Welcoming a New Role: COO

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

Borrowed

"Hiring is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization."

From "The Making of a Manager" by Julie Zhuo [Book]

Learned

Today, we welcomed a new team member in a new role. Sara Asic joined Barrel as COO.

This is a meaningful hire, and I’m energized by what it means.

It’s been almost two years since I became CEO. After over a decade with the company, it’s incredible how much I’ve learned in just those couple of years. In the midst of repositioning the agency, I’ve assumed new responsibilities while finding my way as a leader. It’s been one of the most demanding stretches of my career, and also one of the most clarifying and rewarding.

Much of last year was focused on building out our Growth team to establish ownership across partnerships, sales, and marketing. For a long time, these had been bundled within leadership or spread across team members doing double duty. Building out that team was an exploration of what becomes possible when you invest in dedicated people to take the lead.

And with that evolution came a question I’d been sitting with: what does the business need to fuel our next phase of growth?

For me, the answer now was ownership in how we deliver, not just what we deliver. The infrastructure that makes great work repeatable. The systems that keep quality intact as you scale.

We have strong leaders across our agency discipline teams. What I’ve come to accept, as I’ve stepped more fully into leading Growth, is that I’m less able to give those leaders the dedicated attention I believe they deserve. The conversations about process, about how we onboard, how we escalate, how we run client relationships across service lines. We need someone to make sure these conversations happen, that learnings get implemented, and that we keep building on what’s working as we grow. We spend a lot of time, sometimes months, earning a client’s trust before they sign. That same investment needs to be reflected in continually improving how we deliver for them.

That’s what Sara is here to do.

I’ve known for some time that a role like this would come someday, but it crystallized last month. I was at our Barrel Holdings Leadership Summit, looking around the table at the leaders of our other agencies. I was the only one there on my own. As the sessions went on, I sat with something. A feeling of what it might look like to have a real collaborator, someone by my side.

I didn’t have to wonder for long. Sara came through our network around the same time. She’s joining us from Domaine, one of the most respected Shopify agencies in the space. She understands what it means to build a system around Delivery because she’s done it before at a fast-moving company.

In my years of hiring, meeting Sara was one of those moments you wish you could have more often. She reached out at the right time, with the right background, and a genuine interest in building. In the short term, her focus will be on understanding our current delivery systems and identifying areas for process improvement. She’ll observe, attend leadership meetings, connect one-on-one with everyone on the team, and, together, we’ll explore where to prioritize in the long term.

What’s most exciting, and honestly, the part that feels most personal to me, is how closely Sara and I will work together. I can't remember the last time I had a standing hour-long weekly one-on-one with anyone outside Peter, Barrel Co-Founder and former CEO. She’ll become a real counterpart, someone to think through the hard stuff with, someone who owns a critical part of the business alongside me.

We’re in an exciting season of change, constantly evolving how we can help our clients succeed. Not by adding services carelessly, but by going deeper in areas where we have conviction while carefully exploring others. I couldn’t be more excited to have Sara here to help us strengthen what we’re building.

Welcome, Sara.