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AgencyHabits

AgencyHabits provides learnings, ideas, and templates for agency operators drawn from Barrel Holdings companies. Barrel Holdings incubates, acquires, and grows agency businesses.

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Messed up with a client? Own it, 100%.

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Own up to your agency's mistakes, your clients will trust you more - it's never fun to mess up on a client engagement, but how you respond and handle the situation can actually turn the mistake into something positive. The Consulting Value Proposition Matrix - useful way to look at where you fit along the value prop and must have/nice-to-have matrix. "Is there a budget line item for solving this...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Diving deeper into agency growth challenges - as agency founder, you feel the need to grow and land more clients; before signing up for a firm that promises you 40 qualified leads through outbound email, read this first. Hourly billing doesn't work? Tell that to the law firm that did $7 billion in revenue. An interesting look into Latham, a big law firm with over 3,500 lawyers with an average hourly...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Two types of agency partnerships that generate leads - how building relationships with complementary agencies and "big sibling" agencies can help grow your agency's deal flow. How to lose a pitch in only 5 minutes - sucks to be this agency; avoid this mistake. Looking to scale up your agency in a cost-effect way? We're working with JobRack right now to hire account management talent for one of our...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Healthy, okay, and needing help - a look at 3 profit levels for a $5 million/year revenue agency and what leads to being flush with cash or fighting for the agency's life. We hope you like Sankey diagrams. New agency alert: SuperFriendly is now part of Barrel Holdings - check out the story of how it happened (also additional details here). Looking to scale up your agency in a cost-effect way? We're...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Are you running a Ponzi Scheme on yourself without knowing it? - Check out this fictional but very real story of an agency owner in trouble. Includes lessons on how to avoid ending up in a Ponzi. When should you put pricing on your website? - As an agency, is it even appropriate to publicly publish your pricing? Have a hiring need? One of our best hires ever was via JobRack (sourcing talent for...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Simple, repeatable actions to drive more leads & wins to your agency Super simple to do, but also very easy NOT to do... Must-do exercise for agency owners - David C. Baker has a quality piece with some great questions all agency owners should ask themselves. Do yourself a favor and take time to reflect on them. Have a hiring need? JobRack's partnered with AgencyHabits to bring the best talent from...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Controlled Client Churn - are some of your clients no longer a good fit for your agency? Read about a proactive, deliberate approach to pruning your client roster while ensuring a smooth transition for outgoing clients. A niche is no longer enough - an interesting perspective on going beyond the specialization approach and honing in on your agency's unique perspective Who are we? Hi, we're Peter and...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: The Weekly Outreach Habit and how it can make all the difference - this is habit #4 on The List but one that could easily be #1 in terms of impact if you keep it up. To Standardize or Customize - an insightful discussion between Blair Enns and David C. Baker on how to think about standardizing vs. customizing your firm's service offering and how to think about these in relation to pricing. Who are...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: Two new books added to our Book Recommendations List:Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others - we came upon some useful questions to ask clients, employees, and ourselves from this easy-to-read bookThe Referral Code: Unlock a Constant Stream of Business Through the Power of Your Relationships - we never thought about referrals the same way again after this; very...

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business: We shared the following themes/topics with our Barrel Holdings agency leaders during out quarterly meeting in NYC. Do any resonate with you? Related: here's our Agency Fundamentals that we reference often when we look to "master the basics": Scale At Speed Live 2025 - Austin, TX, save $200 by using code Habits2025. We'd totally be there if we didn't have previous commitments. Scale at Speed by Felix...