The Inside Baseballof...
With Peter Holgate
What really goes on - from the people who know.
The premise
Not another founder story.
One experienced owner. One industry. The things you only learn from being inside it.
The Inside Baseball of... puts experienced business owners in the expert chair.
I take apart how their industry really works: where the money is made, what outsiders misunderstand, where judgment matters, and what experienced operators can see that newcomers can’t.
No origin stories. No five leadership lessons. No polished playbook.
The point is to uncover what isn’t written down.
Who’s asking
I’m Peter Holgate.
My first career was signals intelligence, then a police detective in South Africa. My second was building and exiting six companies.
Three decades of asking questions for a living, two decades of running things. I’m not here to explain your industry to you. I’m here to find out what you know that the rest of us don’t.
Every conversation is an investigation
I keep asking until I get underneath the obvious answer.
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How does this industry really make money?
Where are the economics different from what an outsider would assume?
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What does everyone outside the industry misunderstand?
The accepted wisdom insiders know isn’t quite true.
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Where does judgment matter most?
The decisions that cannot simply be reduced to a checklist.
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What would break if the experienced people disappeared tomorrow?
The knowledge that lives in people’s heads rather than in the company’s systems.
Going inside
Every industry has things outsiders never see.
These are the kinds of businesses and questions I’m interested in.
- Commercial roofing What a 25-year owner knows that you don’t
- Private aviation Where the money is actually made
- Industrial distribution Why the biggest customer can be your worst customer
- Commercial insurance How experienced brokers know which accounts will become problems
- Dental groups What changes after the fifth location
The last ten minutes
From “I just know” to something you can explain.
At the end of each conversation, I take one piece of hard-earned judgment and start pulling it apart.
- What are you noticing?
- Which signals matter?
- What changes the decision?
- What are the exceptions?
The aim is simple: take one thing an experienced operator knows instinctively and make the hidden reasoning visible.
How guests are chosen
Every guest is invited.
There’s no application and no booking link. I go looking for people who’ve spent long enough inside one industry and can explain how it actually works - and then I ask them.
If you know someone who belongs in that chair, that I should know about: tell me who.