The Who Problem Every Growth CEO Eventually Hits

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (3:05)

About a year and a half into build­ing Action Solar, Haysam Sakar hit a wall that every growth stage CEO even­tu­al­ly hits.

“We were burn­ing out every day,” he told me. ​“Every­body was maxed out, and the capa­bil­i­ty of cer­tain peo­ple was­n’t fit­ting the posi­tions they were in.”

In the ear­ly days of any busi­ness, the founder’s ener­gy cov­ers a lot of gaps. You dri­ve hard, you make the calls fast, and you car­ry the weight per­son­al­ly. It works. Until it doesn’t.

That line stuck with me, because it is the exact moment I watch CEOs either grow into their next stage or get stuck repeat­ing the same year over and over. Jim Collins calls it first who, then what, and Haysam brought it up him­self. ​“It’s first who, then what,” he said. ​“Not the oth­er way around, because when you have the right who, they can fig­ure out the what.”

Haysam is hon­est about the mis­takes it took him to get there. Wait­ing too long to upgrade tal­ent. Con­fus­ing loy­al­ty with fit. Hop­ing peo­ple would grow into roles that were too big for them. Hir­ing for com­fort instead of capability.

“You don’t real­ize it until you see the effect on your met­rics and your num­bers,” he said.

He calls the hard­est part of this the loy­al­ty lia­bil­i­ty. ​“We become loy­al to good peo­ple,” he explained. ​“But when a com­pa­ny grows the way ours has, not every­body makes it.” That is not cold. It is hon­est, and hon­esty is what pro­tects the peo­ple who are actu­al­ly in the right seat.

What Haysam built next is the part most CEOs skip. Work­ing with our team at Lawrence & Co., he put a struc­tured tal­ent review process in place across the entire com­pa­ny. Every per­son gets eval­u­at­ed against core val­ues and per­for­mance. Every review answers the same ques­tion: is this per­son in the right seat, and if not, do they need to be coached up, moved, or coached out.

“This is the process your firm intro­duced us,” Haysam said. ​“It was up in the cloud for us where we could try to match two or three things at the same time, but now it’s methodical.”

The unex­pect­ed pay­off was not just clear­er per­for­mance con­ver­sa­tions. It was bet­ter hir­ing. Once the lead­er­ship team knew exact­ly what they were eval­u­at­ing peo­ple against, they got dra­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter at screen­ing for those same qual­i­ties before some­one ever joined the com­pa­ny. Hire qual­i­ty went from unpre­dictable to con­sis­tent­ly above sev­en­ty per­cent successful.

This is what I mean when I say peo­ple are not a soft top­ic. They are the mech­a­nism that either lets a busi­ness scale or caps it at what­ev­er one exhaust­ed founder can per­son­al­ly drive.

CHAL­LENGE

Pick one per­son on your team you have been hop­ing will grow into a role that is big­ger than they are. Have the hon­est con­ver­sa­tion this week, not the one where you wait for the met­rics to force your hand.

Read our recent case study with Action Solar here.

Watch the full interview:

Addi­tion­al Resources

Arti­cles

• Foun­da­tion Over Fast Money
• The Pond Hock­ey Prob­lem: Why Your Team Might Be Your Biggest Growth Blocker
• Build­ing a Team of A‑Players

Growth CEO Interview

• Top­grad­ing Webi­nar with Chris Mursau
• Inter­view with Bund­aberg Brewed Drinks CEO, John McLean

Growth Case Studies

• Action Solar: Foun­da­tion Over Fast Money
• The Lit­tle Pota­to Com­pa­ny: Lessons from a Nat­ur­al Entrepreneur

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.