Saunders & Cash

Mallory Marney started Premier MedExperts to provide a network of expert witness to facilitate expert testimony for all sorts of civil, medical and legal cases in the United States with a primary focus on the Midwest. You can learn all about how she got started in the interview on this podcast. She has seen dramatic growth in her first year of business. Mallory discusses how she has grown the business in respond to significant demand that includes both medical and non-medical expert witnesses. Law firms are now able to find expert witnesses in a wide range of medical specialty areas. Premier MedExperts does all of the research to validate qualifications and accreditations of the witness. Mallory discussed her passion for the business by explaining how she did some soul searching after working in sales and making others successful. The larger law firms are focused on the east and west coasts, so Mallory discovered the mid-west was not really covered. She went from concept to reality in less than a year. Learn

For this podcast we invited Wayne Bell, the local director of the Small Business Administration to the show to learn more about the programs available at the SBA. Wayne Bell has been the local director at the SBA for 12 years. The SBA is a part of robust ecosystem for entrepreneurs in Kansas and across the nation. With the SBA entrepreneurs has an opportunity to use a number of programs that help to strengthen the local and national economy. Small businesses contribute over half of all jobs in the economy. Listen in and find out all of the programs, workshops, loan programs, referrals to approved banks and a number of services that help support the growth and development of local businesses. For example, right now you might want to know more about disaster assistance.  SBA works with a wide range of partners including the Small Business Development Centers, typically at local universities, SCORE and groups like NetWork Kansas. Anyone who wants to get started in business can go to SBA.Gov for help with creatin

Learn how a real estate investor sees growth by bringing back a formerly popular espresso coffee cafe to be a neighborhood destination for fresh coffee and freshly prepared food, combined with great customer service. Daniel Mariotti started in real estate but saw an opportunity to expand his business opportunities by taking over a well-established coffee café that had been in decline due to the owner having moved out of the area and not able to manage the café. With the improvements, he has seen tremulous growth by improving customer service, the product and the décor while rebuilding a loyal customer base. Joins us and listen to his story of entrepreneurship. He moved to Wichita from Southern California and his family started out on seven acres of land, raising animals and a garden much like the TV show Green Acres. He attended college and took a corporate job on the east coast before realizing he wanted an different opportunity for his family and returned to Wichita to work with in real estate, partnering w

For this podcast we caught up with Henna Hundal, a recent graduate of Harvard University who is the host of a syndicated radio program that has featured the likes of Bill Gates, Nobel laureates, Fortune 500 CEOs, and most recently, several of the 2020 U.S. presidential candidates. When Henna started podcasting, she didn’t realize it would grow into a project she was passionate about, but the Henna Hundal Show is a now nationally syndicated news program in addition to being a podcast. Henna has been fortunate be able to launch her show from the studios of Harvard Radio Broadcasting. The story starts from her dorm room, where she started turning discussions with fellow students about the most important issues of the day into podcasts. She then expanded this to recording her professors and leveraging that connection to interview some of the more significant leaders not just in Boston but across the nation and around the world. The show features the world’s foremost experts for groundbreaking discussion within th

Pat Pelkowski as a veteran of the U. S. Air and a retired Air Traffic Controller who knew he loved the idea of owning his own business. He retired at 50 years of age and as he started thinking about what would come next he turned to entertaining others with a mobile bartending service. With a degree in entrepreneurship from Wichita State University he also gives back by ensuring 20 to 25 percent of his business is provided to non-profits with his mobile bartending business. Shaken or Stirred is a service he provides for weddings, corporate events and parties of all types. It’s interesting he didn’t create his business plan on the back of a napkin. He actually grew his business mostly from word-of-mouth referrals. He found that only 10 percent of his business came from bridal fairs, and 90 percent came from referrals. The business has grown for just his wife and himself to several employees and several events each week that includes corporate events, private parties, anniversaries, birthdays and weddings. One

The Women Empowered Market started just a year ago to have a global impact for women.  A diverse group of women entrepreneurs and leaders of nonprofits, designed to help women around the world, got together to plan and bring to the community a market of products produced or sold by women. Each of members of the organizing group are either entrepreneurs themselves or have programs to help enable women to become more self sufficient by helping them start a business. The group organized the first Women Empowered Market with over 40 vendors offering fair-trade, fairly traded and direct trade goods created by local and global small businesses run by women.  Since then the Women Empowered Market has hosted three markets and are about to host the four market during International Women's Month.  Two of the primary organizers, Katy Penner of Alegria Fair Trade and Ginger Lobdell of SheHopes.org joined in the interview to discuss how the market was formed and the success it is having in its second year.  The next marke

Local Entrepreneur Opens Fireworx CoWorking in Historic Fire House Image the excitement you might feel when you have a strong attachment to historic building and you want to encourage entrepreneurship in your hometown and you discover an opportunity.   For Bruce Rowley, an entrepreneur, marketer, creative thinker, commercial real estate developer and managing partner at RSM Marketing, that's what happened one day as he drove by an historic firehouse near his office in downtown Wichita, Kansas.   He had driven by this building many times. The city was using as staging area for public works projects, with trucks and gear parked here and there around the site.   He stopped one day for look at the building, just a bit curious about what the inside looked like. As he was looking around, he stepped into the historic fire station, and was greeted by one of the workers. He got a tour of the building from one of the city employee who mentioned that the city was planning to move their functions out and sel

