In Episode 66, Samuel sits down with Katie Banks-Todd, a vocal and theater teacher at El Dorado High School and a former member of the Broadway and national touring company of Phantom of the Opera. She grew up in the front row of the El Dorado High School auditorium watching her mother direct every production. Decades later, she is back in that same building running the program herself, with a lot of ground covered in between.

Katie's path started with voice lessons at Butler College and opera training at Wichita State, where she learned that Music Theater of Wichita had a reputation that reached well beyond Kansas. Three summers in the MT Wichita resident ensemble gave her a tight group of friends and a resume that turned heads when she moved to New York. She auditioned 13 times for Hairspray over the course of a year, got called back repeatedly, made it to the final rounds for the tour, the London company, and the Broadway cover track, and still never got the job. The feedback, passed along through a connection Wayne Bryan made at Music Theater of Wichita: she looked mean when she sang.

About a year after relocating to the Twin Cities with her husband Patrick to build her resume at a lower cost of living, the same casting director who had turned her away for the Fairy Godmother at Disney tracked her down for the national tour of Phantom of the Opera. Patrick had been married to her for about three months. He told her she was going. A year and a half later, when her track opened up in the Broadway company at the Majestic Theatre, she made the jump. She ended up going on more as Carlotta on Broadway than she had on the entire tour, and her parents were there for her first time on for the role.

After three and a half years with Phantom, she and Patrick decided to come home to start a family. Now she teaches at El Dorado High School, where this year she took a third of the student body to state music competition, had all three of her ensembles qualify, and is currently preparing a production of Peter Pan that involves a professional flying company coming in to teach students how to actually fly each other. Her select group is also heading to Disneyland to perform in the park and work with a Disney entertainment director on a full sound engineering workshop.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 65, Samuel sits down with Alyssa McGinn, founder of Behind Closed Doors, a company built around one idea: the best opportunities in life don't happen in public. Alyssa's path to getting there is genuinely unpredictable, and this is a conversation worth listening to if you've ever tried to network at a networking event and felt like something was fundamentally broken with the whole premise.

Alyssa grew up in Texas, studied journalism at the University of Missouri because she wanted to be the next Erin Andrews on an NFL sideline, graduated with the degree, and then moved to India. For five years, she and her husband did church planting through house churches and ran an import-export business helping companies source manufacturers across cultural and communication gaps. What stayed with her from that time wasn't the business - it was how Indians approach hospitality. In India, the guest is sacred. Your whole household rearranges to make one person feel welcome. She came home to Kansas in 2020 and hasn't stopped thinking about that gap since.

Back in Wichita, Alyssa joined her mom's company, Influency, a data and analytics firm serving middle market clients that her mom started in 2006. She treated those six years like an MBA, getting reps in sales, marketing, and business development in a space she didn't naturally belong to, and learning more that way than any classroom could teach. She also couldn't stop starting things on the side. She launched Wichita Professional Advisors, a B2B networking group that now has two chapters, and an M&A community gathering that consistently pulls close to 100 people a quarter. Both were born from the same frustration: there was no room where the right people could actually find each other.

The pivot to Behind Closed Doors started with a business coach who pushed her to look at the pattern. Every spare thought she had was about gathering people. The founder's dinner she hosted. The happy hours she organized. The way she would walk into a room and start mentally placing people next to each other. The coach asked one question: do you believe the best opportunities in life come from behind closed doors? She said yes, and the name stuck. The business now serves three types of clients - creative entrepreneurs, deal makers, and people with virtual audiences who want to bring their communities into the same physical room - with a model that ranges from planning only, to planning and hosting, to a full year-long event partnership for firms running something like a multi-touch fundraise.

The second half of the episode is a live brainstorm where Alyssa helps Sam think through a Killer Growth podcast annual gathering, and it's a useful window into how she operates: one clear outcome before anything else, less is more, assigned seating as a non-negotiable, and no lazy hosting that just opens the room and hopes something good happens.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 64, Samuel sits down with Jordan Hatfield, filmmaker, creator, and Sam's actual brother-in-law. Jordan has been making movies since he was 14 years old, and this conversation is a full tour through what that actually looks like when you're not in Hollywood and you're figuring it out as you go.

