In Episode 72, Samuel sits down with Jacob Schlittenhardt - co-founder and CEO of Planetary Talent, a hiring accelerator built on the idea that the resume is a fundamentally broken tool and that finding the right person for a job is, at its core, a storytelling problem. Jacob brings a background in branding and design, a failed blockchain gaming startup, and a deeply personal experience on both sides of a brutal job market to a conversation about what it would take to actually fix hiring.

Jacob's path is anything but straight. He nearly missed his entrepreneurship scholarship at Wichita State because his rejection letter kept going to spam - and his persistence in continuing to email the department anyway is what got him back in the running and eventually won him the funding. He'd originally planned to study advertising, but ended up double majoring, and somewhere in the process of helping scrappy startup founders with logos, pitch decks, and websites, he started liking their side of the table more than his own. That itch eventually pulled him into co-founding Duo, a blockchain-based video game built on Cardano, which ran hard for nearly two years before collapsing. When it did, Jacob was left with no income, a new house, and over a thousand job applications that went nowhere. That experience - being ghosted, dehumanized, reduced to an AI-generated resume in a pile of 800 identical ones - is what planted the seed for Planetary Talent.

The epiphany came at Seattle Tech Startup Week, sitting in the front row of an HR and AI panel and realizing that nobody in the room was actually rethinking the system. They were all just bolting AI onto existing infrastructure - AI reads the AI-written resume, AI scores the AI-optimized job description. Jacob walked out thinking about first principles: what does it actually mean to find the right person for a job, and does it require a resume at all? Planetary Talent's answer is no. Their technology builds digital replicas - data models of founders, companies, and candidates - that can interface with each other to assess fit at scale. Instead of posting a job and sorting resumes, they build an ideal candidate profile and run targeted digital ads to find people who are actually interested. The questions they ask candidates are the ones ChatGPT can't answer - what are you most proud of, what team did you actually love working with, and why. Those answers, Jacob argues, are the real signal.

The business model is pay-per-match, with an option to also employ the person if the company wants to skip the paperwork. The long game is bigger - the company has a business plan that runs to 2125, inspired in part by Blue Origin's 100-year plan, built around the idea that if humans ever collaborate across planets, they'll need infrastructure to find and work with each other that has nothing to do with an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. Right now, Jacob and his team are focused on growth: the platform works, the technology is finding real matches, and the next problem is finding more founders who are ready to hire.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 71, Samuel sits down with Emma Schlittenhardt — luxury interior designer, architecture degree holder, and founder of Hardt Studio Interior Design in Wichita. She launched her company during COVID at 21 with a handful of moonlighting clients and a husband studying entrepreneurship. Four years later, she runs a two-designer firm out of the Commerce Club, has designed everything from high-end residential remodels to commercial spaces, and is actively expanding her footprint beyond Wichita. This one's worth a listen if you've ever wondered what it actually takes to go out on your own before you're "ready."

Emma's path into design started the way a lot of the best ones do — sideways. At 17, she walked into an architecture firm for an informational conversation and walked out with a job offer. She didn't ask for it. She was just genuinely curious. That accidental start led to years of drafting work, moonlighting on interior design projects for the architect's clients, and a growing realization that she was essentially running a side business without calling it one. When COVID hit and she got sent home, she and Jacob ran the numbers. Nine months later, she left her 9-to-5 for good. In her first full year, she made in three months what she'd have made in a year at her prior job.

What sets Emma apart in a crowded market is the architecture background she brings into interior design work. She can read a space the way most designers can't — site verifying, checking structural reality against aesthetic vision, and speaking contractor fluently. That last part matters more than people realize. A lot of the tension between designers and GCs comes down to credibility, and Emma's technical knowledge earns her respect on job sites in a way that saves entire projects. Her design philosophy is equally grounded: if it's not both functional and beautiful five years from now, it wasn't good design. She doesn't care about getting the perfect photo and leaving. She cares about whether the kitchen still works for you when your life looks different than it did at install.

