Peter Kang

What does a Culture of Fear at a company look like? People are afraid to speak up for fear of what management or other team members might think. People are afraid to take initiative for fear of making a mistake and getting reprimanded by management. People are afraid to help each other for fear of being blamed if something goes wrong. People are afraid to go above and beyond for fear of being seen as […]

Some years ago, we had a fresh out of college employee at Barrel who was sharp and smart. This was during a time when we had a very flat structure and whoever was available, regardless of experience, was staffed on projects as needed. We staffed this employee on a number of fairly important projects and told the employee to figure things out. That’s what smart people are supposed to do, right? Some weeks later, we […]

Corporate Turnaround Artistry: Fix Any Business in 100 Days by Jeff Sands was a timely read as we entered the coronavirus crisis because it outlines a number of valuable lessons on managing through a tough situation and what it takes to fight for a company’s survival. The book focuses primarily on the process of turning around a business that is suddenly unable to make its debt payments, therefore prompting the bank to seek action. Oftentimes, a […]

Note: I initially published on March 30, 2020 via AgencyDocs, a Barrel-owned website geared towards other agency owners who’re looking for templates to help run their business. I’ve reposted here and expanded some more to include some additional developments including the receipt of our Paycheck Protection Plan loan from the US government. As an agency, Barrel has been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. Within a span of 2 weeks, we saw over 18 engagements–a combination […]

I wanted to jot down and share some quick thoughts on running a small agency business during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) situation developing here in the United States. As an agency with offices in New York City and Los Angeles, we made the call last Monday (March 9th) to have the Barrel team go fully remote. In hindsight, I think we made the right call and acted fairly quickly. The biggest thing that I can’t emphasize […]

I decided to create a tidy table view of Barrel’s business performance for the past 14 years cleaning up some numbers and simplifying the view to focus on revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), gross profit, and gross margin. I decided to keep owner’s compensation completely out and defined COGS as the sum of our payroll and any amounts paid to freelancers/consultants/other agencies to help us deliver work. One year immediately jumped out to me: […]