Run a kickoff meeting

What this is about

Kickoffs drift when they are treated as ceremony: introductions, a slide about the company, general enthusiasm, no decisions. The meeting exists to close the gaps the brief left open and to surface misunderstandings while they still cost nothing. That requires the decision-maker in the room, an agenda that forces choices — deliverables, dates, approval chain — and a written summary nobody can later dispute. Productions that skip this meeting meet the missing stakeholder anyway: in the first review round, holding opinions that would have been cheap on day one and are expensive now.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• The kickoff confirms and sharpens the brief; it does not replace it. A meeting without a brief becomes a briefing workshop — a different format.
• Attendance is the leverage: without the person who signs off, every decision made is provisional.
• It is the last cheap moment to move dates, since nothing is booked yet — crews, studios and talent holds all come after.
• The written summary is the actual product of the meeting; the conversation is just how you get there.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Get the decision-maker into the room, or move the meeting until they can attend. A kickoff without the person who signs off produces decisions that dissolve at the first review.
2. Send the brief and a short agenda in advance, then open by confirming the brief point by point — problem, audience, message — instead of re-explaining the project.
3. Walk through deliverables and channels concretely: lengths, formats, subtitle versions, where each asset runs. Vague deliverables come back later as budget fights.
4. Build the timeline backwards from the publish date: approvals, edit, shoot, prep. Show which dates are hard and which carry float.
5. Fix the approval chain with names: who consolidates feedback, who holds veto, how many rounds the budget includes. Departments do not approve films; people do.
6. Ask directly for mandatories and landmines: brand rules, legal review, people who must appear, topics to avoid. Nobody volunteers these unprompted.
7. Close every open point with an owner and a date, then send the written summary the same day. Once confirmed, that summary is the contract of the meeting.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Running the kickoff as a project presentation instead of a working session — an hour of slides, zero decisions.
• Skipping the written summary because 'we all agreed' — three weeks later, everyone agreed on different things.
• Letting the meeting happen without the brief, so the group improvises strategy in real time.

With TillyGen

The kickoff results go straight into TillyGen as the briefing; what comes back is a first shotlist, storyboard and schedule the whole team can react to instead of a blank page.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.