Ground Zero Growth

At 16, Mary Messner wanted to be a NICU nurse. She spent spring breaks in California shadowing her aunt and cousin, both neonatal intensive care nurses, attending high-risk deliveries back before HIPAA closed those doors. Then she didn't get into nursing school. That rejection forced a question that shaped the rest of her career: if the real pull was connecting with people and making a difference,...

Janet Munro was 20 when she put her newborn son up for adoption in 1970, and she didn't meet him again until 2017. Between those two moments she built a custom furniture business with her husband Bill, rode out two recessions, and once ended up in the Guinness Book of Records for building what was briefly the world's largest rocking horse. Now 75 and living in Nashville, Janet talks with Sam about...

Suyoung Cha flunked out of the University of Minnesota at 19 after passing the brutal actuary exams. The aftermath strained his relationship with his parents for years. What came next was a job as a Wells Fargo teller, seven years climbing a corporate ladder, a move to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a brand new financial advisor business that made almost no money for a year. Suyoung calls that stre...

For the first two years Zach Arend climbed into a bucking chute, he never once made it to the eight second buzzer. He broke his hand, his ankle, and his collarbone trying to ride saddle broncs. Then something clicked, and he went on to become a two time state champion. Years later, as a vice president of sales getting demoted over bourbon at a country club, he found himself back at the bottom of a...

Will Akin is the only nonpartisan sheriff in the state of Missouri, and he spends the first few minutes of this conversation explaining why that matters for how he shows up at his neighbor's door, at a chamber of commerce event, or on a call where somebody is screaming at him about a barking dog. He is also a former Blackhawk pilot who was homeless at eight years old. The Clay County sheriff sat d...

Harry Campbell wanted to be a pro athlete. By six he already knew it wasn't happening. He wasn't fast enough or quick enough. But he could run the same speed for ten thousand meters as he could for a hundred, so he became a long distance runner. In 1982, at a night race on the University of Tennessee track, he set the Vanderbilt school record for ten thousand meters. It stood for thirty-four years...

John Christensen grew up in a Nebraska town of 390 people, graduated in a class of 12, and spent a summer slinging 75 pound tent stakes for a party rental company in Annapolis before he ever set foot in a law school. Now he runs Story One Financial, a multifamily office in Kansas City that serves families worth between 20 and 200 million dollars. The path from farm kid to specialist in estate and...

Gentry Ferguson launched a new executive search firm with his business partner John Doherty in February of 2020. A few weeks later the world shut down. Companies stopped hiring, people stayed put, and the product they had just built had nowhere to land. Instead of folding, Gentry pivoted into career transition services and spent the rest of the year helping laid-off employees find their next role....

Josen Ruiseco almost walked out of a business class when the instructor asked the room to say their harshest inner-voice talk out loud, one person at a time. He stayed. He worked his way around the room. And the reactions he got back, people visibly shocked at how he spoke to himself, cracked something open. The conversation with Sam Sapp moves from that moment through Josen's road from Southern C...

Bill Green spent 23 years at Merck before turning 50 and going all in on his own consulting practice. Then COVID hit, the phone stopped ringing, and he spent the better part of three years wondering if he was really an entrepreneur or just pretending to be one. In this conversation he unpacks what finally broke the stall, why leading with values isn't woo woo, and what he means when he tells other...

Kenny Pointer once sat in a hotel lobby wearing a sweatsuit while a group of people a few feet away rehearsed how they would greet him. He was the person they were there to impress, and they never recognized him. As Chief Services Officer at Mariner, Kenny has spent a career watching the way people shift when they find out his title, and he has made a point of not shifting back. That thread, being...

Kevin Kwok named his digital marketing agency J29 Creative after Jeremiah 29:11, a verse his family leaned on through immigration, loss, and starting over. Airing the day after Christmas, this conversation with Sam Sapp moves through Kevin's arrival from Hong Kong at age six, a software engineering degree he picked up during the dot com era, a Cajun restaurant bar he closed after his father died o...

Lindsay Howerton calls herself a scalpel. Some operators are machetes. Some fall somewhere in the middle. She's the one you hand a stalled business to when sales can't keep up with operations, or operations can't keep up with sales, or the leader just knows something is off and can't name it. In this conversation she walks through how she learned to read people and process early, why she almost di...

