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.