She also tried retail. Opened a showroom at The Waterfront in 2023 with a contractor partner, stocked it with the materials she was already procuring for clients, learned a lot about staffing and margins she hadn't expected, bought out her partner when he hit financial trouble, ran it solo for a year, and then shut it down when she realized it was pulling her attention away from the thing that was actually thriving. No drama, no regret. Just a clear-eyed decision that it wasn't the right use of her time. That kind of self-awareness is rare at 27.

Hardt Studio is now on expansion mode. Emma has her eye on a second location — Kansas City or Oklahoma City — within the next seven years, a growing base of referral partners in both the contractor and direct-client world, and a social media presence that's already turning multi-year followers into paying clients. The work is good, the reputation is building, and the trajectory is exactly what you'd expect from someone who landed her first job without even trying.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 70, Samuel sits down with J.D. Zluticky — founder of Essential IT Services in Wichita — for a conversation that starts with Navy machinist mates and ends up somewhere most IT conversations never reach: what it actually means to run technology like a business decision, not a checklist.

J.D.'s path into IT wasn't a straight line. After nearly 13 years in the Navy, he came back to Wichita with an international business degree, a plan to sell doilies imported from overseas, and a side hustle fixing computers out of a black satchel he used to call The PC Doctor. The side hustle won. He incorporated Essential IT in 1999, and has spent the 25 years since working with small and mid-size businesses across Wichita, helping them figure out what their technology should actually be doing for them.

The conversation digs into cybersecurity in a way that's more useful than most. J.D. is honest about the three-strike problem with selling security: it's complicated, it's hard to implement, and it's expensive. So his firm leads with business continuity instead - how long can you actually be down, and do you have a tested plan for when it happens? He walks through a real-time assessment of Sam's book business, Reliant, poking at access policies, platform credentials, and the fact that a Facebook account got hijacked without anyone knowing how. It's a good illustration of how quickly gaps show up when someone asks the right questions.

The back half of the episode turns to AI, and J.D. takes a long view on it. He's not spooked. He compares it to the internet - a shift that took decades to integrate - except AI is compressing that timeline into months. His take: AI won't take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI to do your job probably will. He points to his EITS method - inform, let the business owner decide, then cheerfully implement their choice - as the philosophy that holds through any technology shift. The goal was never to be the smartest person in the room. It was to make sure business owners had what they needed to make good calls.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 69, Samuel sits down with Keith Coast — comedy magician, musician, book reseller, and one-man entertainment circuit who has performed in 18 countries and 48 states. Keith rolled into El Dorado straight from a library show in Greensburg, Kansas (yes, that Greensburg), and somehow ended up doing balloon art and book auctions on Whatnot until midnight. This one's a ride.

Keith's path into magic started at 20 years old at a tiny boardwalk kiosk in Kemah, Texas, where a guy doing the little red ball trick told him, "The secret's told when this trick is sold." He bought a book, learned the tricks on a cruise, became the magic guy in every room he entered, and never really stopped. What followed was 25 years of building an act that mixes comedy, prop magic, and music in a way that works for a 9-year-old who drives a Kubota tractor and also for the adults in the back who get all the jokes the kids miss.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: how Keith built his signature bit — getting inside a giant balloon and doing the Chicken Dance — after a close call fire eating that singed the back of his neck while his 8-months-pregnant wife watched from the back of the crowd; his 5 days in Manhattan taping Showtime at the Apollo with Steve Harvey, including getting booed offstage and bouncing out of the theater in a balloon; and how that same week ended with him singing Gangsta's Paradise at a karaoke bar with a George Michael tribute artist and a Whitney Houston impersonator.

Keith also talks about his band, The Rockin' Roly Polys — a kids rock band he started with his 19-year-old son that's on Spotify and sounds a lot better than kids music has any right to sound. The dream is to open for The Wiggles. He's not joking.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 68, Samuel sits down with Ben Hutton - CEO of Hutton, a Wichita-based construction and development firm that has grown from a small general contracting shop into a full-spectrum organization with five service lines, 400 employees, and offices across the Plains states. Ben is second-generation, took over as president in 2010, and has spent the last 16 years rebuilding the business around a philosophy that starts with taking care of people first and trusting everything else follows.

