Killer Growth

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/]

From Candy Striper to CEO: Melissa Hall on Rural Healthcare and Why It Matters | Ep 53

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 [https://killergrowth.com/]

Pushing Parts to 107 Employees: How David May Built Trinity Precision | Ep 52

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