OverPressure Podcast

Austin Holmes

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 Joshua Griffin & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Joshua, co-founder of Intrinsi, a full-stack marketing agency based in Lancashire in northwest England. His path to entrepreneurship started from what he calls failing school and leaving with nothing. He talked his way into college anyway, then cycled through dead-end jobs, growing comfortable and then uncomfortable enough to move on, all while knowing the nine-to-five wasn't for him. He tried YouTube videos and gave up. When Pokémon Go launched, he built a UK fan page that peaked at about 40,000 members, an audience he now realizes he could have monetized if he'd understood marketing back then. Then, late one night on YouTube, he came across print-on-demand and dropshipping, and launched his first real business just before the pandemic. The best material isn't the scrappy origin story, though it's a familiar one. It's how openly he talks about watching that first business collapse. During lockdown, with everyone at home and on Facebook, e-commerce was booming, and he scaled fast enough to open physical locations. Based on that year, he took out personal loans to fund the next one. What he didn't understand was that a spending surge after a pandemic or war is usually followed by a sharp decline. When it came, no one was buying, and he was carrying tens of thousands of pounds in debt. He spent another year working as an Amazon courier on top of running the business, 16 hours a day, five or six days a week, until he physically and mentally collapsed. That is when he sold. His takeaway, after one failed business: many founders push far past their limits because of pride, mistaking being busy for being successful. Quick gems from the episode: → The old joke applies, he says: he didn't want to work nine to five, so now he works 24/7. The difference this time is building monthly recurring revenue without destroying himself in the process. → After the e-commerce business, he led marketing for a fast-moving consumer goods brand in a restricted industry where paid ads weren't allowed, so everything relied on SEO and email. He scaled that brand significantly before leaving with some financial runway. There he met Dan, the company's head of e-commerce, who is now his co-founder. → He and Dan split the work cleanly. Dan is the full-stack developer behind everything technical. Joshua handles marketing, sales, being on camera, and client relationships, all things Dan would rather avoid. → He estimates that 80 to 90% of UK agencies run on a churn model: sign as many clients as possible, deliver a basic template site, keyword stuffing, and a generic SEO report, then replace the clients who leave. Intrinsi is built around retention instead, and its early clients now send referrals, buy more services, or bring the agency in to run the entire digital side of new businesses they launch. → Ironically, the e-commerce world he burned out in has come back to him. Struggling online stores are now hiring the agency, often on a percentage-of-profit basis that fits neatly with recurring revenue. → Being valuable to clients comes down to small things. He calls clients personally and remembers details like asking how their trip to the theme park went. Working with fewer, higher-value clients makes it possible to know every one of them. → His biggest recent lesson is to prospect carefully and stop taking on clients just because the money is there. A good fit leads to better results, a stronger portfolio, and natural upsells rather than forced ones. → On the software side, he and Dan are exploring an affordable CRM, AI-powered live chat for busy tradespeople and solo operators, and social media planning tools, all designed to plug into the websites and lead-capture systems they already build. → He sees a backlash against AI building, especially among tradespeople, now that AI-generated posters show up everywhere from the dentist to the local bar. His answer is to use AI for admin and reporting while staying personal with clients, because humans buy from humans. In a country where he can drive to Scotland or London in four hours, showing up in person has paid off more than anything else. The thread connecting a school dropout with a 40,000-member fan page, a founder worn down by debt and courier shifts, and an agency built to keep clients rather than cycle through them is what makes this conversation land. It isn't a rags-to-riches story. It's an argument that most people quit just before things start to work, and the ones who last are the ones who build slowly, treat clients as partners, and stop confusing busyness with success. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Joshua Griffin & Austin

