20).
- Links in every invite. The prototype and project materials go into the calendar invites, so every meeting starts from the same place.
Recorded meetings help here too. Andy keeps recordings in the client folder, which makes it easy to check what was agreed.
If you record, tell the other people on the call. In Ohio, recording a conversation you are part of is generally lawful under the one-party consent rule in Ohio Revised Code 2933.52(B)(4). This is not legal advice, and other states have different rules.
Good meetings also set up the next phase of work. Steady, visible progress is the idea behind Andy's approach to how to upsell without a hard pitch. And if the scope changes mid-project, put it in writing with the same structure as your marketing proposal template.
A client meeting checklist you can use this week
Copy this into your project template:
- Send an onboarding form before the kickoff and review every answer.
- Prepare one or two visual materials, not ten.
- Create one folder per client with admin, strategy, build, and launch sections.
- Put the next three meetings on the calendar before the first one starts.
- Open with purpose, thanks, and the time available.
- Show a baseline so the client can see progress later.
- Name blockers plainly and early.
- Send small updates between meetings, in writing or on video.
Where the Columbus community fits
Andy runs these meetings as a solo studio owner with a lean team of four, and processes like this are exactly what members compare in the rooms he hosts. Columbus Marketing Organization is a peer community for marketers, freelancers, and service providers in Columbus, Ohio, founded by Andy Milligan. Members share leads, introductions, and job opportunities, including the weekly Columbus Marketing Jobs newsletter.
Andy also serves as VP of Membership at AMA Columbus and hosts the Marketing by Design podcast, which has passed 180 episodes. If you want to see how other freelancers in the city structure their projects, come to an upcoming Columbus marketing event.
Run your next client meeting like a kickoff
Every client meeting is easier when the prep is already done. Collect the client's input before the call, open with purpose and time, show where the project stands, and schedule the next meeting before you hang up. Do that consistently and clients stop asking for status updates, because they already have them.
Want more playbooks like this and a room of peers to test them with? Join the Columbus Marketing Organization community on Skool.
Scheduling meetings in advance keeps you accountable for having things ready for them.
Frequently asked questions
How do you prepare for a client meeting?
Collect the client's input before the call with an onboarding form, prepare one or two visual materials, and keep everything in a single client folder. Andy Milligan also schedules the next check-ins before the kickoff, so each upcoming meeting forces the next deliverable to be ready on time.
What should a kickoff meeting agenda include?
Start with the purpose of the meeting and the time available. Then review the client's form answers, look at competitor sites, walk through the recommended plan, and share a baseline audit. Close by confirming what the client needs to finish before the next call and when that call is.
How long should a client meeting be?
Long enough for one clear decision. Andy often works in 30-minute blocks and states the time at the start of the call, which he says sets a boundary people tend to respect. Smaller approvals happen between meetings in a shared channel instead of filling the agenda.
Is it legal to record a client meeting in Ohio?
Ohio generally allows recording a conversation you are part of under the one-party consent rule in Ohio Revised Code 2933.52. Other states differ, so tell everyone on the call that you are recording. This is general information, not legal advice; check with an attorney for your situation.
