Killer Growth

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

In Episode 52, Samuel sits down with David May - CEO of Trinity Precision and co-founder of Akeratos, a robotics automation consulting company - for a conversation covering nearly 30 years of aerospace manufacturing, a COVID-era pivot that spawned a second business, and the kind of company culture that still feels unusual: faith-based, family-first, and genuinely protective of its people.

David's career started at the bottom of the aerospace supply chain - pushing parts at Cessna, coordinating supplier deliveries, and learning fast how to tell when someone was being straight with him and when they weren't. From there he moved into commodity teams that toured over 200 suppliers across North America, from Honeywell and Rockwell Collins down to a guy making widgets out of his garage in Park City, Kansas. Those years gave him a ground-level view of how businesses actually start and grow, and planted the idea that he wanted to run something himself.

After years at Textron and a stint with a PE-backed company, David spent a year putting together an M&A deal, closed on Trinity Precision, and started building. The company now sits at 107 employees, up from 32. During COVID, when commercial aerospace lost over 50% of its revenue overnight, Trinity kept its workforce as intact as possible - giving raises and bonuses through the downturn and absorbing every healthcare cost increase since 2014 so employees are still paying 2014 premiums. Their 12-month turnover rate is under 10%, compared to roughly 30% across the industry.

The COVID era also forced them into deep work on automation, and what they built internally became the foundation for Akeratos - an automation consulting and integration business working across industries from food manufacturing to pressure valves to wire production. Where most automation companies lead with hardware, Akeratos works backwards from the customer's process first. David talks through the difference between traditional high-volume single-part automation and what they built at Trinity: a high-mix, low-volume system where dozens of different parts run through the same automated process because the process itself is what's designed, not just the part.

The conversation also covers what David calls the 3 Ps - people, process, and principle - and what it actually looks like to run a company on Christian principles without making it uncomfortable. Seven kids, a GM he finally trusted enough to step back from day-to-day operations, and a hard-won transition from founder-operator to what he calls the "chief stay out of the way officer" round out the conversation.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 51, Samuel and Tyler sit down to talk about something they've been practicing, not just preaching - the content engine. It's a topic episode, no external guest, just two people 6 months into building something and reporting back on what they've actually learned.

The conversation starts with first principles. A content engine isn't a content calendar or a photo shoot every few months. It's a system - a repeatable process that keeps producing original material and feeds everything downstream: social posts, ads, A/B tests, SEO, the website, and eventually automations. Sam and Tyler's argument is that without a content engine in place, most of the other marketing work is guesswork. You're guessing at hooks, guessing at what resonates, guessing at what the business actually stands for. The engine solves that.

They walk through what a content engine can look like depending on the business: before-and-after photo systems for contractors, client-generated content in exchange for a simple incentive, weekly vlogs, how-to videos, a podcast, a newsletter. The specific format matters less than finding one you won't quit. If you're naturally funny, lean into humor. If you like teaching, build how-to content. The content you make when you're motivated is better than the content you make out of obligation, and consistency is the whole game.

The episode covers what surprised them about their own podcast 6 months in. Networking was the biggest one - three new clients earlier than expected, including a meeting that came in directly because someone heard the podcast discussed in a group and went to check it out. They also talk through the Opus Clips workflow they landed on for turning long-form recordings into shorts, the RODECaster Video auto-switching setup that removes the need for heavy post-production, and the Friday morning block they've protected like a client commitment.

The back half is straight advice for anyone who hasn't started yet: pick a format, block the time, find a partner or accountability structure, and go. You don't need polish on day one. You need reps. The quality follows the consistency.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 50, Samuel sits down with Tylen Hall - the Hunter's Helper - for a second try at a conversation that was lost to a technical issue the first time around. Tylen is a hunting consultant based in Kansas who grew up around outfitting, spent years as a journeyman pipe fitter in refineries, lived half the year in a remote fishing village in Mexico, and eventually landed in full-time consulting after a serious injury in 2021 ended his career in the trades.

