Margin, Design, and Building Pet Products That Actually Win with Trevor Crotts | Ep 59

Margin, Design, and Building Pet Products That Actually Win with Trevor Crotts | Ep 59

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

Cisco Had No CRM. So He Built One: Sandy Mehra and the Making of Telgoo5 | Ep 58

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

The Entrepreneurologist: Why the Soil Matters More Than the Seed with Jon Bachura | Ep 57

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

From $5M to $60M: The Business of Healthcare Staffing with Chris Sund | Ep 56

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 [https://killergrowth.com/]

From Finance to 50,000 Fans: The Emcee Journey of Fayola Oyatayo | Ep 55

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 [https://killergrowth.com/]