Sei-Wook and I continued to be hands on with Matyx, our water treatment digital marketing agency, all throughout August, checking in daily with our CEO Justyn and working with him to turn around a stalled sales engine. By the end of the month, we were able to clean up our CRM with the help of an outside consultant and closed in on the hire of a senior account executive with deep experience in full cycle […]
We had our quarterly board meetings with our six agencies in July. We switched up the format quite a bit, sending out a worksheet for our CEOs to fill out, having them reflect on the past quarter’s performance and to articulate their strategy and priorities for the upcoming quarter. In the past, our meetings ran a bit too long on reviewing financial performance metrics, but now that we have a real-time dashboard that feeds from […]
June was a busy month of focused holdco work. We didn’t have travel or any major transactions/announcements, but there was a lot going on under the hood. In addition to the ongoing M&A work of speaking to potential agency sellers and evaluating businesses, a lot of our time was spent on various portfolio-related issues and initiatives. Some had to do with performance, some with bookkeeping, some with major personnel decisions, some with comp structures, and […]
I was talking with a young founder whose software helps agencies deploy and manage AI voice agents for their clients. He talked about how so many of the “AI-native” agencies that became his customers last year flamed out quickly. They might have ramped up revenue with aggressive outbound campaigns and sales efforts, but they ultimately couldn’t retain their clients and had to shut down. Many were fresh-out-of-college types looking to ride the AI wave and […]
An employee at one of our agencies suddenly passed away in April. She was an important team member, a “glue” person whom everyone appreciated and respected. Her passing was a huge shock for the team. It was yet another reminder that our time here is finite, that unexpected things can happen, and that life and work go on with or without us. Sei-Wook and I are coming up on 20 years since we started our […]
We’re close to completing a deal that we’re very excited about. There are still a bunch of things that we have to get in place and wrap up, but I hope to share some more details in the next episode. A big learning from this deal is the importance of the deal team beyond our core Barrel Holdings team members. This deal was a bit more complex than your standard acquisition, and in hindsight, I […]
In early February, Sei-Wook and I went to the HoldCo Conference in Utah for the 2nd year in a row. Last year, we were complete newbies, still unsure about the vision and strategy of Barrel Holdings. We met a lot of people who were generous with their knowledge and came away inspired. We took those learnings and made a lot of progress with our business, becoming clearer about the design of the holdco. This year […]
January was a bit of a blur for me, so much so that I had trouble figuring out what to write when I started to put an outline for this episode together. I decided to ask Claude Cowork to help me come up with some ideas. I first had it read my past Agency Journey episodes to get a feel for the format. I then told it to check my Google Calendar, LinkedIn posts, and […]
This year felt like a very important year, perhaps a turning point in my career. I fully embraced the role of building a holding company and obsessed with the design of our vision and strategy. We compressed a lot of learnings into a very short period of time, making mistakes, overcoming them, and also having some wins. Most importantly, I felt like I lived, for the most part, the thing I like to preach often […]
One of the hardest calls for an agency leader comes when the business grows and hits a true inflection point. Client expectations rise, operations get more complex, and the team needs stronger, more adaptive leadership. Despite coaching, consultants, and other support, a long-tenured team lead may simply stop growing. They reach a ceiling or show little interest in evolving with the agency’s new demands. This creates a real dilemma: balancing loyalty to the past with […]
There are a few stocks in my portfolio that, had I just left them alone, would have done very, very well for me. But I ended up selling too prematurely, “diversifying” into other stocks, or parking the dollars into a money market account. Sometimes, inaction and patience is the best course. I think about this when it comes to our portfolio of agencies. There’s the urge to want to provide greater support–perhaps bordering on meddling–to […]
We said goodbye to another one of our Barrel Holdings agencies recently. Bolster, the design studio and Framer agency that we co-founded with Henry Alcock-White in 2023, is no longer part of the portfolio. This one was a tough decision. I had personally put in a lot of time and effort to get Bolster off the ground. The work they did on the branding side was very gratifying, and there was some promise with the […]
This episode marks 5 years since I started this series. In 2020, I was looking for a way to write something monthly so I wouldn’t have to keep coming up with new topics. “Why not just write about stuff happening within the agency,” I wondered. And that’s what I did (see Episode 1). Little did I know that the monthly ritual of setting aside a handful of hours to reflect and write would open so […]
We’ve been using a tool for the past month that we developed internally. It’s called Relationship Digest and it sends an email every weekday morning highlighting 3 contacts from my past that I may want to reach out to. The data comes from my inbox, calendar, and LinkedIn and the combination provides useful context. I found myself reaching out to 4-5 contacts of the 15 I get each week, including some people I would’ve never thought […]
We’re officially coming up on 1 year since I moved out of the CEO role at Barrel and handed over the reins to Lucas. Since then, Sei-Wook and I have been focused on building Barrel Holdings. Under Lucas’s leadership, Barrel has had a strong past 12 months, posting high levels of profit and on track to post meaningful revenue growth for the first time in a few years. More than anything, I appreciate the way […]
A professional email inbox that’s been in use for a very long time is an underrated asset. I’ve had my @barrelny.com email for 19+ years. It contains thousands of contacts with people at various points in their careers, some who’ve gone on to found companies or rise up the ranks and become executives. Much like with the thousands of connections I have on LinkedIn, I engage with only a fraction of the people and have […]
We’re starting to see companies using more and more AI tools to do some of the heavier lifting that agencies like ours would traditionally handle. For example, we noticed that for Catalog, some clients were leveraging Lovable to create their marketing websites using AI prompts. This was work that we used to do, but instead, we were asked to focus only on some app UI work (which, too, could be done using AI for the […]
We’re slowly working through a rebranding for Barrel Holdings. Bolster is helping us with our new look. Currently, it’s just a simple Google font with black text on white background. My presentation decks are made using an out-of-the-box minimalist template. We figured that since we’re always talking to a lot of creative/design-focused agency owners and also have some very design-forward agencies in our portfolio, we ought to represent ourselves with a more put-together look. Here’s […]
Exactly a year ago, I wrote about our work around Barrel’s CPG positioning: This past month was filled with various activities that we believe will pay off in the long run. One angle we are pursuing is to position Barrel as an expert firm that helps CPG food and beverage brands get the most out of their website, not only via their direct-to-consumer e-commerce, but by generating greater brand awareness, building direct relationships with customers, […]
I’ve told a few people that these days, working on Barrel Holdings feels a lot like the early years of Barrel (circa 2006 – 19 years ago!), especially the first 2-3 years when it was just myself and Sei-Wook. We were figuring things out and continually excited and drawn to different possibilities. One thing I realize in hindsight is that many of our early explorations and side projects (non-client work) planted the seeds for what […]