Ground Zero Growth

James Gorman helped wire the early internet, stood in a New York data center turning screwdrivers in the morning and pitched bankers in the boardroom that afternoon, and once told GE's leadership they could own the internet for 30 million dollars. They passed. Now he runs Hard to Hack, an advisory practice that builds security programs for small and mid-sized companies, then trains them up and leaves. He calls his clients graduates. Sam sat down with him to talk cybersecurity, the dot com crash, Y2K, CrowdStrike, AI, and why your network really is your net worth.

Robert Gold was 26 years old, on track at KPMG, when his father died at 51. His dad ran a small CPA practice out of the basement of the family house, office wedged between the furnace and the dryer. Robert left the national firm within weeks, took over the clients he had known since high school, and started the long climb that turned a basement practice into Bennett Gold LLP, a Toronto firm he can trace back to 1929. The conversation follows that thread through partnership deals, a few well-timed deaths, early internet audits, and 700 podcast episodes.

Two weeks into his freshman year at Harvard, David G. Ewing tore his Achilles tendon clean in half. The football career he had been recruited for ended before it started, and he spent the next year learning to run without a limp. That early gut check became the pattern for everything that followed. A cancelled future in his family's Detroit manufacturing plant. A tech startup that imploded in the dot-com winter. A first employee hired on September 10, 2001. Every time a door closed, David figured out what he still had and kept moving.

Marc Shaffer is the CFO of Searcy Financial, a firm that started in 1976 with one founder serving physicians and has spent 50 years turning itself into something more. He wrote a book called One For All built on an Irish proverb: hand it out in slices, it comes back in loaves. Sam sits down with Marc on the last day of 2025 to talk about why that philosophy works, where it breaks, and how a kid who almost became a youth minister ended up running business development for a financial planning firm.

Andrew Brown has spent 30 plus years inside professional services, financial services, SaaS, and digital marketing agencies, and he kept noticing the same pattern. The best leads almost always came through a trusted referral, while the sales and marketing machine churned away in parallel. In this conversation he walks through how referral sources get overused, neglected, and disrespected, why trust is the quiet foundation underneath every real referral, and how his Bridgemaker Referral Programs methodology tries to fix it.

Oscar Duran reads four books at a time, runs a bespoke tailoring atelier with his partner Katie, renovates old buildings through his community development company Black Sailboat, and is putting out a book called The Garden Regions of Tomorrow. He started first grade with How to Win Friends and Influence People as his reader. By the end of his sophomore year of high school he was living on his own. Somewhere between door knocking in Italian textile shops and door knocking in South Omaha neighborhoods, he stitched all of it into a single idea about place, craft, and what it means to be a citizen.

Todd Milner almost kept driving. It was 3:30 on a Friday afternoon in western Kansas, he had a two-hour drive home, and he was done. Something told him to pull a U-turn into one more hospital parking lot. That stop turned into a proposal, a signed deal, and a qualifying push into President's Club. Todd, now a business development manager at CBIZ and the founder of a new coaching practice called the M5 Movement, sat down with Sam to trace a 40-year sales career built on the same quiet idea: do the one more thing, and serve the person in front of you.

Kelly Narowsky woke up one Saturday to texts from strangers trying to buy cars. Hackers had taken over her Facebook account, impersonated her with a stolen copy of her driver's license, and wiped out roughly 2,600 friends and nearly 3,000 professional followers she'd built as a Kansas City speaker. That crisis is how she and Sam met. The conversation that unfolded from there went much further than cybersecurity, into bipolar disorder, a spinal cord injury at 25, and the quiet work of choosing to keep going.

About a year and a half before this conversation, Mark Davis took over Translube Lubricants, the 50 year old family business his parents founded in 1975. One of his first moves was a rebrand. People on sales calls had started giggling at the name. The company is now Steelglide. That decision is one chapter in a career Mark describes as reinventing yourself every few years, from programmer on the software that delivered video for the Seoul Olympics to startup founder to family business operator.

