Ground Zero Growth

Will Akin is the only nonpartisan sheriff in the state of Missouri, and he spends the first few minutes of this conversation explaining why that matters for how he shows up at his neighbor's door, at a chamber of commerce event, or on a call where somebody is screaming at him about a barking dog. He is also a former Blackhawk pilot who was homeless at eight years old. The Clay County sheriff sat down with Sam Sapp to talk about approachability, community safety, officer mental health, and the long walk from a California dumpster to a Missouri courthouse.

Harry Campbell wanted to be a pro athlete. By six he already knew it wasn't happening. He wasn't fast enough or quick enough. But he could run the same speed for ten thousand meters as he could for a hundred, so he became a long distance runner. In 1982, at a night race on the University of Tennessee track, he set the Vanderbilt school record for ten thousand meters. It stood for thirty-four years. That race is the story underneath the rest of Harry's career, including a brand management run at Procter and Gamble, a humbling dot com collapse, and a late chapter built around speaking, coaching, and a charity he runs in his wife's honor.

John Christensen grew up in a Nebraska town of 390 people, graduated in a class of 12, and spent a summer slinging 75 pound tent stakes for a party rental company in Annapolis before he ever set foot in a law school. Now he runs Story One Financial, a multifamily office in Kansas City that serves families worth between 20 and 200 million dollars. The path from farm kid to specialist in estate and tax planning sounds random until John walks Sam through it, and then it sounds like a series of conversations he was paying attention to.

Gentry Ferguson launched a new executive search firm with his business partner John Doherty in February of 2020. A few weeks later the world shut down. Companies stopped hiring, people stayed put, and the product they had just built had nowhere to land. Instead of folding, Gentry pivoted into career transition services and spent the rest of the year helping laid-off employees find their next role. He sits down with Sam to walk through the long arc that got him there, from waiting tables at Jack Stack, to a decade at Garmin, to a brand-new partnerships role at AMC, to co-founding Talent Solutions Partners in Kansas City.

Josen Ruiseco almost walked out of a business class when the instructor asked the room to say their harshest inner-voice talk out loud, one person at a time. He stayed. He worked his way around the room. And the reactions he got back, people visibly shocked at how he spoke to himself, cracked something open. The conversation with Sam Sapp moves from that moment through Josen's road from Southern California to Kansas City, losing his mother at 19, building Shout Cloud Studios, and why relationships now sit at the center of everything he does.