Jason Barnaby — The Golden Spreadsheet in the Locked Drawer

What does it actually cost a company when the CEO keeps running sales long after they should have let go?

Jason Barnaby runs Fire Starters Inc., and companies pay him to do the job their founder is already doing badly — running sales. A fractional sales leader, Enneagram-certified coach, and storytelling sales trainer, Jason has worked with teams ranging from 50-person shops to 100,000-person enterprises. Before all of it he was a college professor, a corporate sales leader, a ski bum in Colorado, and the owner of a coffee shop in Poland. He hosts The Sales Spark Podcast and has strong opinions — and, as he puts it, the older he gets the less he cares who agrees with them.

In this conversation, Jason walks through the “toy box” handoff founders give a new sales leader, the golden spreadsheet locked in a drawer that only one person has the key to, the $20M pipeline he audited that was really closer to $10M (with half the deals already past their close date), why hiring one sales-enablement person can lift sales in a single quarter, how the Enneagram exposes what your best rep does when they go quiet under stress, and the caveman logic of paying a salesperson more than the CEO — “what they kill, we eat.” It closes on an unusually honest exchange about depression, psychological safety, and why the people who look most “on” are often the loneliest in the building.

Content note: the final act of this episode (from ~36:00) is a candid discussion of depression and mental health in sales.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open — “if you don’t like my opinions, keep scrolling”
01:33 Founder-led sales: the two sides of the business, and when it gets sticky
03:50 Why a fractional leader in 8–12 hours beats a founder’s 40
05:00 “You’re my VP of sales” — the client who did it right
06:40 Giving busy executives a week of their life back every month
08:16 The breaking points: access to leadership and the “toy box” handoff
10:54 Who owns what? Mapping the internal process
11:55 One approver for every quote, $500 to $500,000 — the bottleneck
12:20 The invisible buyer process: why “yes” doesn’t mean three weeks
14:17 Territoriality and the golden spreadsheet in the locked drawer
15:40 When collaboration breaks down — binders are where information goes to die
16:30 The 15-minute room: agree on the three things, then let go
18:16 Hire one sales-enablement pro, own the data, watch sales rise
20:00 The $20M pipeline that was really $10M — closed dates in the past
22:27 Stages vs. gates: “you’re not in negotiations until you’re redlining”
23:20 The Enneagram: core drivers and how people behave under stress
25:05 The micromanaging story — three weeks of a teammate thinking “does Jason not like me?”
27:30 When your best rep goes dark, pick up the phone
30:04 Compensation as a coordination tool — and job-shadowing every role
32:18 The birthdays missed, and “throwing the grenade over the fence”
33:23 “I’m okay with my salesperson out-earning me” — what they kill, we eat
35:57 The human layer: depression, meds, and dropping the mask
40:00 Psychological safety and the “me too” moment in the room
43:13 Closing advice: run a time audit — if you’re not doing monthly 1:1s, the smoke is already there