Episodes

  • Ep 51 - "Internet Pioneer" with James Gorman

    Ep 51 - "Internet Pioneer" with James Gorman
    Feb 19 2026
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 50 - "Carrying Forward" with Robert Gold

    Ep 50 - "Carrying Forward" with Robert Gold
    Jan 22 2026
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 49 - "Built to Adapt" with David G. Ewing

    Ep 49 - "Built to Adapt" with David G. Ewing
    Jan 15 2026
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 48 - "Meaningful Returns" with Marc Shaffer

    Ep 48 - "Meaningful Returns" with Marc Shaffer
    Jan 8 2026
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 47 - "Get Referred" with Andrew Brown

    Ep 47 - "Get Referred" with Andrew Brown
    Nov 27 2025
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 46 – “Suits & Streets” with Oscar Durán

    Ep 46 – “Suits & Streets” with Oscar Durán
    Nov 20 2025
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 45 - "Serving Intentionally" with Todd Milner

    Ep 45 - "Serving Intentionally" with Todd Milner
    Oct 16 2025
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Ep 44 – “Courage to Be” with Kelly Narowsky

    Ep 44 – “Courage to Be” with Kelly Narowsky
    Oct 9 2025
    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.
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    Less than 1 minute