It’s been an exhilarating month as Sei-Wook and I fully turned our attention to running our holding company.

We have so much we want to accomplish but we know our bandwidth and resources are tight. In some respects, it feels like 2006–it’s the two of us trying to build something new from the ground up.

The name of the game is to prioritize and execute one thing at a time. Very hard to do.

About Agency Journey: This is a monthly series detailing the happenings at our Barrel Holdings agencies. You can find previous episodes here.

Highlights

Our First Acquisition

Barrel Holdings made its first ever acquisition. We acquired Catalog, a product design studio specializing in UX/UI for startups. Founder Win Lin, whom we’ve known for some time, reached out to us knowing we were familiar with his business. We had poked around Catalog a couple of years ago when it was on the market but didn’t make an offer. This time around, we were able to come to terms.

We acquired Catalog in early July.

We’re really excited to add Catalog to our portfolio Its web and mobile app design capabilities will complement the work being done by BX Studio and Bolster. Lots of potential for cross-referrals across all the agencies.

It was also gratifying to actually experience the steps of doing a deal after many years of reading about and taking courses on acquisitions. Sei-Wook was meticulous in keeping things organized and buttoned up, working with our lawyers and accountants to get things properly set up.

Our transition to full-time holdco operators went from 0 to 100 really quickly with this deal. Both Sei-Wook and I complained of sore jaws the day after deal close, perhaps the first time in 20 years that I grinded my teeth in my sleep. It wasn’t because we were stressed, but more because we were excited and eager to get to work.

Speaking of work, there’s a lot we need to figure out. Our top priority is to hire a CEO to run the business. More on this in the Top of Mind section.

Last Barrel Leadership Book Club

Lucas, Wes, Sei-Wook, and I met for what was our last Barrel leadership book club. We’ve read 40+ books together over the past 7 years, and I truly believe that the experience really shaped all of us in meaningful ways.

Related: my blog post “Transformative Books We Read Together as a Leadership Team” and my presentation on the topic at Ecommerce Agency Summit

A final pic of the Barrel Leadership Book Club in this configuration.

With Sei-Wook and myself focusing on the holdco, we’ll be replacing this Barrel-only meeting with one that involves leaders from all the other companies. There may be some reading we do together, but I don’t think we’ll ever have the intimate and intense convos we experienced among the four of us.

Sharing our favorite highlights and takeaways from both of the books.

The final two books we read and discussed were 10X is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy and Implementing Value Pricing by Ron Baker. The combination of the books embodied what made these meetings so impactful: high-level concepts that open our eyes to how we can be better leaders and very actionable ideas we can bring to our day-to-day work.

Going to miss this meeting a lot.

Q3 Barrel Holdings Quarterly Meeting

Barrel Holdings meeting featuring all of our agency leaders, some coming into NYC for the day and others spanning London, Mexico City, and Vancouver Island.

Our agency leaders got together to share their respective performances for the past quarter. Here were the highlights:

• Barrel struggled in Q2, mostly from a couple of key accounts going away in Q1 and not being able to replace that revenue fast enough. We had a handful of key site launches in Q2 (Bobo’s, Willow, Aquor) and also got a couple of great logo wins.
• BX Studio and Vaulted Oak both logged record quarterly revs and are showing strong growth and margins. Both agencies are growing existing clients and adding new ones through referrals.
• Bolster also had its highest revenue quarter to date although it’s still hovering around breakeven. There was a huge volume of output in Q2, a combination of our Omakase offering and paid work that’s been picking up. Standing up our Framer website offering will make a big difference moving forward.

We also introduced a new agency, Prima Mode. It’s focused on helping brands sell profitably on Amazon. We’ll be making more noise about this business in the coming weeks.

We enjoyed a group dinner at Cosme after the meeting.

Along with Catalog, that’ll be six agencies in the portfolio. This is not something we had deliberately planned for at the start of the year, but we’ve acted opportunistically and will now hunker down to help support the performance of all the agencies.

Webflow Partner Summit in Toronto

I joined BX Studio CEO Jacob in Toronto for the Webflow Partner Summit, a gathering of Webflow agencies from all over the world to get an inside look at Webflow’s product roadmap and its plans for enhancing and expanding its partnership program.

Spent a few days in Toronto with BX Studio CEO Jacob Sussman. Right, you can make out BX Studio on the top row of the Webflow partner logo wall.

