Ground Zero Growth

James Gorman helped wire the early internet, stood in a New York data center turning screwdrivers in the morning and pitched bankers in the boardroom that afternoon, and once told GE's leadership they could own the internet for 30 million dollars. They passed. Now he runs Hard to Hack, an advisory practice that builds security programs for small and mid-sized companies, then trains them up and lea...

Robert Gold was 26 years old, on track at KPMG, when his father died at 51. His dad ran a small CPA practice out of the basement of the family house, office wedged between the furnace and the dryer. Robert left the national firm within weeks, took over the clients he had known since high school, and started the long climb that turned a basement practice into Bennett Gold LLP, a Toronto firm he can...

Two weeks into his freshman year at Harvard, David G. Ewing tore his Achilles tendon clean in half. The football career he had been recruited for ended before it started, and he spent the next year learning to run without a limp. That early gut check became the pattern for everything that followed. A cancelled future in his family's Detroit manufacturing plant. A tech startup that imploded in the...

Marc Shaffer is the CFO of Searcy Financial, a firm that started in 1976 with one founder serving physicians and has spent 50 years turning itself into something more. He wrote a book called One For All built on an Irish proverb: hand it out in slices, it comes back in loaves. Sam sits down with Marc on the last day of 2025 to talk about why that philosophy works, where it breaks, and how a kid wh...

Andrew Brown has spent 30 plus years inside professional services, financial services, SaaS, and digital marketing agencies, and he kept noticing the same pattern. The best leads almost always came through a trusted referral, while the sales and marketing machine churned away in parallel. In this conversation he walks through how referral sources get overused, neglected, and disrespected, why trus...

Oscar Duran reads four books at a time, runs a bespoke tailoring atelier with his partner Katie, renovates old buildings through his community development company Black Sailboat, and is putting out a book called The Garden Regions of Tomorrow. He started first grade with How to Win Friends and Influence People as his reader. By the end of his sophomore year of high school he was living on his own....

Todd Milner almost kept driving. It was 3:30 on a Friday afternoon in western Kansas, he had a two-hour drive home, and he was done. Something told him to pull a U-turn into one more hospital parking lot. That stop turned into a proposal, a signed deal, and a qualifying push into President's Club. Todd, now a business development manager at CBIZ and the founder of a new coaching practice called th...

Kelly Narowsky woke up one Saturday to texts from strangers trying to buy cars. Hackers had taken over her Facebook account, impersonated her with a stolen copy of her driver's license, and wiped out roughly 2,600 friends and nearly 3,000 professional followers she'd built as a Kansas City speaker. That crisis is how she and Sam met. The conversation that unfolded from there went much further than...

About a year and a half before this conversation, Mark Davis took over Translube Lubricants, the 50 year old family business his parents founded in 1975. One of his first moves was a rebrand. People on sales calls had started giggling at the name. The company is now Steelglide. That decision is one chapter in a career Mark describes as reinventing yourself every few years, from programmer on the s...

Christian Brim has spent 28 years running Core Group, a firm that helps entrepreneurs in creative industries trade financial anxiety for clarity. But the conversation with Sam Sapp quickly moves past spreadsheets. Christian argues that the same inflated ego that makes entrepreneurs successful is the exact thing that caps their growth, and he ties that idea to a study where a founder's brain lit up...

Jayme Busch grew up selling polished rocks on a busy street in Bellevue and never really stopped selling something. By the time she sat down with Sam, she had been through Mary Kay, 31, color street nails, Tupperware, a $5,000 LuLaRoe package, a bankruptcy filing, a move to a town of 900, a 1988 work trailer turned mobile boutique, and two storefronts. Unique Boutique Iowa is the name that stuck,...

Twenty five years into running Fulling Management and Accounting in Olathe, Kansas, Rusty Fulling has seen the full arc of small business pain. Owners projecting four million in sales who haven't taken a paycheck in months. Products that lose a hundred dollars every time they sell. The Ponzi shuffle of running new projects to cover old ones. Rusty's work as a fractional CFO is about pulling founde...

George Commons keeps returning to a single verse: 1 Corinthians 3. It's the passage about every person's work being tested by fire, with only gold and precious stones surviving the flames. George first heard a coworker describe a dream about that verse at an AT&T Bell Labs Bible study more than 40 years ago, and he's been measuring his life against it ever since. Today he runs the Barnabas Group K...

