This Week's Agency Insights

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

What's Top of Mind

If "done" means something different on every Slack thread... – The tell-tale signs of quality inconsistency and a 5-step framework for building predictable excellence.
You're betting your pipeline on a three-way coincidence. - Chris DuBois breaks down why referrals don't come from great work, they come from your client's calendar.

Quality systems and referral pipelines both depend on the same thing: knowing where you're known. Join us for our free monthly Knowledge Share where we're diving deep into agency ecosystems. Peter's offering feedback live.
Mar 25th, 12:30 PM ET.

📌 Save your spot here.

What We're Talking About

Two agencies. Same revenue. Same margins. Completely different cash realities.

We break down working capital in plain English: why billing terms, payment methods, and timing gaps determine whether your agency feels financially strong or constantly stressed.

Tune in to our latest episode: "Understanding Working Capital for Agency Owners."

👉 [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!

6 W 18th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10011
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Two agencies, identical P&Ls, opposite realities

In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook go deep on working capital: the timing gap between when you pay your team and when clients pay you. The core insight: two agencies can have identical revenue and identical margins, but completely different financial realities. One has $300K in cash. The other has $300K in receivables. Same P&L. Very different stability. They cover: Why moving upstream to enterprise clients (net 60, net 90 terms) can create a liquidity crisis disguised as...

4 days ago • 1 min read

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...

9 days ago • 1 min read

Your agency offsites aren't working

In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook break down leadership offsites: what they're actually for, how to structure them, and what they learned from running them quarterly for over seven years. The core insight: a leadership offsite isn't another meeting. It's an investment in alignment. The conversations that don't happen during the normal course of work - the hard decisions, the tensions that linger, the things everyone avoids -that's what offsites are for. They share the...

11 days ago • 1 min read