  There have been a lot of wins for EmpowerHer Conference sponsored by the Women Entrepreneurs of Kansas (WEKAN). March 13th at WSU Tech on Webb Road. The Theme is “Her Vision For the Future.” We were joined by Marquetta Atkins and Brandy Willett. Two of the board members for both Women Entrepreneurs of Kansas and Camp Destination Innovation. One of those wins is Jennifer McDonald of Jenny Dawn Cellars who started with an idea three years ago at the conference. She was able to put together her business plan, find investors, go learn the wine business at UC Davis in California and bring all of that back to Wichita where she now has her own business with the first urban wine cellar in Kansas. Another win is of course, Christina Long, founder of the Create Campaign. The Create Campaign does so much to help launch businesses in Wichita with counseling, connections, workshop and serves as the hub of minority business development, growth and innovation in Kansas. Another win for entrepreneurs in Wichita is Founders

Professional organizer Rachel Murphy joins us in the interview on Saunders and Cash to talk about her experiences starting a business to help people de-clutter their homes, offices and work spaces. In just a few short years Rachel helped over 150 people and has worked with clients who want a simple redo of their closet all the way to a complete redesign of their home or garage. She hasalso help hoarders overcome the challenges they face by dealing with the psychology of hoarders which often includes holding on to a deep seated underlying trauma. Rachel helps clients find what really serves them well and makes it much easier to maintain an organized life. Her solutions are custom, as there is no one size fits all solution to having an organized life. Her clients often feel overwhelmed by the clutter in their life or even their workspaces. Rachel is about to launch her own podcast on the topic of simplifying your life, which is also the business also her business. In the second half of the interview, we talk ab

As a part of National FFA Week across the United States we interviewed FFA members and leaders in the state’s agriculture education programs. Kansas is an agriculture state with more than 30% of the economy based on farming and agriculture business. National FAA is a national youth program and in Kansas it includes 110 programs across the state and 10,000 young people We started the interviews with Kurt Dillon, from the Kansas State Department of Education. Kurt is focused on agriculture education and is also the state advisor for the 110 FFA programs across the state. Joining Kurt, we also talked with Mary Kane, the Kansas FFA Association Executive Secretary and JoAnn Farmer, a teacher at Southwest High School and local advisor for the FFA program. JoAnn teaches agriculture and agribusiness courses. She teaches over 200 students and 145 members in the FFA program. The Mission of Agricultural Education is to prepare students for successful careers and a lifetime of informed choices in the global agriculture,

We may have found the “Apple” of Wichita as we interviewed Reid Hansen and Margie Crawford of Callcap, a company that has grown from an operation started in the founder's garage to a nationwide firm providing call tracking and rating services for any company that needs to track all of their customer service calls, from scheduling appointments to handling any sort of customer service call. This technology started with a simple rating service for inbound calls to insure that business calls were properly handled per the business expectations. It has grown into a company using artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve how customer calls are responded to, with a goal of continuously improving the quality of calls for both inbound and outbound marketing programs. On average a business will lose or mishandle 18% of their calls, often with an auto-attendant service. Advances in the way calls are tracked and rated for mishandled calls or calls not responded to make it easier to reduce that error rate and

The technology council of Kansas has had a solid year of growth in 2019, as we learned when we talked with Lisa Roberts, the executive director of FlagshipKansas and Stan Finger, a writer for the technology council, both of whom joined us for the interview. Growth has been fantastic after starting a year ago with 50 charter members, the organization has grown to 23,000 members and an additional 58,000 student members. Many of the universities in Kansas have paid for the student members making it free for students to join and participate. Stan Finger joined FlagshipKansas to write a number of stories about the initial charter members and we discussed a really interesting story he is working on about teaching coding and programming skills to inmates at the Topeka Women’s Correctional Facility. With this training, women upon release can use their new coding skills to get great paying jobs in the Kansas technology industry. Most of the students in the first class didn’t have any sort of coding skills before takin

We started the interview, with Andrew Gough, the founder of Reverie Roasters, with a brief summary of the grand opening of Groover Lab, a new co-working space locally here I Wichita, KS and a preview of our partnership with FlagshipKansas.tech, followed by introducing our guest, the founder and CEO of Reverie Roasters, a local company that includes a wholesale operations, coffee shops, a bakery and a community events space. Andrew didn’t start out thinking he would flourish as a entrepreneur with a business focused on community and coffee. He completed a degree in public relations at Kansas State University and worked first in financial services where he coordinated and delivered retirement planning education to local businesses employees. It while traveling for work, that he first realized the challenge for a local coffee establishment is building up excellent coffee experience but also a place for community. He also learned that coffee as a business is a service industry that attracts younger workers. As he

