Ground Zero Growth

James Gorman helped wire the early internet, stood in a New York data center turning screwdrivers in the morning and pitched bankers in the boardroom that afternoon, and once told GE's leadership they could own the internet for 30 million dollars. They passed. Now he runs Hard to Hack, an advisory practice that builds security programs for small and mid-sized companies, then trains them up and leaves. He calls his clients graduates. Sam sat down with him to talk cybersecurity, the dot com crash, Y2K, CrowdStrike, AI, and why your network really is your net worth.

Robert Gold was 26 years old, on track at KPMG, when his father died at 51. His dad ran a small CPA practice out of the basement of the family house, office wedged between the furnace and the dryer. Robert left the national firm within weeks, took over the clients he had known since high school, and started the long climb that turned a basement practice into Bennett Gold LLP, a Toronto firm he can trace back to 1929. The conversation follows that thread through partnership deals, a few well-timed deaths, early internet audits, and 700 podcast episodes.

Two weeks into his freshman year at Harvard, David G. Ewing tore his Achilles tendon clean in half. The football career he had been recruited for ended before it started, and he spent the next year learning to run without a limp. That early gut check became the pattern for everything that followed. A cancelled future in his family's Detroit manufacturing plant. A tech startup that imploded in the dot-com winter. A first employee hired on September 10, 2001. Every time a door closed, David figured out what he still had and kept moving.

Marc Shaffer is the CFO of Searcy Financial, a firm that started in 1976 with one founder serving physicians and has spent 50 years turning itself into something more. He wrote a book called One For All built on an Irish proverb: hand it out in slices, it comes back in loaves. Sam sits down with Marc on the last day of 2025 to talk about why that philosophy works, where it breaks, and how a kid who almost became a youth minister ended up running business development for a financial planning firm.

Andrew Brown has spent 30 plus years inside professional services, financial services, SaaS, and digital marketing agencies, and he kept noticing the same pattern. The best leads almost always came through a trusted referral, while the sales and marketing machine churned away in parallel. In this conversation he walks through how referral sources get overused, neglected, and disrespected, why trust is the quiet foundation underneath every real referral, and how his Bridgemaker Referral Programs methodology tries to fix it.