You Can’t Rush a Brisket (or a Business)

April 4, 2026

“Let your feet hit the street, find a good place to eat, get some barbecue” - Robert Earl Keen Jr.

It’s Easter weekend. I’m looking forward to spending some time with family, slowing things down a bit, and like most things this time of year, it got me thinking about cooking.

After a few heavier topics the last couple of weeks, this felt like a good time for a lighter Halcyon Headwinds.

A few years ago, I was on the EdTech Bites podcast with Gabriel Carrillo, and I found myself going down a path I hadn’t really thought through before. I started talking about brisket.

At first, it was just a comparison, but the more I explained it, the more it actually held up. The longer I’ve spent building inside Education Technology, the more I’ve realized how true it really is. You can’t rush a brisket. People try all the time. They turn the heat up, check it too often, try to control every part of the process. But every time you open the smoker, you lose heat, you lose consistency, and more often than not, you end up setting yourself back. Building something meaningful works the same way.

There’s a process to it, and it starts with the ingredients. In barbecue, that’s the cut of meat. If you don’t start with a good brisket, it doesn’t matter what you do after that. In Education Technology, it’s no different. The product matters. The problem you’re solving matters. The reason you exist in the first place matters. Some of the best companies I’ve seen didn’t start by saying, “Let’s go build a company.” They started by seeing a problem up close and deciding to fix it. That part shows up later.

Then there’s trimming. If you’ve ever cooked a brisket, you know you don’t just throw it on the smoker. You trim it, but you don’t trim everything. You need some fat because that’s where the flavor comes from. Building a company works the same way. You have to run lean and be disciplined, but you also have to know where to invest, where to add the right kind of weight, the right people, the right capabilities, and the right focus areas that will pay off over time. Cut too much and you lose what makes it work. Leave too much and it never really comes together. That balance matters more than people think.

And then there’s the part most people get wrong. You have to let it cook.

There’s a moment when brisket hits what’s called the stall. The temperature stops rising and it feels like nothing is happening. If you don’t understand it, you think something’s wrong, and that’s when people panic. They turn up the heat, they start making adjustments, they try to force progress. Sometimes they even wrap it too early trying to push it through.

And what happens is pretty telling. It might cook faster, but you lose the bark, the texture changes, and it can get dry in spots or even a little mushy. You didn’t completely ruin it, but it’s not what it could have been.

That’s actually the most important part of the process. That’s where it’s breaking down and becoming what it’s supposed to be. If you rush through that part, you never quite get it right.

I’ve seen the same thing happen inside Education Technology. A company builds something solid. They have the right ingredients and they’re solving a real problem. But then the pressure hits. Growth targets, competition, market noise. Instead of staying disciplined, they speed everything up. They acquire too fast, add features too quickly, and start reacting instead of building.

It’s the equivalent of turning the heat up in the middle of the cook. You might get there faster, but it won’t be as good.

One of the things I talked about on that podcast was how often you see companies “buy, buy, buy” thinking they’re accelerating the process. And sometimes those are the right ingredients. But if you don’t integrate them properly and don’t give them time to come together, you don’t end up with a better product. You end up with something disjointed. In barbecue terms, you’ve got all the right components, they just never came together the way they should.

There’s also something to be said for knowing what you’re trying to build from the start. If you’ve got people coming over at 7:00 PM, you don’t just throw the brisket on whenever you feel like it. You plan for it. You work backward. You understand the timing, the phases, and the process it takes to get there.

Building a company isn’t that different. You have to know what success looks like, understand the sequence it takes to get there, and respect the time it requires along the way.

In Education Technology, we talk a lot about speed. Shipping faster. Moving faster. Responding faster. But some of the things that actually matter, trust, adoption, and real impact inside a school don’t respond to speed the way we think they do. They respond to consistency, clarity, and doing things the right way over time.

Out here, you learn pretty quickly that some things just take time.

You can’t rush a brisket.

And the same is true for anything worth building.