SUCCESS IS EARNED.
FREEDOM IS DESIGNED.
Conversations with founders, operators, and builders who designed a life worth living.
Hunt for Success documents how real builders think, decide, and live — from the boardroom to the backcountry. No recycled advice. No performance. Just the honest version — on business, discipline, and the designed life.
"Success should fund a life you actually want — not a self-created prison."
This show exists for the builder who wants both. The business and the life. The discipline and the freedom. The boardroom and the backcountry.
Gregory DePriest
Reinvention, Strategy, and the Thrill of the Chase
Sam McGough sits down with Gregory DePriest — one of ten kids raised by a widowed mother in Mississippi, taught to hunt and to be a man by the successful businessmen of his church's 3,000-acre hunting club. He spent his first career in auto finance, helping launch Infiniti Finance, then pivoted at 33 into ministry and spent 25 years building a 60-person East Tennessee church into the largest-attended in the Tri-Cities at 2,200 people a Sunday. At 57 — no retirement fund, no interest in pride — he walked away to start a logistics company from zero, got his CDL, and today runs an Amazon delivery business with 200-plus employees and a $600K monthly payroll. Along the way he helped raise $56.6M for an orphanage in the highest PGA-endorsed fundraiser in history, gave up an established Austin territory to rebuild in his home region, and turned a lifetime of bird hunting and fly fishing into a leadership philosophy. This is a conversation about reinvention without a safety net — why everything has a shelf life, why faith without a strategy is just a wish, why "potential" is the only curse word he won't allow, and why the men who win are the ones who found someone safe to brag to.
DR. SAM McGOUGH
A healthcare CEO and multi-company operator, Sam built his career by identifying inefficiencies and engineering systems that perform under pressure.
This show wasn't created to interview influencers. It documents peer-to-peer conversations with builders who've done what most only talk about.
For Sam, the backcountry isn't a weekend escape—it's where discipline, patience, and clarity come from. The two aren't separate.
Every conversation on this wall was built, not given.
Gregory DePriest
Amazon DSP Owner & Former Pastor
Faith without a strategy is just a wish.
Listen →Choose your next conversation.
Reinvention, Strategy, and the Thrill of the Chase
Gregory DePriest
Sam McGough sits down with Gregory DePriest — one of ten kids raised by a widowed mother in Mississippi, taught to hunt and to be a man by the successful businessmen of his church's 3,000-acre hunting club. He spent his first career in auto finance, helping launch Infiniti Finance, then pivoted at 33 into ministry and spent 25 years building a 60-person East Tennessee church into the largest-attended in the Tri-Cities at 2,200 people a Sunday. At 57 — no retirement fund, no interest in pride — he walked away to start a logistics company from zero, got his CDL, and today runs an Amazon delivery business with 200-plus employees and a $600K monthly payroll. Along the way he helped raise $56.6M for an orphanage in the highest PGA-endorsed fundraiser in history, gave up an established Austin territory to rebuild in his home region, and turned a lifetime of bird hunting and fly fishing into a leadership philosophy. This is a conversation about reinvention without a safety net — why everything has a shelf life, why faith without a strategy is just a wish, why "potential" is the only curse word he won't allow, and why the men who win are the ones who found someone safe to brag to.
Hospitality, Real Estate, and Wilderness
Jeramie Worley
Sam McGough sits down with Jeramie Worley — a Missouri operator who was buying short-term rentals in 2006, before Airbnb existed, and wrote one of the first books on the model in 2016. Then a herd of red stag crossing a gravel road on his birthday weekend rewired what he wanted to build. He and his partners made an offer on an 80-acre Ozarks property with a 10-acre private lake before they'd ever laid eyes on it, and have spent five years cutting trails, clearing culverts, and turning it into Lake Longbow — a private retreat where burned-out executives come to hunt, fish, and work with their hands. This is not a highlight reel. Jeramie is straight about the economics: it doesn't cash flow like a syndication, some years he subsidizes it, and the well may cost another $40,000 before it's right. What it does produce is harder to put on a spreadsheet — the trust that forms when you take a man who's expert at everything, hand him a white belt, and watch him take his first deer. He lays out why hospitality beats guiding, why he's selling off a third of the property in $50K increments to people he's actually vetted, and why the operators who win are the ones who turn the water on before the plumbing is perfect.
