Author: Peter Kang

Client Experience vs. Quality Work

March 21, 2021
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

“Deliver quality work and the client will be happy” is something I used to tell myself and our team members at Barrel over the years. Upon deeper reflection, this isn’t necessarily true. In recent years, we’ve talked more and more about the “client experience” – what it looks and feels like from the client’s perspective to work with an agency like Barrel. Do they feel like they’re taken care of? Are the cadence of communication and […]

Dark Moments and Counters

March 3, 2021
by Peter Kang
comments 2

I’d like to think that I live a happy and blessed life. And on most days, I feel pretty good. However, I would be lying if I said things were always smooth sailing. Like most others, I have my darker moments and they come at unexpected times. I wanted to catalog some of these (along with how they spiral down a darker place) and also share some counters that have been helpful for me to […]

Desired Future State for Our Culture

March 2, 2021
by Peter Kang
comments 2

A company’s culture is never a finished product. It continues to evolve with time as new rituals emerge, as the nature of the work changes, as personnel come and go, and world outside of work brings in new influences. I’ve seen the culture at Barrel evolve through the years with its highs and lows. There were moments when things clicked and we felt we were on an unstoppable rocket ship. And then there were times […]

Recent Stock Buys #2: 10 Picks Including Adobe, Snowflake, Asana, and The Trade Desk (Jan. & Feb. 2021)

February 28, 2021
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

This is the 2nd edition of Recent Stock Buys, where I share my thinking behind recent stock purchases. Disclaimer: I’m not an investment professional, so please don’t take any of these posts as investment advice. I’m simply looking for ways to get good returns while learning about businesses. Intro I freed up some cash in January by selling out of my REIT and bond positions. With REITs, I felt that commercial real estate will only suffer more […]

Agency Journey Episode 6 (Y14M9)

February 22, 2021
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

My brain’s been on fire the past couple of months as I’ve been processing and applying concepts from a few books that have resonated deeply with me. They are: The Courage to Be Disliked by Ochiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, and An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. A common theme that runs through these books is […]

Agency Journey Episode 5 (Y14M8)

January 25, 2021
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

Refreshed and back from the holiday break, it’s been a very fast-paced and intense January. Let’s jump in to episode 5. About Agency Journey: This is a monthly series detailing the happenings of my agency Barrel, founded in 2006. You can find previous episodes here. Highlights A Week of Looking Ahead The week of January 11th was a crucial “planning” week to help us prioritize initiatives and set goals for 2021. One session, two and half hours long, […]

Recent Stock Buys #1: 8 Picks Including Airbnb, IAC, and Stitch Fix (Dec. 2020 & Jan. 2021)

January 18, 2021
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

Intro I’m starting a series to share my stock investments and what was going through my mind when I bought them. I’m hoping that over time, I’ll be able to revisit these posts and see what I got right and what I could have assessed differently. I’m not an investment professional, so please don’t take any of these posts as investment advice. I’m simply looking for ways to get good returns while learning about businesses. […]

2020: Habits That Stuck

January 3, 2021
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

Having a system for keeping track of my daily habits and goals was vital in keeping me grounded and feeling relatively in control in 2020. I wrote more extensively about the mechanics of my tracking approach in my Q1 2020 Habits & Goals Report Card and showed how it looked again 6 months later. In 2021, we’re expecting our 2nd child, and I’m eager to see how well the system holds up and evolves. If […]

Agency Journey, Episode 4 (Y14M7)

December 21, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment
Barrel Agency Journey Episode 4

One question that’s kept up coming up again and again in my mind the past few weeks has been: “Are we in a better place than we were a year ago?” In other words, what kind of progress have we made? One bit that’s been a damper towards the end of the year has been the slowed momentum in new business won and receivables collected in Q4. While we’ll finish the year slightly above where […]

The Fundamentals of Knowledge Workers Revisited

December 7, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

A few years ago, I wrote about how knowledge workers, like basketball players, ought to have a set of basic skills (e.g. shooting, dribbling, passing, etc.) that apply to their daily work and how mastering these fundamentals can make them more valuable team members (view original post here). These are hard skills that can be improved with better technique and repetition and are less about having deep experience, subject matter expertise, or intangibles like charisma […]