Christian Brim has spent 28 years running Core Group, a firm that helps entrepreneurs in creative industries trade financial anxiety for clarity. But the conversation with Sam Sapp quickly moves past spreadsheets. Christian argues that the same inflated ego that makes entrepreneurs successful is the exact thing that caps their growth, and he ties that idea to a study where a founder's brain lit up identically for photos of their kids and their business. From there it goes to delegation, faith, bankruptcy in the oil patch, and why he still can't explain why he bet everything on a franchise in 1997.

Jayme Busch grew up selling polished rocks on a busy street in Bellevue and never really stopped selling something. By the time she sat down with Sam, she had been through Mary Kay, 31, color street nails, Tupperware, a $5,000 LuLaRoe package, a bankruptcy filing, a move to a town of 900, a 1988 work trailer turned mobile boutique, and two storefronts. Unique Boutique Iowa is the name that stuck, and this episode is the story of how she pivoted her way into it.

Twenty five years into running Fulling Management and Accounting in Olathe, Kansas, Rusty Fulling has seen the full arc of small business pain. Owners projecting four million in sales who haven't taken a paycheck in months. Products that lose a hundred dollars every time they sell. The Ponzi shuffle of running new projects to cover old ones. Rusty's work as a fractional CFO is about pulling founders out of that cycle. In this conversation he also opens up about the hospital visit that pushed him to start his own firm and the mission trip that changed how he ran it.

George Commons keeps returning to a single verse: 1 Corinthians 3. It's the passage about every person's work being tested by fire, with only gold and precious stones surviving the flames. George first heard a coworker describe a dream about that verse at an AT&T Bell Labs Bible study more than 40 years ago, and he's been measuring his life against it ever since. Today he runs the Barnabas Group Kansas City, a ministry to ministries built around Christian business leaders who want to use their strategic skills for something that lasts.

Mike Grigsby introduces himself as a retired Kansas City Missouri police officer first, not as a former FBI forensic examiner, former CIO, or 25-year executive coach. It's a deliberate choice. Telling someone you used to be a cop instantly sorts them into one of three camps, and Mike likes having that signal up front. From there, the conversation opens into identity, tribal belonging, the mental cost of forensic work on child exploitation cases, and why the only person coming to rescue you is the version of you that's fed up with your current situation.

Eric Kelting didn't know e-discovery existed until the day he interviewed for a job in it. Eleven years into running Complete Legal, the litigation support company he co-founded in 2014, he can trace the entrepreneurial thread all the way back to a dilapidated movie theater two blocks from his childhood home that he used to daydream about buying. This conversation walks through the slow path from a lawn-mowing route, to a college newspaper ad staff, to a full-time leap he took over Thanksgiving weekend, with his wife's blessing and his own stomach in knots.

Christian Roduner grew up in Rossville, Kansas, a farming town with one stoplight that never turns green and a high school class of thirty-five. He graduated with no job offers, nearly enlisted, and scraped into a junior college baseball roster at the last minute. Five years later he's a junior partner at Apollo Insurance Group in Lee's Summit, running health insurance for families and small businesses and trying to be the Roduner who changes the trajectory of a last name he calls cursed.

Keith Davenport recorded this episode from a park in Olathe, after a library patron sat behind him in frame and a cello lesson pushed him out of his home office. That small logistical scramble is a pretty accurate picture of his life. He runs three businesses, a coffee shop in Gardner called Ground House Coffee, Blazor Strategies, and an HR tech company called Mythic Higher, while navigating a closing on a new house and working out what a value based entrepreneur actually does in practice.

Matthew Entringer didn't grow up around homelessness. Then one bitter December in 2021, three or four people were bundled up in the lobby of his downtown Kansas City apartment just trying to stay out of the cold, and he couldn't unsee it. He started carrying care kits in his backpack, fell in with a Saturday outreach at Scraps KC, and by 2023 he'd filed the 501c3 paperwork for Street Support KC. The conversation starts there and ends up on dopamine, shame, and how a small business can use AI without losing the human part.

