Following Curiosity: From Ranch Life to Country Music Media with Chase Locke | Ep 54

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/]

Following Curiosity: From Ranch Life to Country Music Media with Chase Locke | Ep 54

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 [https://killergrowth.com/]