Read the video transcript
Kind: captions Language: en Hey there and hello. My name is Andy. I'm the founder of MMG Studio and I have a solo marketing business that made $394,115 to date. And this is my daily marketing channel where I build and strategize in public and teach you guys what's working in live time. So, I have about I have a meeting with a customer here in 1 hour. So, I'm going to show you guys how I prepare for kickoff meetings and really make sure that I have my tabs organized. I'm ready to prepare the work and I have a strict calendar laid out for all tasks. Um, but the normal format that we follow here is we're going to start with a little bit of live lead genen. So, take you guys inside my pipeline, how I'm getting leads for the business and the daily non-negotiables that I have to make sure pipeline is full. Then, we're going to build and strategize in public. So, I'm going to talk about the things that I'm building that are longer term in order to be sustainable and have a vision for the future. Make sure that we're building in a manner that's meant to scale. and then we're going to finish off with some updates and growth stats across YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and my products that I'm focused on growing and revenue as well. So, I have two different businesses. One is a CMO, which is my Inerson marketing uh mastermind group for marketers here in Columbus, and the other is my web and SEO studio for healthcare called MMG Design. And those are the ones we're focused on growing today. So, let's get right into it. Um, yeah, I know I got a few people that reached out yesterday and um were concerned about yesterday's video seemed said that I seemed a little bit down and um I appreciate that. I really do. But uh I promise you guys I am doing well. I just kind of had, you know, a little bit of a down day as we do in entrepreneurship. And you know, the main thing is that I'm focused on posting every day. And that means you guys are going to see everything, the highs, the lows, and everything in between. So, if I go here to the channel, um, just see how some of the the past episodes have done. And currently at 52 subs, 10 views, just posted that last night, so not bad. Um, but yeah, I'm going to start kicking off the lead genen habit here. So, I'm gonna open up quad and make sure that we get our connect sent. Um, also I have been really consistently using my tracker. Let me hide that here. My tracker here to to track all of my daily actions and wouldn't you know it, they are going up. So I want to get in the green. Ideally get to 100 outreaches every single day. I did spend some time on content yesterday. So that's why this isn't fully green. But I also prototype a little widget that appears in the bottom left of my screen every time I open a new tab and I load this. So, this should load right here. Boom. So, yeah. Um, let's get started sending a LinkedIn connection request. And this is what I'll need for the client meeting here. But I think we'll do about 30 minutes of lead genen and 30 minutes of client prep before I'm meeting here at 10 a.m. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to quad code LinkedIn API outreach. Hey, hey, it's a new day. Let's send 30 from our ICP list. Give me a link where I can preview the spreadsheet that you've been building as well. Boom. And then I'll log into the native browser here. And while we're doing that, I'm going to go to network and recently connected and start reaching out to the people that we have recently connected with that are in our ICP. So, okay. So we connect there. Hey Patricia, exclamation point. So glad we connected. Smile face. Bro, what is going on? Hey there, are you able to continue sending outreaches? Hey there, are you able to send connection requests? We should be logged in in our native browser. disregard. Please go ahead and send 30 more, please. Glad we connected. One thing I do wish is that when I was when I'm scrolling through connects here, I wish I could see their location on here cuz I know some of these people are probably based in Columbus, but it would be another click for me to go in and check that out. So, boom. All right, sent 30 more connect requests. Still have a sizable amount of people to to follow up with here. What's up Ashley exclamation point? Thanks for coming to Content Adventure and I hope you had a great time. Smiley face emoji. Bob's meeting you and I can tell that you're great at what you do. Exclamation point. Hope your week is off to a great start, period. I wanted to reach out quickly and just say thanks for coming. All right. All right. Also, for a video yesterday, I've been showing you guys how I'm using Instinct, and I'm going to ask it to help me surface old emails. To me, using this stuff is basically all about reducing the friction. It's so much easier to me, even with AI, it's still a task to go into Claude and say, "Hey, I want to surface through old emails that I have missed or haven't responded to promptly." This is just it feels like a background task. And that's ideally want to compress our time with outreach a little bit, making sure that we have multiple things running at once. since we can be efficient with our time and you know really you know absolve our impact and just have more impact. So I'm just going to prompt it here. Hey my friend exclamation point. I still feel like there are multiple