Why Your First Pancake as Consultancy Will Suck

If you’re building a consultancy, I need you to listen to me on this:
Your first pancake will suck.

And you can’t escape it, no matter how much you try to pretend otherwise.

One of the more common themes I’ve noticed in my career in consulting is that we consultants want to be in control.

What I didn’t realize until starting to advise other consultants is how widespread this bad habit is among all of us (and especially those of us building small consulting shops)

You see it in so many forms:
Fear of picking up new skills
Of trying a new workflow for your company
Not trying a different approach for a client relationship that’s not working

Believe me, I’d know: I’m guilty of it too.

When I help my clients, one of the biggest principles I share with them is that experimentation and iteration are the foundation of any strong consultancy.

If you don’t try, you don’t learn. And if you don’t learn, you don’t grow.

That awful first pancake teaches you everything you need to know: that process doesn’t work, this service needs to be packaged differently, we’re not pursuing the right types of clients, our delivery methodology sucks, and so on.

The beauty of it is:
If you mess up or you think something doesn’t work, you just throw it out and start over.

It’s really that simple.

So as you think about your goals for 2026, here’s what I want you to try:

Pick an idea you’ve been avoiding for your consultancy. Find the simplest possible version of it. Build It. Review how it went after a week or two.

Make that pancake.

You might just be surprised by what you learn when you do!