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 entrepreneurship studies at Wichita State, a school supply distribution company he was running out of a trailer while still in college, and an early conviction that he wasn't built for the normal path. But the deeper thread starts earlier, when Ted traveled to Ethiopia with his family during an international adoption and witnessed a mother place her children's hands into his parents' hands and walk away. That moment, and a month-long trip to Ghana at 21 where he met 8 boys brought out of child labor, led him and his wife Ellie to start 8 Oaks — a home for 8 girls living in the same conditions. They were 22. They had no business doing it. They did it anyway. Thirteen years later, those girls are finishing high school, enrolling in college, and building futures that would have been unimaginable without the intervention.

That sense of responsibility — of being given a lot and being expected to do something with it — is the engine underneath everything Ted has built professionally. He ran a data analytics company called Lion Graph, merged with Moonbase Labs where he spent four years doing software product and business development, and eventually left to go figure out what was actually true about him. What came out of that was a prolific writing practice, a newsletter for nonprofit leaders, seminars on what nonprofits get wrong about software, and ultimately Honeystack — a company that offers education, consulting, and custom software development, exclusively to nonprofits that are ready to stop letting software happen to them and start owning their tech stack. The name comes from the mutualistic relationship between the honey guide bird and the honey badger: two different species that team up to get something neither could get alone.

Ted is clear-eyed about what he's building and what he's not. It's a lifestyle business. It's not going to IPO. And he's completely at peace with that — because he found his people, found his lane, and learned that once you do, what you should do next becomes surprisingly obvious.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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 should look like.

Janelle's path into ownership started with a simple observation: home service companies don't answer the phone, don't follow up, and don't show up with a plan. After years of watching that from the consumer side, she decided she could do better. She and her husband Lance entered the franchising world through a broker-matched process, eventually landing on 360 Painting under the Premium Service Brands umbrella — drawn in by the systems, the support, and Janelle's own lifelong love of painting. They've since added a second franchise, Temporary Wall Systems, serving construction clients across Kansas and Arkansas.

The conversation goes deep on what actually moves the needle in a painting business: speed of estimate delivery, subcontractor vetting, high-quality paint (and why the Sherwin-Williams at Lowe's isn't the Sherwin-Williams from Sherwin-Williams), and the slow-burn payoff of SEO over lead aggregators like Angie's. Janelle breaks down the "spray and pray" model that makes platforms like Angie's a necessary evil — and why she's working to grow organic traffic so she can eventually walk away from it.

What drives all of it is a mindset Janelle describes simply: never settle. Whether she's managing a global IT team, running two franchises, or sitting in a BNI meeting quietly eyeing the leaderboard, she's always looking for the next domino to set up. She's not wired to stop — and the results show it.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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.