Mike Grigsby introduces himself as a retired Kansas City Missouri police officer first, not as a former FBI forensic examiner, former CIO, or 25-year executive coach. It's a deliberate choice. Telling someone you used to be a cop instantly sorts them into one of three camps, and Mike likes having that signal up front. From there, the conversation opens into identity, tribal belonging, the mental c...

Eric Kelting didn't know e-discovery existed until the day he interviewed for a job in it. Eleven years into running Complete Legal, the litigation support company he co-founded in 2014, he can trace the entrepreneurial thread all the way back to a dilapidated movie theater two blocks from his childhood home that he used to daydream about buying. This conversation walks through the slow path from...

Christian Roduner grew up in Rossville, Kansas, a farming town with one stoplight that never turns green and a high school class of thirty-five. He graduated with no job offers, nearly enlisted, and scraped into a junior college baseball roster at the last minute. Five years later he's a junior partner at Apollo Insurance Group in Lee's Summit, running health insurance for families and small busin...

Keith Davenport recorded this episode from a park in Olathe, after a library patron sat behind him in frame and a cello lesson pushed him out of his home office. That small logistical scramble is a pretty accurate picture of his life. He runs three businesses, a coffee shop in Gardner called Ground House Coffee, Blazor Strategies, and an HR tech company called Mythic Higher, while navigating a clo...

Matthew Entringer didn't grow up around homelessness. Then one bitter December in 2021, three or four people were bundled up in the lobby of his downtown Kansas City apartment just trying to stay out of the cold, and he couldn't unsee it. He started carrying care kits in his backpack, fell in with a Saturday outreach at Scraps KC, and by 2023 he'd filed the 501c3 paperwork for Street Support KC. T...

Paul Abugattas has signed the books, run the stores, unloaded the containers, and stood outside a crime scene at 24 wondering what on earth to say to the SWAT team. He grew up outside Washington DC, didn't realize until he was 18 that he wasn't a US citizen, and spent the next three decades building a retail career that ran from a suburban drug store counter to running divisions of national brands...

Clients at Hovey and Company joke that you shouldn't drink the water. Babies keep arriving. Meghan Hovee runs a predominantly women led accounting firm in Kansas City, and she has built it on a bet most CPA firms aren't willing to make: that women can have careers and full family lives without either one collapsing. Four kids in, nearly ten years in business, two offices across Kansas City, and ta...

Alex Walker's daughter once asked her if she was taking PTO. Alex laughed and said no, because she was already driving her kid around at three in the afternoon. That is the trade a mompreneur makes. Room mom and den mom by day, grant writer by night after bedtime. Alex sits down with Sam to talk about building Green Desk Grant Writing, the community she lost when a women's co-working space closed,...

Joshua Peters was 19 years old and six months into a war when an IED blew up the Humvee he was riding in near Balad, Iraq. Shrapnel tore through his left foot and right thigh. He bled from an artery in his foot for 45 minutes and somehow did not need a transfusion. What followed was a decade of PTSD, a misfired prescription, a marriage a month in, a career identity that had to be rebuilt from scra...

Tim King will tell you flat out that everything is sales, and he has the resume to back it up. Fresh out of college he got handed a Yellow Pages and the Kansas City metro, and six months later he had landed three accounts that barely paid anything. On this episode of Ground Zero Growth, Tim walks through two decades of sales jobs, warehouse shifts, collections calls, and a layoff two weeks before...

Robert Roncska carried the nuclear codes as the commanding officer of a $2 billion nuclear submarine. He has written two books about what he learned down there, and the one he talks about most with Sam Sapp is titled Beyond the Sea: Leading with Love from the Nuclear Navy to the White House and Health Care. The conversation moves from the fear-based commanding officer who once made a young Robert...

Jeb Graham got his real estate license on a Saturday. Tuesday was September 11, 2001. That was supposed to be his first day selling houses at Keller Williams. Nobody sold anything. Everyone stood around the TV. The conversation with Sam Sapp walks through that start and all the others, from underwriting construction loans at Bank of America, to food sales at Cisco, to finally landing in 2004 in th...