Paul Abugattas has signed the books, run the stores, unloaded the containers, and stood outside a crime scene at 24 wondering what on earth to say to the SWAT team. He grew up outside Washington DC, didn't realize until he was 18 that he wasn't a US citizen, and spent the next three decades building a retail career that ran from a suburban drug store counter to running divisions of national brands. By the time he landed in Kansas City, he'd learned that the job is almost always the people.

Clients at Hovey and Company joke that you shouldn't drink the water. Babies keep arriving. Meghan Hovee runs a predominantly women led accounting firm in Kansas City, and she has built it on a bet most CPA firms aren't willing to make: that women can have careers and full family lives without either one collapsing. Four kids in, nearly ten years in business, two offices across Kansas City, and tax seasons that cap around 45 hours a week. This conversation gets into how she got there, why she left big four after nine months, and what she learned the hard way about hiring, culture, and delegation.

Alex Walker's daughter once asked her if she was taking PTO. Alex laughed and said no, because she was already driving her kid around at three in the afternoon. That is the trade a mompreneur makes. Room mom and den mom by day, grant writer by night after bedtime. Alex sits down with Sam to talk about building Green Desk Grant Writing, the community she lost when a women's co-working space closed, and how she turned 15 years inside nonprofits into a business that has landed over 22 million dollars for clients.

Joshua Peters was 19 years old and six months into a war when an IED blew up the Humvee he was riding in near Balad, Iraq. Shrapnel tore through his left foot and right thigh. He bled from an artery in his foot for 45 minutes and somehow did not need a transfusion. What followed was a decade of PTSD, a misfired prescription, a marriage a month in, a career identity that had to be rebuilt from scratch, and a slow climb into the IT compliance consulting work he does today as owner of Key Consulting KC.

Tim King will tell you flat out that everything is sales, and he has the resume to back it up. Fresh out of college he got handed a Yellow Pages and the Kansas City metro, and six months later he had landed three accounts that barely paid anything. On this episode of Ground Zero Growth, Tim walks through two decades of sales jobs, warehouse shifts, collections calls, and a layoff two weeks before a home build, then explains how Southwestern Consulting finally got him coaching the thing he had been doing all along.

Robert Roncska carried the nuclear codes as the commanding officer of a $2 billion nuclear submarine. He has written two books about what he learned down there, and the one he talks about most with Sam Sapp is titled Beyond the Sea: Leading with Love from the Nuclear Navy to the White House and Health Care. The conversation moves from the fear-based commanding officer who once made a young Robert wet his pants, to the mentor who showed him a different way, to a five-second hallway conversation four years later that helped bring a child into the world.

Jeb Graham got his real estate license on a Saturday. Tuesday was September 11, 2001. That was supposed to be his first day selling houses at Keller Williams. Nobody sold anything. Everyone stood around the TV. The conversation with Sam Sapp walks through that start and all the others, from underwriting construction loans at Bank of America, to food sales at Cisco, to finally landing in 2004 in the career he studied for in college, and eventually building Metcalfe Partners Wealth Management into the firm it is today.

At 16, Mary Messner wanted to be a NICU nurse. She spent spring breaks in California shadowing her aunt and cousin, both neonatal intensive care nurses, attending high-risk deliveries back before HIPAA closed those doors. Then she didn't get into nursing school. That rejection forced a question that shaped the rest of her career: if the real pull was connecting with people and making a difference, what other path could still do that? The answer turned into a 14-year run at Cerner and, eventually, a keynote speaking business built around creativity in the workplace.

