OverPressure Podcast

Austin Holmes
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Business

OverPressure is a weekly podcast that brings authentic, unfiltered conversations from veterans,service members, entrepreneurs and advocates. Hosted by Austin Holmes, the show highlightsresilience, leadership, and the real challenges faced during and after military life. Each episodeoffers inspiration, practical advice, and powerful storytelling designed to empower the veteranand entrepreneur community.

  1. 3d ago

    OverPressure Podcast Kati Peterman & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Katie, a Dallas-based operator and founder of FRX, a fractional operations firm whose 14 advisors have worked with about 3,200 companies in recent years. As a COO for different founders and visionaries, she kept running into the same two things. The traditional COO role was outdated, and new COOs walked into companies full of fear, where staff assumed layoffs and upheaval were coming. She also kept working herself out of a job by putting systems in place, which she notes is exactly what a good operator is supposed to do. A self-described number two, she loves taking someone else's vision and turning it into something a team can actually carry out. She built FRX to deliver that support month to month, with no contracts, so a small mom-and-pop business can get a right-hand operator without hiring a $300,000 executive. The best material isn't the founding story, though it's a smart one. It's her blunt diagnosis of why companies keep hiring the wrong people. Most job descriptions, she says, list a few duties, a little company history, the hours, and the pay, then ask people to apply. If all you talked about was salary and commission, you shouldn't be surprised when people show up only for a paycheck. That, she argues, is the owner's responsibility. A strong job description lays out the mission, core values, and culture as non-negotiables. It says who the role reports to and how big the team is. And it describes a real day in specific numbers: a daily huddle, outreach to 37 prospects, 11 follow-ups, three booked calls. That gives candidates something they can say yes to because they believe in it, not because of the money. Getting this wrong is expensive. Burn someone out in their first few weeks of onboarding, she warns, and it can take two to three years to rebuild their trust. Quick gems from the episode: → Sales skills don't automatically transfer. Phone sales, door-to-door, and live-event or high-ticket sales draw on different personalities, and a top performer who doesn't get an early win in the wrong environment will leave quickly. → Her view of AI in operations: if a founder already communicates poorly, AI won't fix that. It's like adding salt and pepper to a tomato. It seasons the tomato, but it won't turn it into an eggplant. → She predicts backlash over AI costs will bring back appreciation for human operators who understand every part of a company and can feel connected to the founder's original vision. → Most people don't really know what operations means. She compares it to foreigners who think every U.S. state is California or Texas. → A players aren't defined by pay level. What makes someone an A player is mindset, and in particular a commitment to keep improving their communication even if they aren't naturally good at it. She also says to verify track records, because a lot of people never check. → DISC profiles can shift over the years. A 25-year-old and that same person at 35 with new financial responsibilities may show up very differently. She recommends Predictive Index, which measures drives and needs that stay more stable over time, because you're hiring for output, not personality. → She doesn't want 30 advisors. As fractional work has become a buzzword over the past year and a half, clients increasingly want to pay less while still feeling like your only client. Her answer is to invest in tools that increase each advisor's output, not headcount, so her team can still enjoy family time at the end of the day. The thread connecting an operator who kept systematizing herself out of jobs, a firm designed to remove every barrier to getting help, and an insistence on painting an honest picture before anyone is hired is what makes this conversation land. It isn't a lecture on hiring tactics. It's an argument that most people problems in a business begin with what the founder failed to communicate. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Kati Peterman & Austin