The episode covers a lot of Tylen's background - his father was an outfitter, and Tylen grew up hunting but never had the money for private land leases in his 20s. He went the pipe fitter route, working new construction and traveling for outages while coming home to hunt in the off-season. That changed when a fall at a refinery in 2021 tore his bicep off the bone and damaged his vertebrae. He couldn't go back. So he went all-in on the hunting industry he'd been treating as supplemental income his whole career.

Before the injury, there were years spent living in Yalapa, a fishing village on the coast of Mexico accessible only by boat. Tylen co-owned a boat and ran fishing and excursion tours for American and Canadian tourists. He describes the place - mountains with palm trees, a cove 800 feet deep, two rivers meeting and draining into the ocean - as somewhere that felt like home from the first time he saw it. His daughter picked up Spanish so well that locals say she speaks it better than they do.

The conversation also surfaces one of the stranger chapters of his life. In 1997, Tylen was the center on an 8-man football team that ran a trick play - he handed the ball to the quarterback under the pretense of a ball mix-up, the quarterback walked to the sideline and then took off running. The play ended up on ESPN's top 10, generated magazine coverage from across Kansas, and eventually got them a limo ride in New York for an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. Marv Albert was in the green room. Paul Shaffer was smaller than expected.

The back half of the episode gets into foraging. Tylen has been into native plants and mushrooms since his mother taught him as a kid, and he talks through the difference between how morels, oyster mushrooms, and lion's mane work - not just how to find them, but what they're actually doing underground. There's a stretch on mycelium and how fungi respond to stress that gets genuinely interesting, along with some practical notes on why drought years can produce better morel seasons than wet ones.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 49, Samuel sits down with Ted Kriwiel — childhood friend, founder of 8 Oaks, and the person behind Honeystack.agency, a software consulting company built specifically to help nonprofits build modern tech stacks. Ted is one of those rare people who found his thing and built everything around it, and this conversation traces exactly how that happened.

Ted's path started with entrepreneurship studies at Wichita State, a school supply distribution company he was running out of a trailer while still in college, and an early conviction that he wasn't built for the normal path. But the deeper thread starts earlier, when Ted traveled to Ethiopia with his family during an international adoption and witnessed a mother place her children's hands into his parents' hands and walk away. That moment, and a month-long trip to Ghana at 21 where he met 8 boys brought out of child labor, led him and his wife Ellie to start 8 Oaks — a home for 8 girls living in the same conditions. They were 22. They had no business doing it. They did it anyway. Thirteen years later, those girls are finishing high school, enrolling in college, and building futures that would have been unimaginable without the intervention.

That sense of responsibility — of being given a lot and being expected to do something with it — is the engine underneath everything Ted has built professionally. He ran a data analytics company called Lion Graph, merged with Moonbase Labs where he spent four years doing software product and business development, and eventually left to go figure out what was actually true about him. What came out of that was a prolific writing practice, a newsletter for nonprofit leaders, seminars on what nonprofits get wrong about software, and ultimately Honeystack — a company that offers education, consulting, and custom software development, exclusively to nonprofits that are ready to stop letting software happen to them and start owning their tech stack. The name comes from the mutualistic relationship between the honey guide bird and the honey badger: two different species that team up to get something neither could get alone.

Ted is clear-eyed about what he's building and what he's not. It's a lifestyle business. It's not going to IPO. And he's completely at peace with that — because he found his people, found his lane, and learned that once you do, what you should do next becomes surprisingly obvious.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 48, Samuel sits down with Janelle Wilson, owner of 360 Painting in Wichita and a 32-year veteran of Koch Industries, where she leads a global IT team of 65 people across enterprise technology. Janelle brings a rare combination of corporate discipline and entrepreneurial fire — and she's channeling both into building a franchise business that's redefining what home services should look like.

