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 frontline staff working with kids with severe behavioral challenges, eventually building and leading the organization's entire learning and development function. That decade-plus in a high-crisis, deeply human environment is the foundation for everything he does today. A little over a year ago, he took the entrepreneurial leap and launched his own coaching and leadership development practice, now doing work he never anticipated — global manufacturing companies, clean energy firms, and senior leadership teams across industries he once thought were completely outside his lane.

The conversation goes deep fast. Shem walks through the personality assessment tools he uses — DiSC, OPQ, and Process Communication Model — and why PCM stands out: it doesn't label you as a type, it maps the types that live within you and asks what happens when you're in distress. He unpacks the difference between knowing yourself versus using a tool to analyze others, why the Enneagram can create empathy breakthroughs in personal life but gets messy in organizational settings, and the five-step framework — regulation, mindset, skill set, behavior, tool set — that underlies almost everything he does with clients.

Then Samuel becomes the client. In a live, unrehearsed coaching segment, Shem walks him through what's actually going on at KillerGrowth — the virtual team, the fear of leaving people behind while moving fast, the tension between identifying opportunities and staying present long enough to bring people along. What surfaces is real: the pattern of a high-speed filter who genuinely cares but sometimes outruns the room, and the cost of fear and anxiety masquerading as drive.

Shem closes with a concept worth sitting with: the difference between homeostasis — getting back to normal — and allostasis, the body's deeper drive to reach a new kind of stability. In a world being reshaped by AI and remote work and constant change, connection and leadership can't just be recaptured. They have to be redefined.

Shem is launching Wired Human with collaborator Kyle Harvey — a new venture built at the intersection of human skills development and the tech-driven age. Watch for it.

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 kid sleeping four hours a night, carrying nice clothes in the back seat to change into for client meetings, printing proposals from a laptop in his truck. He bought his first house three months out of high school, rented out two bedrooms and a pullout sofa just to cover his mortgage and groceries, and built SPS Paving through sheer volume of hustle. When a city project nearly broke him in 2009 — maxing a credit card to $35,000 just to make payroll — he pushed through anyway.

What separated Andy wasn't just grit. It was how he thought about every dollar, every relationship, and every opportunity. A single postcard campaign to school districts turned into consistent clients across multiple states. A keen read on real estate during the recession led to 50 or 60 rental properties, eventually sold at the peak of the COVID-era market. Even his foray into retail — buying the Brewski Barn and Anglers Bait and Tackle by the lake — came down to fundamentals: buy right, store product on deep sale, bridge the timelines, and let volume do the work.

Andy also went deep on what the transcript of a business life really looks like: the chaos behind a music festival nobody asked him to run, the value of a properly drafted operating agreement before you spend a single dollar with a partner, and the quiet strategy behind rolling SPS into Encore Pavement before getting acquired — then acquired again — then acquired a third time by a private equity platform now spanning 30 paving companies across the country.

Later in the conversation, Andy shares something more personal: a recurring "life skills class" he runs for his three boys on a giant whiteboard — covering amortization schedules, compounding interest, credit versus debit, box breathing, addiction science, choosing friends, online safety, and how to give a real handshake. It's practical, direct, and built on the same principle that drove everything else: don't wait until they're old enough to need it.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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 night (power, water, land use, noise, PFAS) and what local leaders can actually do about it. Bill explains why planning, zoning, and special‑use permits exist — how they create the guardrails that let a town evaluate projects on facts instead of headlines, and why developers should pay for the infrastructure their projects require.

Bill is clear about tradeoffs: hyperscalers don’t deliver thousands of long‑term factory jobs, but they can materially strengthen a city’s tax base via franchise fees and grid upgrades — if protections are in place so residents don’t shoulder the burden. He also highlights modern technical solutions (closed‑loop cooling, cold‑plate designs) and why communities should insist on them when water or forever‑chemical risks are raised.

Beyond policy, this episode is about transparency and civic trust. Bill shares concrete examples of how El Dorado communicates (work sessions, mailed inserts, public forums), why not every loud voice is right, and how citizens — especially younger residents and business owners — can get involved and ask the right questions before decisions are made.

Listen for a thoughtful, balanced take from a mayor who says he won’t close doors without understanding the facts, but who also won’t accept proposals that threaten the community’s resources. Practical, local, and full of real stories about what it means to steward a small town’s future.