A Matrix for Qualifying New Business Opportunities

November 22, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

At the start of this year, as we became more diligent at Barrel about tracking certain business development metrics, our Partner and Creative Director Lucas Ballasy wondered if it could be helpful to come up with a scoring rubric for new leads. The thinking was that, over time, a data set would emerge and offer some potential insights while making the exercise of qualifying leads less intuitive and more rigorous. Lucas and I quickly mocked […]

Agency Journey, Episode 3 (Y14M6)

November 16, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

The past four weeks haven’t been the smoothest of times. We’ve had some hiccups in delivering for our clients that’s led to frustration for our clients and scrambling on our end to make amends. New business activity has also been slower than we’d like, so our numbers aren’t looking great at the moment. I trust that things will improve and we’ll find a way through these rough patches. What I’ve come to value more and […]

Reviewing My 2020 Stock Investing Activity

October 19, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

I’ve had more stock trading action in 2020 alone than all the years leading up to it combined. It’s been a compressed period of learning and making mistakes. I thought it would be a good use of time to reflect on this year’s moves and ways to be a better investor in the future. Primary Catalyst The main reason I engaged in such high volume of trading activity was the sale of our condo back in […]

Agency Journey, Episode 2 (Y14M5)

October 12, 2020
by Peter Kang
comment 1

As someone who grew up watching and playing a lot of sports, especially football and basketball, the final quarter of the year in business excites me in a way that the 4th quarter might motivate and energize a competitive player. If there’s anything left in the tank, I want to put it all out there. Knowing there’s a holiday break to end the year, I want to give it my all and get lots of things done […]

Q3 2020 Habits & Goals Report Card

October 5, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

Entering the last 25% of 2020, I wanted to revisit my habit & goals tracker to see how I’ve kept up since my last “report card” back in April. I’m happy that I’ve managed to keep up with the tracker dutifully marking “x” in the appropriate columns day in and day out. It’s been a ritual to reinforce the notion that I can only control what I can control and that it’s best to focus […]

My Personal Finance Stack 2020: 6 Months Later

September 21, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

It’s been an eventful past 6 months, and I wanted to revisit my personal finances to see how things have changed since my last update in March, when COVID-19 started turning into a pandemic in the United States, the market had hit its lows, and there was much uncertainty about what would happen next. The High-Level Summary In March, I saw our investments decrease by nearly 20% from their highs in late February. Luckily, my family […]

Agency Journey, Episode 1 (Y14M4)

September 14, 2020
by Peter Kang
comments 4

Intro to a New Series I’m 14 years and 4 months into running Barrel, a digital agency that I started with Sei-Wook Kim back in 2006. We’re a team of 30+ full-time employees and dozens of contractors all over the world. We work with a number of brands and organizations to build and optimize their websites and help them on their marketing efforts across email, social, and search. I’ve been publishing on my blog about […]

Operating Rules Vol.2

August 24, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

My first volume of “operating rules”, written about 18 months ago, included the following: Get the unpleasant thing out of the way sooner than later Very few things are worth getting worked up over There’s no need to have the last word There’s no rush, stick to a pace that works for me Just listen, no need to provide advice Play offense, not defense Things I will never regret: time spent writing, time spent with […]

The No Exit Approach to Agency Business

August 10, 2020
by Peter Kang
comment 1

In the play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, three deceased characters find themselves in an unexpected Hell, a plain room where they are seated together, no instruments of torture in sight. As they learn more about each other and are exposed to their respective manipulations and fits of anger and sarcasm, it’s clear that eternal damnation is coexistence with other people, hence the famous line: “Hell is other people.” I found myself thinking about this […]

Winning Factors: What Leads to Client Wins

July 19, 2020
by Peter Kang
Leave a comment

At our quarterly town hall meeting at Barrel, one of the questions asked was: “What are the top reasons why we don’t win projects?” The answer we gave at our town hall was something like this: There are numerous factors ranging from our pricing, our body of work, the impression we made on the prospect, who referred the prospect to us, etc. that contribute to why someone ultimately decided not to work with us. The […]