  2. 5d ago

    OverPressure Podcast Mart Ratliff & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Mart, a Desert Storm-era veteran from Fort Worth, Texas, who is building Hero Haven, a nonprofit designed to treat veterans and their families in one place. His path there started with watching close military friends struggle with the aftermath of service. About seven years ago he joined a nonprofit serving veterans and first responders with PTSD. Through that work and his own experience with the VA, he kept seeing the same problem. Help exists, but it is fragmented and siloed, and it almost always leaves out the families who carry the weight of service alongside the veteran. The best material isn't the mission statement, though it's a compelling one. It's the personal experience behind it. When Mart left the military, the government and the VA were still denying that Gulf War Syndrome existed. He had to find a civilian doctor who had taken on the issue on his own and work out his treatment by himself. It was about 30 years after he got out before he got the help he needed. Hero Haven is built so no one else has to wait that long. The goal is a place where a veteran can say they are struggling without knowing exactly what with, ask for help, and hear yes, at no charge to the veteran or their family, ever. The organization is also designed to avoid the ways nonprofits typically fail. It will be veteran-run and fully transparent about money raised and spent. It will hold off spending until funding commitments reach a set level, so the project doesn't start, stall, and restart. And it will draw on foundations and corporate sponsors rather than depend on government money that rises and falls with politics. Quick gems from the episode: → His take on the military's famous phrase is "hurry up and wait," reversed: Hero Haven will wait until the funding is secured, then hurry up and move fast once it starts. → The plan calls for 300 to 500 acres in Texas. If the land turns out to be unavailable or unaffordable there, the change will be posted publicly on the website, following the idea that every plan exists only until first contact. → Long term, he envisions regional campuses that may each develop a specialty, such as mental health or limb restoration. He also sees partnerships with medical schools and openness to emerging treatments like psychedelic therapy, which the VA has recently started to consider. → He's telling his future board to pull him back "fast and hard" if he ever does something that threatens the mission. His reason: this isn't about a cult of personality, it's about helping veterans. → For him, leadership comes down to signal, and signal means consequences, not intentions. Good leaders exist only when followers hold them accountable. As an E6, he would pull his own platoon sergeant aside when he saw him slipping, and the good leaders always listened. → He has rethought "embrace the suck." Looking back, the leaders he would have charged a hill for weren't the ones who simply endured. They were disciplined NCOs who set clear expectations and treated their people right. → His approach to pressure is to make the plan, work the plan, and build in contingencies. Most pressure comes from making decisions in the moment, so the more decisions you make ahead of time, when there's no pressure, the calmer the mission becomes. The thread connecting a veteran who had to find his own Gulf War Syndrome treatment, a nonprofit designed around transparency and accountability from day one, and a belief that the veteran community will always show up for its own is what makes this conversation land. It isn't a fundraising pitch. It's an argument that when existing institutions let people down, the people who were failed are often the ones best equipped to build something better. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Mart Ratliff & Austin

  3. Sep 24

    OverPressure Podcast Peter Boolkah & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Peter, a business coach joining from across the pond who spent 16 years at McDonald's, a company he calls the grandfather of the turnkey business, before buying and selling a restaurant of his own. He never planned to become a coach. Between careers, he agreed to explore a coaching franchise, did his due diligence, found the franchise partners uninspiring, and was ready to walk away. Out of commitment, he kept his last scheduled meeting with a man who lived nearby. That man became the mentor he needed, and the two worked together for 15 years. Twenty-one years and more than 60,000 coaching hours later, a total he says only about 1% of coaches reach, he now works with founders three to five years out from selling their companies. The best material isn't the career story, though it's an unlikely one. It's his blunt view of what really decides whether a business can be sold. Having been part of roughly 50 deals, he says the first question isn't how to get ready for an exit but who the buyer will be. A family succession, a private equity or VC buyer, a trade sale, and a management buyout each call for a differently structured business. He is just as direct about buyers: most skip real due diligence because they're "blinded by romance," and they accept being told they can't talk to the management team until the deal is signed. That, he says, is where the biggest discount appears, once the buyer finds out the management team is weak. His list of discount points is short. It covers the strength of the leadership team, how much the business depends on the founder, and client concentration. His best deals involve tired founders who now see the business as a liability rather than an asset. Those deals can close at around a 60% discount and pay for themselves by year two. Quick gems from the episode: → Chapter one of his book, Your Business Sucks, is called "The Mirror." If a founder keeps hiring bad people, he asks one question: who's doing the hiring? → In 2016 he changed his identity from a coach who did marketing to a marketer who coaches. He calls it the turning point of his career and argues that the colder your database, the harder you have to sell. → For finding acquisition targets, his advice is simple: research the companies and send them a letter. After six years of pandemic, inflation, supply chain problems, and war, he says many more owners are ready to sell than you'd expect. → Stepping out of the day-to-day doesn't mean stepping away. The founder's job moves to strategy and the next three to five years, with one goal: increasing the value of the business. → He argues the economy recognizes only two things, competency and incompetency. Competence gets rewarded and incompetence gets punished. → Every hour, about 11,000 startups launch worldwide, and 80% fail within five years. He blames founders who start with an idea but never study business. His office wall reads "the more you learn, the more you earn." → The book is the first of a planned eight-book series he describes as a Harry Potter for business. The second installment releases March 27, and the Kindle edition of book one is available for 99 cents. The thread connecting a McDonald's systems education, a franchise meeting he almost skipped, and five decades of deals and coaching hours is an argument that no one else is responsible for the business you've built. The mirror shows founders exactly what they created, and the ones who can look at it honestly are the ones who build something worth buying. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Peter Boolkah & Austin