Janet Munro was 20 when she put her newborn son up for adoption in 1970, and she didn't meet him again until 2017. Between those two moments she built a custom furniture business with her husband Bill, rode out two recessions, and once ended up in the Guinness Book of Records for building what was briefly the world's largest rocking horse. Now 75 and living in Nashville, Janet talks with Sam about weathering storms, running a business for 46 years, and why she still doesn't consider herself a quitter.

Suyoung Cha flunked out of the University of Minnesota at 19 after passing the brutal actuary exams. The aftermath strained his relationship with his parents for years. What came next was a job as a Wells Fargo teller, seven years climbing a corporate ladder, a move to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a brand new financial advisor business that made almost no money for a year. Suyoung calls that stretch his crucible. This episode is the story of what the heat burned off.

For the first two years Zach Arend climbed into a bucking chute, he never once made it to the eight second buzzer. He broke his hand, his ankle, and his collarbone trying to ride saddle broncs. Then something clicked, and he went on to become a two time state champion. Years later, as a vice president of sales getting demoted over bourbon at a country club, he found himself back at the bottom of a new arena. The saddle bronc lessons are what carried him into leadership coaching.

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Green spent 23 years at Merck before turning 50 and going all in on his own consulting practice. Then COVID hit, the phone stopped ringing, and he spent the better part of three years wondering if he was really an entrepreneur or just pretending to be one. In this conversation he unpacks what finally broke the stall, why leading with values isn't woo woo, and what he means when he tells other founders to burn the boat.

Kenny Pointer once sat in a hotel lobby wearing a sweatsuit while a group of people a few feet away rehearsed how they would greet him. He was the person they were there to impress, and they never recognized him. As Chief Services Officer at Mariner, Kenny has spent a career watching the way people shift when they find out his title, and he has made a point of not shifting back. That thread, being the same human in every room, runs through his conversation with Sam Sapp.

Kevin Kwok named his digital marketing agency J29 Creative after Jeremiah 29:11, a verse his family leaned on through immigration, loss, and starting over. Airing the day after Christmas, this conversation with Sam Sapp moves through Kevin's arrival from Hong Kong at age six, a software engineering degree he picked up during the dot com era, a Cajun restaurant bar he closed after his father died of cancer, a bankruptcy he filed in his early twenties, and the long climb back that eventually put him at the front of a marketing agency.

Lindsay Howerton calls herself a scalpel. Some operators are machetes. Some fall somewhere in the middle. She's the one you hand a stalled business to when sales can't keep up with operations, or operations can't keep up with sales, or the leader just knows something is off and can't name it. In this conversation she walks through how she learned to read people and process early, why she almost didn't want to be tied to her Missouri hometown, and how she and her husband now buy and rehab blighted houses there on purpose.

About ten years ago, four women in Kara Viatori's family sat down and chose a new last name together. They went looking for something that meant more, and landed on a Latin word for traveler. Kara carries that name now as Director of Information Technology at MOCSA, a Kansas City nonprofit countering sexual violence, and the story is the doorway into a conversation about social engineering, burnout, and why curiosity is the real IT skill.

Krista Shelton will tell you that only an accountant could catch Al Capone, and she can quote the poster that still hangs in IRS offices to prove it. She spent 13 and a half years at the IRS, three and a half as a revenue agent auditing small businesses and the next ten as a federal special agent carrying a gun, kicking in doors, and working drug conspiracies next to the DEA. She now runs Focus Forensic Solutions from a sixth-generation family farm in Maryville, Missouri, and she's convinced that most fraud isn't clever. It's just unwatched.

A kid from the projects of Cleveland sat in a window one Christmas waiting for a father who never pulled into the driveway. Thirty-plus years later, that same kid had played college basketball at Ohio State, signed with the Harlem Globetrotters, eaten dinner with Muhammad Ali, and been waved through a traffic stop in Sydney by an officer who couldn't see a seven-foot driver folded into the back of the car. Derek Polk tells Sam Sapp how all of that fits inside one life, and what it took to hold it together.