Jordan started with a Sony camcorder, his younger brother Shim, and no shirts. The result was Good Ninja, Bad Ninja, an hour-and-ten-minute martial arts film he made at 15, followed by two more that got progressively longer and somehow packed the gym at Remington High School for premiere screenings. That run continued into Butler Community College, where he and Sam met during a practicum building theater sets, and Jordan kept pulling out a camera every chance he got.

After college, Jordan cleaned windows and toilets for Sam's cleaning company (Good to Be Clean), co-founded a video production company called Revelate Creative where he and Sam made a genuinely over-the-top pest control promo for Shaw's Pest Control, and eventually started Great Light Studios, a ministry-focused filmmaking platform that shifted over time into an interview series with former members of the World Mission Society Church of God, a South Korean high-control cult. Those videos have helped a lot of people get out.

The bulk of the episode covers Jordan's life as an online creator. That includes the hillbilly comedy brand Hicks and Giggles (fake teeth, a wig, dad jokes, 2 million followers across platforms, and a briefly perfect partnership with Dude Wipes), a run of AI-generated music channels generating passive income on YouTube, and his current main project: the Monumental channel, where he makes AI-animated cinematic short films pitting iconic movie characters against each other. Those videos started as "who would win" analysis pieces and evolved into 30-minute short films making people cry over Darth Vader storylines. He hit 100,000 subscribers, got his silver play button, then got demonetized overnight by YouTube's AI moderation with no warning and no clear path to appeal.

Jordan runs the Monumental channel, is one half of Hicks and Giggles, and has been making things on camera since he was 14. Most of what he's built didn't come with a clean blueprint, and this conversation doesn't pretend it did.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 63, Samuel sits down with Joel Fox - owner of Fix It Quick Computers in El Dorado and co-founder of Speed Trap Distillery. Joel is the kind of guy who has a pilot's license, tinkers with cars, does his own plumbing, and once got curious about how hard it is to make alcohol during COVID. Three years later he's running a licensed craft distillery out of a building he didn't have when he bought his still.

Joel's background is IT through and through. He grew up fixing things because if you broke the family computer, you fixed it yourself. He worked for Butler, the El Dorado school district, and eventually a private company that handed him a proprietary information agreement and told him to sign or walk. He walked. Started his own business the next day, and has been self-employed ever since.

The distillery started the same way the IT business did - just wanting to understand how something works. He and his lifelong best friend Nathan Lowery, friends since preschool, made their first small batch out of curiosity and it turned out well enough that the question shifted from "can we do this?" to "should we do this legally?" That process took about three years. They bought a custom 200-gallon still from a builder in Georgia - six month lead time, $2,000 to ship - before they had a building, a license, or any idea where it was going to go. They drove down and picked it up themselves, stayed two hours at a hotel, and saved $500. They were fermenting batches before the still even arrived.

Speed Trap's flagship is their Orange Cream Rum, which traces back to a Thanksgiving experiment Joel's sister cooked up mixing amaretto and coconut rum and orange oil extract around a table. She told him to figure out how to make it. He did. The rest of the lineup includes a Barn Burner cinnamon rum they dialed in across 14 different cinnamon varieties, an Apple Cinnamon, in-house made caramel rum, and a Sandhill Plum Rum they can only make when Kansas frost cooperates - which it hasn't the last two years running. The whole process runs on cold-fermented molasses and organic cane sugar mixed with fresh well water pulled the same day as every batch. Joel's answer to whether bacteria in well water is a concern: if it survives being cooked at 200 degrees and then turns into 180-proof alcohol, it deserves to kill you.

