Don't Order Fish on Monday, and Other Notes on Running an Agency

As ever, Anthony Bourdain brings the clarity

I’ve been thinking a lot about Anthony Bourdain recently.

Maybe it’s because the Tony movie has taken over my feed, or because I was just in Provincetown with the kids.

Weirdly, I think I thought about him the most when making a presentation recently. I know—that might be the most anti-Anthony Bourdain thing I’ve ever said.

Tony picks one summer before Anthony Bourdain really did anything impactful. It’s 1976, Provincetown. Bourdain is 19, a student on break, and by the movie’s own admission he is a nightmare. The opening title card is Tony’s own line from the memoir Kitchen Confidential, where he describes his younger self as spoiled, miserable, self-destructive and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.

That’s what stuck with me. You have this huge, complicated life to work with. And instead, you pick one summer when almost none of it has happened yet.

So what made me think of all this as I was building a Google Slides presentation?

Hear me out.

I was putting together a pitch for a new business client. One that we will be PERFECT for. The exact things they want are the exact things we’ve done over and over. The ask is a combination of all the best parts of 10 different projects we’ve done and nailed.

I don’t know the person—a friend of a friend intro. They have no idea if the passion I’m about to share about their goals is real or faked (even though it is very much real).

How do I make them believe it in a 20-minute presentation?

The instinct, obviously, is the greatest hits album. 10 projects, 10 logos, 10 “results slides”, a sizzle reel scored to something cool with beautiful visuals. Look how much we’ve done.

It is the most natural thing to reach for, because it’s true, and because it feels generous: Here is everything, take your pick.

It’s also the thing that loses.

When the greatest hits are your biggest miss

The greatest-hits structure has a fatal flaw, which is that breadth reads as distance. You can cover an entire career and still leave someone knowing less about the person than if you’d shown them one summer in Provincetown.

The same thing happens in a pitch.

Ten case studies tell you we’re capable. But you’re never in one place long enough to see how we actually think. What we noticed. Where we got it wrong. What we did next.

The good stories pick the summer. They go small and go deep, and they trust that if you understand one thing completely, you’ll extrapolate the rest yourself. Nobody walks out of “Tony” confused about who he became.

“Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.”

And I think there’s another reason this matters in a pitch: You cannot assert enthusiasm. It’s like asserting you’re funny.

What you can do is know something about their business at a depth that nobody would bother reaching for unless they actually cared. The specific, checkable, slightly-too-granular thing… the item on the menu that doesn’t belong, the one review that keeps repeating, the reason their October is always weird.

Nobody does that research on spec for a client they’re lukewarm about, and the person across the table knows it without you having to say a word about how excited you are.

Ten projects prove we’re competent. One unreasonable detail proves we’re paying attention.

The ‘One Summer’ approach

So I went with one project. The closest analog to what they’re actually trying to do—not the flashiest, not the biggest logo, the closest. The full arc of it, including the part in the middle where we were wrong and had to turn the whole thing around.

Then the rest of the credentials on a single slide, small, at the end, presented roughly the way you’d mention that you also speak conversational Italian. Available. Not the point.

And we spent the remaining time on their problem, in their language, with the specific things I’d noticed and had opinions about before anyone paid me to have them.

It’s not that clever. It’s just the discipline of trusting one thing to carry the weight and being genuinely curious about what makes the person across the table from you tick.

Tony Bourdain built a whole career on this, and I don’t think he’d have described it as a strategy. He’d have described it as being interested. Parts Unknown was just a guy sitting down across from a person and wanting, with what appeared to be his entire body, to know what that person’s life was like. What they cooked on a Tuesday. What their father did. What they thought was funny.

He wasn’t doing that as a technique. I think he was just genuinely more interested in the individual than the thesis. The thesis was a byproduct of curiosity, not the destination.

Maybe that’s the real lesson for new business, too. Get interested. Go deep enough that the caring is visible without you naming it. Or, as Anthony Bourdain said, “Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”

Oh, and still don’t order fish on Monday, just in case.