  4. Sep 22

    OverPressure Podcast Nancy Jasin & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Nancy, a retired nurse and author from the Toledo-Detroit border area who's been writing since she was four years old and still gets called back into nursing work decades after retiring. Her father was a charismatic government photographer with a photographic memory who danced at weddings and ran the church, yet something unspoken happened at home that she still hasn't fully resolved, only forgiven. Books thrown into her playpen as a baby became her first fascination with language, and her mother's Juilliard-trained musical talent shaped an artistic sensibility she carried straight into nursing. The best material isn't the biography, though it's a striking one. It's the night that defined her entire career: an 18-year-old nursing student, days into her first year, thrown into a chaotic ER after a small plane carrying a college football team crashed in dense fog. Told to treat a severely burned young man she had no training for, she found a vein by his foot, got an IV in, and shouted for Demerol from a stranger who turned out to be a well-known doctor. When the patient, barely able to speak, managed to say "don't let me die," something in her shifted permanently. She stopped being afraid and became, in her words, who she was always supposed to be. It's also the harder story she tells without flinching: decades later, as a head nurse on a neurology unit responsible for other people's lives, she was secretly battling alcoholism so severe that colleagues suspected cancer from her weight loss. She's now 42 years sober, and treats that survival not as a private victory but as an obligation to help other women fighting the same thing. Quick gems from the episode: → Her writing draws directly from lived experience treated like a recipe: real people, real settings, real sensory detail, then fictionalized and rearranged, sometimes with a source's direct permission to tell a story that's genuinely theirs. → Partial deafness in one ear taught her to read lips as a child, a skill that now surfaces in her fiction as a quiet ability certain characters have that others don't know about. → Her first book, The Tire Swing, began as a poem about swinging as high as she could as a child, trying to see down the block for parents who might or might not come back, a metaphor she carried into a full memoir decades later. → A stranger's offhand comment, "look, a rainbow in December," became the title of one of her books on the spot, proof that material shows up anywhere if you're paying attention. → Listening, she insists, is categorically different from hearing. Real listening means giving full attention without offering advice unless it's asked for, a distinction she says even her own children have had to remind her of. → She counsels women dealing with addiction and relationship struggles not as a credentialed therapist but as someone with a matching story, offering to share it only if they want to hear it, never imposing it. The thread connecting a terrified 18-year-old finding her purpose in a burn ward, a hidden battle with alcoholism survived through decades of quiet support, and a lifetime spent turning both into fiction that helps other people feel less alone is what makes this conversation land, not as a nursing career retrospective, but as an argument that the hardest nights of a life are often the ones that eventually become someone else's lifeline. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Nancy Jasin & Austin

  5. Sep 17

    OverPressure Podcast Faisal Ensaun & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Faisal, a high-performance coach based in Canada who's worked with over 2,000 clients across 11 years, built on a personal history he doesn't shy away from sharing. In his early 20s, addiction and self-destructive behavior brought him to a moment outside a subway station, throwing up, seeing blood on the floor, and watching strangers walk past. He credits that pause, calling it grace, as the moment life slowed down enough for him to actually feel the pain he'd been avoiding rather than just reacting to it. The best material isn't the credential count, it's the mechanics underneath his coaching philosophy. He distinguishes sharply between anger as expression and anger as feeling: expressing it skips the actual layers, rage, frustration, disconnection, sadness, and underneath all of it, an old hurt often from childhood that was never processed because a child's mind isn't equipped to. His core insight is that the human mind doesn't tell the truth, not out of malice but as a survival mechanism, keeping people in an illusion of homeostasis rather than confronting what's actually happening. That's why he watches a client's body language more closely than their words in session, since the body, he argues, doesn't know how to lie the way the mind does. Quick gems from the episode: → Self-deprecation disguises itself as high standards but isn't the same thing. High standards mean working toward an ideal while accepting mistakes along the way; self-deprecation is just a mind that's learned a language of putting itself down. → Three questions replace the internal beating-yourself-up cycle entirely: what worked, what didn't work, what can I improve. No negativity required. → Gratitude isn't an obligation, it's a trained connection to what's already present. He treats it as a felt experience, not a checklist, walking through mornings noticing what he can already feel gratitude for rather than what he "should" list. → Depth comes from reflection, not accumulation. Someone who's visited five countries and closely examined how each one changed them will outgrow someone who's collected twenty countries as badges without reflecting on any of them. → A medieval philosopher observed that the hardest thing for a person is sitting in a room for thirty minutes without distraction a problem that's only intensified since phones and social media entered the picture. → His three-part coaching framework: does the client have a resolved relationship with their past, a clear vision for their future, and clarity about who influences them and who they influence in turn? Get those three right, and presence follows naturally. The thread connecting a moment of crisis outside a subway station, a decade and a half of quietly working through his own trauma before ever coaching anyone else, and a coaching practice built on creating space rather than dispensing advice is what makes this conversation land, not as a self-help pitch, but as an argument that the stories we've inherited about our own pain are often just protective fictions worth examining rather than facts worth defending. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Faisal Ensaun & Austin

