Should We Just Become a Consultancy?

We’ve started to wonder whether we accidentally opened a consultancy that happens to serve coffee and breakfasts on the side.

Because lately, the questions we get asked about The FTC aren’t always about the food.

They’re about the business.

• Who designed your menus?

• Who built your website?

• Who does your printing?

• Where do you get your supplies from?

• What till system do you use?

• How do you work out your pricing?

• Who came up with that idea?

And the funny thing is, these questions rarely come from customers. They usually come from other business owners, people thinking about starting something themselves, or those helping someone else bring an idea to life.

Which is why we’ve started to wonder... Should we just become a consultancy?

The truth is probably less exciting than people expect.

There seems to be an assumption that somewhere behind every successful small business is a team of specialists pulling the strings. A web designer. A marketing consultant. A branding agency. A menu expert. A systems expert. Someone with a mysterious playbook that tells you exactly what to do.

In reality, most of the things people ask us about are done by us.

The menus that people ask about were usually being tweaked late at night after service. The photographs on the website were taken between customers. The website itself was built one page at a time, often with a coffee in hand and several tabs open trying to work out why something wasn’t behaving as expected.

New dishes don’t appear on the menu because a consultant suggested them. They arrive after plenty of tasting, discussion, tweaking and the occasional disagreement about whether something is quite right yet.

Costings are worked out around the kitchen table. Signs get redesigned. Suppliers get reviewed. Social media posts get written. Leaking taps get fixed. Printers get unjammed.

And when something isn’t working, we don’t usually go looking for a magic solution. We sit down with a cup of coffee and try to work out how to make it better.

That’s not because we think we’re experts in any of those things. Far from it.

Most of it has been learned as we’ve gone along.

The website you’re looking at today isn’t the first version. The menus have changed countless times. We’ve tweaked recipes, altered layouts, changed suppliers that didn’t quite fit, redesigned signs and rewritten things more times than we could ever count.

What people often see is the version that’s in front of them today. They don’t see the earlier attempts, the ideas that didn’t work, the things we quickly abandoned, or the lessons learned from getting something wrong.

And that’s probably why we find these conversations so interesting.

When somebody asks who built the website, what they’re often really asking is how we got from an idea to something that works.

When they ask about the menus, they’re often asking how we’ve learned to present information clearly.

When they ask about suppliers or systems, they’re usually looking for reassurance that there isn’t some secret they’ve missed.

The reassuring news is that there really isn’t.

Most small businesses are figuring it out as they go and using their experience to guide them.

The difference isn’t usually access to better information. It’s the willingness to keep improving things over time.

We’ve never sat down and produced a grand masterplan for what The Feather Trail would become. We spent time on a business plan, of course, but beyond that we’ve simply tried to create the kind of place we’d want to visit ourselves and then paid attention to what our customers tell us.

Sometimes that means introducing something new.

Sometimes it means changing something we’ve spent hours creating because it turns out customers find it confusing.

Sometimes it means admitting an idea wasn’t as good as we thought it was.

That’s all part of it.

So… should we become a consultancy?

After all, we seem to spend a surprising amount of time talking about websites, menus, suppliers, systems, pricing, marketing, customer experience and all the other things that keep a small business moving forward.

And, if we’re honest, there are probably easier ways to make money than baking cakes at silly hours of the day.

But perhaps that’s missing the point.

The reason people ask these questions isn’t because they’re looking for a consultant.

They’re usually looking for confidence.

Confidence that it’s possible to build something, improve it over time and make it work.

We certainly didn’t have all the answers when we started, and we’re not convinced anybody else does either.

We’re still learning still tweaking… we’re still changing things that seemed like a good idea a month ago.

The website, menus & the business evolves.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson behind most of the questions we get asked.

There isn’t a perfect blueprint.

Just people willing to keep trying, keep learning and keep improving.

Although…

If the questions keep coming at the current rate, we might have to start charging for the coffee that comes with the advice.