SPECIAL TRIBUTE EPISODE // Greg Haflich had a gift for walking into a room, whether it be a franchisee meeting, a strategy session, or a dive bar stage, and making everyone feel like they were exactly where they were supposed to be. A Kansas-born, KU-bred field marketer who built his career across Bernstein-Rein, Val-Rad, Barkley, Applebee's, Sonic, and Callahan Creek, Greg had a rare ability to connect the boardroom to the boots on the ground, and he did it with a warmth and dry wit that people never forgot. When he wasn't solving field marketing problems nobody else wanted to touch, he was laying down guitar riffs with his band, The Bad Dadz. We lost Greg in 2025 and in this special tribute episode, four of Greg's closest colleagues join Sam and Mike to remember a legend who understood that great marketing, like great music, only works when it's honest, grounded, and played from the heart.

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If you've lived in Kansas City long enough, you've heard Skip Quimby, you just might not have known it was him. As a co-founder of Wysong, Quimby & Jones, Skip helped make radio advertising an art form in this market, lending his voice and his wit to spots that people still remember decades later. But behind the craft was a serious business philosophy — be interesting, tell the truth, and sell more instead of cutting overhead. In this episode, Skip sits down with Sam and Mike to talk about the golden age of broadcast creative, what ego does to good ideas, and the principles that held up across every era of this business.

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Pat O'Neill didn't take the obvious path to running a KC communications firm. He took the scenic route through cemetery caretaking, late-night concert reviews, limo runs for touring rock bands, and tiny Colorado newspapers before coming back to Kansas City and building something uniquely his own. Four generations of the O'Neill family have been woven into this city's political, cultural, and civic fabric since the 1880s, and Pat's chapter, the micro-agency that never wanted to be the biggest, just the best, may be the most colorful of all. In this episode, Pat sits down with Sam and Mike to talk about speed, trust, Irish Fest, and why the best business development in KC has always happened at five o'clock at the bar.

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