The distillery has a layer to it that doesn't usually come up in spirits conversations. Joel tithed 10% of the company's income to a Baptist church after opening. The church rejected the check. He asked for a biblical basis for the decision, didn't get one, and moved on. But the experience pointed toward something he and Nathan have been thinking about since - that a distillery might be one of the better places to have real conversations with people who will never walk through a church door. He calls the concept Bible, Bourbon, and Brethren. Speed Trap is in year three, still putting everything back in, still operating as a two-man operation where Nathan works third shift and then comes straight to the distillery. Joel says this is the make-it-or-break-it season. The long game is a business that can run without them doing everything themselves.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 62, Samuel sits down with Clay Hoberecht - owner of Best Body Shop and Wichita Wagyu, and one of the more unusual social media success stories in Wichita. Clay built a massive following by doing something most body shops would never do: being radically transparent about how insurance companies operate, what they push shops to hide from customers, and what you're actually entitled to when you file a claim. It cost him friendships, landed him in courtrooms, and made him one of the busiest shops in Wichita.

Clay got into the collision world the same way most people do - stumbled into it at 17, worked for free for a year, and learned everything nobody else wanted to do. He worked his way through hot rod builds and eventually opened Best Body Shop out of a two-car garage while still working full time at another shop. The real turning point wasn't the opening - it was getting fired, which pushed him to go all-in, quit cigarettes, stop breeding dogs, and start reading.

The social media piece came from Grant Cardone and from a full-time hire nobody thought made sense: a dedicated content guy named Chris Williams, brought on 11 years ago when a Wichita body shop having a social media team was genuinely considered insane. Clay and Chris studied the data obsessively, figured out what the platform wanted, went live in the paint booth, and discovered something important - controversy drives followers. The more they exposed about how the insurance claims process actually works, the more the industry hated them, and the more customers showed up.

The hate wasn't accidental. A customer once asked Clay a simple question - "Do you work for me or the insurance?" - and it changed how he thought about the whole business. He went from operating the standard way to refusing insurance contracts entirely, never taking referrals, and putting everything on video. He's been sued multiple times. The DA got involved. He's had depositions where insurance companies showed his YouTube videos in court. He's also never been slow.

Wichita Wagyu started the same way the body shop did - with obsession. A steak from a local farm showed up as a Boss's Day gift, and Clay spent the next year eating lunch with the farmer every Thursday, interviewing 100 farms, buying commercial freezers for his garage until his HOA told him to stop, and eventually opening two retail locations. The connection between collision repair and premium beef is closer than it sounds: big players commoditize quality, farmers and body shops get squeezed, and the consumer ends up with a product that doesn't match what they paid for. Clay's answer in both worlds is the same - work directly with the source, tell people what they're actually getting, and don't apologize for it.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 61, Samuel sits down with Tim Hillebrand — president of Don's Appliance in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and someone Sam calls a genuine mentor from his years running Charlie's Appliance in Kansas. This one has a different feel than most episodes: it's two guys who've been in the same industry at very different scales, catching up on what the business actually looks like when you build it to $100 million and beyond.

Tim started at Don's in 1988, right out of college, loading up at the bottom while learning from his father who founded the company in 1971. When his dad wouldn't expand, Tim and his brothers went and built Hillman Appliance from scratch about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, grew it into a real business, and eventually merged it back with Don's in 2010. From there, Don's went from 4 stores to 12 locations across Pittsburgh, Morgantown, and Erie. In September 2023, they sold to Kodiak Building Products. Tim stayed on as president, and after a PE split and restructure, Don's is now a standalone business inside a 5-company appliance group with more acquisitions on the horizon.

The operations conversation alone is worth the listen. Don's runs 25 service trucks and 33 to 35 delivery trucks every single day, hitting somewhere between 400 and 500 homes. Tim talks through the logistics of running a single distribution hub out of Pittsburgh, how next-day delivery actually works at that scale, and where a second hub becomes necessary as they look to expand into Ohio. He gets into the technology stack too: PackageAI for delivery tracking and crew efficiency, AI-assisted pre-diagnosis tools that pull from their service history to send techs out with the right parts the first time, and how remote service specialists in New England and Illinois review transcripts of calls to flag what part is probably failing before the truck ever rolls.