  2. 5d ago

    OverPressure Podcast Matthew Meredith & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast’s latest episode features Matthew, a Houston-based attorney who works in estate planning, business structuring, and tax strategy. His route into the field was anything but direct. He spent three and a half years as a pre-med student before a paper cut during a summer organic chemistry class made him realize he didn’t even like blood. He closed the book, walked out, moved to Houston, and finished a business degree. His roommate there, a former Wall Street trader, overheard Matthew wanting a job like his and asked whether he had any money. Matthew had student loan money, so they opened a brokerage account. A few years later he was licensed and working as a proprietary equities trader in Boca Raton during the 2008 crash, buying put options against Lehman Brothers while slowly realizing that his job would disappear along with it. The best material isn’t the career detour, though it’s a great one. It’s why he went to law school. After the crash he moved into wealth management, first in bank-style advising and then running a region for Capital One Investing, and he kept seeing the same problem. A client’s CPA, attorney, and financial advisor each did their own work, but none of them worked together, and the client was left passing messages between them. He also saw where the industry was going. Computer models would make charging 2% to manage assets hard to justify, and family offices, where all of a client’s professionals sit in the same room, were on the rise. Advisors who couldn’t also offer tax and estate planning, he decided, would be pushed out. Law school was his way to stop sending away work he knew how to do. Today his practice is more legal than financial, but it’s built on the same idea: bring every part of a client’s plan together. Quick gems from the episode: → Every plan he builds starts with one question: if you die today, what happens? For many clients, it’s the first time anyone has asked. The answer also gives him a complete inventory of everything they own. → He argues that incapacity is worse than death. In his nightmare scenario, you wake up after an accident to find your business gone, your vendor relationships lost, and your savings spent because your spouse had no legal authority to step in. → Not everyone needs a trust, he says, but everyone needs some plan to stay out of probate. In a community property state like Texas, half of a married couple’s house doesn’t automatically pass to the surviving spouse. Basic planning to avoid that typically costs $6,000 to $12,000, and more as things get complex. → He has seen more families torn apart by estate plans that looked perfect on paper than by the lack of a plan. In one case, a mother named her two children, who had never gotten along, as co-trustees in hopes it would bring them together. Three years later nothing had been settled and the lawsuits had begun. → A business owned by one person with no succession plan generally goes through probate. Operations stop until a court gives someone authority, and he has seen such businesses sell for about 30 cents on the dollar. His fix is to have a trust own the business, often through a Wyoming holding company, so that privacy, control, and succession are all part of the same structure. → The best time to set up a trust isn’t while you’re still in survival mode, when every dollar should go into the business. Once there’s real value to protect, put a trust in place, and form every future company with the trust as its owner from the start so you never have to redo the filings. → A series LLC can hold dozens of properties with each one shielded from lawsuits against the others, but only in states that recognize that structure. Doing business in a state that doesn’t can expose every property to a single lawsuit. → The S corp election became a trend, and he now sees many owners switching back because the added compliance wasn’t worth it at their income level. → A revocable trust is essentially an extension of you, and you can change it whenever you want. An irrevocable trust protects assets precisely because you no longer own them, a point he illustrates with a Jurassic Park reference: try to keep too much control and the IRS tells you that you didn’t say the magic word. → On taxes, his view is that most people are already paying the money. The question is whether it goes to the IRS or into an investment such as oil and gas that they actually own, but that requires capital available to invest and a strategy repeated year after year. The thread connecting a pre-med student who couldn’t stand blood, a trader who watched Lehman fall from the inside, and an attorney determined to make every part of a family’s plan work together is what makes this conversation land. It isn’t a dry legal lecture. It’s an argument that the hard questions about death, disability, and control are the ones that actually protect what you’ve built and the people you built it for. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Matthew Meredith & Austin

