BARREL

On June 1, we celebrated 7 years of being in business at Barrel. Sei-Wook and I started the company from an apartment bedroom in Astoria and slowly grew the business. In the past couple of years, we experienced a faster pace of growth which has allowed us to add more team members (we’re hovering around 30) and take on more clients.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Sei-Wook to try our hand at recording a podcast. We named the podcast The Garage as we happened to be sitting in our large conference room, also named The Garage. The name seemed apt because of what we wanted to cover: the stories and lessons learned from constantly building, tinkering, and growing our business.

For our inaugural episode, we decided to reflect on our seven years in business with a show to highlight seven very important lessons we learned along the way. We’re still working on our podcast site and will have recordings available soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a condensed version here.

1. Learning to Trust Employees
This was a big one for me, as I was very prone to micromanagement in our earlier days. My crimes included checking in on people every hour, hovering around and giving unsolicited feedback, and being paranoid about whether I could trust people to meet a deadline or follow up on a client email. The transition from doing all the work to entrusting others to do it was a tough one, but once we became better about this and focused our efforts on training and developing processes, it allowed us to grow as a company. Plus, trusting people on the team allows them to take initiative and ownership over projects, which leads to better results and a happier workplace.

2. The Importance of Project Management
If Sei-Wook and I had to do this all over again, we would probably hire project managers first. We learned the hard way that strong project management is what allows projects to move forward and get completed on time and on budget. For too long, we juggled many projects without being strict about schedules and were fairly loose on time-tracking and monitoring the budget. We also forced our designers and developers to play the role of primary communicators with our clients, which often wasn’t the best use of their time or skills. Luckily, we’ve been able to assemble a very strong team of project managers (we called them Producers) who lead our project teams, provide great client service, and ensure successful launches.

3. Be Proactive in Communications
When we were less than 10 people, it used to be very easy to talk to everyone in the company every day. With more people, it’s become more and more challenging to stay connected to everyone all the time. We’ve also learned from various experiences that it’s much better to over-communicate than to stay quiet, even if it’s just to say that something’s on our minds or that we’re in the process of deciding. We’ve taken steps in the past year to increase our team-wide communications through weekly Principal Updates, and we’ve been receptive to anonymous feedback through a Barrel Anonymous Feedback form. We’ve also put more effort into our monthly meeting presentations outlining new plans and initiatives for our team as well as the progress of existing efforts.

4. The Importance of Cash Flow
As the business has grown, we’ve become more diligent about managing our cash flow, which means making sure that there’s more money flowing in than money going out. We keep our books up-to-date (thanks to our friend Sergey for his advice and guidance over the years), enlist the services of a much more hands-on accountant (he comes in every now and then to review our books and give us in-depth reporting), and have overhauled the way we handle our account receivables, which has led to more timely payments. We’ve also secured a line of credit with Chase to help us in tight cash situations.

5. Constantly Promote Yourself
For a good chunk of our company’s existence, Sei-Wook and I were very shy when it came to talking about Barrel. Whether it was the lack of confidence or a belief that modesty made us better people, we now know that it’s bad for business when you can’t talk about yourself. We’ve put in effort and practice to become more comfortable talking about Barrel such as the things we’ve been able to achieve for our clients and how we strive to build a strong team culture. Whether it’s at an event, on the phone, via email, or through social media, we’ve found value in sharing things about ourselves and the business, and it’s helped us tremendously in building new business relationships and attracting new talent.

6. Seek Out and Ask for Advice
I don’t know why we took as long as we did to become more proactive in reaching out to other business owners to hear about their experiences, ask for advice, and find ways to help each other. Perhaps we felt we were too small beans and would be wasting the time of more important people. But the truth is, asking doesn’t hurt and most people are more than willing to share things they’ve learned. Once we started doing this regularly, going out to meet entrepreneurs and heads of different design studios and agencies, we learned so much and brought back great ideas that we could implement immediately. On the flip side, we’ve tried our best to make ourselves available to people who reach out to us and want to learn about our lessons learned.

7. Celebrate Small Wins
We’ve been trying to instill a culture that recognizes and savors small wins. Why? Two reasons: 1) a continuous flow of small wins is what eventually adds up to the big wins and 2) life is much more pleasant when you can take time to enjoy something positive. Internally, we’ve created the Sweet Board, where you can text a number to anonymously thank someone or give a shout out to a win. We also have a stand up meeting every Friday over a new bottle of bourbon. We call this BourbON Fridays and it’s a time for recognizing various wins by different groups and individuals from the past week. We hope to continue finding other ways to celebrate small wins.

These are just some of the many lessons we’ve learned in our 7 years of doing business, but we think these 7 are a good overview of the things that have made us who we are today. We’re incredibly excited for another year of learning, growing, and doing great work. Thank you to all of our friends, family, clients, and partners for your support. Cheers!

Illustrations by Andrea Horne