Sam and Tim also dig into the independent appliance industry itself: what BrandSource actually is and why $6 billion in buying power matters against Home Depot and Lowe's, why appliance service is a money loser that everyone has to run anyway, what the Midea-Electrolux joint venture might mean for a manufacturing landscape that's already consolidated down to 4 or 5 players, and what Tim would tell someone thinking about getting into the business today. His answer on starting capital ($100k, plus a line of credit, plus a seller willing to hold the paper) is more specific and useful than most advice you'll hear.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 60, Samuel sits down with Sam Foreman — founder and CEO of Foreman Law, an attorney focused on mergers and acquisitions based in Wichita. Sam's story is an honest one: a career built through hard work and ambition that eventually ran him straight into the ground, and the long road back to a version of work that actually means something to him.

Sam grew up homeschooled in Topeka, studied accounting at Washburn, and went to law school while working full time. He landed in Wichita at a firm where he met his wife, made partner at a second firm after his practice took off, and then left to start Foreman Law in 2019 — first office above Wasabi on Douglas Avenue downtown. The firm started with big aspirations: a lean, transparent model built for young attorneys with growing practices who didn't want the traditional grind. Then they signed a multi-year lease on a beautiful space with river views one week before COVID lockdown. The attorneys they were counting on to join never came.

What followed was a stretch that Sam doesn't sugarcoat. The startup-focused law model didn't survive contact with reality — too much complexity, too little budget, too high a failure rate in the client pool. The overhead decisions compounded. His health took a hit. He kept working harder to work his way out of it, which made everything worse. The moment that finally broke through was his wife sitting across from him at the kitchen table and telling him she didn't recognize the person she married. He got into therapy, worked it hard, and came out the other side — not just healthier, but genuinely humbled in a way that changed how he sees his business and himself.

The pivot to M&A wasn't just a market correction. It clicked for Sam when he realized what actually happens when a family business sells well: you can change a family story for generations. That purpose, specific and real, is what drives the firm now. Foreman Law has grown while the headcount has shrunk — a weird ego conflict he's made his peace with — built on a lean, transparent compensation model that ditches the traditional pyramid and creates predictability for everyone involved. Sam also gets into AI, with a clear-eyed take: it's a force multiplier on value creation, not a displacement machine, and the people who win with it will be the ones who never lose sight of what their clients are actually paying for.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 59, Samuel sits down with Trevor Crotts - founder of Buddy Rest and American Pet Works, and someone who spent years figuring out that building a product and building a product business are two very different things.

Trevor's story starts in mattress retail, where he spent years training salespeople and getting genuinely frustrated with how the industry talked about sleep. That frustration eventually pointed him toward an idea: take the science of sleep and cross it over into pets. In 2012, he launched Buddy Rest with a foam dog bed designed around pressure relief and joint support - the kind of thing that existed for humans but had no real equivalent in the pet space. Their first trade show brought Target, Petco, and Walmart into the booth within the first 20 minutes. It felt like a rocket launch. Then, about three years in, every major mattress brand came out with a dog bed, and Buddy Rest got squeezed - not because the product was bad, but because the margin profile wasn't built to survive competition.

That lesson is the spine of everything Trevor talks about in this episode. He spent the next several years building out a multi-brand portfolio - buying PetEnvy, building PupIQ and Tuff Pup, acquiring SitStay.com - and learning the hard way that splitting your attention kills escape velocity. He also thought vertical integration was the holy grail, and running his own manufacturing for years taught him that owning everything makes you heavy and limits how fast you can grow. Both lessons track back to the same thing: getting the fundamentals right before you try to scale anything.

Today, American Pet Works works with early-stage pet founders to help them build and source products the right way. The framework is straightforward - margin first (Trevor recommends a minimum 65-point margin), design for manufacturing, a certified factory network across Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and China, and a product attribute checklist he calls championship DNA. He's honest about overseas manufacturing in a way that might surprise people who've heard him champion American-made: for most early-stage founders, going offshore is simply the smarter move. Lower MOQs, better price per unit, and less inventory risk outweigh the Made in USA story for most products at most stages.