Webflow’s done a great job of continually evolving from a website builder to a full-on website experience platform. This will give agencies like BX Studio the opportunity to go from project-based work to offering long-term retainer relationships focused around website optimizations and marketing campaigns.

I really enjoyed meeting many of the other agency leaders there, getting to learn about their positioning, strengths, and challenges. The experience gave me a sense of the community and the competitive landscape. I couldn’t help but think of the earlier days of WordPress, Drupal, and Shopify and how they all cultivated energetic agency communities and a sense of a rising tide lifting all boats.

We have lots of learn from others, especially in how we can level up for Webflow Enterprise clients. At the same time, I’m super proud of what Jacob and his team have been able to build thus far with BX Studio.

Top of Mind

Hiring a New CEO

The highest leverage activity that Sei-Wook and I can make across Barrel Holdings is figuring out who will lead a particular agency.

The right leader sets the tone and enforces standards for an agency, which ultimately how the culture is established. A leader who works tirelessly to deliver results for clients, communicates clearly, and stays organized will quickly have an organization that reflects these behaviors. A leader who hustles to build pipeline, who continually improves based on feedback, and who maintains strict cost discipline will have a team that hustles, continually improves, and keeps an eye on costs.

Sei-Wook and I talk a lot about the qualities of our various agency leaders and how we can more effectively build a pipeline of future leaders.

One idea we have is to nurture future leaders through a training program. We published this General Associate Program page on our website to accept applicants interested in becoming agency leaders. Through exposure to our various agencies and special projects that touch upon areas like business development, marketing, talent acquisition, and operations, we believe associates can develop foundational knowledge and skills for a leadership role. Of course, the program will also be a way for us to evaluate for leadership potential. So much of a leader’s effectiveness is in their innate willingness to learn and be coached as well as their innate level of proactivity (bias towards action and communication).

With Catalog, we are a bit behind. We would’ve loved having someone in place prior to deal close, but we are still actively interviewing. We want to make sure that whoever we bring on is someone that we feel really great about. Our criteria is focused less on the person’s credentials and past experience and more on their curiosity, energy level, flexibility, and aptitude for learning. It also helps for them to have familiarity and knowledge about the type of work Catalog does and experience connecting with Catalog’s target audience (e.g. founders, investors, startup community types).

Over time, Sei-Wook and I will work to systematize and better scale the process of CEO hiring at Barrel Holdings. But for now, it’s a very scrappy and homegrown process that we’re relying on to deliver someone special. I’m confident we’ll make it work.

Shared Quotes

“If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft. Seneca therefore recommends that we take steps to ensure that we never get too comfortable.” (William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life)

“Do hard things” – exerting ourselves physically, going on a trip without the usual comforts, reading a dense book, or trying to learn something new – is the antidote to becoming soft and overly sensitive.

“Customer satisfaction always affected our notion of ‘a win.’ A sales contract is not yet a complete win: the end zone is when we have implemented successfully and created a delighted customer. Not just some revenue, but another brick in the wall of building a company one thrilled customer at a time. Selling a deal was great, but we immediately felt the pressure of making sure that customer was successful. Being blue-collar meant pride in workmanship and full accountability—if we ever fell short, it was a major event to be scrutinized and learned from by all of us. We took everything personally.” (Frank Slootman, Tape Sucks)

I absolutely love this perspective on how to think about a win. The successful delivery and conversion of a customer into an advocate is the true lasting win for any business. I’ve lived through too many instances where a new business win failed to turn into a productive long-term relationship. The client would churn and we’d be scrambling to fill them with another client win, making it very difficult to grow organically.

“Because expectations are dynamic, not static, it is also imperative to continuously ask customers what they expect. A firm should never rest on its laurels and assume it knows exactly what the customer is up to. Knowing your customer’s expectations also enables you to ask Peter Drucker’s deceptively simple question mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: What are we getting paid for? Often, if companies ask, ‘What job is the customer trying to get done?’ they can innovate higher-value offerings. When General Electric asked this question for its jet engines, it innovated the ‘Power by the Hour’ program for its aircraft engines, whereby it would be responsible for maintaining the engines and price for the serviceable usage the airline received.” (Ronald J. Baker , Implementing Value Pricing)

When you get curious about the progress your customers are trying to achieve in their lives and/or work, you can identify what “jobs” customers are ultimately looking to hire for and how they might value successful outcomes. With this understanding, you can then create products and services that deliver great value at prices that seem both reasonable to the customer and very profitable for you as the problem-solver.