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.

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 a mutual friend — a common connector in a surprising number of these episodes — called and said a local cabinet shop was for sale, Josh and his wife had an offer in by 4:00 that afternoon. That was the summer of 2019. COVID came months later and kept him busier than he ever expected.The conversation gets into the real mechanics of what custom woodworking actually looks like: why hickory is beautiful but brutal to work with, why maple stains blotchy, why cherry is making a comeback, and what it actually costs to paint cabinets versus stain them (hint: most people have it backwards). Josh walks through his full process — from the first site visit and rough rendering, through material orders and cut lists, to the install — and is honest about where it breaks down: scheduling when only two people are doing everything.He and Samuel dig into the side of owning a business that nobody advertises — the admin, the billing, the tax bill that hits in year one, the 60-hour weeks you thought were temporary but somehow became permanent. Josh caught the Tim Jordan episode and said it hit close to home. He's still working on the freedom part.If you're thinking about custom cabinets, need to find a woodworker in Butler County, or just want to understand how something beautiful gets built from a stack of random-width lumber — this one's worth your time.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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 true — is what eventually gave birth to Mortgage Punk: a name his graphic designer Seth accidentally coined in two words that changed everything.Chris walks through the full journey: from being turned down as a waiter at Applebee's, to landing his first loan officer job through a former bandmate, to spending years quietly building a lending team before finally giving the brand room to breathe. He talks about what it means to build something that's genuinely you — and why chasing 100% of the market is the wrong goal. His version of success sounds more like Happy Gilmore dragging a rowdy, beer-mug crowd onto a golf course.The conversation gets into real territory: AI voice assistants for client intake, the fine line between automating for your business versus actually serving your clients better, the power of a polarizing brand name, and why "bad news travels faster than good news".It ends with a full breakdown of the American Dream Home Buying Conference — happening April 25th at the Hyatt Regency in Wichita — where Chris is bringing together financial planners, real estate experts, local artists, guitar solos, and five-figure giveaways under one roof to make homeownership feel like something worth showing up for.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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 debate that most communities are navigating with little context — separating the real concerns from the noise, and asking the harder question: under what conditions does a data center actually become a win for a community?They dig into how data centers work, what hyperscalers actually are, and what communities like El Dorado need to think about before any deal gets made — from power cost-shifting protections (Kansas passed landmark regulations in November 2025) to setbacks, noise barriers, and negotiation leverage. They also look at Ashburn, Virginia, home to over 200 data centers and still one of the most desirable places to live near DC, as a real-world case study in what long-term coexistence can look like.The bigger thread running through the whole conversation is about infrastructure, sovereignty, and the AI race reshaping the global economy. Data centers aren't going away. The question is whether communities engage with eyes open or get caught flat-footed when someone comes knocking.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 41, Samuel sits down with Stephanie Boswell — the creative mind behind Dueling Llamas, the card game that started with cardstock, hand-drawn llamas, and a lot of encouragement from her husband Brian.Stephanie's story doesn't start with entrepreneurship. It starts with writing stories as a kid, falling in love with sewing in high school, designing and producing a full fashion line for a college runway show, and then stepping back from all of it to raise a family. When COVID hit and the world slowed down, an idea showed up — fast. She typed out everything she was thinking, sketched the characters, cut the cards by hand, and started playing with her family. What she built in those early sessions became the foundation of a real product.She walks through the whole journey: why llamas (their pet llama Mike was a protector of their backyard herd and a surprisingly intimidating animal), how her brother became the game's illustrator with almost no creative guardrails, what it felt like to hold a physical box for the first time after years of iteration, and why the hardest part of the process wasn't design or manufacturing — it was believing other people would actually love what she made.The conversation covers the balance between luck and strategy that makes a game genuinely fun, what she learned from debuting at Toy Fair in New York City alongside Mattel and Melissa & Doug, how Dueling Llamas has quietly found its way into coffee shops, assisted living communities, and family game nights all over the country — with over 10,000 units sold including the expansion pack — and where she wants to take it next.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 40, Samuel sits down with Dr. Brandon Alleman, co-founder of Antioch Med (Antioch Direct Primary Care) in Wichita — a practice built from scratch with $30,000, no debt, and a conviction that the current healthcare system isn't broken, it's just optimized for the wrong people.Brandon's path to medicine was anything but linear. Math and physics degrees in three years, a Fulbright Scholarship in Eastern Europe, an MD-PhD program at Iowa, and a deliberate choice to enter family medicine — nearly unheard of from that track. He and co-founder Dr. Nick Thompson opened Antioch straight out of residency because they wanted their incentives aligned with their patients, not with insurance billing codes.The conversation gets into what Direct Primary Care actually is and how it differs from concierge medicine, why the traditional fee-for-service model leads to 8-minute appointments and physician burnout, and how a membership-based model at $39–$70 a month can provide labs, medications, same-day visits, after-hours access, and even creatine — all at a fraction of what the standard system charges. Brandon walks through the business model, why growth is a two-sided market matching patients to physicians, and how Antioch has scaled to serve individuals, families, and about 70 businesses in the Wichita area.The deeper thread running through the episode is how the system got this way — why insurance premiums are structurally incentivized to go up, why the ACA's medical loss ratio accidentally made costs worse, why employers are unknowingly proxy-buying healthcare without any idea what they're actually spending it on, and what CFOs and HR leaders could change tomorrow if they wanted to. Brandon's take isn't that there are villains — it's that the rules of the game are bad, and DPC is a small but real attempt to play a different one.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com