PROGRAMME
Hold Your Own
Learn the techniques to run client meetings which build trust and authority, make progress - and get you paid again and again.
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What you'll learn
- A simple, repeatable way to open and steer any client meeting from the first minute
- Build genuine trust and real authority, without a job title to lean on
- Simple structures you can use to help clients with discovery, feedback and decision-making in meetings.
- Handle curveballs, dominant voices and awkward moments without losing the room
- Set and hold your boundaries warmly, so scope creep and over-delivery stop happening to you
- How to make real progress in every meeting, and get paid again and again
- A full playbook of every technique, phrase and approach to use over and again.
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A structured approach, not tips.
Most advice on meetings stops at "have an agenda". This goes deeper. You will learn how skilled facilitators actually run a room, so you can lead a client meeting with quiet confidence even when you have no job title to back you up and you are outnumbered at the table.
A blend of facilitation skill, personal presence and simple tools and structures you can use in your very next meeting.
Made for people who go it alone
If you run client meetings on your own and you're often outnumbered or outgunned by clients, this is for you. You're an expert in your content - let me teach you how to make sure that translates into true authority with every client, no matter what curveballs come at you.
The three-part programme
Design how you work together, put in the structures that carry it and handle whatever the relationship throws at you.
Part 1
Design how you work together
Agree the shape of the working relationship up front to mitigate all the most common client collaboration issues.
By the end, your team can
- Open a project by designing how you'll work together, rather than being overpowered by the client's default way of working
- Run a simple social contract with a client: purpose, roles, deciding lanes, and what good looks like for both sides
- Agree the cadence and rhythm of the project, so you set the tempo instead of reacting to theirs
- Decide together where decisions get made, and where the single source of truth for the project lives
- Get clear on awkward things early, budget, scope, ways of working, to create helpful boundaries you can hold later
Part 2
Just enough structure to create flow
Put in light structures that carry the work, so you can make more progress and decide and do together.
By the end, your team can
- Use simple scaffolds to run a meeting so every voice contributes and no single person takes over
- Design fit-for-purpose meeting formats instead of defaulting to the hour-long catch-up
- Set clear async channels with a client and use them to speed up communication and dovetail with a clients' existing workflow
- Move the right things to async, updates and input-gathering, so live time is spent on real thinking and decisions
- Use creative scaffolds to draw the most helpful contribution from your team and theirs, including disagreeing well and making decisions together
Part 3
Handle the curveballs
Stay calm, clear and create great outcomes even when a client meeting gets difficult.
By the end, your team can
- Handle dominant voices, neutral big talkers and pointed dissenters
- Read and calibrate to very different rooms, from informal founder to twelve partners in a boardroom
- Challenge a client and disagree well, so trust goes up rather than down
- Defuse tension in the moment, and repair the relationship when something ruptures
- Set and hold boundaries warmly, around scope, time and getting paid
- Bring stakeholders and people affected by the work along with you, and handle any resistance
Who you'll be learning from
I go it alone too, and this is what I use
I've spent the last nine years working on one question, which is why collaboration goes well or badly, and why the meeting is where you find out. I did my PhD at Cambridge on it. Most of my work is with large, complex organisations, running talks and programmes and building a library of techniques that give teams just enough structure to think well together.
I do all of that as a solo consultant. So most weeks I'm the one walking into someone else's building with no job title anyone there recognises, in front of people who didn't ask for me and have their laptops open. Everything in this masterclass is what I actually use to open those conversations, hold my ground when someone tests me, and leave with the client wanting the next piece of work.
Why I built this for client meetings
The client meeting is where your client actually experiences you. It's where you shape the relationship, build your authority and make progress on the work you're paid to do. And you're usually doing all of that outnumbered and outranked, in front of people who know each other and don't know you.
Almost none of us has ever been taught how to do any of this. We get trained in our craft and then sent off to run the conversations that decide whether the craft ever gets commissioned, extended or paid for. What I've found over nine years is that this is a learnable system rather than a personality you either have or you don't, and for a consultant or freelancer who spends most of the week in client meetings, learning it changes the shape of your working life.
Refreshing. Simple. Life-changing?!
"I really didn't think there was much I could do to make them better, but this course shifted my mindset completely. Now I understand what's going on and I have a simple toolkit to draw on, my working life has genuinely changed. It's like Carrie is whispering in my ear - I know what to do and what to say."
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