Author: Peter Kang

Playing in the Capitalist Economy

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I came across this tweet by Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia: Lavingia’s epic post “Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company” on his founder’s journey is worth reading. He also openly shares the progress of the business in both a public dashboard and in tweets like this, always fascinating to see as a business owner. I wanted to save his tweet about owning capital in a capitalist economy because it made me think about […]

Small Agency Owner Compensation

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Can an owner of a small creative/marketing/digital agency make decent money? The answer is yes, but like anything worthwhile, it takes discipline, hard work, and some luck. The business model itself is really simple: be great at sales, control costs (especially labor), do excellent work, and have a good CPA. I built a really simple model on Google Sheets to show the inner workings of a small agency’s business from the owner’s perspective.  You can copy […]

Lessons from Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday

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Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday is a book about inner peace and how this “stillness” is the key to “unlocking all that we are capable of in this life.” Holiday references ancient philosophers, religions, historical figures, and other successful people throughout the book to lay out his framework for achieving stillness: mastering the mind, spirit, and body. I’ve been a long-time subscriber to Holiday’s monthly newsletter where he recommends books he’s read. It’s […]

Lessons from Orphan X and His Ten Commandments

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Orphan X is a entertaining fiction series from author Gregg Hurwitz. The hero, Evan Smoak a.k.a. Orphan X, is a product of a government black ops program that turned wayward children into deadly assassins. Smoak is out of the program and has turned into the “Nowhere Man”, an invisible force who saves the helpless, dishing out punishment to sex traffickers, rapists, domestic abusers, gangs, and other nefarious characters. Think Jason Bourne meets the Equalizer. I’ve listened […]

Lessons from The E-Myth Chief Financial Officer

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The E-Myth Chief Financial Officer: Why Most Small Businesses Run Out of Money and What to Do about It by Michael E. Gerber and Fred G. Parrish focuses on the importance of the chief financial officer role in a small business and how, in the absence of a full-time CFO, the entrepreneur must be willing to play the role. It’s taken me well over a decade to truly appreciate the importance of how financial thinking […]

Reflecting on The 11 Laws of The Fifth Discipline (from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline)

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It’s been a year since I read Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and yet, I’ve been reminded almost every single day of the lessons from the book. My company Barrel recently celebrated 13 years of being in business. My co-founder Sei-Wook and I have been there for all 13 years, and I feel like it’s only been in the past year that the two of us started to take a less reactive approach to running […]

Operating Rules Vol.1

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I’ve found myself recently repeating a few different rules to in my head as reminders on ways I should be operating, whether it’s in day-to-day behaviors, in occasional decision-making, or interactions with others. Sometimes, when I’m distracted, emotionally incensed, or completely in mindless mode, I’ll forget these rules and behave in regretful ways. But one thing I’ve noticed is that as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to embrace the upside to slowing down and considering […]

My Personal Finance Stack 2019

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I last wrote about my personal finance “stack” in the summer of 2017. A lot has changed since then, so I want to make this an annual activity and use it as an opportunity to examine how I’m managing my money. Without going into any absolute figures, I’ll share how I organize my money, what types of investments I’ve made, and the services and tools I use. Money is something that’s still a tough topic to […]

2018: Habits That Stuck

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2018 was a good year for experimentation. I tried out a lot of different approaches to cultivating or switching up my habits . Some ended up sticking and many were abandoned. I’m grateful that I’ve had the luxury of time, energy, and resources to continually mold my daily routines freely. I know that this won’t always be the case, especially when new responsibilities (e.g. parenthood) emerge, but I hope that the past few years of […]

Lessons from Atomic Habits by James Clear

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I’ve thought and written a lot about habits over the past few years. However, after reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, I realized that I was still lacking awareness when it came to understanding how habits formed and stuck around. While many of the ideas, examples, and concepts in the book were very familiar to me (e.g. cognitive biases, small wins / reinforcing feedback loops, tracking, etc.), it was really nice to see everything come together in an […]

