Henry Harrison Podcast | Dallas Texas

One client grew to 60% of his revenue. When they left, Michael Trkolta laid off nearly 40% of his staff — and made a rule he has never broken since.

Michael Trkolta is the Founder and Managing Director of WebOracle and founder of Premium Links, part of Network Media Group in Melbourne, Australia. He came out of professional tennis, studied at RMIT, and started a directory publishing business with no business acumen and one idea: give local businesses in small townships a place to advertise that they could actually afford. He grew it to 1.5 million readers across the entire east coast of Australia, then sold it — because he could see where dial-up was heading and knew the window would not stay open.

That instinct for moving before he has to has defined the twenty-plus years since. He moved into web while most of the market still did not know what a website was, and today runs three companies from a single floor in central Melbourne: WebOracle, a full-service digital agency; Amped Brand, covering FMCG branding and print; and Premium Links, the B2B PR platform that has become the group's entry point into the US market.

The turning point in this conversation is a failure. WebOracle's largest client grew to 60% of company revenue, and when they left, Michael cut nearly 40% of his staff. He describes it as the worst day of his life. His wife reframed it as the best one. Since then, no single client has been permitted to exceed 10% of total revenue.

From there Henry Harrison draws out the mechanics: what actually counts as recurring revenue and what doesn't, why service level agreements beat project work, and why recurring revenue is the thing that makes a business sellable when most owners have no exit strategy at all. Michael also walks through the Hilton Melbourne relaunch — understanding the audience in the legal and financial district, scoring each channel like a song sheet, and filling the bar five nights a week within three months.

He is direct about AI. He describes building a silo for each client, capturing meetings with Granola and loading them into Claude so design, marketing, finance, and management all work from the same versioned record. And he points to a nearby agency of 50 years that collapsed to two people after failing to adopt AI. The talent was strong — he hired half of them.

Also in this episode: the five-second test every homepage has to pass, pre-selling an entire book before spending a cent on print, and why the clients you turn down determine your outcome more than the ones you win.

Connect with Michael Trkolta

WebOracle: https://weboracle.com.au

LinkedIn: search Michael Trkolta

The Henry Harrison Podcast https://henryharrison.com

Hydraulics is a $750 billion market that hasn't seen a real breakthrough in actuation in decades. Hiten Sonpal is running the company trying to end it.

RISE Robotics started in 2011 with an MIT-affiliated team chasing an Iron Man-style exosuit. They could not find an actuator strong, fast, or efficient enough to build it, so they invented one — Beltdraulic, a fluid-free linear actuator that pulls with belts rather than pushing fluid. Then they made the decision that defined the company: drop the exosuit and go after the hydraulics market itself.

Hiten Sonpal joined as CEO two years ago to solve a problem that was never scientific. The technology worked. The patents — more than twenty of them — were solid. What the company needed was commercialization, and that is what Hiten had spent a career learning, first at iRobot's military business, which shipped 1,200 bomb-disposal robots to Iraq and Afghanistan, and later on consumer teams that moved nine million units across 20 products.

He walks Henry through three business lines running in parallel: an Air Force program to modernize 1,500 aging munitions handling trucks, a hydraulic-free liftgate developed with Anthony Liftgates, and cylinders sold directly to OEMs. Along the way he explains why the team chased a Guinness World Record on purpose, how they choose customers, and why extending a pump's service interval from three months to nine months triples a customer's service revenue without adding a single technician.

The conversation closes on capital and country: how RISE opened its institutional round to everyday investors through Regulation Crowdfunding on Wefunder, drawing $5.8 million in interest against a $5 million cap, and how Hiten got from a missed cutoff on an Indian entrance exam to running an American robotics company.