Janelle's path into ownership started with a simple observation: home service companies don't answer the phone, don't follow up, and don't show up with a plan. After years of watching that from the consumer side, she decided she could do better. She and her husband Lance entered the franchising world through a broker-matched process, eventually landing on 360 Painting under the Premium Service Brands umbrella — drawn in by the systems, the support, and Janelle's own lifelong love of painting. They've since added a second franchise, Temporary Wall Systems, serving construction clients across Kansas and Arkansas.

The conversation goes deep on what actually moves the needle in a painting business: speed of estimate delivery, subcontractor vetting, high-quality paint (and why the Sherwin-Williams at Lowe's isn't the Sherwin-Williams from Sherwin-Williams), and the slow-burn payoff of SEO over lead aggregators like Angie's. Janelle breaks down the "spray and pray" model that makes platforms like Angie's a necessary evil — and why she's working to grow organic traffic so she can eventually walk away from it.

What drives all of it is a mindset Janelle describes simply: never settle. Whether she's managing a global IT team, running two franchises, or sitting in a BNI meeting quietly eyeing the leaderboard, she's always looking for the next domino to set up. She's not wired to stop — and the results show it.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

In Episode 47, Samuel sits down with Shem Hatfield, founder of Process Elevation — a leadership development coach, certified organizational leader, and someone Samuel has known since they were building theater sets and running Code Teal ops through the hallways of Butler Community College 17 years ago.

Shem spent 13 years in a residential school program for neurodiverse youth — starting as frontline staff working with kids with severe behavioral challenges, eventually building and leading the organization's entire learning and development function. That decade-plus in a high-crisis, deeply human environment is the foundation for everything he does today. A little over a year ago, he took the entrepreneurial leap and launched his own coaching and leadership development practice, now doing work he never anticipated — global manufacturing companies, clean energy firms, and senior leadership teams across industries he once thought were completely outside his lane.

The conversation goes deep fast. Shem walks through the personality assessment tools he uses — DiSC, OPQ, and Process Communication Model — and why PCM stands out: it doesn't label you as a type, it maps the types that live within you and asks what happens when you're in distress. He unpacks the difference between knowing yourself versus using a tool to analyze others, why the Enneagram can create empathy breakthroughs in personal life but gets messy in organizational settings, and the five-step framework — regulation, mindset, skill set, behavior, tool set — that underlies almost everything he does with clients.

Then Samuel becomes the client. In a live, unrehearsed coaching segment, Shem walks him through what's actually going on at KillerGrowth — the virtual team, the fear of leaving people behind while moving fast, the tension between identifying opportunities and staying present long enough to bring people along. What surfaces is real: the pattern of a high-speed filter who genuinely cares but sometimes outruns the room, and the cost of fear and anxiety masquerading as drive.

Shem closes with a concept worth sitting with: the difference between homeostasis — getting back to normal — and allostasis, the body's deeper drive to reach a new kind of stability. In a world being reshaped by AI and remote work and constant change, connection and leadership can't just be recaptured. They have to be redefined.

Shem is launching Wired Human with collaborator Kyle Harvey — a new venture built at the intersection of human skills development and the tech-driven age. Watch for it.

In Episode 46, Samuel sits down with Andy Waller, CEO of Encore Pavement — an entrepreneur Samuel counts as his second business mentor. Andy's story starts in a Wichita State entrepreneurship program, where a side job sealing a single driveway sparked what would become one of the region's most respected commercial paving companies.

Andy didn't follow a straight line. He was a college kid sleeping four hours a night, carrying nice clothes in the back seat to change into for client meetings, printing proposals from a laptop in his truck. He bought his first house three months out of high school, rented out two bedrooms and a pullout sofa just to cover his mortgage and groceries, and built SPS Paving through sheer volume of hustle. When a city project nearly broke him in 2009 — maxing a credit card to $35,000 just to make payroll — he pushed through anyway.

