This Week's Agency Insights

Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business:

• ​Don’t Let a Bad Sample Write Your Playbook - whether it's freelancers, clients, processes, or new tech, don't let a bad experience lead to poor decision-making.​
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• At one of our agencies, we were paying a lot for software (HubSpot, Notion, JIRA, Basecamp, etc.) but things still felt so manual and cumbersome. We saw frequent data entry errors as team members copied and pasted from one app to another.
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  We enlisted Grantbot to conduct an audit and they came back with some really smart workflow automation solutions that helped us streamline processes & get more out of our software.
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  Grantbot is a workflow automation agency that helps agencies scale without increasing headcount. They uncover what can be automated in an agency through workflow assessments. They then build simple, scalable solutions that multiply the team.
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  Whether you are trying to increase revenue per employee or focus on letting creatives stay creative, Grantbot removes copy and paste in HubSpot, ClickUp, and the quickly evolving automation and AI landscape.
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  ​Learn what you should automate first on a call with founder Grant Hushek.​
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  ​[This is a sponsored section - we offer select partnership opportunities if any of our Barrel Holdings agencies are a happy paying customer of your product/service. Email us at hi@agencyhabits.com]
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• ​New features from Harvest - a rare product update from time-tracking software company Harvest, which rolled out a new "Premium" tier that includes profitability reporting (see screenshot from one of our agencies), activity login, the option to require notes with time entries, and more single sign-on options. You can play around with it for free for 30 days.
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  Not sure we'll go for the 60% price hike for these features. The profitability numbers don't quite match our financials, and we've already built our own view that works well. But we do have a list of AI-powered feature requests we'd love to see!
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  As customers of Harvest for nearly 19 years, it's a very sticky product and it'd be hard to switch to another time-tracking tool at this point. We look forward to other feature releases from them (AI pls!). Is your agency using Harvest? What do you think of these latest features?

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

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!