An Army of “Yeasayers” might be the best way to describe Connecting ICT, group of forward thinking Wichita citizens who have banned together in an informal group to help the community to connect to each other and contribute to a stronger, growing and vibrant city. Connecting ICT has become a hub for area professionals who are committed to making a positive impact on the growth of their community.  In our interview with Todd Lewis and Doug Ledbetter we discussed the activities for the group in 2019 and their plans for 2020. Connecting ICT is committed to impacting the growth of the region around Wichita, KS through a combination of business, personal, civic, and community connections and to engage with every interested group. Be sure to connect on Facebook to learn more.  Some of the significant events hosted by Connecting ICT in 2019 include doubling the size of the membership to over 800 members and connecting dozens of the members to the Wichita State University workgroups to evaluate and help implement the

We are with Seth Etter, one of the co-founders of DevICT talking about how they are growing a technology community in Wichita, KS.  DevCT is a community group of software engineers and anyone interested in technology. Members often join and participate in meetings to connect with others, to learn, share, and find connections that might lead to job opportunities. DevICT has been in Wichita for the past eight years. It got started to develop a community group around technology at a time when Seth was teaching at a local community college and was complaining about the lack of a community group. So someone suggested they just get started and create a group. DevICT grew from that challenge. The group started using MeetUp.com to schedule gathering,  and because technology people like to talk technology, members would give talks at monthly meetings on a variety of technical topics. They now meet at a co-working space, The Labor Party, located in the Old Town part of Wichita. Membership now numbers in the thousands,

In our interview with members of the Matchstick Alliance we discovered they want to be that friction that causes the spark to ignite new business growth not just in Wichita, KS but across the region. The Matchstick Alliance will fill the need of “second stage” startups that already have a viable idea that they are pursuing and need help growing to the next level. Each company is committed to growing the resources available to entrepreneurs in this community, and the alliance believes they can do it more effectively as an integrated team.  Their ultimate vision is that the startups they support will be better positioned to grow and secure funding. Most “second stage” startups need some or all of these key services – technology, consulting, marketing and legal – at some point in order to get to the next level and secure funding. The Matchstick Alliance is four well-known Wichita companies – High Touch Technologies, AGH, Gardner Design, and Foulston that have come together to offer these key services through a c

Join us in this interview from September of 2019 as we talk with two of the staff from QuiCC, Taylor Stevenson and Krissy Buck, about the exciting new technology launched several months from Wichita, KS for creating captions from the audio in your videos. Look for fresh updates from QuicCC in the near future on our podcast, as the company is growing rapidly and they have new announcements frequently.  85% of video is now watched with the sound off, so your really need to learn about this new approach for creating video with hard captions burned right to the video with their own algorithms for capturing the audio and burning into the audio file captions that can be read from any mobile device QuiCC is an Artificial Intelligence company, headquartered in Wichita, KS is using software they developed for the QuiCC app.  This hard caption software app they have released to the market works and the success of the rollout of the beta to all seven continents including Antarctica. Creating hard caption of your video f

When Andrea Hattan embarked on her journey to start a co-working space for women, she thought she would find women with part-time side businesses that needed a place to work away from distractions. What she discovered was that it was more about building a community of women in business. While many of her members are entrepreneurs, a large number actually work at corporate jobs but have found they wanted a community were they could connect with other women in business.   Andrea’s prior experience was along the lines of teaching, photography and marketing before starting to realize that connecting with other women about growing personally and professionally was very important to her. When she first started freelancing, she worked out of a local co-working space with a lot of men in technology. That didn't really work well for her; she needed a space to connect with other women, to be inspired and to inspire others, so she did some market research, created the branding elements she wanted and got busy creating h

Desiree Plamer has an amazing story of not accepting her doctor’s diagnosis that she was dying and it was an issue that had no cure. At the time she did have health issues and they were certainly affecting her life, her future and the future of her family. But she turned a life-threatening problem into an opportunity and now a successful business, Satori. She began her path toward energy healing after being given a diagnosis that was essentially a death sentence. Not willing to lay down and die, she determined to find out how the human body can heal itself. After helping herself, she knew she would be able to help others feel better as well. Now she has dedicated her business to do just that. In this interview, we dig into How Desiree turned a diagnosis of “We can’t cure you” into a business focused on using cutting edge bio-field technology, to help you find you path to self-healing. At Satori, they treat the energetic body field in several different ways, using mind, body, and spirit. Energy therapy, holist

How do you take a trusted family recipe for wonderful, melt-in-your mouth cheesecake and turn it in to a full time business you are passionate about?  Learn how as we talk with the CEO of Wichita Cheesecake Company and 2019 visionary award winner for entrepreneur of the year, Mark Daniels.  Mark talks about how he can to the Wichita area on active duty in the United States Air Force. Liked the area so much, he stayed and earned a BA degree in business from Wichita State, where he took advantage of the programs to develop an entrepreneurial business and started forming his business plan.  The company is 100% bootstrapped with their own savings and they have taken a planned approach of building up, testing the market, watching demand and marketing with local events and the good recommendations of their customers.  Wichita Cheesecake Company is a premier family owned bakery based in Wichita, Kansas devoted to delivering a high-quality dessert that is decadent and delicious each and every time.  From a small dinn