Ground Zero Growth

Paul Abugattas has signed the books, run the stores, unloaded the containers, and stood outside a crime scene at 24 wondering what on earth to say to the SWAT team. He grew up outside Washington DC, didn't realize until he was 18 that he wasn't a US citizen, and spent the next three decades building a retail career that ran from a suburban drug store counter to running divisions of national brands. By the time he landed in Kansas City, he'd learned that the job is almost always the people.

Clients at Hovey and Company joke that you shouldn't drink the water. Babies keep arriving. Meghan Hovee runs a predominantly women led accounting firm in Kansas City, and she has built it on a bet most CPA firms aren't willing to make: that women can have careers and full family lives without either one collapsing. Four kids in, nearly ten years in business, two offices across Kansas City, and tax seasons that cap around 45 hours a week. This conversation gets into how she got there, why she left big four after nine months, and what she learned the hard way about hiring, culture, and delegation.

Alex Walker's daughter once asked her if she was taking PTO. Alex laughed and said no, because she was already driving her kid around at three in the afternoon. That is the trade a mompreneur makes. Room mom and den mom by day, grant writer by night after bedtime. Alex sits down with Sam to talk about building Green Desk Grant Writing, the community she lost when a women's co-working space closed, and how she turned 15 years inside nonprofits into a business that has landed over 22 million dollars for clients.

Joshua Peters was 19 years old and six months into a war when an IED blew up the Humvee he was riding in near Balad, Iraq. Shrapnel tore through his left foot and right thigh. He bled from an artery in his foot for 45 minutes and somehow did not need a transfusion. What followed was a decade of PTSD, a misfired prescription, a marriage a month in, a career identity that had to be rebuilt from scratch, and a slow climb into the IT compliance consulting work he does today as owner of Key Consulting KC.

Tim King will tell you flat out that everything is sales, and he has the resume to back it up. Fresh out of college he got handed a Yellow Pages and the Kansas City metro, and six months later he had landed three accounts that barely paid anything. On this episode of Ground Zero Growth, Tim walks through two decades of sales jobs, warehouse shifts, collections calls, and a layoff two weeks before a home build, then explains how Southwestern Consulting finally got him coaching the thing he had been doing all along.

Robert Roncska carried the nuclear codes as the commanding officer of a $2 billion nuclear submarine. He has written two books about what he learned down there, and the one he talks about most with Sam Sapp is titled Beyond the Sea: Leading with Love from the Nuclear Navy to the White House and Health Care. The conversation moves from the fear-based commanding officer who once made a young Robert wet his pants, to the mentor who showed him a different way, to a five-second hallway conversation four years later that helped bring a child into the world.