Topics covered:

• Why a bigger market beat a better story
• The muscle analogy behind Beltdraulic
• Scaling manufacturing, application engineering, sales, and distribution simultaneously
• Selecting customers rather than landing them
• Feasibility, desirability, viability
• Verification versus validation, and what a real pilot uncovers
• Patents as a moat when software moats disappear
• Regulation Crowdfunding as both capital and marketing

Guest: Hiten Sonpal, CEO, RISE Robotics

Website: https://www.riserobotics.com

Investor page: https://invest.riserobotics.com

Hiten is reachable on LinkedIn and accepts meeting invitations from interesting people.

Host: Henry Harrison The Henry Harrison Podcast — Entrepreneurs, Business and Finance https://www.henryharrison.com

Amy Ledgister spent ten years as a dental hygienist making $40 an hour. Within six months of discovering lash extensions, she was earning $400 an hour — and that leap became 3D Lash & Brow, a private beauty college in Dallas and Forney, Texas that has graduated thousands of women since 2018.

In this episode, Amy tells Henry the full story: the barter arrangement at a Dallas dental practice that introduced her to lash artistry, the night-school hustle that let her leave a stable career, and the brutal early years of running a school solo — teacher, janitor, HR, and financial aid officer all at once, from 7 AM to 9 PM.

She also walks through two defining tests of the business. First, the pandemic pivot to online learning, which unexpectedly grew enrollment 60% by opening the school to students nationwide. Then, the day the state abruptly banned online programs, forcing her to drop 200 enrolled students and take her case to Governor Abbott and the state legislature.

Amy gets specific about the mechanics most founders never hear: why new beauty schools can't access government funding for their first two years, and why accreditation effectively makes a school owner the bank behind their students' loans. Fresh off graduating from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, she shares her plan to exit the CEO role, mentor the next generation of school owners, and franchise her first location in January 2027.

Learn more about Amy's school at 3Dlashandbrow.com, or connect with her directly for school-ownership mentorship at AspireWithAmy.com.

The Henry Harrison Podcast features conversations with entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders. Find every episode at henryharrison.com.

In 1984, Edward DuCoin registered a trade name for $102 and started a company from his bedroom. Sixteen years later it was a NASDAQ-listed business with 1,000 employees and $20 million in revenue. Then a bookkeeping error escalated into a $692,000 IRS claim — later resolved at under $30,000 — that ripped his company and reputation apart and took a decade to overcome.

Henry Harrison sits down with DuCoin to trace the full arc: collecting newspaper payments as a kid, near-miss payrolls settled at a Jersey diner, believing his own publicity in the dot-com era, and rebuilding from unemployable to founder of Orpical, rated one of Philadelphia's fastest-growing companies two years in a row.

Along the way: Orpical's "intellectual venture capital" model of taking equity in the software it builds, the patent-pending Connection Compatibility Algorithm behind Langus AI , why narrowing your market widens it, 40 years of growth on referrals alone, a professional stock car racing career that brought Toyota into NASCAR, and his forthcoming book, Indicted Loyalty, Convicted Logic.

Guest links: orpical.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardducoin/

Full transcript and more episodes: https://www.henryharrison.com/edward-ducoin

Show Notes:

Most financial advice focuses on accumulating wealth. Jeremiah Konger built his company around the harder problem: what happens when the paycheck stops.

Jeremiah is the founder of Annuity Association, an independent annuity advisory firm with relationships across more than 80 carriers — a deliberate contrast to an industry where most advisors represent only two or three companies. His path there ran through mowing lawns as a kid in Tampa, a $34,000 home theater sale at Circuit City that sparked his entrepreneurial ambition, and building and selling 24 wireless retail stores across two exits.