What separated Andy wasn't just grit. It was how he thought about every dollar, every relationship, and every opportunity. A single postcard campaign to school districts turned into consistent clients across multiple states. A keen read on real estate during the recession led to 50 or 60 rental properties, eventually sold at the peak of the COVID-era market. Even his foray into retail — buying the Brewski Barn and Anglers Bait and Tackle by the lake — came down to fundamentals: buy right, store product on deep sale, bridge the timelines, and let volume do the work.

Andy also went deep on what the transcript of a business life really looks like: the chaos behind a music festival nobody asked him to run, the value of a properly drafted operating agreement before you spend a single dollar with a partner, and the quiet strategy behind rolling SPS into Encore Pavement before getting acquired — then acquired again — then acquired a third time by a private equity platform now spanning 30 paving companies across the country.

Later in the conversation, Andy shares something more personal: a recurring "life skills class" he runs for his three boys on a giant whiteboard — covering amortization schedules, compounding interest, credit versus debit, box breathing, addiction science, choosing friends, online safety, and how to give a real handshake. It's practical, direct, and built on the same principle that drove everything else: don't wait until they're old enough to need it.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

Sam sits down with Bill Young — El Dorado, Kansas Mayor and Tharseo IT Chief Strategy Officer — to talk local leadership, community service, and the practical tradeoffs towns face when opportunity meets stewardship. Bill walks through his path from radio and IT to public office and why small‑town civic life matters to him.

We dig into the data center conversation head on: what keeps people up at night (power, water, land use, noise, PFAS) and what local leaders can actually do about it. Bill explains why planning, zoning, and special‑use permits exist — how they create the guardrails that let a town evaluate projects on facts instead of headlines, and why developers should pay for the infrastructure their projects require.

Bill is clear about tradeoffs: hyperscalers don’t deliver thousands of long‑term factory jobs, but they can materially strengthen a city’s tax base via franchise fees and grid upgrades — if protections are in place so residents don’t shoulder the burden. He also highlights modern technical solutions (closed‑loop cooling, cold‑plate designs) and why communities should insist on them when water or forever‑chemical risks are raised.

Beyond policy, this episode is about transparency and civic trust. Bill shares concrete examples of how El Dorado communicates (work sessions, mailed inserts, public forums), why not every loud voice is right, and how citizens — especially younger residents and business owners — can get involved and ask the right questions before decisions are made.

Listen for a thoughtful, balanced take from a mayor who says he won’t close doors without understanding the facts, but who also won’t accept proposals that threaten the community’s resources. Practical, local, and full of real stories about what it means to steward a small town’s future.

In this episode, Samuel sits down with Josh Cogan, owner of Cogan's Woodshop in El Dorado, Kansas — a full custom cabinet shop with roots going back to when Josh was sweeping floors at 14 years old.Josh didn't plan on owning a cabinet business. He spent his early career working in a cabinet shop through college, then ran a manufacturing facility for a hydraulic company for six years. When a mutual friend — a common connector in a surprising number of these episodes — called and said a local cabinet shop was for sale, Josh and his wife had an offer in by 4:00 that afternoon. That was the summer of 2019. COVID came months later and kept him busier than he ever expected.The conversation gets into the real mechanics of what custom woodworking actually looks like: why hickory is beautiful but brutal to work with, why maple stains blotchy, why cherry is making a comeback, and what it actually costs to paint cabinets versus stain them (hint: most people have it backwards). Josh walks through his full process — from the first site visit and rough rendering, through material orders and cut lists, to the install — and is honest about where it breaks down: scheduling when only two people are doing everything.He and Samuel dig into the side of owning a business that nobody advertises — the admin, the billing, the tax bill that hits in year one, the 60-hour weeks you thought were temporary but somehow became permanent. Josh caught the Tim Jordan episode and said it hit close to home. He's still working on the freedom part.If you're thinking about custom cabinets, need to find a woodworker in Butler County, or just want to understand how something beautiful gets built from a stack of random-width lumber — this one's worth your time.Learn more at https://killergrowth.com