Ground Zero Growth

Oscar Duran reads four books at a time, runs a bespoke tailoring atelier with his partner Katie, renovates old buildings through his community development company Black Sailboat, and is putting out a book called The Garden Regions of Tomorrow. He started first grade with How to Win Friends and Influence People as his reader. By the end of his sophomore year of high school he was living on his own. Somewhere between door knocking in Italian textile shops and door knocking in South Omaha neighborhoods, he stitched all of it into a single idea about place, craft, and what it means to be a citizen.

Todd Milner almost kept driving. It was 3:30 on a Friday afternoon in western Kansas, he had a two-hour drive home, and he was done. Something told him to pull a U-turn into one more hospital parking lot. That stop turned into a proposal, a signed deal, and a qualifying push into President's Club. Todd, now a business development manager at CBIZ and the founder of a new coaching practice called the M5 Movement, sat down with Sam to trace a 40-year sales career built on the same quiet idea: do the one more thing, and serve the person in front of you.

Kelly Narowsky woke up one Saturday to texts from strangers trying to buy cars. Hackers had taken over her Facebook account, impersonated her with a stolen copy of her driver's license, and wiped out roughly 2,600 friends and nearly 3,000 professional followers she'd built as a Kansas City speaker. That crisis is how she and Sam met. The conversation that unfolded from there went much further than cybersecurity, into bipolar disorder, a spinal cord injury at 25, and the quiet work of choosing to keep going.

About a year and a half before this conversation, Mark Davis took over Translube Lubricants, the 50 year old family business his parents founded in 1975. One of his first moves was a rebrand. People on sales calls had started giggling at the name. The company is now Steelglide. That decision is one chapter in a career Mark describes as reinventing yourself every few years, from programmer on the software that delivered video for the Seoul Olympics to startup founder to family business operator.

Christian Brim has spent 28 years running Core Group, a firm that helps entrepreneurs in creative industries trade financial anxiety for clarity. But the conversation with Sam Sapp quickly moves past spreadsheets. Christian argues that the same inflated ego that makes entrepreneurs successful is the exact thing that caps their growth, and he ties that idea to a study where a founder's brain lit up identically for photos of their kids and their business. From there it goes to delegation, faith, bankruptcy in the oil patch, and why he still can't explain why he bet everything on a franchise in 1997.

Jayme Busch grew up selling polished rocks on a busy street in Bellevue and never really stopped selling something. By the time she sat down with Sam, she had been through Mary Kay, 31, color street nails, Tupperware, a $5,000 LuLaRoe package, a bankruptcy filing, a move to a town of 900, a 1988 work trailer turned mobile boutique, and two storefronts. Unique Boutique Iowa is the name that stuck, and this episode is the story of how she pivoted her way into it.