emails over the last several weeks that I have missed and I want you to and I mean these are from real people. Like I get a lot of spam emails and I already have a quad routine that flags them as spam. So, if you can tell an email is a cold email that is automated, don't surface it here. But I want you to look through like even the last month and find things that I haven't responded to or threads that I haven't responded on that are high value. Are you able to do that? Question mark. This is a guy that I met at a conference in Atlanta last week. One other thing that I want to do is I want to create a LinkedIn sales navigator save search so that roa can update the comas marketing jobs pipeline. Yeah, these guys are cool. Hey Brett, exclamation point. Loved meeting you and Austin last week at the conference and just wanted to say I'm really impressed by what both of you guys has built. Period. Thank I can tell you guys are great. I can tell you you are great people and great at what you do and I'm glad that we got connected. Period. Keep being a boss, my friend. Exclamation point. Flexi emoji. Just wanted to reach out quickly and say loved meeting you at off Austin at the conference last week. Period. Damn. Whisper flow. loved meeting you in Austin at the conference last week. Is this a Austin, Greg. Okay, 28 connection requests. Go here. We can see that we have sent 28 more. Great. Love that. So now I can go here to the tracker 28 refresh 28 connect request. Love that little confetti animation. Really reinforcing as well. Look at our agenda today. Okay, we have one meeting here at 10:00. We have a meeting with a prospect here actually at noon. Um, I'm not sure if he has budget, but he did express interest in our services. So, I'm looking forward to that. And yeah, we'll transition in a little bit to scoping the outreach here. Boom. Meeting set up for next week. Boom. On instinct. Yes. Scanning. Boom. Love that. Let's keep making our way through. I also need to respond to comments on my past post here and actually comment on other posts as well. So, yeah. I love that take by the way Pence and agree Pence. Hey, Oh, port block harassment. This is harassment. Amazing instinct. What you got for me? Okay. Howie 8. Yep. Renee. Um, all of this indeed be true. Cool. Oh, yes. I know who this is. flashing emoji. Salute emoji. Oh, London, England. God. Yoink. Okay. Comment. Boom. Boom. trying to get to 10 comments a day, but you know, we don't always get there. Oh, yeah. I need to reset the wood to Dara. That is a high leverage email for me to send. What's up, Dar Point? Hope you're having a great start to your week. wanted to reach out and say a hu huge thanks for coming to Content Adventure last week and it was really great catching up period. Your talks was one of my favorite and you never fail to deliver abundant value. Period. As promised, I wanted to get the ball rolling on the podcast and make it as easy as possible on your end. Good. Below is how I usually handle next steps. Colon I figure we could just use that time to talk about newsletter collabs as well. Period. Podcast onboarding. Podcast onboarding. If it's a busy few weeks coming up, feel free to throw something on for a couple weeks out period. Either way, really looking forward to spotlighting you and making you look as good as possible. Lol. a switch point. I've CCD my team member comma roa comma on here for visibility and to configure the schedule. after you book appeared. Why is there such a lag when it does that? Damn, that's so annoying. Roa will Boom. So, that is sent. Another email sent already, bro. We are smashing it. We're going might get to 100 before we even have to do prep for the meeting. Amazing. Do you guys ever notice that when you drink caffeine, you're just happier? Because crazy. That's kind of um kind of what I am experiencing at this moment in time. Thinking about watching this as well. I think we're going to use this client build to this next client we're working with on a sprint model um is I'm really excited. We're going to build their site in Astro. So, I'm really excited for that because they've already committed to an SEO retainer and I'm really excited to use this as an opportunity to build the site on Astro and make it super accessible and use some of the new tools that we've been kind of implementing into our existing client sites. So, I'll share more about that here in a minute. Jason Velasquez browsable case study collection. Okay, these I've been putting these off for a long time, so I do just need to respond and I'm going to eat the frog this morning and get back to these. So, um, one is from Ada Corino. Hey Ada, exclamation point. Thank you much. Exclamation point. This isn't mostly a new project, but our lead developer is busy with our project based work and we need someone who can work hourly on a retainer basis to do small updates for clients. Period. Is that something that you're open to? Question mark. All of our project based work appeared. I owe you and all caps. What the [ __ ] just happened there. I've had an email labeled quote overdue followup quote in my drafts folder and that to it totally got away from me. Period. Thank you for such a warm message and I'm glad you reached out to Paula dot dot dot. Her and I have a text thread going and I will her and I will likely reconnect soon as well. Period. I think we have a lot to catch up on. Period. You are