12 Lessons from Bob Fifer's "Double Your Profits."

This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter, BL&T (Borrowed, Learned, & Thought). Subscribe

Borrowed, Learned

Barrel hit an EBITDA milestone in 2025. When I was reflecting on what contributed to that result, I thought back to Bob Fifer’s book, Double Your Profits: In Six Months or Less. Peter, Barrel’s co-founder, suggested I read it when I was about to take over as CEO. The core message he wanted me to internalize was the distinction between strategic and non-strategic costs.

The book was a valuable read as I was early in my CEO journey (still am). It solidified a mindset I’d been considering at the time: running the business is no different from managing my personal finances. I’ve always been deliberate about how I spend money. I remember several years ago coming across a spreadsheet from when I first moved to NYC that outlined exactly how I’d budget each paycheck. Funny to look at now because life was much less complicated then, but it said everything about who I was. Why should the business be any different?

If there's one thing I've learned about myself, it's that being cost conscious can make it hard to give myself permission to spend on the things that bring joy or are clearly worth it. When the investment is big, I'll labor over decisions until they start to weigh on me, even when I know what I need to do. Just knowing this about myself has been helpful, and getting outside perspective when I'm stuck has made a difference. There's power in that discipline, but waiting as long as I did to buy a proper snowblower is an example of where it gets in the way. I sense a similar thing at Barrel. We had a milestone year, but it's also shown me there's more I could be investing in areas that matter. This is where that distinction between strategic and non-strategic costs comes in.

Strategic costs are the things that clearly bring in business or improve profitability. For an agency like Barrel, that might mean hiring an outside consultant to share an outside perspective on an important challenge and bringing on a strategist to pilot a service offering. Non-strategic costs are everything else. The “nice to have” perks, the software subscriptions that sound promising but go underutilized, the meetings that don’t need to happen. Fifer’s argument is simple: outspend your competitors on strategic costs and cut non-strategic costs to the bone.

All said, this book left me with a mindset that continues to shape how I operate and what I try to instill in the team. We stick to our target margin when scoping projects and rally the team around that number. We’re disciplined about how and where we use freelance resources. We question every marketing expense. And even then, are we clear on expectations?

The logic is simple: you can always cut an expense later, but if you don’t scrutinize it upfront, you’ll never catch it. It’s not about one big move. It’s daily discipline, compounded over time. What makes this especially meaningful at Barrel is our profit-sharing program. I don’t want it to feel like a bonus that shows up at the end of the year; it’s the result of working smart all year long. When the business does well, the team feels it too.

And with that, here are 12 lessons from the book that I find myself returning to:

On the goal of any organization: “The end, the driving goal of any organization, should be one simple thing: to be the best. Nothing motivates employees, excites them about coming to work, and produces better bottom-line results, than to tell everyone in the organization that we as an organization and each of us as individuals will be the best, and will settle for nothing less.”
On why profitability matters: “Profitable companies have the money to reward employees, build exciting career paths, and invest in new products, businesses and technologies. Less profitable companies inevitably sink into mediocrity in all ways—morale, product distinctiveness, and so on—because they wind up funding each part of the business half-heartedly and inadequately.”
On being unapologetic: “Never apologize for maximizing profits: There’s nothing to apologize for. If you’re unapologetically excited about profits, your employees will be too.”
On process versus results: “An over-focus on process is the refuge of weak or mediocre managers.”
On strategic versus non-strategic costs: “Strategic costs are defined as all those things that clearly bring in business and improve the bottom line. Non-strategic costs are all other costs, i.e., the costs necessary to run the business, but that don’t clearly bring in more business.”
On minimizing waste: “Never write a memo if telling someone will do, never call a meeting if a memo will do, never call a four-hour meeting if a one-hour meeting will do, never have two meetings if one will do, and never set up a process if two meetings will do.”
On decision-making: “Superb managers are instinctual, making the right decision most of the time based on limited data. The quantification that less-skilled managers insist upon is in fact illusory: They wind up making decisions based upon that which can be quantified rather than that which is important.”
On the burden of proof for spending: “The comforting thing about cutting costs is that, if you do make a mistake, somebody will always tell you and you can add the cost back.”
On keeping resources scarce: “A truly busy employee is forced to prioritize and do only the truly worthwhile things. More importantly, a manager with scarce resources reporting to him or her is forced to prioritize and to get things done efficiently. In other words, that manager is forced to manage well.”
On meetings: “Never call a meeting to discuss; call a meeting only to decide.”
On selling: “Always remember that you are selling to a person, not a company. Always get them to tell you the real reason they want to buy the product or service you are offering, not the rational, on-paper reason, which is rarely the real reason.”
On asking for more: “The simplest sales rule of all is to ask for more: more than you’ve gotten before, more than the customer’s talking about, more than your insecure self thinks you deserve.”

I hope these ideas are as useful to you as they were to me. If you’re running a business and want a blunt, no-nonsense perspective on profitability, this book does just that. And does it well.