What if upgrading your business’s lighting could pay for itself — and an energy company covered roughly half the upfront cost?

In Episode 74 of the KillerGrowth Podcast, Samuel sits down with Brandon McLey, founder of Titan Lighting, to talk about the surprisingly complex business behind something most of us barely think about: light.

After nearly two decades in the electrical distribution industry, Brandon left the corporate world in 2023 to build Titan Lighting. He shares what pushed him to make the jump, the inefficiencies he saw in the traditional construction and lighting industry, and how Titan helps contractors, developers, architects, and business owners find better lighting solutions without overpaying.

They also dig into Evergy’s commercial lighting rebate program, which can cover roughly 50% of qualifying LED retrofit projects, why billions of fluorescent bulbs are still in use, and how dramatically LEDs can reduce energy and maintenance costs.

And then things get nerdy.

Brandon explains why some streetlights suddenly turn purple, how LED color temperature actually works, why lighting affects your circadian rhythm, how the wrong light can completely change the appearance of a room, and why some people can actually see fluorescent lights flickering.

They also talk about the realities of entrepreneurship: cash flow, competitors, hiring, building relationships, and Brandon’s vision for growing Titan Lighting into a $10M+ regional business.

In this episode:

• Leaving a billion-dollar company to start Titan Lighting

• Why commercial lighting projects are often over-designed

• How value engineering can save building owners money

• How Evergy’s LED rebate program works

• The real ROI of replacing fluorescent and metal-halide lighting

• Why some LED streetlights turn purple

• Color temperature and the science behind LED lighting

• How lighting affects sleep and circadian rhythm

• The challenges Brandon didn’t expect when starting a business

• Building a company around relationships instead of transactions

• Brandon’s plan to grow Titan Lighting to $10M+ and multiple locations

If you own a business, work in construction, or have ever wondered why the lighting around you looks the way it does, this conversation will make you look at light completely differently.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 73, Samuel sits down with John Banks — El Dorado native, longtime entrepreneur, and one of the quieter forces behind more businesses in that town than most people realize. John doesn't particularly want to be here. He said so himself. That's exactly why this conversation is worth listening to.John's story starts the way a lot of good ones do: with a father who had a contract. In 1955, Banks' dad was the dirt contractor at the El Dorado refinery when someone asked if he'd be interested in handling the petroleum coke coming out of a new coker unit. He said yes. What followed was 45 years of one family showing up at that refinery - John eventually bought the business from his dad, grew it from 2 employees to 160, expanded into 6 refineries across California, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and built a trucking operation to go with it. When a larger company decided they wanted into the coke handling business, the fastest way in was to buy Banks Companies Inc. John sold in 2000.After the sale, John tried his hand at consumer lending - loaning his own money to people who needed it - and discovered that the banking commission has opinions about that, even when it's your money. He pivoted to business loans only, where the regulations are considerably more relaxed, and has been doing that ever since. The people who came to him were often the ones the bank turned away: too new, no tax returns, not enough time in business. John's version of underwriting was simpler. If someone showed up with a real plan, he'd find a way to get them the rest.There's a neighborhood in El Dorado because of John Banks. There's a restored 1886 building on the corner of Central and Main. There's an appliance store. There are businesses run by people Samuel has known for years, where John's name came up later, quietly, as the one who made the first bet. He doesn't need his name on any of it. His version of legacy is pretty simple: be fair, don't take advantage of anyone, and treat people the way you want to be treated.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 72, Samuel sits down with Jacob Schlittenhardt - co-founder and CEO of Planetary Talent, a hiring accelerator built on the idea that the resume is a fundamentally broken tool and that finding the right person for a job is, at its core, a storytelling problem. Jacob brings a background in branding and design, a failed blockchain gaming startup, and a deeply personal experience on both sides of a brutal job market to a conversation about what it would take to actually fix hiring.

Jacob's path is anything but straight. He nearly missed his entrepreneurship scholarship at Wichita State because his rejection letter kept going to spam - and his persistence in continuing to email the department anyway is what got him back in the running and eventually won him the funding. He'd originally planned to study advertising, but ended up double majoring, and somewhere in the process of helping scrappy startup founders with logos, pitch decks, and websites, he started liking their side of the table more than his own. That itch eventually pulled him into co-founding Duo, a blockchain-based video game built on Cardano, which ran hard for nearly two years before collapsing. When it did, Jacob was left with no income, a new house, and over a thousand job applications that went nowhere. That experience - being ghosted, dehumanized, reduced to an AI-generated resume in a pile of 800 identical ones - is what planted the seed for Planetary Talent.

The epiphany came at Seattle Tech Startup Week, sitting in the front row of an HR and AI panel and realizing that nobody in the room was actually rethinking the system. They were all just bolting AI onto existing infrastructure - AI reads the AI-written resume, AI scores the AI-optimized job description. Jacob walked out thinking about first principles: what does it actually mean to find the right person for a job, and does it require a resume at all? Planetary Talent's answer is no. Their technology builds digital replicas - data models of founders, companies, and candidates - that can interface with each other to assess fit at scale. Instead of posting a job and sorting resumes, they build an ideal candidate profile and run targeted digital ads to find people who are actually interested. The questions they ask candidates are the ones ChatGPT can't answer - what are you most proud of, what team did you actually love working with, and why. Those answers, Jacob argues, are the real signal.

The business model is pay-per-match, with an option to also employ the person if the company wants to skip the paperwork. The long game is bigger - the company has a business plan that runs to 2125, inspired in part by Blue Origin's 100-year plan, built around the idea that if humans ever collaborate across planets, they'll need infrastructure to find and work with each other that has nothing to do with an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. Right now, Jacob and his team are focused on growth: the platform works, the technology is finding real matches, and the next problem is finding more founders who are ready to hire.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com