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

In Episode 56, Samuel sits down with Chris Sund - president and CEO of United Med and GQR Healthcare, keynote speaker, Maxwell-certified coach, and founder of Amplify Speakers bureau. Chris took a risk on a brand-new healthcare staffing company, helped grow it from a small team and roughly $5 million in revenue to over $60 million in three years, earned the number 3 spot on the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies in the Midwest, and then watched the company get acquired by GQR Healthcare. This conversation goes deep on what it actually took to get there, what COVID did to the entire staffing industry, and how a company built around human experience decided to build an AI product to go with it.
The growth story looks clean from the outside. Inside, it was a cash flow nightmare. United Med was cutting payroll for employees 60 to 90 days before reimbursement came in from hospitals, meaning the faster they grew, the more financial pressure the ownership group absorbed behind the scenes. Chris talks through what that actually looked like - managing ownership responsibilities, keeping the books together at scale, and building a culture where your staff spends every day inside someone else's organization. The answer was high-touch over high-volume: recruiters as relationship managers, employees supported from credentialing through their last day on assignment, with the goal that if someone never wanted to leave, that counted as a win.
COVID sent the industry vertical and then sent it back down hard. Hospitals that had never used contract labor suddenly couldn't function without it. Rates doubled in some markets as facilities competed for nurses and allied staff. Workers quit mid-contract to chase better money. When the market corrected, it corrected fast - double-digit revenue drops in a quarter for companies holding leases and payroll built for the spike. Chris's response was to build a product designed to prevent the problem: Nebula, an AI talent platform with over 200 million profiles that actively headhunts, emails, and texts candidates on behalf of employers. His framing is direct - contract labor is like going to the ER. You should only be there when you have to be. Nebula is the preventative care.
On the speaking side, Chris keynotes on leadership, culture, and what he calls the human side of healthcare - the idea that hospital reviews almost never talk about the equipment. They talk about the person who made eye contact in the hallway or the staff member who knew a family member's name. Clinical care is the baseline. The human side is what people remember. He holds Maxwell certifications in both coaching and speaking, runs Amplify Speakers to connect event planners with professional talent, and launched the Amplify Speakers podcast earlier this year to showcase the people behind the bureau. His advice for anyone who wants to speak professionally is simple: do free to fee, apply constantly, and ask every room to tell you what to work on.
Chris Sund runs United Med and GQR Healthcare, leads the Amplify Speakers bureau, and keynotes on leadership and the patient experience for healthcare organizations and corporate audiences.
Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 55, Samuel sits down with Fayola Oyatayo - Wichita-based emcee, media entrepreneur, and the closest thing this city has to a hometown host. Known to most as Fay, he's the guy running energy at WSU basketball games, KU's College GameDay, corporate galas, and wedding receptions. The path to that mic was anything but direct.
Fay grew up with a father who did something unusual - instead of backyard baseball or teaching him to ride a motorcycle, he took him to Nordstrom and taught him how to iron his pants and tie a tie. That early investment in being presentable became a genuine belief that the way you show up opens doors you didn't even know existed. His name, Fayola, literally means "God has put joy in your prosperity," and he returns to that sequence throughout the conversation. Joy comes first, not the money, not the outcome. He tried it the other way as a licensed financial advisor running on 100% commission, grinding through Series 6 and 63 exams with dreams of lobbying in DC. It drained him. He walked away after two years.
What came next started small - DJing friends' weddings at Sterling College, a couple hundred dollars to host a kids soccer clinic, a podcast interviewing Wichita locals doing interesting things. Each gig stacked onto the next. By 2022, he was standing in front of 50,000 fans at Memorial Stadium when College GameDay came to town for KU vs. TCU - one of the first sold-out KU football games in over a decade. He also flew to Rome to host a tech and AI conference, bringing his wife, his team, and the people who believed in him when he was still doing events for nothing. His measure of a successful gig isn't the paycheck. It's whether multiple people come up afterward and say thank you for hosting - because he knows that means they actually understood the work it took.
Behind the mic, Fay runs Fay Solutions, a media production agency handling video, social, and influencer work for brands. He also operates a podcast studio in Wichita - rental sets, three cameras, edited and delivered in 48 hours for $150 to $200. Senators, mayors, and business owners have walked through. He describes himself as a tech nerd who quietly researches gear and AI while building a brand that keeps him out of every frame but in the middle of everything.
Fayola Oyatayo is a media entrepreneur and emcee building toward the biggest stages in the world. The College GameDay gig at KU is still the favorite - but he's certain it'll be beaten. He runs Fay Solutions, hosts events across the country, and operates a podcast studio out of Wichita where you show up, pick a set, and leave with a fully produced episode.
Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 54, Samuel sits down with Chase Locke — El Dorado native, former CEO of One Country, and the kind of guy who has somehow managed to weave together radio, nonprofits, local government, Nashville, and a Reba McEntire Corvette campaign into one career that makes no sense until it does. This is a long one, and it earns it.