  6. Sep 15

    OverPressure Podcast James Lang & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features James, who started out as a freelance content writer during the early days of SEO, cutting his teeth on subjects as unglamorous as garage door openers and personal injury law before an unlikely phone call from his business partner rerouted his entire career. A self-described "off the grid billionaire," serial inventor John Hoffman, whose past credits include patents inside GM vehicles and producing Bar Rescue, wanted to acquire James's small marketing agency outright rather than hire it as a client. James became employee six or seven at a medtech startup built around a shockwave therapy device for erectile dysfunction, timed almost perfectly with the pandemic-era biohacking boom. The best material isn't the origin story, though it's an unusually vivid one. It's the operational lesson buried in a Thanksgiving customer service disaster: James discovered, almost by accident, that the company's white-glove marketing funnel dead-ended in a generic, unhelpful chatbot experience a gap nobody upstream had noticed because nobody upstream was actually testing the customer journey themselves. He and a colleague in Thailand split twelve-hour shifts fielding real customer questions for over a week, and that raw, direct exposure to how customers actually talked about the product became the foundation for rewritten marketing copy, a customer service guide, and eventually his promotion to Director of Customer Experience. It's also the harder discipline underneath the humor: operating inside FDA-regulated messaging while competitors from big pharma actively tried to bait the team into liability-triggering claims via chat and social media, which forced James to build a company culture precise enough to stay compliant without losing the product's natural, slightly irreverent voice. Quick gems from the episode: → Learning why a task is being asked of you, not just how to do it, is what actually earns trust to delegate, manage, and eventually lead a lesson he traces straight back to his earliest freelance writing days. → Writing about a niche topic for pay is functionally a crash course in that topic expertise through drafting, the same way research papers force real learning along the way. → The company's whole value proposition distilled to three words once the founder cut through the noise: convenience, privacy, cost. A home device beats a $3,000 clinic series precisely because it sidesteps the discomfort, scheduling, and expense of the in-person alternative. → Recurring issues need recurring solutions one-time treatments at a clinic don't address the biology that caused the problem in the first place, which is what made a reusable at-home device commercially durable rather than a single purchase. → Influencer marketing worked because it matched the actual customer base in an unexpectedly literal way performers whose jobs demand consistent physical output made for credible, if unconventional, brand advocates. → Abraham Lincoln's line, "if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter," became his working framework for both marketing copy and internal communication: brevity takes more skill and more knowledge than length does. The thread connecting a freelance writer who backed into deep technical expertise through sheer repetition, a Thanksgiving spent fielding stranger's sexual health questions in his pajamas, and a company that scaled from seven employees to sixty by treating a sensitive, stigmatized topic with genuine clinical seriousness and genuine humor at once is what makes this conversation land not as a novelty business story, but as a case study in how curiosity about the "why" behind a task turns into real operational authority. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast James Lang & Austin

