The situation: The contract got signed Thursday and the kickoff call is Monday. Your prep, if we are being honest, is skimming the client's homepage and their last three LinkedIn posts twenty minutes before the call, then opening with "so tell us about your audience." The client has answered that question for every agency they have ever hired, and they can tell when you are the fourth one asking it.
The move: Spend 90 minutes the day before running prep prompts on the client's actual assets, and give the last 20 of those to the Pre-Mortem Analysis, a paid prompt in the Hub library built for exactly this. You feed it the scope of work, what you know about the client's team, their stated goals, and anything odd you noticed during the sales process. It does not list "risks." It writes the engagement's post-mortem, dated [SIX MONTHS FROM TODAY], as a finished document: the engagement failed, here is what happened, in past tense, with named causes.
The mechanism is the clever part. Asking Claude "what are the risks" gets the same beige list every time: misaligned expectations, unclear KPIs, resourcing. Forcing a dated, past-tense failure narrative forces specifics, because a story needs actors. The approval sat with [STAKEHOLDER] for three weeks. Scope crept the day the founder saw a competitor's rebrand. Reporting drifted off the metric written in the SOW. The prompt also carries a refuse condition: where it has no evidence, it must label a failure cause as an assumption to test on the call rather than assert it as fact. You walk into kickoff holding the three uncomfortable questions nobody else in the room was planning to ask.
One stealable tip that works without the full prompt: end your next campaign planning session with "write the post-mortem for this plan dated [SIX MONTHS FROM TODAY], past tense, and every failure cause must name a person, a handoff, or a decision, not a market condition." The people-shaped causes are the ones that actually happen.
The full Pre-Mortem prompt, with its input checklist and refuse conditions, sits in the paid library next to the Audience Reality Check, the other half of the kickoff prep pair. The whole routine is written up in the 4 prompts I run before any client kickoff. Both ship with the Hub, $149 one-time, own it forever.