This Week's Agency Insights

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

What's Top of Mind

• Our fourth AgencyHabits Knowledge Share brought together agency founders, operators, and consultants for a conversation that sounds simple on the surface, but goes deeper than most agencies ever bother to go: your ecosystem.
  ​
  Not your positioning.
  Not your service offering.
  The actual world where your name comes up.
  ​
  ​🎥 Watch the full recording​
  ​📂 Grab the slides​
  ​✍️ Dale Bertrand's LinkedIn post​
  ​
  Inside, you’ll learn:
  • The 4 ecosystem archetypes, and which one fits your agency
  • Why referrals aren’t a strategy (and how to make them one)
  • The compounding effect of the right ecosystem: lower CAC, higher deal quality, better pricing power
  • The #1 ecosystem mistake: misalignment between who you say you serve and where you actually show up
  • The two-move strategy: when to go deeper vs. when to expand
  ​
  This session had some great real-talk from the room, including a jewelry agency getting surfaced by AI search, an entertainment marketing agency turning industry layoffs into a referral system, and a hospitality shop that landed a partnership opportunity mid-session. Good stuff.​​
  ​👀 Next Knowledge Share coming soon​
  Book your calendar, we already know the next session is happening on April 28th, 12:30 PM ET. Save your spot here, we will be going one layer deeper into the Agency Growth Engine.

What We're Talking About

Still wearing all five BD hats yourself?

Most agency founders don't scale business development, they just hire one person and hope for the best. It never works. This episode breaks down why the "hire a salesperson" move keeps failing, and what to do instead: deconstruct BD into its five core functions and hand them off one at a time.

👉 [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!