  7. Sep 10

    OverPressure Podcast Annikka Aborro & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Annikka, an operations specialist who started as a virtual assistant in 2008, at 18, putting herself through college in the Philippines before most of the world had any concept of what remote work even was. Eighteen years later she's managed people across 23 countries and now runs both a virtual assistant agency and a sister OBM (Online Business Manager) agency, with a training program for experienced Filipino VAs launching this December. The best material isn't the origin story, though it's a striking one. It's the honest admission underneath the scaling narrative: for fifteen of her eighteen years, she never grew past working solo, held back by what she calls a scarcity mindset, the belief that whatever she earned had to stay hers alone. It wasn't until 2024, after hitting what she describes as a hard ceiling, that she recognized the only path forward was delegation. It's also the cultural insight she's built her whole training methodology around: Filipino communication norms tend toward indirectness and reluctance to push back, which she actively trains against in her VAs, insisting they ask clarifying questions and say no when they mean no, because vague agreement causes more damage down the line than an uncomfortable question ever does. Quick gems from the episode: → Her onboarding process starts with a short discovery call, then a paid short-term "audit" contract that maps every system, tool, and gap in a client's business before any long-term commitment. She calls the resulting 90-day engagement a "dating project," a trial period before either side signs anything longer. → Most hiring breakdowns trace back to one root cause: expectations that live only in the business owner's head and never make it into writing. If it's not documented, the team member is guessing. → Defining what "done" or "success" actually looks like for a task, not just assigning it, prevents the majority of downstream friction and scope creep. → Teams work in the client's time zone, not their own, treating cross-cultural fluency as a genuine competitive advantage rather than a scheduling inconvenience. → Scope creep is one of the most common failure points in remote-team relationships, and it's largely preventable with a clearly bounded initial contract rather than a jump straight to a year-long retainer. → Remote work and entrepreneurship compound each other's isolation. The efficiency gains are real, but so is the loss of unplanned, non-business human connection, the kind that happens naturally over an in-office lunch and rarely gets replicated on a call. The thread connecting an 18-year-old self-funding college through freelance work before "virtual assistant" was even a recognized job title, a scarcity mindset that quietly capped her growth for over a decade, and a training model built specifically around teaching directness across a culture that discourages it is what makes this conversation land, not as a hiring how-to, but as an argument that the biggest operational bottleneck in most businesses is unspoken expectation, not unskilled people. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Annikka Aborro & Austin

  8. Sep 8

    OverPressure Mike Konrad & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Mike, a self-described "reluctant entrepreneur" who spent 34 years building an electronics manufacturing company he never actually set out to start. In the late 1980s, working in the industry, he came up with a way to eliminate a soon-to-be-banned ozone-depleting chemical from a manufacturing process entirely, rather than chase the alternative-chemical dead end everyone else was stuck on. His employer passed. His wife asked the obvious question, why are you trying to give away an idea you actually believe in, and that single conversation became the whole company. The best material isn't the founding pitch, though it's a sharp one. It's what happened after: Mike built a prototype in his garage while still employed, gave two weeks' notice with full written disclosure that he intended to compete, and was told to stay, no hard feelings. Two months after he left, they sued him anyway, a lawsuit that burned through more than 100% of his startup capital and, by his own admission, technically bankrupted the company before it had even properly started. He kept going anyway, comparing himself to the corpse in Weekend at Bernie's, propped up and dragged to the party by sheer stubbornness. It's also the harder admission buried later in the conversation: he was a brilliant visionary and a terrible operator, a founder who micromanaged tactical details he had no real aptitude for, until his team, now led by his son-in-law, finally took the operational reins and built the standardized systems he should have built decades earlier. Today he's stepped fully out of day-to-day operations and become the company's storyteller and industry authority instead, hosting a podcast, writing technical papers, and helping author industry standards. Quick gems from the episode: → Founders create disproportionate impact partly because they're unconstrained by corporate committee structure. Apple's 16-person design team under Jony Ive could out-execute Samsung's thousand-person team across four countries simply by deciding faster. → Hire for culture fit over raw skill. Skill is teachable; character isn't, and it eventually surfaces no matter how well someone fakes it early on. → The deepest shift in his 34 years: replacing revenue and KPI targets as the actual goal with the goal of simply making the best possible decision each time, and letting the scorecard follow rather than lead. → Every major insight he's had traced back to an earlier moment he'd dismissed as "stupid" ideas don't fail because they're bad, they fail because the person hearing them isn't ready yet. → A mentor once told him, if you want to sell more, stop talking about your product constantly. It sounded insane until he actually tried it. → Bad early decisions, in hindsight, often turn out to have been necessary failures the ones that forced the pivots the business actually needed. The thread connecting a rejected idea built out of spite in a garage, a lawsuit that nearly ended the company before it began, and a founder who eventually had to learn to let go of the wheel is what makes this conversation land, not as a manufacturing success story, but as an argument that the hardest skill in entrepreneurship is knowing when your own instincts are the thing standing in the way. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Mike Konrad & Austin
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About

OverPressure is a weekly podcast that brings authentic, unfiltered conversations from veterans,service members, entrepreneurs and advocates. Hosted by Austin Holmes, the show highlightsresilience, leadership, and the real challenges faced during and after military life. Each episodeoffers inspiration, practical advice, and powerful storytelling designed to empower the veteranand entrepreneur community.

Information

  • Creator
    Austin Holmes
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    49
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 OverPressure Podcast
  • Show Website
    OverPressure Podcast