Hayes Barnard

The Level 5 leader origin trifecta: learning disability, daddy issues, near-death

Hayes Barnard argues many great (Jim Collins 'Level 5') leaders share three formative drivers: a learning disability or being on the spectrum (creating childhood trauma that fuels a hunger for affirmation), severe father issues, and a near-death or career-ending experience that forces sacrifice and refusal to quit.

“And so the reason is for this, if you dig a couple layers lower, is oftentimes they have a learning disability. Many times they're on the spectrum. And so people that have Asperger's or they're on the spectrum, when they're in school, they get made fun of a lot too. This, this turns out this big T trauma where all your friends make fun of you and you don't have a lot of friends and you're an outcast as a young person, wants you to do things later in your life to gain affirmation and get respect, especially if you're a male and you want male affirmation. The second component of that that often you'll see is daddy issues.”

Give up to go up

Hayes Barnard's rule against becoming a control freak: the smartest operators refuse to delegate ('I can do it in 15 minutes vs. an hour to train') and end up trapped doing every task forever. You must 'give up' tasks to 'go up' levels and let the business scale.

“Well, the problem is they keep doing that same task over and over and over for 15 minutes and they never give up to go up and they end up becoming a control freak. And then they wonder why their business isn't going to scale. Because they have to be involved in everything all the time.”

Steal thisStop doing the 15-minute task yourself; spend the hour training someone, even if it's slower today.

$80-90M for a CD: the software margin that blew Hayes's mind

Selling Oracle software at the dawn of the information age, Hayes was stunned that you could sell a product for $80-90 million and all you physically shipped was a CD, which sold him on the economics of software.

“The fact that you could sell Air for $80, $90 million and all you shipped was a CD blew my mind.”

Oracle ran like a pro sports team: bottom 20% cut, top 20% promoted

Hayes describes Larry Ellison's Oracle culture as pure meritocracy: age, school pedigree, and race didn't matter, only numbers. The bottom 20% were cut and the top 20% promoted every year, producing alumni like Benioff, Siebel, and Conway.

“It was very competitive. The bottom 20% got cut, the top 20% got promoted. And you could look around and it didn't matter age, race, you know, anything. It just came down to performance.”

If you can sell software remotely, you can sell anything remotely

Hayes's career-defining breakthrough: realizing that if you can sell complex software virtually over the internet, you can sell any complex product remotely. He applied his Oracle phone-sales playbook to mortgages, which became Paramount and later GoodLeap.

“Once you realize you can sell really complex items like we were selling from a software perspective, you can do it virtually over the internet. You're like, okay, you can sell anything virtually over the internet. It was a huge breakthrough moment for me in my career, and that led to everything else that I did.”

Steal thisTake a sales skill you've proven on a hard product and point it at a complex, high-ticket industry that's still sold in person.

Zeke fired the kid who kept asking 'what's next?' — then made him boss

Hayes's boss Zeke fired him for finishing tasks fast and then asking what to do next every day. After a summer of self-directing his work, Zeke handed him the keys and made him boss over men ten years older, because he stopped needing to be told what to do.

“And he goes, you're the boss of all of them now because you know why? You didn't come in here and ask me what to do. You knew exactly what to do. And that stuck with me for the rest of my life.”

Steal thisStop asking the boss what to do; decide what the boss would want and do it. Think like the boss to become the boss.

The devil doesn't tempt you with spinach

Hayes's ethics test for the subprime era: when every rival was pushing stated-income, no-money-down, reverse-amortization loans, he refused because it 'felt morally wrong.' His line: the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach — the most tempting deals are usually the rotten ones.

“And so that felt really, really wrong to me. Like, morally, I was like, I was saying, the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach.”

The valley is the value

Hayes argues that the moment your soul is getting crushed and competitors are dying off one by one is precisely when your company creates its real value — even though the stock price or board deck won't show it. 99% of people quit in that valley; surviving it captures market share and forges a stronger operator.

“And so the key in those moments when you're getting your soul crushed is to find a way to get through it, to find a way to not quit and make sure the team stays together and not quit because the valley is the value. And no one realizes that when all your competition dies, and they, they're going out of business one after another because of maybe a bad decision, or maybe they lost the team because people weren't inspired anymore, or maybe it just got too hard and people were fed up with it. That is the moment where your company is actually creating value.”

The 5 pillars of success: don't trade the other 4 for money

Hayes's advice to his 27-year-old self: financial success is only one of five pillars. The other four — time, mental health, physical health, and friendship/community — are the ones workaholics sacrifice while chasing money to prove they're 'enough.'

“I need you to think about time success, and I need you to think about mental health success, and I need you to think about physical health success. And I want you to think about friendship and community success, because I'm afraid that you're gonna sacrifice those other 4 pillars of success for one, right? Which is financial success.”

Steal thisScore yourself on five pillars — financial, time, mental, physical, friendship — not just net worth.

SolarCity had 40% US solar market share

After Hayes rolled Paramount Solar into SolarCity, he says they were by far the biggest solar company in the country with 40% market share across the entire United States, while building the largest solar-panel manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere.

“We had 40% market share in the entire United United States.”

Blue Ocean: turn your biggest competitor into your biggest partner

Hayes's GoodLeap insight from Blue Ocean Strategy: instead of red-ocean 'beat your competitor' testosterone, build the picks-and-shovels B2B marketplace that lets every installer, manufacturer, and sales pro win. Enabling the whole ecosystem creates a scaling flywheel.

“Red Ocean would be like, okay, let's imagine, you know, I are both gold miners and we're out there, you know, panning for gold. Blue Ocean is like, I want to be the guy that sells the picks and shovels to everybody. Right. And so the mindset was, if I can enable the entire ecosystem from all the panel manufacturers to all the battery manufacturers to all the different installers in the marketplace, to all the sales professionals in the marketplace, and empower them with a B2B marketplace and platform that allows them to have access to capital, access to each other”

Steal thisInstead of fighting rivals, build the marketplace/platform that lets all of them win and take a cut.

Clean drinking water for a penny a day per person

Hayes's GivePower water model: solar-powered desalination delivers healthy drinking water for one person for one cent per day, with water sold locally at half a cent to fund operations. One system produces 75,000 liters of water daily.

“For 1 cent, you can provide healthy, affordable drinking water for 1 person for a day. It's a penny a day, man. And we maintain these systems for basically, we sell the water in the areas for half of a cent.”