Continually Evolving Thoughts on Talent and Hiring

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In writing this post, I wanted to make a reminder for myself about the continually evolving nature of how I’ve viewed talent and hiring, and how it’s possible that my views will continue to change in the future. When we first started Barrel, Sei-Wook and I were essentially a couple of freelancers who said yes to enough work that we needed to hire people to help us. We used Craigslist and that was the start […]

Common Opportunities in Growing E-commerce Businesses Vol. 1

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At Barrel, a segment of our clients (and prospective clients who contact us) are growing e-commerce businesses doing anywhere between $500k to $5 million in sales. They are typically run by small teams (usually less than 10 people, often just 2-5 people) and have either been bootstrapped (funded with the founder’s savings plus the profits of the business) or with a small seed investment from friends and family. Drawing from my observations and experience reviewing dozens of […]

Exploring Daily Commitments

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I recently signed up for an online fitness program called Athlean-X. It’s a 3-month plan that requires 5 days of workouts with 2 days of rest and recovery. I haven’t been able to keep up day-for-day with the plan, especially as I like to fit in basketball and running on some of the days, but I’ve tried my best to fit the 5 workouts every 8-9 days. The workouts themselves are not overly difficult or […]

Being Short and Embracing Setbacks from Astroball by Ben Reiter

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Sig had developed a theory—a hypothesis, to be exact—about undersized ballplayers, after so many years of watching Jed Lowrie and José Altuve, and now Alex Bregman. Most players with their skills but traditional pro bodies had lived their entire lives without having ever been told no and often without suffering any setbacks. So, when faced with the prospect of failing at a critical moment, they didn’t know how to handle it, because they’d never had […]

The Discipline of Joy & More Thoughts on Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam

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I’ve compiled some additional thoughts on Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam. You can read about my time diary experiment here. Progress is motivational, and makes time feel expansive. In the time-perception survey, people who strongly agreed with the statement “Yesterday, I made progress toward my personal or professional goals” were 20 percent more likely than the average survey respondent to believe that they generally had enough time for the […]

Thoughts on Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam and My Time Diary Experiment

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In Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam, the author writes about her study of over 900 participants in which she surveys them on how they spent a Monday in March hour by hour and how they felt both about that day and about time in general. She writes: First, people who feel like they have enough time are exceedingly mindful of their time. They know where the time […]

The Importance of Marketing to Existing Clients from Managing the Professional Service Firm

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Managing the Professional Service Firm by David H. Maister is a must-read book for anyone running a professional services business. For too long, I thought that a digital creative firm like Barrel was somehow special and played by different rules than consulting, legal, accounting, or architecture/design businesses. Wrong. It became quickly apparent in the first few pages of the book that Barrel operates in the same way as any other professional service firm and that […]

Lummi Island and The Willows Inn in Washington

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Lummi Island Baker Preserve Overlook View of Surrounding Islands

Melanie and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary with a trip to Washington. We spent a couple of days in Seattle meeting up with friends and doing touristy stuff around the city. We then drove north a couple of hours to Lummi Island and stayed overnight at The Willows Inn. We enjoyed an excellent dinner at The Willows Inn, enjoyed the amazing view from our beachfront room, and woke up the next morning to an […]

Systems Archetypes from The Fifth Discipline and How They Apply to a Digital Agency

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One of my favorite parts of The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge is the topic of systems thinking and how so many of the problems inherent in organizations (and even personal behaviors) stem from being unaware of the various systems at play and how these systems, when undetected and untouched, can control and determine outcomes, often in ways contrary to what you may have intended. In such situations, we’re likely to blame external forces for our […]

Personal Mastery from The Fifth Discipline

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Organizations learn only through individuals who learn. Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. But without it no organizational learning occurs. In Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, one of the five disciplines is personal mastery (the others being systems thinking, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning). Senge equates personal mastery with personal growth and learning, espoused by those who “are continually expanding their ability to create the results in life they truly seek.” As […]