Killer Growth

In Episode 66, Samuel sits down with Katie Banks-Todd, a vocal and theater teacher at El Dorado High School and a former member of the Broadway and national touring company of Phantom of the Opera. She grew up in the front row of the El Dorado High School auditorium watching her mother direct every production. Decades later, she is back in that same building running the program herself, with a lot...

In Episode 65, Samuel sits down with Alyssa McGinn, founder of Behind Closed Doors, a company built around one idea: the best opportunities in life don't happen in public. Alyssa's path to getting there is genuinely unpredictable, and this is a conversation worth listening to if you've ever tried to network at a networking event and felt like something was fundamentally broken with the...

In Episode 64, Samuel sits down with Jordan Hatfield, filmmaker, creator, and Sam's actual brother-in-law. Jordan has been making movies since he was 14 years old, and this conversation is a full tour through what that actually looks like when you're not in Hollywood and you're figuring it out as you go. Jordan started with a Sony camcorder, his younger brother Shim, and no shirts. The...

In Episode 63, Samuel sits down with Joel Fox - owner of Fix It Quick Computers in El Dorado and co-founder of Speed Trap Distillery. Joel is the kind of guy who has a pilot's license, tinkers with cars, does his own plumbing, and once got curious about how hard it is to make alcohol during COVID. Three years later he's running a licensed craft distillery out of a building he didn't ha...

In Episode 62, Samuel sits down with Clay Hoberecht - owner of Best Body Shop and Wichita Wagyu, and one of the more unusual social media success stories in Wichita. Clay built a massive following by doing something most body shops would never do: being radically transparent about how insurance companies operate, what they push shops to hide from customers, and what you're actually entitled to...

In Episode 61, Samuel sits down with Tim Hillebrand — president of Don's Appliance in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and someone Sam calls a genuine mentor from his years running Charlie's Appliance in Kansas. This one has a different feel than most episodes: it's two guys who've been in the same industry at very different scales, catching up on what the business actually looks like whe...

In Episode 60, Samuel sits down with Sam Foreman — founder and CEO of Foreman Law, an attorney focused on mergers and acquisitions based in Wichita. Sam's story is an honest one: a career built through hard work and ambition that eventually ran him straight into the ground, and the long road back to a version of work that actually means something to him. Sam grew up homeschooled in Topeka, stu...

In Episode 59, Samuel sits down with Trevor Crotts - founder of Buddy Rest and American Pet Works, and someone who spent years figuring out that building a product and building a product business are two very different things. Trevor's story starts in mattress retail, where he spent years training salespeople and getting genuinely frustrated with how the industry talked about sleep. That frust...

In Episode 58, Samuel sits down with Sandy Mehra - CEO of Telgoo5, a full-stack telecom software platform that's been powering mobile operators and MVNOs for over 20 years. Sandy runs a company of nearly 500 people from Bryant Park and has stayed largely out of the spotlight. This conversation is a good introduction to why that's about to change. The origin story is a good one. Sandy's...

In Episode 57, Samuel sits down with Jon Bachura - self-described entrepreneurologist, peer group facilitator, and the newest member of the Acumen team in Wichita. Jon has spent the better part of 20 years studying entrepreneurs up close, and this conversation is about what he's actually learned from all that watching. Jon's path is not a straight line. He started as a music major who want...

In Episode 56, Samuel sits down with Chris Sund - president and CEO of United Med and GQR Healthcare, keynote speaker, Maxwell-certified coach, and founder of Amplify Speakers bureau. Chris took a risk on a brand-new healthcare staffing company, helped grow it from a small team and roughly $5 million in revenue to over $60 million in three years, earned the number 3 spot on the Inc. 5000 fastest-g...

In Episode 55, Samuel sits down with Fayola Oyatayo - Wichita-based emcee, media entrepreneur, and the closest thing this city has to a hometown host. Known to most as Fay, he's the guy running energy at WSU basketball games, KU's College GameDay, corporate galas, and wedding receptions. The path to that mic was anything but direct. Fay grew up with a father who did something unusual - instead of...

