Your company's value is capped at the level its CEO is comfortable running.

I take the cap off. I find the constraint across your marketing, sales, operations and finance, remove it, and build the systems and AI that let the company scale without depending on any one person, including you.

Find your constraint →

Navy nuclear QA · 12 years inside thousands of companies at Munich Re's HSB · PE acquisition and diligence · Author, All Hands on Deck

Hiring a CEO is a gamble. It's a six-figure bet with no skin in the game.

Contractors create chaos. Every agency and advisor has a theory, and none of them reads the whole business.

So the company stays where it's comfortable. And its value stays there too.

The method

A company is a four-sided scale: marketing, sales, operations and finance. When one side outweighs the others, growth stalls or breaks something. I read all four through your own data, find the one constraint holding the system back, remove it, and move to the next, before it breaks something else.

  1. 1Connect the data
  2. 2Find the constraint
  3. 3Prove it
  4. 4Remove it
  5. 5Run the risk pass

Revenue: the right customers, through the right door, converted and kept.

Margin: AI and systems instead of headcount, and fewer vendors.

Multiple: a company that runs without its owner, with numbers a buyer trusts.

Private equity and family offices with operating companies, owners of $5M+ companies ready to step back, and enterprise teams that need to grow without growing headcount.

AI-generated portrait of Jeff Barnes in a black coat in a snowy doorway

About

I grew up watching a bad partner destroy my father's business. We lost the house, and I swore I'd never own a business. The Navy made me a nuclear-trained mechanic, a diver and a submarine QA officer, the one who inspected the escape trunk at test depth so the boat wouldn't sink. From 2006 to 2018 I was at Munich Re's HSB, inside the operations of thousands of companies: inspecting them, insuring them, and doing diligence on the ones Munich Re backed. Since then I've built and run my own companies, run acquisitions for a private equity firm, and moved most of the work I used to need people for onto AI. I wrote the method down in All Hands on Deck.

It starts with a paid diagnostic of the whole business. If there's real value to unlock, I stay on as an operating partner: a retainer plus a share of the value we create. I take on a limited number of partnerships each year.

Speaking

Jeff Barnes speaking on stage at The MoneyShow
MoneyShow
Jeff Barnes with participants on stage at the FreedomFest 2019 Pitch Tank in Las Vegas
FreedomFest 2019
  • The Constraint Moves: What a Coffee Shop Teaches About Scaling

    Keynote: CEOs, owners, PE

  • AI Instead of Headcount

    AI, operators, enterprise

  • Run It Like a Submarine

    Leadership, operations

  • What the Buyer Will See

    PE, family office, M&A

  • Your Backup Plan Is Broken

    Risk, operations, insurance

Keynote (30 to 45 min), fireside chat, panel, half-day workshop.

All Hands on Deck by Jeff Barnes, book

All Hands on Deck (2018)

International bestseller.

The Ultimate Guide to Self Directed Investing & Retirement Planning by Jeff Barnes, book

The Ultimate Guide to Self-Directed Investing

International bestseller.