Month: March 2020

My Personal Finance Stack 2020: Coronavirus Crisis Edition

March 23, 2020
by Peter Kang
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In this troubling and uncertain climate, I thought it would be a good time to review my personal finance stack head on and to share some of the moves I’m making. Like most others, there’s been a great deal of pain seeing my investment portfolio take some big hits. However, there’s opportunity to do some discounted buying in the coming weeks which may pay off in the long run. Then again, as a small business […]

The Upside of Having Struggled

March 15, 2020
by Peter Kang
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I wanted to jot down and share some quick thoughts on running a small agency business during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) situation developing here in the United States. As an agency with offices in New York City and Los Angeles, we made the call last Monday (March 9th) to have the Barrel team go fully remote. In hindsight, I think we made the right call and acted fairly quickly. The biggest thing that I can’t emphasize […]

Hindsight: Why 2015 Was A Bad Year for the Agency

March 2, 2020
by Peter Kang
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I decided to create a tidy table view of Barrel’s business performance for the past 14 years cleaning up some numbers and simplifying the view to focus on revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), gross profit, and gross margin. I decided to keep owner’s compensation completely out and defined COGS as the sum of our payroll and any amounts paid to freelancers/consultants/other agencies to help us deliver work. One year immediately jumped out to me: […]