What is on the menu? The McGrinsey Menu

What is on the menu? That was the open question behind the McGrinsey Menu in June 2022: how do you communicate an offer that is both wide and deep without cataloguing it to death.

Until then, we mostly did not. Default was a flat rate. The flat rate saved us the mammoth job of naming every daily click cleanly. It also saved the client from choosing between twelve mini-packages they could not compare.

Then we still wanted to start describing the modules. Not with an invented service list. With the question itself, and with the formats such a description can live in.

The questions that stick

How do you describe the individual modules of a consultancy for business models that touch the internet somehow?

How do you describe every step of digital business optimisation?

How do you describe every step of online marketing?

It is almost impossible if you mean completeness. It is doable if you start with formats and only name modules when a client actually needs them.

What we wanted to start with

With:

• Text
• Lists
• Tables
• Flowcharts
• Infographics
• Videos

That is not a menu of services. That is the kitchen kit. Before you promise dishes, you need plates they can arrive on. A flowchart explains a process better than a paragraph. A table holds price and scope when those exist. A video shows pace. A list holds the overview without prose.

Flat rate and menu

A flat rate says: you hire us for a phase, not for a line in a catalogue. A menu says: here are the dishes, pick one. Both models can be right. Both lie if you pretend consulting is a finished window-card menu.

So the question stays in the title. What is on the menu? Not the finished answer yet. The start: choose formats, sharpen modules only where a real brief demands them, and defend the flat rate not out of laziness but because completeness is often theatre.

If you describe an offer yourself, run the same test: can you scan it in a list, compare it in a table, show it as a process in a flowchart? If not, you are missing a format, not another slogan. The menu grows from usable plates, not from invented dishes.

Fact table

Claim	Basket	From where
Original post on 21 June 2022, slug was-steht-auf-der-speisekarte-the-mc-grinsey-menu, id 154	Fact	Magazine archive.
The stub names flat rate as the prior default and asks how to communicate the offer	Fact	Original text.
The six starting formats text, lists, tables, flowcharts, infographics, videos are in the original	Fact	Original stub list.
This rewrite invents no concrete service menu	Fact	Brief and text: question and formats, no invented service modules.
Complete catalogues for internet-adjacent consulting are often theatre; formats first, modules at the brief	Thesis	This rewrite. Stance, not a pricing audit.