The Bagel Bros

The Bagel Bros consultancy believes you should never waste a crisis.

Advice I agree with. 

The Bagel Bros lost a client over bagels. That was the crisis.

They used the crisis to name themselves the Bagel Bros. This is a bad use of a crisis because now they tell their potential clients the story of the incident whenever anyone asks how they got their name.

How’d they get their name?

The Bagel Bros are two friends named Mike and Matt. Their stated mission is to consult with CEOs and founders on company culture. Admittedly, CEOs are hard to have as clients. They see everything through the lens of what they’ve built and what they have to lose. In the context of this story, I’m going to say that CEOs can see a bagel, but not that it has a hole in the center.

The CEO in this story brought Mike and Matt in to be positive. Mike and Matt are positive guys, but that’s not why you hire consultants. The CEO challenged Mike and Matt to interview and collect all of the positives within the company. The CEO then wanted to boost these positives, believing it would elevate productivity.

What Mike and Matt found was a bleak picture. Every employee was dissatisfied with their work. They didn’t like their coworkers or the direction of the company. Employees thought the CEO was more suited as a street-performing clown than a boss. The employees were overworked, underpaid and stuck to a rigid in-person schedule. In all of Mike and Matt’s interviews, only an entry-level employee named Phil offered anything they could use.

After 20 minutes of an interview, Phil finally admitted, “Well, at least we have bagels on Thursdays.”

That’s right, a tradition as old as the office itself. Someone brought bagels on Thursdays. They were grocery store bagels, untoasted with two tubs of generic cream cheese. In my bagel ranking, these are considered bad bagels. But at least they had bagels.

So, Mike and Matt leaned into the bagels. They found a baker willing to make a few giant bagels the size of tires. They also got a banner. Then Mike and Matt scheduled a meeting with the CEO on a Thursday. They bought the best bagels in town.

When the CEO walked into the conference room, he found an employee he didn’t know named Phil contemplating whether to grab a regular-sized bagel or a tire-sized bagel. 

“What is the meaning of this?” The CEO yelled. Phil scurried out of the room with an everything bagel—no time for cream cheese.

The CEO stormed over to the banner, which read, “At least we have bagels,” and tore it down.

“That’s the positive feedback,” Matt said helpfully.

“Bagels on Thursdays!” Mike added.

“I didn’t approve bagels!” The CEO said. “Why are you wasting my money on bagels?”

The CEO grabbed one of the tire-sized bagels to throw at Mike but couldn’t keep his balance. He fell over, crushed by a giant cinnamon raisin bagel. Mike tried to help him up, but the CEO told them to instead “get out, get out, get out!”

Matt grabbed some bagels for the road, and they left the building, having ruined the only tradition at the company that anyone liked. 

From this, the Bagel Bros consultancy was born! Want to hire them?