kind, easy to speak to, and clearly great at what you do. Okay. Please keep me posted on how it goes with PA dot dot dot. Also comment I wanted to reach out regarding I wanted to share an update regarding the marketing leaders launch and the official date period. I ended up moving it back to the 29th, Thursday at 11:30 to 1 just due to availability and getting a few people there up here. Does that work for you? Obviously would love to have you and I'll add you to the list if that works. Smiley face. Apologies again for the delay and I'm looking forward to staying in touch, my friend. Keep being a boss. Exclamation point, North Market and Dublin. to trying to meet everyone's schedules and keeping a good room. Lapping face emoji. obviously. K, would love to have you and supporting any way I possibly can. I see nothing but continued success for you. I appreciate you sharing as transparently as you did and I hope I didn't overshare on my end as well. Laughing face emoji. Bro, come on Oh, I have about 10 to 15 new attendees from last time in order to help everyone meet a few new people every time they come. Period. All right, it's about 9:30, so I'm going to get started on the I know I have a few more emails to get back through here. calendars one or two workshop the five podcast trash. No, I actually ended up sending those. Damn, this is helpful, but it is a good way to stress myself out just reminding of all the stuff I have to do. So, um, yeah, I'm going to talk to you guys how I prep for a meeting. And AI has been remarkably helpful in me just being able to compress the time that I have with clients on the calendar and really make it a good, productive, thorough, and honestly exciting meeting. So, what we're going to do in our kickoff meeting here is I have a few things that I want to share. Um, we have clients fill out an onboarding form. I use a tool called Tally that allows them to that has an AI integration that lets you like really quickly create an awesome form. So, I am going to bring that up. Um, I have that right here. I'll go over lightly the submissions to show that I'm receptive to everything that they talked about. And, um, this has like their uh, inspirations in terms of the sites that they liked, what they don't like. I'll have that up to show them. Additionally, um I will bring up the site map. So I have Figma brought up right here. Sorry, this is me just designing thumbnails. I have a low fidelity site map that I built here within um Figma, a fig jam file right here to kind of explain the growth of them, the growth of the site, link to their existing pages, colorcoded based on their I should leave that there. colorcoded based on the ideas and I'll explain to this upon launch. We'll probably make this a just a contact page and um have that with mandatory fields in my field form field recommendations there. This is a technical site map. So this is basically everything all the original pages with the page data and I've been using AI at so many points in this process to just get the presentation side and the research of things ready. So I have a long build thread here within quad. Every time we onboard a new client, we make a obviously make a quad project about them. Pin that there because I want that to be pinned. Great. Uh or repin it. Um what I will do is I will go into the project and I'll literally sync it with their client folder. So, here I am within um here's kind of how we architect our folders, our Google Drive folders. And having the Google Drive app allows you to sync natively within whatever tools that you're using uh and then share that uh with Quad. So, we have these four main folders, administrative, strategy and design, website development, migration and launch. And then we have necessary subfolders based on everything within project admin. We keep their contracts, uh, proposals, invoices, and agreements there. Invoices and payments actually go here. Logins and credentials. I have nothing filled in there yet cuz they filled all filled it all in within the form. Meeting recordings. So, those will all be stored here. Project intake and brief. This is the CSV that I exported of their form submissions. And then I just gave that to Quad as well. And I just give Quad this root folder here. I hit this and copy link to clipboard. And then I add it uh within here. So, it already has access to everything including its brand guidelines. What I've done is I've used Quad Design to put together a lowfidelity brand guidelines based on um just their their PDFs. I've given it all their logos, things like that. Um it's been really helpful. So, I've created a lightweight design system using their fonts, colors, things like that that I can kind of show them to get their eyes on concept. Um won't do that in this meeting. I'll save that for the next meeting. um but also prototyping this right here and I will share this link to them and include it in the link to all of our calendar invites um which I'll go in and I'll refine further but yes um meeting calendar. So, I have this built a project calendar and I'll walk them through this like, "Hey, this is today. This is our kickoff meeting. Next week at our check-in um asynchronously, this is why we also have a Slack channel where I can share smaller updates like this. Hey, before our next meeting asynchronously, um we're going to approve the site map and just give a thumbs up on it and then