Chase grew up on a ranch in Butler County, credits a Garth Brooks concert at age 8 or 9 with giving him his first real taste of what a crowd in a room can feel like, and stumbled into his first industry experience at 17 when a community volunteer committee handed him $20,000 and told him to book talent. He reached out to William Morris. They didn't know he was a teenager. He still has the contract. That early push led to an internship at Clear Channel's KZSN in Wichita, which led to a spot on the morning show - earned by taking the mic at a CMA Awards broadcast in Nashville when a co-host was making things difficult. A month later, he had the job.
From there, Chase became music director, which put him at the table with record labels, artists, and management teams earlier than most people get close to that world. That's where a lot of the relationships started - including a memorable day when he invited a photographer friend named Hailey to shoot a Taylor Swift visit to the station, not telling her who was coming. Taylor ended up asking to get a photo with Hailey. Scott Borchetta took the picture. Chase later watched Hailey hold up that photo 20 feet from Taylor Swift at the Eras Tour from row 6 on the floor.
After iHeart, Chase went to work for Numana, the nonprofit meal-packaging organization, where he leveraged his music industry relationships to raise $250,000, pull in artists and labels as sponsors, and break a Guinness World Record for meals packaged in a single event - shipping everything to an orphanage in Haiti. He also ran for county commission in his early 20s, served on the SBA Foundation board at Anthony Memorial, and eventually made the move to Nashville with a small LLC called Buck, helping people like Bobby Bones co-host Amy Brown grow her brand and launch a podcast network.
The One Country chapter is where it gets really interesting. What started as a country music blog spun out of Country Outfitter - a Western wear e-commerce site that later sold to Boot Barn - became a full media company with an app, a membership product, a radio station, podcast content with artists, and an elaborate sweepstakes operation. Chase eventually became CEO, and what followed was a series of creative campaigns that show how he actually thinks: a Walker Hayes Suburban giveaway with a charitable twist, a custom Reba-red Corvette packed with her product line, and a Jefferson White cold outreach through Cameo that somehow became a TV commercial. He left One Country last June over disagreements about direction - the company was moving toward gaming, and that wasn't where he wanted to put his energy. He's back to working with artists and brands directly, which sounds like where he does his best work anyway.
Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 53, Samuel sits down with Melissa Hall — CEO of Susan B. Allen Memorial Hospital in El Dorado and one of those rare executives who actually did every job on the way up. She started volunteering at a hospital at 14, was trained as a CNA by her own grandmother, served breakfast to assisted living residents before high school, and has spent 25-plus years figuring out how healthcare actually works from the inside out. This conversation is part origin story, part operational deep-dive, and part community reckoning.
Melissa grew up in Burlington, Kansas, in a farming family where dinner happened in the field and you didn't complain about the work. Her grandmother, who had paid off her husband's hospital bills by becoming a CNA on the job in an era before formal training existed, was probably the single biggest influence on who Melissa turned out to be. When her sister's premature son spent 14 weeks in the NICU, Melissa watched her sister talk more about the nurses than the fear and the stress, and that was enough to flip everything - she scrapped her plans for ag business and spent her senior year of high school finding the right nursing program. She eventually landed in labor and delivery at Stormont Vail, circled back to Burlington when family made the commute impractical, and kept picking up new skills - surgery, ER, IT - until she understood how every part of a hospital actually functions. That range is what eventually put her in the CEO chair at Susan B. Allen.
When Melissa arrived as COO, the hospital was financially upside down and had a reputation problem in the ER. Wait times were over 2 hours. Patients were checking in and leaving before being seen. She brought in a new provider group, worked on the relationship between ER providers and hospitalists, and started pushing on every metric. Average wait time to be seen is now under 30 minutes. Patients leaving without being seen dropped by nearly 75%. The quality scores submitted to CMS improved across the board. Most of that progress happened in roughly 2 years.
Then came July 2025, which the hospital staff now refer to simply as "the event." A ransomware attack at 3:00 AM took down the entire server infrastructure. For 45 days, the hospital couldn't generate a single bill. Staff worked on paper. Melissa drove to Best Buy and bought 40 laptops so departments could function while their own IT team audited the damage, wiped everything, and rebuilt the infrastructure from a replicated server rack in Iowa. The financial hit landed on a hospital that already didn't have deep reserves. That's the context behind the 1% sales tax measure heading to the August ballot - and Melissa explains plainly what a no vote means: not closure in September, but a set of decisions that prioritizes survival over the future.
Susan B. Allen is an independent nonprofit - no parent health system, no shareholders, no mothership. It's a board, a team, and a community. The conversation gets into what that actually means operationally: how decisions get made at the table instead of four levels up, why nurses at smaller hospitals cover each other's shifts so someone can make it to a Valentine's party, and why 31% of nursing staff being contract workers is a problem that nobody has a clean answer to. Melissa is clear-eyed about all of it, and she doesn't pretend any of it is simple.
Learn more at https://killergrowth.com