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.