In Episode 54, Samuel sits down with Chase Locke — El Dorado native, former CEO of One Country, and the kind of guy who has somehow managed to weave together radio, nonprofits, local government, Nashville, and a Reba McEntire Corvette campaign into one career that makes no sense until it does. This is a long one, and it earns it. Chase grew up on a ranch in Butler County, credits a Garth Brooks co...

In Episode 53, Samuel sits down with Melissa Hall — CEO of Susan B. Allen Memorial Hospital in El Dorado and one of those rare executives who actually did every job on the way up. She started volunteering at a hospital at 14, was trained as a CNA by her own grandmother, served breakfast to assisted living residents before high school, and has spent 25-plus years figuring out how healthcare actuall...

In Episode 52, Samuel sits down with David May - CEO of Trinity Precision and co-founder of Akeratos, a robotics automation consulting company - for a conversation covering nearly 30 years of aerospace manufacturing, a COVID-era pivot that spawned a second business, and the kind of company culture that still feels unusual: faith-based, family-first, and genuinely protective of its people. David&#3...

In Episode 51, Samuel and Tyler sit down to talk about something they've been practicing, not just preaching - the content engine. It's a topic episode, no external guest, just two people 6 months into building something and reporting back on what they've actually learned. The conversation starts with first principles. A content engine isn't a content calendar or a photo shoot ever...

In Episode 50, Samuel sits down with Tylen Hall - the Hunter's Helper - for a second try at a conversation that was lost to a technical issue the first time around. Tylen is a hunting consultant based in Kansas who grew up around outfitting, spent years as a journeyman pipe fitter in refineries, lived half the year in a remote fishing village in Mexico, and eventually landed in full-time consu...

In Episode 49, Samuel sits down with Ted Kriwiel — childhood friend, founder of 8 Oaks, and the person behind Honeystack.agency, a software consulting company built specifically to help nonprofits build modern tech stacks. Ted is one of those rare people who found his thing and built everything around it, and this conversation traces exactly how that happened. Ted's path started with entrepren...

In Episode 48, Samuel sits down with Janelle Wilson, owner of 360 Painting in Wichita and a 32-year veteran of Koch Industries, where she leads a global IT team of 65 people across enterprise technology. Janelle brings a rare combination of corporate discipline and entrepreneurial fire — and she's channeling both into building a franchise business that's redefining what home services shoul...

In Episode 46, Samuel sits down with Andy Waller, CEO of Encore Pavement — an entrepreneur Samuel counts as his second business mentor. Andy's story starts in a Wichita State entrepreneurship program, where a side job sealing a single driveway sparked what would become one of the region's most respected commercial paving companies. Andy didn't follow a straight line. He was a college k...

In Episode 47, Samuel sits down with Shem Hatfield, founder of Process Elevation — a leadership development coach, certified organizational leader, and someone Samuel has known since they were building theater sets and running Code Teal ops through the hallways of Butler Community College 17 years ago. Shem spent 13 years in a residential school program for neurodiverse youth — starting as frontli...

Sam sits down with Bill Young — El Dorado, Kansas Mayor and Tharseo IT Chief Strategy Officer — to talk local leadership, community service, and the practical tradeoffs towns face when opportunity meets stewardship. Bill walks through his path from radio and IT to public office and why small‑town civic life matters to him. We dig into the data center conversation head on: what keeps people up at n...

In this episode, Samuel sits down with Josh Cogan, owner of Cogan's Woodshop in El Dorado, Kansas — a full custom cabinet shop with roots going back to when Josh was sweeping floors at 14 years old. Josh didn't plan on owning a cabinet business. He spent his early career working in a cabinet shop through college, then ran a manufacturing facility for a hydraulic company for six years. When...

In this episode, Samuel sits down with Chris Waipa, branch manager and loan officer at Neighborhood Loans and creator of Mortgage Punk — the brand that's making mortgages feel less like a root canal and more like a rock show. Chris traded a career in music for a career in mortgages back in 2003, and he's never stopped thinking like a musician. That tension — between what's expected and what feels...

In Episode 42, Samuel sits down with Tyler Norris, lifelong El Dorado resident and co-founder of KillerGrowth, for a grounded conversation about one of the most talked-about topics hitting small towns across America right now: data centers. Tyler spent his early career in tech, visiting and working inside colocation facilities like Equinix on the East Coast. He brings firsthand experience to a deb...