Jason Lakes: When God Calls You "Beyond Success"

The Map You Don't Get to See

Most leaders want a clear roadmap — a straight line from where they are to where they're going. Jason Lakes will tell you that's not how it works. "My journey has not been a straight path for sure," he says with a laugh. "It's been a bit of a windy road, and some of the things only make sense when you look backwards."

That kind of hard-won perspective doesn't come from a business school seminar. For Lakes, it came over a decade of grinding it out on his own terms, a pivotal moment in one of the poorest corners of the Western Hemisphere, and a willingness to keep saying yes when God kept interrupting his plans.

Today, Lakes is one of the leaders of White Hat, a commercial roofing and restoration company that works with large real estate investment groups to extend the life of their buildings. But the company's tagline — "We restore lives, we restore roofs, and we restore the world" — tells you right away that this is not a typical construction outfit.

Faith Came Later

Jason Lakes didn't grow up where faith was a central part of everyday life. During his first twenty years, church and a relationship with God simply weren't significant influences. That began to change in college, where he met his future wife and, through pre-marital counseling with her pastor, started asking serious questions about God for the first time.

"In my early 20s I was baptized and gave my life to the Lord," he recalls. "I knew it was important for me to live that life and I wanted that — I wanted that relationship with the Lord." But by his own admission, the early years looked more like intellectual consumption than genuine transformation. He describes himself as "a consumer of content versus someone actually living the life Jesus had called me to."

For nearly a decade, he moved through different roles and companies, learning as he went but still operating mostly from self-reliance. "It was me grinding it out and me trying to move myself forward versus living in God's design and his plans for me." He was searching for something — a company, a culture, a community — where faith and work weren't kept in separate boxes. He found it when he joined Threefold, the parent holding company where he would spend the next fifteen years.

A Single Day That Changed Everything

The real turning point came in 2013 during a company rewards trip to the Dominican Republic. Lakes, characteristically curious, asked a simple question: what would it look like to spend a day serving in the community? The answer led him and his wife into the sugarcane villages where an organization called Freedom International was building schools.

What he saw stopped him cold.

"I saw poverty at a level I'd never seen before," he says. "In the moment I was brought to extreme sadness — these people have so little." But the sadness gave way to something far more convicting. The people he met — people with almost nothing by any material measure — radiated more faith, more joy, and more love than he had encountered almost anywhere else.

"I've got so many things, but I have so little dependency on the Lord. These folks have so few things and such a high dependency on just how they're going to make it to the next day."

That contrast became the hinge on which his entire leadership philosophy would turn. He came home a different man — not because of what he gave, but because of what he received. "The only difference between me and that family living in the sugarcane village was where they were born and what family they were born into." Gratitude replaced entitlement. Generosity began to crowd out self-preservation. And the wall between his Sunday self and his Monday-through-Friday self started to come down.

One Life, Not Three

Lakes is direct about what that integration looks like in practice. "I try to take the three bubbles of my personal life, my faith life, and my work life, and I just try to mash them as close together as I can to make it one life — not three different lives." For him, that's not an aspirational slogan. It's the operating principle behind every significant decision he makes.

Nowhere was that more evident than when he was asked to leave a thriving role — one where he was earning more than he ever had and leading a team he had helped build — to help lead at White Hat, a brand-new business still finding its footing. Every rational metric said stay. "Everything in the world would say, you've got a lot of security, you've got a lot going for you." His initial answer was no.

But through prayer and the counsel of trusted peers, he heard something louder than his own comfort. He took the leap.

"God, if this is where you're calling me — to take what I've learned over the last eight years and expand it into a new business, a new group of people, a new environment — then I'm in."

That leap became the foundation of White Hat's unique model. For every commercial roof the company restores, they invite customers and partners to join them on international service trips where they build homes for families in need. The company fully funds these experiences — partners only pay for their flight. "We feel every family has the right to a roof," Lakes says simply.

Stewardship Over Ownership

When the conversation turns to money and business success, Lakes doesn't flinch — but he reframes the question entirely. "I believe it's all God's. None of it's mine. He just entrusted it to me, and it's my responsibility to steward it."

He distinguishes sharply between ownership and stewardship. Ownership is about accumulation and possession. Stewardship is the harder posture — holding things loosely, knowing they could be gone, and asking how to use them most faithfully. For White Hat, that means tying a percentage of profits directly to home builds and service experiences around the world.

"The more generous I've been in my life," he says, "the more he has abundantly blessed me in ways I never thought possible." That's not a prosperity gospel talking point — it's a man reporting what he's actually lived.

The Community That Kept Him Accountable

Lakes is candid that none of this happened in isolation. For fifteen years, he has been part of peer roundtable groups — including Kingdom Factor — where leaders gather not to perform but to be real. "We're very isolated, we're very much on an island," he acknowledges. "There's this perception that we all try to keep."

Kingdom Factor, he says, has been a place of both challenge and encouragement. The group wrestled with him over emerging issues — from cryptocurrency to artificial intelligence — always asking the deeper question: how do we see this through a biblical lens? And when he brought his newest idea to the table, they didn't just applaud it. Some pushed back hard.

"Not all thought it was a great idea. Some of them challenged me in good ways — made me think about things in a different way. That's what that group does for me."

He offers a word for anyone considering a group like this: come ready to give, not just to receive. Come willing to be vulnerable, not just visible. "The more open and real you can be as leaders, the more you get out of it. If you walk in asking only what you can get, you've already missed the point."

Beyond Success: A New Call

Earlier this year, Lakes and his wife launched something new — a faith-centered leadership venture called Beyond Success. It's rooted in three questions he believes quietly haunt most high-achieving leaders: Is this all there is? Has my career become my identity? And am I building my kingdom or God's Kingdom?

The program is a twelve-month formational journey for a cohort of twelve leaders, meeting regularly throughout the year and anchored by an international service experience designed to disrupt comfortable assumptions and recenter participants on what actually matters.

"I've tried not to do this because everything in me says I've got too many other things going on. And God keeps coming back to this — it's what he's calling me to do."

But Beyond Success isn't designed to manufacture mountaintop moments. Lakes has taken hundreds of people on service experiences over the years and watched nearly all of them come back transformed — and then life happens and many drift back to old patterns. This program is built to close that gap: to take what happens in those disruptive moments and embed it into everyday leadership, business, family, and community.

The first cohort launches in November 2026. You can learn more or reach out directly at www.beyond-success.org. Lakes asks only that you come with patience — he's building the plane while flying it, trusting that God will fill in what he doesn't yet know.

The Question That Changes Everything

Jason Lakes didn't find clarity by having a perfect plan. He found it by staying available — to hard questions, to uncomfortable moments in sugarcane villages, to God's persistent redirection away from comfort and toward purpose.

His story is an invitation to stop compartmentalizing faith and work, to loosen the grip on what we think we own, and to ask honestly: am I building something that will last beyond me, or something that is simply about me?

Those aren't easy questions. But they're the right ones. And for leaders willing to sit with them long enough, the answers have a way of changing everything.