  3. Oct 9

    When Good Men Don't Step Up | Long Walk E1 | Austin Holmes

    The Overpressure Podcast’s latest episode is a solo episode from host Austin Holmes, a former Navy explosive ordnance disposal technician who points out that defusing bombs sounds exciting until you realize 90% of the job is paperwork and preparation. Today he’s president of Raptor and runs his businesses alongside his wife, Heather, whom he met in San Diego. After the military, he joined her firm, Heather DeSantis Public Relations, just before it became Publicity For Good, a name he says holds them to a high standard because media is one of the pillars that shapes culture. Raptor grew out of the censorship of the past few years. After watching voices get shut down and losing an account themselves for questionable reasons, they started a company to make sure stories that needed to be told actually got out. The episode is aimed squarely at men building families right now: men carrying a heavy load, with a marriage they don’t want to lose, kids growing up fast, careers that may or may not last, and technology that’s trying to both distract and replace them. The best material isn’t the résumé, though it covers the New York Times, USA Today, the Daily Wire, the Blaze, Family Radio, and now a byline in Entrepreneur magazine. It’s how openly he talks about failing. His first real stint as a team leader in the military was, in his words, a complete failure. He had no idea what he was doing, his own direct leadership wasn’t setting a good example, and he resented things like the daily team meeting. Looking back, he admits the things he hated were lessons he hadn’t learned yet. He now considers clear, regular communication one of the most valuable things a leader can provide. That early failure is what made him care so much about leadership, and it shapes the three principles he repeats almost daily to his team and his family. Quick gems from the episode: → His first principle is simply “do the right thing.” He calls it deliberately basic, because a principle that can’t be stripped down to something usable in every situation isn’t a very good principle. Judgment is still required, but the standard never changes. → His second principle came from one of their first business coaches: entrepreneurs have a responsibility to make the world a better place. That coach described people building businesses as the most consistent source of positive human progress there is. → His third principle is gratitude in everything, including the hard things. He shares an example from a man who said he was grateful for the screaming kid behind him on a plane, because it meant he could hear and was alive to be there. → He and Heather have four kids: a four-year-old girl and three boys aged three, two, and seven months. They build life and business around a God-first approach, aiming to create a community of faith-filled entrepreneurs with families who want to make a positive impact. → About ten years ago, in EOD, he was among the first to put drones to work in the field. That experience shapes his view of today’s technology shift. Unlike the sci-fi version everyone expected, software arrived before the robots, but he believes the outcome will be the same. He predicts AI and robotics will take over at least half of today’s work before 2030. → Even so, he’s optimistic. In his view technology might handle about a third of the work, and the other two-thirds will still depend on relationships and human connection. His advice is to focus on relationships, because technology will make everything else easier. → The show’s name comes from explosives physics. Overpressure is the sudden change in pressure that throws everything out of balance, the same reason diving and flying are hard. He applies the idea to business, where both positive and negative pressure can knock a founder off course. → The show just passed its 50th episode. Next up are more solo episodes on what he’s learning in real time and in-person interviews recorded in Nashville, because human connection works better outside a Zoom window. The thread connecting a failed first-time team leader, a husband-and-wife partnership built on faith and gratitude, and a clear-eyed view of the biggest technology shift of our time is what makes this episode land. It isn’t a founder’s highlight reel. It’s an argument that whatever mission you’re leaving behind, there’s another one worth stepping into, and when good men don’t step up to shape what comes next, someone worse will. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    When Good Men Don't Step Up | Long Walk E1 | Austin Holmes

  4. Oct 8

    OverPressure Podcast Carly Pepin & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Carly, a Southern California coach and consultant whose first business lesson came in fourth grade, when she got in trouble for selling things at school. She took two things from it: people value good things, and she wasn't going to give them away for free. After a rocky start at community college, where a career advisor told her the path she wanted didn't exist, her entrepreneur parents noticed how much she loved work. They had watched her grow from employee to manager at a surf shop in high school. So instead of more college, the three of them started a skincare business with a retail store in Santa Monica. That, she says, was her degree. The best material isn't the family business, though it's a charming start. It's how the thing she was worst at became her career. The skincare company was strong in sales, but in the early 2000s, she admits, they didn't understand marketing. They committed fully to product design and packaging before doing enough research. Then Burke Williams wanted their products in its spas, on the condition that the packaging be completely redesigned. A few years later they wound the business down. Carly's next step came through her parents' cell phone store, where she was helping with the books. She had been doing her mom's accounting in QuickBooks since she was 11. A connection there led to a job as executive assistant to a fashion designer named Tadashi. It was his first assistant, and she kept running out of work. The marketing manager who had hired her, a woman doing a lot more than her title suggested, started handing Carly marketing projects and training her. Within three months Carly was working for her, and she eventually became the company's marketing manager. As she puts it, she wasn't bad at marketing. She just needed some mentorship. Quick gems from the episode: → Her biggest marketing lesson from fashion was to know exactly who the product is for. The goal isn't to put a dress on any celebrity, it's to find the woman who is actually looking for that refined look. She also learned to track which magazine placements drove real traction, because sometimes the expensive ones were worth it. → Working for a designer doing about $20 million a year taught her to let a creative founder try ideas while keeping them grounded with a budget and a plan, knowing not every idea would work. → When photographer Giuliano wanted to become a fine artist and everyone thought he was crazy, she was the practical voice behind him, booking enough paid shoots to fund the personal work. He is a fine artist today, and she still consults with him and with the marketing manager who hired her, relationships that now span about 25 years. → Her father's advice was to make yourself indispensable wherever you work. She still asks what she could do that would move the needle so much that a client wouldn't want to stop working with her, and would come back if they did. → To find your zone of genius, look at where you already spend the most time and money and what you study and talk about most. That pattern is your genius, and your business sits where it overlaps with what the market wants. → Her take on AI: let it ask you questions, but don't let it make your decisions. When you're working in your area of expertise, you have the best last answer. → She points out that the smartest companies aren't replacing 50 people with five plus AI. They are training all 50 to work with AI and getting far more output. A company that just wants to swap its people for agents, she says, probably isn't a place you want to work. → After about 10 years of coaching, she saw a gap in her own results and brought strategy, drawing on writers like Jim Collins and Peter Drucker, into her mindset work. She and her husband now run business-to-business engagements that clear mental blocks first and then put structure in place so the business runs smoothly. The thread connecting a fourth-grade seller, a skincare startup undone by packaging, and an assistant who asked for more work until she became the marketing manager is what makes this conversation land. It isn't a career highlight reel. It's an argument that becoming indispensable comes from doing what you love so consistently that no one, and no technology, can replace you. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Carly Pepin & Austin