In this episode, Henry and Jeremiah cover:

• What annuities actually are, and when they function as an investment versus a risk mitigation tool
• Why decumulation is a harder equation than accumulation — and the Mount Everest analogy that explains it
• How longevity acts as a risk multiplier across volatility, taxes, healthcare, and inflation
• Why covering essential expenses with guaranteed income changes investor behavior in down markets
• The moment Jeremiah was told to "just read the brochure" to a client — and how it led him to buy annuityassociation.com for $14 that same night
• The firm's Inc. 5000 ranking at #294, over $100 million in annuity production in five years, and the launch of NestEasy Annuities, a direct-to-consumer buying platform for DIY investors

Learn more: Henry Harrison Podcast — https://henryharrison.com Annuity Association — https://annuityassociation.com NestEasy Annuities — https://nesteasyannuities.com

Mike DeJong has built, turned around, and sold franchise locations across the country, learning how to step out of the day-to-day without the business breaking.

In this episode, Henry Harrison and Mike dig into the "operator trap" — the point where the work that built your business becomes the thing holding it back.

Mike shares how he turned a failing location from -12% to +30% in a year by putting the customer first, how a single vanity metric nearly bankrupted him, and the KPIs and hiring discipline that now let him run everything from the road.

A grounded, practical conversation for founders, operators, and franchise owners.

Connect with Mike: https://mikedejong.com | [email protected]

Fuse Associates founder Jamie Christensen joins Henry Harrison to explain why strategy is only a fraction of the work in marketing — and implementation is where results are won or lost. After 15 years in institutional finance, Jamie built a fractional marketing firm for growing businesses, and she shares how Fuse turned a client's $1M/year Google Ads spend from a negative return into a 2X while recovering roughly $900K in missed revenue.

A grounded conversation on fractional marketing, the real impact of AI on small business, and the network and mindset behind sustainable growth.

Fuse Associates: https://FuseAssoc.com

Tags: entrepreneurship, marketing, small business, fractional marketing, business growth, AI, leadership, founders, Henry Deimel Harrison

Zach Nathan, founder of Suite Leap, joins Henry Harrison to talk about a problem most founders eventually hit: needing senior leadership before they can afford a full-time hire.

Zach shares how he went from 11 years at American Airlines to building businesses of his own — including an urgent care company he grew to $20M — and what that taught him about finding the right expertise at the right time. He covers the $5–50M growth ceiling, why a full-time executive often carries more cost and risk than founders realize, a $15M client that grew roughly 50% in 18 months, and the lessons from a partnership dispute that ended an otherwise successful business.

A direct, practical conversation on entrepreneurship, growth, and leadership.

Suite Leap: https://www.suiteleap.com

More episodes: https://www.henryharrison.com

Why do criminals make billions off hardworking people every year? Because most of us do nothing to stop them.

Cybersecurity and personal protection expert Robert Siciliano joins Henry Harrison to explain the psychology behind why people resist security, the real economics of a $12.2 trillion cybercrime industry, and the handful of practical steps every business owner should take today.

In this episode:

-Why attackers log in instead of hacking

-The three habits that put you in the top 10% of secure users

-Why phishing simulation training rarely works

-How to reframe security from "paranoia" to risk management

-The personal story behind 30+ years of this work

Connect with Robert: https://protectnowllc.com/

Kep Kepner is a repeat entrepreneur and founder of Kepner CPAs and Mindsmarts. He joins Henry Harrison to talk through an unconventional path — from his father's Wichita manufacturing business, to IBM sales, to an Arthur Young partnership, to a venture-backed real estate company that collapsed in the 1980s Texas downturn, to rebuilding a CPA firm from his bedroom.

Kep opens up about what most founders miss when they take outside capital, why the savings and loan era taught him to read his investors as carefully as the market, and how the family cost of a business failure often exceeds the financial one.

He also explains why he restructured his CPA firm around fractional CFO retainers, why he licensed neuroscience protocols from the Center for BrainHealth at UT Dallas to build Mindsmarts, and how brain training helped him double profits and grow revenue 25 percent without adding headcount.

A practical conversation on capital structure, decision-making, and the mechanics of building a business that doesn't trap its owner.

Learn more at https://kepnercpa.com/.

Episode: https://www.henryharrison.com/kep-kepner

Tags: entrepreneurship, business growth, leadership, fractional CFO, brain health, founder lessons, capital strategy, family business