Tate Fisher has opened a lot of stores. The fastest brand his team ever supported was opening 3.5 locations a week for almost two years. The one that almost broke his business went the other direction. A commitment to open 90 stores turned into 11, a $600,000 hole, and a choice: file bankruptcy and walk, or spend the next several years paying vendors back a dollar at a time. Tate chose the second option. This episode is about why, and what the hole taught him about partnerships, family, and saying no.

At eleven-thirty at night, in a guest room turned study space, Megan Brenner sat crying over her CFP books. Her dad was in an assisted living facility after a massive stroke. Two small kids were asleep down the hall. A full-time job waited the next morning. She asked herself why she was doing this to herself, then remembered exactly why. Megan, co-founder of Craft and Sage Wealth in Kansas City, walks Sam through how a small-town upbringing, a stubborn streak, and the hardest season of her life shaped the values she runs her firm by.

Hiba Rosace walked Sam through a year that would have broken most business owners. Her boutique marketing firm had been pulling in six figures a month when a string of client buy-sells cut her revenue in half almost overnight. What she talks about on this episode is not the playbook she ran to recover it. It's the mental work underneath. How a pastor's daughter who grew up on mission trips learned to treat her business like a calling, set boundaries with male-dominated rooms, and pace herself through burnout without walking away.

John Hall grew up riding in rodeos in West Texas oil country. At 12 he moved to Coronado, California and became a surfer. By his 30s he was running rooms at Madison Square Garden, holding two VP roles and a GM seat while the NFL, NHL, and NBA all paid for his time. Then in August 1999, at 40 years old, a former quarterback named James Gidry stopped him in a crowded hospitality room and told him they needed to pray. John walked out of that event a different person. This conversation is about the transitions that followed.

Ryland Miller became president and CEO of the Ottawa Area Chamber of Commerce at 27, and he didn't know what a chamber of commerce was until he stumbled into one as an intern. In this conversation, Ryland walks through how chambers actually work, what membership buys a small business, and why the real value shows up in rooms where strangers become partners. Sam also shares how early Ottawa Chamber support pulled Lockbaud back from the brink of pivoting out of tech entirely.

Jim Starcev bought his first house at twenty off the earnings of a Kansas City Star paper route. By the end of that run he had three trucks and eleven people delivering papers to nearly two thousand homes. That early stretch, along with a childhood east of Troost raised by a single mother who worked in a factory, shaped the work ethic he carried into financial services, into a bootstrapped tech company that grew to almost fifty employees, and eventually into his current role at KC Digital Drive.

Ray Freeman was 12 years old, riding his bike through Kansas City, Kansas, when a police officer stopped him and told him he wasn't going home. That afternoon became the first of what Ray now calls multiple lifetimes. He spent the next six years in eight different foster homes, aged out at 18, and stumbled into adulthood with no driver's license, no savings, and no idea how to hold a job. Today he runs One Community Jiu Jitsu Club, a Wyandotte County nonprofit built on a $5,000 grant, a $1,200 GoFundMe, and a refusal to take zero days.

Pat Phelan wrote his book, Leaping Forward, during COVID after what he calls a Jerry Maguire moment at the manuscript. Eighteen years into owning the company now known as Leap, he sits down with Sam Sapp to trace the winding path from a failed stint as a restaurant operator to a national supplier of restaurant furniture and case goods. Along the way he unpacks the line between a hustler and a con artist, why partnerships are tougher than marriages, and the kind of business amnesia that keeps an entrepreneur moving forward.

Allison Mott scored a 102 on her first college accounting test. The class average was a 60. That moment in a 500-seat lecture hall at Oklahoma State flipped her major from public relations to accounting and set up a decade-long loop through a big four firm, a burnout so deep she quit without another job lined up, two nonprofit roles that rebuilt her love for the work, a failed apprenticeship, and finally AMCPA, the full-service CPA firm she founded five years ago this September.