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.

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