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
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...
8 days ago • 1 min read
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
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...
15 days ago • 1 min read
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...
18 days ago • 1 min read
This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Our third AgencyHabits Knowledge Share brought together agency founders and operators for an honest deep dive into something most agencies think they've figured out - but haven't: the Ideal Client Profile.Spoiler: it's not just picking an industry and a revenue range.🎥 Watch the full recording📂 Grab the slidesInside, you'll learn:• The 5 ICP components (most agencies only use 2)•...
22 days ago • 2 min read
In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook do a deep dive on agency profit - specifically, why so many founders misunderstand what healthy numbers actually look like. The core insight: gross margin is the starting point for everything. It's not just a metric, it's the funding source for the rest of your business. Without strong gross margin, you don't have the dollars to invest in growth, build systems, or weather volatility. They break down: Gross margin vs. EBITDA The levers...
25 days ago • 1 min read
This Week's Agency Insights Every week, we share content to help you run your agency business. What's Top of Mind Profitable projects, unprofitable agency? – How to pull the 6 levers that impact margins, from staffing to scope management to AI. "We're specializing"...but every deal is still bespoke. - David Hoos on why most agencies think they're growing vertically but their behavior says otherwise. Margins and growth direction both start with the same foundation: knowing exactly who you...
29 days ago • 1 min read
In this week's AgencyHabits Podcast, Peter and Sei-Wook introduce the concept of engagement yield: the idea that every client engagement should generate returns far beyond the invoice. Revenue is obvious. You agree on scope, you deliver, you get paid. But the best agencies extract much more from every engagement, and that's what compounds over time. They break it down into four components: Proof: Case studies, testimonials, portfolio assets. The stuff that makes the next sale easier....
about 1 month ago • 1 min read