Mastering Business and Real Estate
Chris Rood
Sam McGough sits down with his own real estate mentor, Chris Rood — a blue-collar Louisiana operator who started changing oil out of the back of his truck in college and turned it into four quick-lube shops with 33 employees, funding every expansion by flipping houses on the side. He sold the shops in 2017, went all-in on real estate, and today runs a roughly $45M portfolio of mobile home parks, vacation rentals, and ground-up neighborhoods. But this isn't a highlight reel — it's Chris cutting through the guru noise with the blunt honesty that became his trademark. He explains why luck is just calculated action over time, why you need more balls than brains but a spouse who's on board, and why this is a 20-year game you shouldn't start unless you can give it five. Then he lays out the framework that anchors everything: fast, medium, and slow money — and makes the contrarian case that rental property isn't about cash flow at all, that taking a house with no equity is a financial time bomb, and that the surest way to win is to stop over-leveraging, buy only unicorn deals, and pay it all down until you're bulletproof.
Building Wealth and Freedom
Chris Udall
Sam McGough sits down with the first venture capitalist he ever met — Chris Udall, the man who wrote him his first check. Chris manages a $15M evergreen fund through Innovate Alabama and just launched a $5M Capital Access Fund to pull outside capital into the state and keep founders from decamping to the coasts. But his road into capital is anything but conventional: it started building entrepreneurial schools for refugees in Jordan and ran through Oxford, Notre Dame, a Seattle acquisition, and a LinkedIn "easy apply" that landed him in Huntsville. The throughline of the conversation is the show's own thesis — building wealth while designing freedom. Chris explains what a VC actually does (Shark Tank, minus the rules), why he bets on founder grit over the originality of the idea, and why the only real failure is the decision to stop trying. Then he draws it straight into the backcountry: the elk hunt he prepped for obsessively and still missed four times, why hunting is the one thing that quiets his problem-solving brain, and how he once turned a Bay Area vegan into a state-record turkey hunter and a $6M investor in Alabama founders.
Designing a Life of Adventure
Eric Killen
Sam McGough sits down with one of his best friends and his go-to for adventures, Eric Killen — founder of Killen Outdoor Adventures (yes, in Killen, Alabama). Eleven years ago Eric and his wife Mary turned a hunting-and-fishing habit into a business that last year sent around 230 people across roughly 48 vetted locations worldwide, all while Eric kept his 26-year corporate sales job. The model is built on a single non-negotiable: he won't send a client anywhere he or his team hasn't personally been and photographed. This one is less a how-to than a how-he-built-the-life-he-wanted — client-first service, zero debt, a logistics operation that delivers your trophies to your wall, and the traits Eric sees in both great entrepreneurs and great hunters: patience, persistence, and the discipline to come back after you've been beaten.
How to Master the Intrapreneur Mindset
Theron Leany
Sam McGough sits down with Theron Leany — partner and operator at Action Plumbing, Heating, Air & Electric, a home-services company running across four to five states. Theron's story is the clearest case study the show has had in the intrapreneur mindset: a guy who took a pay cut to $50K to learn a business from the inside, treated it as his own from day one, made himself invaluable, and asked for the equity rather than waiting for it. He breaks down why most owners stall when they lose sight of their "why," how an eight-man walkout forced Action to stop hiring from the industry and start hiring for character, and why the techs who care the most out-sell everyone. The hunting half is its own meditation — bowhunting as the one place with no phone service, and a Kansas whitetail spot built to bring his four daughters into the field.
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This show is built for people who have actually built something — in business and in life. We're selective because our listeners are.