500 Homes a Day: Running a $100M Appliance Empire with Tim Hillebrand | Ep 61

500 Homes a Day: Running a $100M Appliance Empire with Tim Hillebrand | Ep 61

In Episode 61, Samuel sits down with Tim Hillebrand — president of Don's Appliance in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and someone Sam calls a genuine mentor from his years running Charlie's Appliance in Kansas. This one has a different feel than most episodes: it's two guys who've been in the same industry at very different scales, catching up on what the business actually looks like when you build it to $100 million and beyond. Tim started at Don's in 1988, right out of college, loading up at the bottom while learning from his father who founded the company in 1971. When his dad wouldn't expand, Tim and his brothers went and built Hillman Appliance from scratch about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, grew it into a real business, and eventually merged it back with Don's in 2010. From there, Don's went from 4 stores to 12 locations across Pittsburgh, Morgantown, and Erie. In September 2023, they sold to Kodiak Building Products. Tim stayed on as president, and after a PE split and restructure, Don's is now a standalone business inside a 5-company appliance group with more acquisitions on the horizon. The operations conversation alone is worth the listen. Don's runs 25 service trucks and 33 to 35 delivery trucks every single day, hitting somewhere between 400 and 500 homes. Tim talks through the logistics of running a single distribution hub out of Pittsburgh, how next-day delivery actually works at that scale, and where a second hub becomes necessary as they look to expand into Ohio. He gets into the technology stack too: PackageAI for delivery tracking and crew efficiency, AI-assisted pre-diagnosis tools that pull from their service history to send techs out with the right parts the first time, and how remote service specialists in New England and Illinois review transcripts of calls to flag what part is probably failing before the truck ever rolls. Sam and Tim also dig into the independent appliance industry itself: what BrandSource actually is and why $6 billion in buying power matters against Home Depot and Lowe's, why appliance service is a money loser that everyone has to run anyway, what the Midea-Electrolux joint venture might mean for a manufacturing landscape that's already consolidated down to 4 or 5 players, and what Tim would tell someone thinking about getting into the business today. His answer on starting capital ($100k, plus a line of credit, plus a seller willing to hold the paper) is more specific and useful than most advice you'll hear. Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

Law, Burnout, and the M&A Work That Finally Made Sense with Sam Foreman | Ep 60

In Episode 60, Samuel sits down with Sam Foreman — founder and CEO of Foreman Law, an attorney focused on mergers and acquisitions based in Wichita. Sam's story is an honest one: a career built through hard work and ambition that eventually ran him straight into the ground, and the long road back to a version of work that actually means something to him. Sam grew up homeschooled in Topeka, studied accounting at Washburn, and went to law school while working full time. He landed in Wichita at a firm where he met his wife, made partner at a second firm after his practice took off, and then left to start Foreman Law in 2019 — first office above Wasabi on Douglas Avenue downtown. The firm started with big aspirations: a lean, transparent model built for young attorneys with growing practices who didn't want the traditional grind. Then they signed a multi-year lease on a beautiful space with river views one week before COVID lockdown. The attorneys they were counting on to join never came. What followed was a stretch that Sam doesn't sugarcoat. The startup-focused law model didn't survive contact with reality — too much complexity, too little budget, too high a failure rate in the client pool. The overhead decisions compounded. His health took a hit. He kept working harder to work his way out of it, which made everything worse. The moment that finally broke through was his wife sitting across from him at the kitchen table and telling him she didn't recognize the person she married. He got into therapy, worked it hard, and came out the other side — not just healthier, but genuinely humbled in a way that changed how he sees his business and himself. The pivot to M&A wasn't just a market correction. It clicked for Sam when he realized what actually happens when a family business sells well: you can change a family story for generations. That purpose, specific and real, is what drives the firm now. Foreman Law has grown while the headcount has shrunk — a weird ego conflict he's made his peace with — built on a lean, transparent compensation model that ditches the traditional pyramid and creates predictability for everyone involved. Sam also gets into AI, with a clear-eyed take: it's a force multiplier on value creation, not a displacement machine, and the people who win with it will be the ones who never lose sight of what their clients are actually paying for. Learn more at https://killergrowth.com

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