Ben grew up in the business, starting at 11 years old rebuilding a backyard fence (and quickly discovering the arbitrage opportunity in paying his younger brother $2/hour while collecting $8 a panel). After studying construction science at K-State and spending a few years in Colorado Springs, he came back to Wichita in 2006 and worked his way from assistant superintendent to president inside four years. But taking over from his father wasn't clean. He spent years trying to do the job the way his dad had done it - and nearly burned out doing it. The turn came when he stopped trying to fill his father's shoes and started redesigning the role around his own strengths, eventually promoting someone else to president so he could focus on what he was actually good at.

The conversation covers a lot of ground on Hutton's business model - specifically the move into design-build, which now accounts for a growing share of their volume and a team of 35 to 40 designers, architects, and coordinators. Ben breaks down why design-build is the fastest-growing delivery method in commercial construction: one point of contact, early price certainty, overlapping design and construction phases, and a guaranteed maximum price that keeps the client protected. Hutton has also added real estate development, facility services, energy services, and Sevenfold - a strategy consulting arm Ben describes as part passion project, part platform for his views on what actually makes organizations succeed.

Ben doesn't dodge the harder topics either. He talks about the labor shortage in construction - an industry that loses more workers to retirement than it gains every week, at every level - and why AI's biggest role in his world isn't replacing workers, it's filling gaps that people can't fill fast enough. He goes long on Kansas's economic development challenges, the inferiority complex holding communities back, and why he thinks the state is fighting over the wrong things. And there's a stretch on art - murals at Hutton's headquarters, a sculpture by Kevin Box, and a reproduction of John Trumbull's painting of Washington resigning his commission - that says more about how Ben thinks about leadership than most business books do.

Ben Hutton has built something that genuinely reflects what he believes. Hutton Corporation is growing, its people are staying, and its reputation in Wichita is the kind you can't manufacture. This one's worth your time.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 67, Samuel sits down with Ariel Westphal - founder of Blow Tissues, a Wichita-based brand that set out to do something the tissue industry hasn't bothered with since the 1930s: make a tissue worth actually using. This one's a founder origin story at its most honest, covering everything from a bad hotel tissue experience to a full customs nightmare during a government shutdown.

Ariel's path to entrepreneurship ran through fashion, finance, and a lot of frustration. She started at Pink Saloon at 15, followed that into apparel marketing at K-State, and eventually landed at a Wichita finance company where she spent nine years watching the business scale from 6 million to 60 million in annual revenue. Good skills, wrong industry. When she left in September 2025, she wasn't sure what came next - she seriously considered moving to Sonoma wine country before an ADHD deep dive into tissue history sent her in a completely different direction.

The origin moment is specific: she was sick, made a special trip to the store for the good tissues, brought home a box covered in flamingos and toucans, and the tissues were just as bad as the ones she was already using. That sent her down a rabbit hole into what tissues are actually made of, who invented the cardboard box (the 1930s, for the record), and why no one had bothered to change any of it since. Blow Tissues is the answer to that question. Five-ply bamboo, lotion-infused to keep them soft, packaged in a refillable acrylic box that doesn't require a separate cover because it already looks good on a shelf. The differentiator she kept hearing from customers had nothing to do with the box - it was that these are the softest tissues anyone had ever used.

Getting the product to market was its own story. Her first container shipped from China directly into a government shutdown, got held by customs, passed through every level of inspection up to and including a full unload where unpaid inspectors went through every single box. She launched with nothing in hand, fulfilled pre-sales on faith, and got her 948 units the week of Thanksgiving - unloaded by hand with her husband, her sister, and a high school kid, racing a 5 p.m. rainstorm.

Ariel knows exactly who she's building for and exactly who she's not competing with. The big tissue companies are selling to hospitals and schools at scale. She's selling to the person who already has a tissue box cover and finally wants a reason to throw it away.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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