on our next call, we'll review it and start to bleed into design phase." Um, and I'll caveat before going over this with them, like, hey, you know, I make it look all pretty and organized here at the beginning, but in actuality, some of these deadlines start to bleed over onto each other, and I always emphasize on being early rather than late to make sure that we stay enforced on our guidelines. Um, but yeah, we'll have our weekly check-ins on Wednesday, and I'll start to get those on the calendar before we meet because I'm telling you guys, scheduling meetings in advance keeps you accountable for having things ready for them. when I know that I'm meeting with a client on Wednesday, I know on Monday I need to have everything ready to meet the next phase. So, this is just so good for keeping things on task and, you know, ready to move and I cannot recommend that you do that enough pre-planning. So I'll go over all of this with them and also mention like okay sometimes here on Friday I'll start to um I'll send like asynchronous loom updates like this or tea updates like this so that you know we overcommunicate rather than undercommunicate. But yeah the time for today is going to be going over the form submissions reviewing the competitor sites and also going over the lowfidelity recommended site map. Um, and then maybe going a little bit over some of the keyword research here. So, yes, that is what we're going to be doing and then just kind of give them a baseline of where their site is at. I did run an audit within SC ranking uh right here. So, I'll go over some of their biggest areas for improvement, what they're currently ranking for, and um yeah, that'll be a really good thing to do, just kind of let them in on the project, know where they're sitting, and then that way post launch, they have a really good idea of just how how much we overd delivered for them, how much better they are now. So, um yes, that is uh how I prep for client meetings. I try to keep them all within this one folder here and keep them operationalized. So I will go literally one by one through and I'll say at the top of the meeting like hey the purpose of this meeting today is to cover XYZ and then um that way for on our next call and then align on expectations that they need to have done beforehand and also congratulate them like early on like hey thank you so much for filling out the form submission and getting that to us before this meeting. That is allowing us to hit the ground running and that is amazing and this is going to be a great collaboration. So I'm super excited. Appreciate you doing that. So reinforce the behavior that they want them that you want them to continue doing. And don't be afraid to not be confrontational, but say to them, hey, we need this done. This is stopping our progress. So that shows them that take that they're taking it ser that you're taking it seriously. And it sets up the project for success. So I want to close out this call here. I have all those tabs ready to go over with them. And also one final tip, at the top of every call, you can say, "Hey, I know we have 30 minutes of the calendar today. here is what I would like to use our time together while we're face time for while we're face to face together. Um, it sets a clear boundary and I found that people don't tend to cross it once you uh set that boundary. So, let's track our brand stats. YouTube channel, LinkedIn, and podcast downloads. Uh, main YouTube channel, we are at 421 subs. So, we've gone up a little bit here. It's not that. Boom. 421 subs. Amazing. Second channel, we are up to 52 subs. Excited to get this back rolling with the daily uploads. That will be big for progress. LinkedIn, we are up to 7,900 followers, which is a substantial increase actually. 7,900. Boom. X, not worried about it. Podcast downloads, uh, and newsletter subs here. Uh, for creators, boom. All righty tidy newsletter. I think we have a substantial increase since last time. So last time we tracked we're at 211. Now we are at If I can get anything to load that would be phenomenal. Uh pin tab close some of these other ones. Okay, podcast downloads. We are at man. Brutal. Truly brutal. All righty. It looks like our streams recording pretty well, though. That's a positive for us. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. 4553. All time podcast downloads should be up a little bit. 45. Oh, sizeable amount. Too bad. 455 53. I am deeply awaiting the day when I can get to 5,000 downloads on a podcast because that puts you in the top. I don't know what the exact percentage is, but it puts you pretty high up there. So, I'm excited about that. Really, really struggling with Beehive today. See if we can get anything to work here. I was just on there yesterday. There. Damn. app.behive.com. Last thing we got to track. Come on now. And drum roll please. 243 subscribers. Love it. That is an increase of 32. Love that. Love it. Love it to death. So, some good increases there. Some good upticks. I am thrilled and excited by that. And we're all set. So, I appreciate you guys checking in. See you guys back here tomorrow. I hope you got some value out of this. If you are a high performing marketer and you want to learn, connect, and grow with other high performers in your space, we are launching marketing masterminds uh here in Columbus. So, check that out in the link below. Otherwise, I will see you tomorrow. Pipes.