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 We're Talking About

Positioning isn't the same as ecosystem. Most agencies confuse the two.

We unpack why going deeper matters more than going broader, and how to diagnose whether your agency is aligned with the ecosystem where you're actually known.

Tune in to our latest episode: "Mapping and Leveraging Your Agency Ecosystem."

👉 [Listen on Spotify] | [Listen on Apple]
💬 Liked it? Drop a review, it helps us reach more agency founders.

What We’ve Made

The Business Development Collection is a curation of real, winning proposals and SOWs from Barrel Holdings agencies along with our New Outreach Message Kit, Biz Intake Guide and Agency Lead Tracker. Now available for purchase.

P.S.

If you found value here, The AgencyHabits Podcast takes it further. Give it a listen, and if it landed, leave a review. It’s fuel for this work.

Who are we?

Hi, we're Peter and Sei-Wook, co-founders of Barrel Holdings, a portfolio of agency businesses. We also run AgencyHabits, a resource for agency operators featuring lessons learned from our various agency businesses.

Thanks for being a subscriber. If you or anyone you know is interested in selling their agency business, please check out what types of agencies we're looking for and email hi@barrel-holdings.com.

Also: Peter posts a lot of agency content on LinkedIn, give him a follow!

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Smaller Teams, Better Work?

This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind "Intelligence tools paired with smaller teams are enabling a new way of working." – What Jack Dorsey's memo reveals about the three layers of AI impact most leaders aren't thinking about yet. DIY, DWY, DFY: mapped to margin. - A practical framework for designing agency services that meet clients where they are without sacrificing profitability. What We're Talking About If your...

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Would your agency name come up?

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