Peter Kang

Last week, our leadership team at Barrel spent 3 full days aligning on goals and priorities for 2020. We came away with some concrete assignments that will improve processes, enhance our service offering, and deepen relationships with our clients. A recurring theme that’s become clearer to us in the past year is that all the problems and all the successes of an agency business, when you get down to the root of things, really boils […]

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 […]

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 […]

This past weekend, the four Barrel partners held an offsite retreat in Old Chatham, NY to plan the company’s priorities and initiatives for 2018. The two full days of planning were incredibly productive and we came away with a roadmap that we’re very excited to execute on in the coming weeks and months. It also helped that the AirBnB we were staying at was stunning. A barn-style home, the layout of the home, the high […]

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time–twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. […]

The effort heuristic is a mental rule of thumb in which the quality or worth of an object is determined from the perceived amount of effort that went into producing that object. In brief, the effort heuristic follows a tendency to judge objects that took a longer time to produce to be of higher value. – Wikipedia When it comes to managing a team that’s producing work for clients, it’s critical that everyone working on the […]

Every June 1, we celebrate the incorporation of Barrel. Most years, it’s a simple toast at the end of the day. Last year, on our 10-year anniversary, we had a nice party at one of my favorite restaurants. This year, we had margaritas and ice cream. We also launched a brand new website. What I most cherish about June 1 is that it gets me thinking about lessons I’ve learned in the past year. Over […]