A business coach on making yourself indispensable by building your work around what you already love
By Austin Holmes, Co-Founder & President, Publicity For Good & Signal Raptor / Host of OverPressure Podcast
Focus Insights
- Your calendar and spending already point to your zone of genius.
- People who use AI to sharpen their own thinking keep their value, and the smartest companies are training their teams to use it.
- Pressure feels lighter once a person can see how a hard task connects to something they love.
Partway through my conversation with Carly Pepin, she pointed to the first place to look for your strengths, and it was your own habits. Whatever you spend the most time and money on, study the most and talk about the most forms a pattern, and Carly calls that pattern your zone of genius. Where it overlaps with something the market will pay for, you have a business. Carly runs a coaching and consulting firm with her husband and has spent about a decade helping founders and their teams build work around that overlap.
That framing gave me a calmer way to think about AI.
A Marketing Gap Started Her Path
Unsure what to study, Carly started at community college, and her parents, who had run businesses themselves, offered to start one with her instead. Together they opened a skincare company with a retail store in Santa Monica in the early 2000s. The mother-daughter team sold well, and marketing turned out to be the gap. They had paid for packaging before doing enough research, so when a spa chain wanted to carry the products, it meant redoing that packaging, and after four or five years the family moved on.
Most of the brands we work with are in CPG, where packaging, manufacturing and distribution stay the hardest part even for brands doing millions a year.
Mentorship Turned a Weakness Into a Specialty
Helping at her parents’ cell phone store led Carly to an executive assistant job with a fashion designer. She kept running out of work and asking for more, so the marketing manager started handing her projects and training her. About three months in, she became that manager’s assistant, and she later became the company’s marketing manager.
At a company doing around $25 million a year, she learned to define the exact customer, pick imagery and publications for that customer, and track which placements drove the most traction. The skill that hurt her first business became her strength once someone took the time to teach it.
Make Yourself Indispensable
Her father told her to make herself indispensable wherever she worked. She carried that into running a photographer’s studio, keeping the budget steady while he built toward fine art. She still consults for him, and for the woman who hired her at the fashion company nearly 25 years ago. Roughly half of our own business traces back to a relationship, so this part hit home.
Let AI Ask You the Questions
I asked how people can stay valuable as AI changes their work. Carly’s view is that loving the work keeps you studying it, and daily study builds mastery that’s hard to replace. She uses AI to question her thinking and surface new angles, and she keeps the final call for herself because she knows her field best.
She has seen larger companies cut staff for AI and then bring people back. The companies she considers smartest kept their teams and trained everyone to use AI for slow research tasks. Small firms still need someone to manage the tools, so she’s considering a hire just for that. My own take is that people get their best ideas by connecting information from very different parts of their lives, which is a big reason to lean into the work you love.
Change How the Pressure Feels
I asked how founders keep from crushing themselves under pressure. Carly sees pressure as part of any big vision, so she helps people experience it differently. One client with a successful business wanted to sell and retire early because the pressure felt like too much. Carly used real examples from the client’s own life to remind her how much she enjoyed the challenge, and by the fourth session the client was working more, enjoying it again and no longer wanted to sell.
The same approach works on any task you dread. When a task carries more drawbacks than benefits in your mind, you avoid it, so she looks for concrete links between that task and what you value. She does this with whole teams, connecting each person’s daily work to what matters to them. Once that mindset work is done, she and her husband help owners build a strategy and structure that fits how involved they want to be.
Finding Your Zone of Genius
- A person’s zone of genius shows up in the patterns of where they spend their time, money and attention.
- A viable business sits where that zone of genius overlaps with what the market wants.
- Using AI to ask questions and test ideas keeps the final judgment with the person who knows the field best.
- Linking a dreaded task to something a person values makes them more willing to do it.
- Inspiration is personal, and Carly finds hers in art, architecture, artisan craftsmanship and fashion, whether traveling or at home in LA.
Put More of Your Week There
The version of this I keep coming back to is how much of the answer is already in front of us. Start with last month’s calendar and bank statement, and notice the work that still gets you out of bed on a rough day, since that’s where more of your week belongs. That shift pays off whatever AI ends up doing to your industry.
Watch the full episode with Carly Pepin and other episodes of the OverPressure Podcast on Spotify and YouTube.
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About the Author
Austin Holmes is a Navy Special Operations veteran, father, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and President of Publicity For Good and CEO of Signal Raptor, a SaaS-enabled PR platform that modernizes one of the most traditional industries by productizing services and pairing technology with human expertise. He hosts the OverPressure Podcast, where he interviews veteran entrepreneurs about building businesses under real-world pressure.