American Pet Works also produces pet hospitality kits for hotel chains including Marriott, Omni, and Hilton, as the share of pet-friendly hotels has jumped from around 30% to 75% in the last decade.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 58, Samuel sits down with Sandy Mehra - CEO of Telgoo5, a full-stack telecom software platform that's been powering mobile operators and MVNOs for over 20 years. Sandy runs a company of nearly 500 people from Bryant Park and has stayed largely out of the spotlight. This conversation is a good introduction to why that's about to change.

The origin story is a good one. Sandy's first company was a call center - one of the first VoIP call centers in the country. Cisco sold them a giant rack of hardware, and then had no CRM to go with it. So they built one overnight, integrating telephony directly into it. A customer noticed and asked if they could extend it for their MVNO launch. That was the first version of Telgoo5. Twenty years later, the platform handles everything from billing and customer apps to shipping logistics, inventory, campaigns, and call center tooling. The pitch to any MVNO is simple: just sell. We'll handle the rest.

Sam walks Sandy through the telecom stack for a general audience - carriers at the top (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile), aggregators in the middle, and MVNOs carving out niches the big carriers either can't or won't serve. Think Consumer Cellular selling to an aging population that mostly just wanted someone to talk to when they called in. Sandy also breaks down the B2B side of Telgoo5, where large enterprises need multi-carrier deployments because one carrier covers this building and another covers the next. The platform routes activations by AI, handles carrier swaps automatically, and manages contracts that split activations across carriers by percentage.

The AI conversation goes somewhere unexpected. Sandy's team recently launched an AI revenue monetization engine - taking the same technology Telgoo5 has used for decades to ingest and rate millions of call duration records, and applying it to count and bill AI tokens. They spotted an AI company whose invoice had 13 months on a 12-month contract, flagged it, and made their pitch on the spot. The bet is that AI companies have the same billing complexity problem that telecom solved 20 years ago, and Telgoo5 already built the infrastructure.

Sandy was born in India, educated there, moved to Seattle, then New York. He doesn't spend much time on the immigrant angle - his framing is that the computer never cared where he came from, and neither did his clients. He also talks about going through Harvard's leadership program, expecting to be in over his head, and walking out having outperformed most of the room. His takeaway for the entrepreneurs listening: you don't have to be the smartest. Outwork the smartest. Have faith. Treat people right. Life will find its way.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 57, Samuel sits down with Jon Bachura - self-described entrepreneurologist, peer group facilitator, and the newest member of the Acumen team in Wichita. Jon has spent the better part of 20 years studying entrepreneurs up close, and this conversation is about what he's actually learned from all that watching.

Jon's path is not a straight line. He started as a music major who wanted to spend his life singing songs with Catholic elementary schoolers - until an economics class quietly killed the dream. He spent a decade with Youth Entrepreneurs, helped build their training infrastructure as they went national, and eventually landed at the Catholic University of America where he spent four years helping develop a vocational entrepreneurship curriculum for Catholic high schools. The through-line across all of it was peer-based learning: the idea that the most valuable education happens when people who are actually doing the thing sit in a room and tell each other the truth.

That conviction brought him to a business advising firm built on the idea that families are living systems - anxiety networks that move resources the way mycelium moves nutrients through soil. Jon spent over a year running peer groups for first-generation entrepreneurial founders before moving to Acumen, where the model is simpler: get the right people in the room, create enough safety for honesty, and then let them stab each other in the front. He describes Acumen as a soil company. Not a consulting firm. Not a coaching practice. A company that builds the habitat where entrepreneurial growth becomes possible.

The faith thread runs through all of it. Jon is Catholic, and his whole thing is integration - the idea that the version of you at work and the version of you at church and the version of you at the dinner table are the same person. He talks about this not in abstract terms but through the actual mechanics of the peer group itself, including a 5-step process Acumen uses to walk someone through a hard problem without, as Jon puts it, rolling out the solutions mat.

There's also a stretch near the end where Samuel reflects on where he is personally - a hard few years, a real-time recalibration, wanting to learn how to ask for help. Jon doesn't rush past it. He names it for what it is: the mid-journey. Then they talk about mycelium, quantum physics, and whether time actually exists. Normal business podcast stuff.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com