13 Years, 13 Ideas

I launched the new home for The Long Aisle podcast last week. Check it out at www.thelongaisle.com.

And today, I released Episode 5 with the co-founders of Loonen, a special kind of bottled water (listen to hear why).

Behind it are two people who came at this from opposite sides of the table: Clara Sieg and David Kimmell. Clara spent over a decade as a venture investor. Loonen came out of her own experiences during IVF and early motherhood. For the operating half, she called David Kimmell, who was on the founding team at Spindrift and spent nearly a decade running operations and R&D there.

We got into the story behind their partnership, what happens when an investor and an operator team up, and how each of their backgrounds shapes the way they're building.

More details on the episode here.

Borrowed

"Thinking again can help you generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It's a path to learning more from the people around you and living with fewer regrets. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it's time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity."

From "Think Again" by Adam Grant [Book]

Learned & Thought

I write an internal newsletter for the Barrel team. It doesn’t really have a name, but every edition starts with EOW (end of week), and I send it on Fridays. I share updates from the week and things on my mind, stuff that not everyone would necessarily be aware of without me deciding to share it.

Per usual, I didn’t realize it was my 13th Barrel-versary this week until someone on LinkedIn liked my auto-generated work anniversary post. I thought it would be fun to go back through the last 12 months of EOW updates and pull out 13 lessons from my writing. Here’s what I came up with.

1. In new business conversations, speed is a message. A CEO DM’d me on LinkedIn this year, and we kicked off his project after just a couple of calls. Moving that fast told him more about how we work than anything in our deck. Funny enough, they had the rushed timeline, and in the end, they were the ones who couldn’t keep up with us.
2. One of our retainer clients told us one of the reasons they value our partnership is how we can flex with their needs; some months are more intense than others, and no one is counting hours. We’ve spent a few years living in a world without T&M, and hearing a client describe our vision back to us unprompted was motivating.
3. When you lose a pitch, chase the why. Feedback from losses reshaped how we propose work, the services we offer, and how we showcase what we’ve done. The wins feel better, but the losses teach faster.
4. Share the losses with your team. My updates include the accounts we lost and the real reasons why. It’s important to celebrate the wins, but there’s a lot to gain from the losses. Sharing them creates alignment and camaraderie among the team for all the takeaways and changes that shape what's to come.
5. Leave the seat open until you find the right person. And start looking, even when you’re not ready. Some of our most impactful hires this year came from searches that took longer than was comfortable, and others from people who showed up before we knew we needed them.
6. Being explicit upfront is kinder than being flexible later. This lesson found us more than once: a client asks for something beyond what was planned, our instinct is to absorb it and keep everyone happy, and suddenly the time meant for the thing they hired us for is going somewhere else. The yes feels generous in the moment, but not if it risks the priority. Most of the time, the client isn't even asking for it free. They just want to know what it takes.
7. Measure how the team feels with the same rigor as revenue. We run the same engagement survey every quarter, and I share the results in full. Alongside real check-ins with the team, it’s a helpful, data-driven look at how our choices are landing. Sometimes uncomfortable to write up, but it forces acknowledgment in a way I’m grateful for.
8. Some clients are buying as much sleep as what we produce. A prospect told us this year that our experience across their industry, CPG, and ecommerce “helps us sleep at night.” I think about that phrase often. Sometimes it’s sleep; other times it’s their reputation with their boss, or something else they’re not saying. Every deck, case study, and reference call ultimately needs to answer some underlying question: Can we trust these people? Will they make me look good? Can I finally stop worrying about this? If you can figure out which one you’re answering, even better.
9. Barrel became a Shopify Platinum partner this month. We knew the tier mattered in our ecosystem and continued to invest in the partnership, but we were careful to treat it as an outcome rather than a target. Targets have gravity; chase one hard enough and you start making decisions that serve the number instead of the work. The goal stayed the same: do great work for CPG clients and be a real partner to Shopify. Get those right, and the milestone tends to take care of itself.
10. If something matters, give it structure. We brought in consultants to provide an outside perspective on gaps we recognized, changed how we run 1-1s, and split our client meetings into two: one for delivery, one for the relationship and where it can grow. Three changes, one idea. It’s easy to say something is a priority and assume good intentions will carry it. Structure is what makes the expectation real.
11. Contracts are with companies, but relationships are with people. A client stakeholder was laid off this year, and within months, they were pulling us into their new company. Every client roster is really a people roster in disguise. The person you do right by today is your warmest intro down the road.
12. Deals that go dark or go elsewhere aren’t always dead. Over the last 6 months, we’ve signed three deals with brands we started talking to as far back as three years ago. One even chose a different agency the first time around. You can’t count on these, but you can stay close, keep the door open, and be easy to come back to.
13. Question every tool. Asking "what does this unlock with AI" became part of the equation. We left a presentation platform we loved because of it. Instead of paying for an ATS no one enjoyed using, I built one, not long after an internal web app that's increasingly powering how we operate. Nothing was broken in how we were working. We're just asking more.

Plenty more ideas came to mind while doing this that haven't made it into an EOW update. Yet. The fun thing about a list like this is that some of these would have made my list years ago, too, just with a different spin. The lessons don’t change much. Your relationship to them does, and they take on a new dimension every time you revisit them.