Foundation Over Fast Money

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (4:20)

Part one of a three-part series pub­lished along­side our new case study on Action Solar and inter­view with CEO Haysam Sakar.

Every indus­try gets a sea­son when growth comes easy. Mon­ey starts mov­ing, sub­si­dies kick in, and rev­enue shows up whether a com­pa­ny earned it or not. That is the exact moment most lead­ers make their biggest mis­take. It is also the exact moment Haysam Sakar refused to.

Haysam is the CEO of Action Solar in Utah. Before solar, he spent twen­ty years found­ing and scal­ing busi­ness­es in auto­mo­tive and finance. When he acquired Action Solar, it was a sim­ple install shop doing about a mil­lion dol­lars in rev­enue. The indus­try around him was rid­ing a wave of tax cred­its, ener­gy inde­pen­dence, and ris­ing pow­er costs, and most oper­a­tors were rac­ing to sell as much vol­ume as the mar­ket would give them.

Haysam did the opposite.

The unglam­orous first year

“In the begin­ning, a lot of peo­ple in solar con­fuse vol­ume with busi­ness qual­i­ty,” he told me. So instead of chas­ing installs, he spent his first year build­ing financ­ing rela­tion­ships, pro­cure­ment sys­tems, and exe­cu­tion dis­ci­pline. He calls it foun­da­tion over fast money.

This is the same thing I write about in The 4 Forces of Growth. Real growth is sell­ing more while pro­tect­ing the prof­it on every unit you sell. It is not chas­ing top-line rev­enue at any cost. Vol­ume is van­i­ty, prof­it is san­i­ty, and cash is king. Bet­ter isn’t big­ger, and it nev­er was.

The com­mer­cial client flywheel

Here is what foun­da­tion over fast mon­ey actu­al­ly looked like inside Action Solar. Instead of going after the easy res­i­den­tial sales first, Haysam built the com­pa­ny’s ear­ly rep­u­ta­tion with com­mer­cial clients: cus­tomers who are sophis­ti­cat­ed, who set clear mile­stones, and who do not tol­er­ate slop­py delivery.

That one sen­tence describes an entire fly­wheel. Invest in A‑talent and sys­tems first. Deliv­er installs on time and at qual­i­ty. Earn a rep­u­ta­tion as the oper­a­tor peo­ple trust. Only then do you let the growth fuel show up, in the form of bet­ter sales lead­ers, bet­ter financ­ing part­ners, and big­ger contracts.

Most com­pa­nies run that sequence back­ward. They sell first and promise to fix oper­a­tions lat­er, bet­ting rev­enue will paper over what­ev­er is bro­ken under­neath. It works right up until the tail­wind disappears.

When the tail­wind disappears

That is exact­ly what hap­pened in solar. When incen­tives shift­ed and reg­u­la­tions tight­ened, hun­dreds of oper­a­tors who had built their busi­ness­es on vol­ume alone could not sur­vive the tran­si­tion. Action Solar, built on foun­da­tion instead of hype, kept grow­ing, from a mil­lion dol­lars in rev­enue to more than sixty.

I see this pat­tern in near­ly every indus­try I work in. The com­pa­nies that sur­vive the hard years are almost nev­er the ones that grew fastest in the easy ones. They are the ones that did the unglam­orous work while every­one else was busy cash­ing in.

Chal­lenge:

Ver­sion 1: Man­age­ment vs, Mar­ket Growth

Look hon­est­ly at your last twelve months of growth. How much of it came from you and your team dri­ving it (man­age­ment-led growth), and how much came from a mar­ket tail­wind that will not always be there (mar­ket-led growth)? Then brain­storm with your team one or two things you could do now to make sure you dou­ble the busi­ness in the next five years, no mat­ter what the mar­ket does.

Ver­sion 2: Two Columns

Pull your last twelve months of growth apart into two columns. In one, the growth you and your team actu­al­ly drove. In the oth­er, the growth the mar­ket hand­ed you. Be bru­tal about which col­umn is big­ger. Then pick one move you can make this quar­ter that shifts a point of growth out of the mar­ket’s col­umn and into yours.

Read our recent case study with Action Solar here.

Watch the full interview.

Addi­tion­al Resources

Arti­cles

• The Growth Move that Looks Stu­pid on a Spreadsheet
• The Most Under­rat­ed Strat­e­gy Tool: The Stop Doing List
• Mar­ket-Dri­ven vs. Man­age­ment Dri­ven Lead­er­ship: Which One Are You?

Growth CEO Interview

• Inter­view with Push Oper­a­tions CEO, Tina Lum
• Inter­view with Quest Glob­al CEO & Co-Founder, Ajit Prabhu

Growth Case Studies

• Action Solar: Foun­da­tion Over Fast Money
• Push Oper­a­tions: How a Pur­pose-led, Peo­ple-Cen­tered Busi­ness Achieved 5X MRR

Book: The 4 Forces of Growth 

• 4 minute Overview
• 45 Minute Webinar
• Buy on Amazon

Book: Scal­ing Up

• 45 Minute Webinar
• Arti­cle: 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What I’ve Learned About Growth

Book: Your Oxy­gen Mast First

• Assess your­self
• Resilience Webi­nar

Action Solar is a ful­ly inte­grat­ed solar ener­gy plat­form based in Utah, serv­ing res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial, oper­a­tions and main­te­nance, and stor­age clients across the coun­try. What began as a one mil­lion dol­lar install shop has grown into a six­ty mil­lion dol­lar com­pa­ny han­dling the full devel­op­ment stack, from design and financ­ing to instal­la­tion and long term asset man­age­ment. Action Solar has been a Lawrence & Co. client since 2024.

Haysam Sakar is the CEO of Action Solar. Before solar, he spent twen­ty years found­ing and scal­ing busi­ness­es in the auto­mo­tive and finance indus­tries. He is a co-founder of the Res­i­den­tial Solar Asso­ci­a­tion, rec­og­nized by the Solar Ener­gy Indus­tries Asso­ci­a­tion as a crit­i­cal voice in the indus­try, and has led leg­isla­tive advo­ca­cy work in Utah to pro­tect the res­i­den­tial solar mar­ket. He works with Lawrence & Co. advi­sor Kur­tis Osborne, COO of Lawrence & Co., on strat­e­gy and execution.