About ten years ago, four women in Kara Viatori's family sat down and chose a new last name together. They went looking for something that meant more, and landed on a Latin word for traveler. Kara carries that name now as Director of Information Technology at MOCSA, a Kansas City nonprofit countering sexual violence, and the story is the doorway into a conversation about social engineering, burnou...

Krista Shelton will tell you that only an accountant could catch Al Capone, and she can quote the poster that still hangs in IRS offices to prove it. She spent 13 and a half years at the IRS, three and a half as a revenue agent auditing small businesses and the next ten as a federal special agent carrying a gun, kicking in doors, and working drug conspiracies next to the DEA. She now runs Focus Fo...

A kid from the projects of Cleveland sat in a window one Christmas waiting for a father who never pulled into the driveway. Thirty-plus years later, that same kid had played college basketball at Ohio State, signed with the Harlem Globetrotters, eaten dinner with Muhammad Ali, and been waved through a traffic stop in Sydney by an officer who couldn't see a seven-foot driver folded into the back of...

Tate Fisher has opened a lot of stores. The fastest brand his team ever supported was opening 3.5 locations a week for almost two years. The one that almost broke his business went the other direction. A commitment to open 90 stores turned into 11, a $600,000 hole, and a choice: file bankruptcy and walk, or spend the next several years paying vendors back a dollar at a time. Tate chose the second...

At eleven-thirty at night, in a guest room turned study space, Megan Brenner sat crying over her CFP books. Her dad was in an assisted living facility after a massive stroke. Two small kids were asleep down the hall. A full-time job waited the next morning. She asked herself why she was doing this to herself, then remembered exactly why. Megan, co-founder of Craft and Sage Wealth in Kansas City, w...

Hiba Rosace walked Sam through a year that would have broken most business owners. Her boutique marketing firm had been pulling in six figures a month when a string of client buy-sells cut her revenue in half almost overnight. What she talks about on this episode is not the playbook she ran to recover it. It's the mental work underneath. How a pastor's daughter who grew up on mission trips learned...

John Hall grew up riding in rodeos in West Texas oil country. At 12 he moved to Coronado, California and became a surfer. By his 30s he was running rooms at Madison Square Garden, holding two VP roles and a GM seat while the NFL, NHL, and NBA all paid for his time. Then in August 1999, at 40 years old, a former quarterback named James Gidry stopped him in a crowded hospitality room and told him th...

Ryland Miller became president and CEO of the Ottawa Area Chamber of Commerce at 27, and he didn't know what a chamber of commerce was until he stumbled into one as an intern. In this conversation, Ryland walks through how chambers actually work, what membership buys a small business, and why the real value shows up in rooms where strangers become partners. Sam also shares how early Ottawa Chamber...

Jim Starcev bought his first house at twenty off the earnings of a Kansas City Star paper route. By the end of that run he had three trucks and eleven people delivering papers to nearly two thousand homes. That early stretch, along with a childhood east of Troost raised by a single mother who worked in a factory, shaped the work ethic he carried into financial services, into a bootstrapped tech co...

Ray Freeman was 12 years old, riding his bike through Kansas City, Kansas, when a police officer stopped him and told him he wasn't going home. That afternoon became the first of what Ray now calls multiple lifetimes. He spent the next six years in eight different foster homes, aged out at 18, and stumbled into adulthood with no driver's license, no savings, and no idea how to hold a job. Today he...

Pat Phelan wrote his book, Leaping Forward, during COVID after what he calls a Jerry Maguire moment at the manuscript. Eighteen years into owning the company now known as Leap, he sits down with Sam Sapp to trace the winding path from a failed stint as a restaurant operator to a national supplier of restaurant furniture and case goods. Along the way he unpacks the line between a hustler and a con...

Allison Mott scored a 102 on her first college accounting test. The class average was a 60. That moment in a 500-seat lecture hall at Oklahoma State flipped her major from public relations to accounting and set up a decade-long loop through a big four firm, a burnout so deep she quit without another job lined up, two nonprofit roles that rebuilt her love for the work, a failed apprenticeship, and...