Why we do wrap-up meetings
At iilo, we believe being transparent with our clients is one of the defining features that makes us a small but mighty agency. One of the key steps to our process with clients occurs at the end of the project — during what we call our “wrap-up” phase.
These meetings are to explore the outcome of a project. Before we wrap things up with our client, we check in with our team to discuss their perspective throughout the process, including the wins, occasional frustrations and challenges along the way.
Why are wrap-up meetings so important?
Wrap-up meetings allow us to talk about how we can integrate the lessons learned and best practices from the work we do on your project into future projects (especially if we continue working together). We see every project and every client as an opportunity to learn more about how to best serve you, refine our processes, and grow as a team.
To truly understand how we can evolve as service providers, we believe it’s important to explore three important concepts during any client project.
- Celebrate! While it’s important to review the ins and outs of every project, it’s important to celebrate the milestones throughout the project, and the work we created together. Celebrating the positive project outcomes helps to acknowledge everyone’s hard work and confirm that we’re meeting a client’s strategic goals. Celebrating wins goes a long way, especially as we’re building a long-lasting collaborative relationship.
- Listen. This is when we dive into the minutia of a project. What didn’t go as planned and why? This step is crucial during our internal team and client wrap-up meetings because we need to understand how the process played out for all parties. This step also helps us to identify possible trends that can be hard to see when you’re working in the details on a project.
- Learn. A project is more likely to go well when the steps are clearly outlined. But we also understand that issues can come up beyond our control (hello! life!) and sometimes a project progresses differently than we thought it would. This step helps us to refine our processes or implement new creative strategies and best practices to manage the unexpected when it happens (if you haven’t caught on — we’re planning and process nerds!)
Learning with our team and from our clients is invaluable. As a business, we’re committed to ongoing learning to improve our skills and client services. We thread learning into all areas of our business.
Our clients appreciate that we can customize their services to meet their needs. This process matters because it shows how adaptable we are, and we know people want to work with someone who can listen and be flexible.
What does the wrap-up process look like?
Typically, we try to schedule a wrap-up meeting for one to two weeks after deliverables are completed. We usually meet as a team first and do an internal wrap-up meeting. This is where we’ll have each person involved in the project share input on what worked (or didn’t work) along the way. This is also a great opportunity for us to ask if there’s any feedback we want to give to our client (an important factor for building a productive ongoing relationship with our clients).
Once our internal wrap-up meeting is done, we book our project wrap-up with our client. During this meeting, we make sure to celebrate, listen and learn from our client, and then we share our experience as the service providers.
The client wrap-up meeting can be just as important as the kick-off process because this is where we commit to strengthening our working relationship. During wrap-up meetings, we can address any concerns about project outcomes. Talking through disappointments or miscommunications can clarify any confusions and help to build trust.
We have the utmost respect for our clients and collaborators. Our values of transparency and communication are threads woven into the fabric of our business. We see wrap-up meetings not as the final step to ending the project, but as a start in an ongoing working relationship.