  5. Oct 6

    OverPressure Podcast Julia Rock & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Julia Rock, a Las Vegas-based leadership expert who spent her corporate career in finance at two of the biggest companies in the world, JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil. Her business began almost by accident. In college she wrote resumes and coached friends, family, and classmates for free, and she kept doing it as a hobby after starting her career. Then a friend she was helping told her she had a real knack for it and should start charging. Around the same time, while representing ExxonMobil's finance function at career fairs, she noticed that many candidates, especially candidates of color, had the skills and background but weren't presenting themselves as well as they could. She realized she had the skill set to close that gap. Even then, she didn't leap. She built the business alongside her day job for years, which she credits to the finance mindset of stabilizing before taking risks. The best material isn't the origin story, though it's a relatable one. It's the moment she decided to go all in. She was in a senior, near-executive role overseeing a portfolio of about $23 billion in operating expenses, with people's careers depending on her. She realized she couldn't do that job well and run her business well at the same time. She was also working under leadership that was underdeveloped and unwilling to change, and their decisions were creating tension and chaos for everyone below them. She concluded she couldn't credibly teach leadership while staying in that environment, so she bet on herself. In her words, if she has to bet on something, she will always be her own best bet. The business she started, writing $75 resumes, has since grown into full leadership development: keynotes, workshops, leadership program redesigns, culture consulting, and executive coaching. The coaching exists because, as she points out, leaders attend seminars but have nothing afterward to help the ideas stick. Quick gems from the episode: → Her biggest lesson from big companies is that you have to take up space on your own. In organizations that large, opportunities don't come to you, and it's easy to get lost. → One of the greatest gifts you can give is to pull people up behind you. She had mentors and sponsors who put their necks on the line for her, so she felt obligated to do the same for others. → Her finance background taught her the difference between revenue and profit. Generating $100,000 in revenue is not the same as making $100,000. She also warns that the cheapest route often costs more when you have to redo the work two or three times. → Her book, Uncomplicated Leadership, began as a Substack. It identifies five things every great leader she has worked with does well: clarity, consistency, connection, courage, and celebration. None of them depend on technical knowledge. → The part of courage that gets talked about least, she says, is vulnerability: being willing to admit you don't know, you're nervous, or you don't have the answer, instead of keeping up a performance for no one. The other part is being willing to stand alone. She watched senior executives go along with bad ideas just to avoid being outsiders. → She deliberately keeps the language simple so it can be shared by a whole organization. Much of leadership theory works for executives but loses everyone else. Her framework is meant to be repeatable for any challenge and easy to hand to a new hire without sending them to a six-month program at Yale. → The leadership fix often starts with asking. Rather than guessing what their teams want, leaders should ask, listen, and act on the answers instead of throwing the 40th pizza party. → Her long-term plan is to license the framework so companies can adopt it internally without paying her every year, train practitioners around the world to use it, and create a premium, Tony Robbins-style program for C-suite executives facing pressures that only someone who has managed billions can fully understand. The thread connecting a finance professional who refused to leap before she was stable, a career fair observation that grew into a mission, and a leadership philosophy built to work without her in the room is what makes this conversation land. It isn't a corporate success story. It's an argument that good leadership isn't complicated, and the leaders who make it look that way are usually the ones holding their teams back. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Julia Rock & Austin

  6. Oct 1

    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

  7. Sep 29

    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

  8. 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
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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
    54
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 OverPressure Podcast
  • Show Website
    OverPressure Podcast