This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Hiring a "sales guy" won't fix founder-led sales. – This week, at Barrel Holdings Leadership Summit, we also touched on this topic. So here's a reminder on how to move past the founder biz dev bottleneck. Still the primary contact for your top clients? - Leah Leaves on why that's a systems problem. A sharp breakdown of the sequence that actually frees founders from delivery. What...
7 days ago • 1 min read
In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook talk about ecosystems - not your service offering, not your positioning statement, but the spaces and networks where your agency is actually known. Here's the test: If someone in your ICP asked their peers for an agency recommendation today, in what community would that question be asked? And would your name come up? Most agencies can't answer that clearly. And the ones with vague answers - “we serve startups" or "we work in tech" - are...
10 days ago • 1 min read
This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Our third AgencyHabits Knowledge Share brought together agency founders and operators for an honest deep dive into something most agencies think they've figured out - but haven't: the Ideal Client Profile.Spoiler: it's not just picking an industry and a revenue range.🎥 Watch the full recording📂 Grab the slidesInside, you'll learn:• The 5 ICP components (most agencies only use 2)•...
14 days ago • 2 min read
In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook do a deep dive on agency profit - specifically, why so many founders misunderstand what healthy numbers actually look like. The core insight: gross margin is the starting point for everything. It's not just a metric, it's the funding source for the rest of your business. Without strong gross margin, you don't have the dollars to invest in growth, build systems, or weather volatility. They break down: Gross margin vs. EBITDA The levers...
17 days ago • 1 min read
This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Profitable projects, unprofitable agency? – How to pull the 6 levers that impact margins, from staffing to scope management to AI. "We're specializing"...but every deal is still bespoke. - David Hoos on why most agencies think they're growing vertically but their behavior says otherwise. Margins and growth direction both start with the same foundation: knowing exactly who you...
21 days ago • 1 min read
In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook introduce the concept of engagement yield: the idea that every client engagement should generate returns far beyond the invoice. Revenue is obvious. You agree on scope, you deliver, you get paid. But the best agencies extract much more from every engagement, and that's what compounds over time. They break it down into four components: Proof: Case studies, testimonials, portfolio assets. The stuff that makes the next sale easier....
24 days ago • 1 min read
This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Outbound didn't fail you. Your foundation did. – Why most agencies jump to marketing too early, and the two high-leverage areas to fix first. "Feedback loses value when it's delayed." - That's why Danny Gavin runs quarterly CSATs, not annual surveys. He shared the system behind his team's 100% score (and why process matters more than the number). Note: we'll be diving deeper into...
28 days ago • 1 min read
In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Sei-Wook interviews Peter about his new book, The HoldCo Guide: How Entrepreneurs Structure and Build a Holding Company That Lasts. What started as notes from conversations with other founders turned into a 20,000+ word manual on a topic that didn't have a clear resource: how holding companies actually work. The book covers the spectrum from capital allocator holdcos (think Berkshire Hathaway - buying great businesses and letting them run) to operational...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Scaling Your Agency Beyond $2M - Why the same hustle that got you here won't get you there, and the five systems that actually create breathing room. Your ICP is probably too broad. Let's fix it, live.Join us for our free monthly Knowledge Share where we're going deeper on agency foundations. Bring your current ICP and get real-time feedback and problem-solving on the spot.📅...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read