Ground Zero Growth

Twenty five years into running Fulling Management and Accounting in Olathe, Kansas, Rusty Fulling has seen the full arc of small business pain. Owners projecting four million in sales who haven't taken a paycheck in months. Products that lose a hundred dollars every time they sell. The Ponzi shuffle of running new projects to cover old ones. Rusty's work as a fractional CFO is about pulling founders out of that cycle. In this conversation he also opens up about the hospital visit that pushed him to start his own firm and the mission trip that changed how he ran it.

George Commons keeps returning to a single verse: 1 Corinthians 3. It's the passage about every person's work being tested by fire, with only gold and precious stones surviving the flames. George first heard a coworker describe a dream about that verse at an AT&T Bell Labs Bible study more than 40 years ago, and he's been measuring his life against it ever since. Today he runs the Barnabas Group Kansas City, a ministry to ministries built around Christian business leaders who want to use their strategic skills for something that lasts.

Mike Grigsby introduces himself as a retired Kansas City Missouri police officer first, not as a former FBI forensic examiner, former CIO, or 25-year executive coach. It's a deliberate choice. Telling someone you used to be a cop instantly sorts them into one of three camps, and Mike likes having that signal up front. From there, the conversation opens into identity, tribal belonging, the mental cost of forensic work on child exploitation cases, and why the only person coming to rescue you is the version of you that's fed up with your current situation.

Eric Kelting didn't know e-discovery existed until the day he interviewed for a job in it. Eleven years into running Complete Legal, the litigation support company he co-founded in 2014, he can trace the entrepreneurial thread all the way back to a dilapidated movie theater two blocks from his childhood home that he used to daydream about buying. This conversation walks through the slow path from a lawn-mowing route, to a college newspaper ad staff, to a full-time leap he took over Thanksgiving weekend, with his wife's blessing and his own stomach in knots.

Christian Roduner grew up in Rossville, Kansas, a farming town with one stoplight that never turns green and a high school class of thirty-five. He graduated with no job offers, nearly enlisted, and scraped into a junior college baseball roster at the last minute. Five years later he's a junior partner at Apollo Insurance Group in Lee's Summit, running health insurance for families and small businesses and trying to be the Roduner who changes the trajectory of a last name he calls cursed.

Keith Davenport recorded this episode from a park in Olathe, after a library patron sat behind him in frame and a cello lesson pushed him out of his home office. That small logistical scramble is a pretty accurate picture of his life. He runs three businesses, a coffee shop in Gardner called Ground House Coffee, Blazor Strategies, and an HR tech company called Mythic Higher, while navigating a closing on a new house and working out what a value based entrepreneur actually does in practice.

Matthew Entringer didn't grow up around homelessness. Then one bitter December in 2021, three or four people were bundled up in the lobby of his downtown Kansas City apartment just trying to stay out of the cold, and he couldn't unsee it. He started carrying care kits in his backpack, fell in with a Saturday outreach at Scraps KC, and by 2023 he'd filed the 501c3 paperwork for Street Support KC. The conversation starts there and ends up on dopamine, shame, and how a small business can use AI without losing the human part.