How Ninety.io CEO Mark Abbott grew Ninety.io to $30M revenue and 13.3K customers in 2024.

well I I don't want to bury the lead but I I rarely see someone take advantage of a movement and build it into a $30 million Revenue software company as quick as you did so guys buckle up Mark take it away to aw awesome thank you all right so good afternoon I'm curious how many of you are founders Andor CEOs all right I'm curious during your journey as a Founder Andor a CEO um how many of of you have actually kind of hated the journey for at least a little bit if you raise your hands all right you're my audience thank you all right so over the next 20 minutes or so I'm going to talk about um our growth because you know Nathan always likes to hear people talk about their numbers um and then I'm going to talk about our business and how we help people do something which I'll talk about in a second and then how we've also gone about getting our customers which he also talked about a little bit so our growth but then I'm going to go a little bit different um than most of the other speakers I'm going to talk about where the world is and where it's going because if you're a CEO or a Founder you need to be aware of all this and you need to play into it right we want to ride the wave not fight the wave so I'm going to talk a little bit about where the world of work is going and then finally I'm going to talk about how we're leveraging AI to help our clients ride the wave all right so that's the next 20 minutes so a little bit background on me I started my career back in the 80s all right so I'm an old dude and um I started with a big bank and they sent me down to Oklahoma City to work out bad oil and gas loans so really early in my career I found out what happens when a company goes under and how it hurts lots of people not just the investors but the employees the community um and uh and and and and even their their vendors and their customers so it's not a good thing so I did really well at that and I got to go anywhere I wanted to go in the bank and I helped start a leverage buyout Finance business started sitting on a bunch of boards and I became fascinated with the Art and Science of building companies uh helped build a company um and a platform that was pretty uh successful helped take company public to this day the company's over 5050 billion pretty well known in space and part of my journey was I love data and collecting data and understanding why things are the way they are um this takes us to the next thing because I like understanding things and why the way they are I um I ended up being on a bunch of boards and um I actually got frustrated as a board member because I thought building a company is not this hard it's not that complicated I should say it's hard but it's not complicated and so so I got frustrated I thought I should be able to help people with this thing and that's really the big idea behind 90 which is that we're going to give people everything they need to build a company that ultimately you'll love forever because for a lot of us there are a lot of times when we don't love our companies so what's 90 we're an Innovative cloud-based platform that simplifies the hard work of building extraordinary productive and human and resilient organization where people are focused aligned and thriving now you'll see up there we've got great place to work certification we came in at 98% this year um I was afraid of our certification because we do it every single year and honestly I was afraid of it because we just did one of those transitions that you will do as you as you navigate the stages of development of a company we went from having a about 10 different departments reporting to me to me hiring a SE Suite over all those department leaders and that's not an easy thing for people to experience right and so I thought for sure my numbers were going to go down our numbers were going to go down this year and they actually went up and we made it um on a number of Fortunes uh best places to work uh list this year and so we've been able to sort of walk the talk if you will so I'm proud of the team proud of our organization all right so what do we do we basically just help people Master the fundamentals as I mentioned earlier and we do this by helping a master what we call the nine core competencies I won't get into all this but right you need to have the vision stuff you need to have the customers obviously you need to have the goals there's about nine things that you need to be great at and when you're really really strong at these things scaling starting building scaling and running your organization just because so much easier all right how do we do this we have a bunch of tools these are the tools that everybody in the company should be using everybody should be in meetings everybody should be having quarterly conversations everybody should have kpis every team should have scorecards right everybody should be hopefully helping the company move 90 days forward right all hitting about 90% of what they want to do so those are the goals and we help people communicate share ideas and come together we give assessments and so really everything that the everyone in the company is using we want them to all be using the same tools so they're on the same page so that's what our platform does what we do is we help people think about whether or not they really want to become masters of being being great company Builders so first thing is in our process is just assess whether you want to build a great company you know I'm not a magician if you don't want it I can't help you get it but if you really do want to try to build a great company we can help you figure that thing out once you to decide you really want to build a great company next thing you need to do is get everybody and your senior leadership team to agree and then to commit to the journey and then the first thing is to focus make sure you guys are all on the same page in terms of what your you're trying to build then the next thing is to make sure everybody else in the company is aligned around where you want to take the company and then ultimately where you want to get it to is where everybody in the company genuinely loves being there one of the speakers talked about it earlier you want to be surrounded by people who genuinely care about one another and want to work together and want to make the company better and better and stronger because they understand that together you can build something extraordinary so that's what we help people do all right so from a revenue perspective we've started the company re first revenues were 2017 um we grew you know like a lot of smaller businesses 100% 100% 100% plus um last year we were 85% this year we're not going to quite hit 85% but we're going to still perform pretty darn well and I know Nathan's probably GNA ask me a question about that later on so let's jump into work now so the ages of work so we're going to talk about the ages of work I'm going to talk about the future of work in learning and I'm going to talk about what I like to call useful intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence so I've got a book coming out called work 9.0 and it talks about the Seven Ages of work we've been through the eighth age that we're going through right now and my optimistic perspective on the ninth age of work so the seventh age of work was the age of information you're all aware of that right part of the age of information was we became overwhelmed we didn't know what information to believe in what not to believe in we were talking a bit earlier someone was talking about a bit earlier about the um Jen gen Z wanting to understand things well we all want to understand things a lot better than than we have been right we want to understand what's real what's not real this is why I talk about useful information so I deeply believe that Co started this transition and that chat GPT has accelerated it and by the way big transitions like this do not happen without a lot of turmoil transitions like this threaten the status quo there's status quo all over the place all over the world and if you think about some of the anxiety and some of the stuff that's going on that's what we're going through right now there is a major transformation taking place in the world right now and um we need to As Leaders we need to be able to confidently walk our way through and take our organizations through this major transformation so I think it's really important to understand what's going on and that's why I've spent the last four years writing this book that hopefully will be out the very beginning of next year so Trends future of learning lifelong learning all right skill-based credentials decentralization of knowledge letting people move at their Pace these are the future of learning the future of work is proliferation of data it's teaming right and it's developing soft skills especially for leaders we need to be able to meet people where they are the status quo is not enough one of the things someone else was talking about is you know I've written a ton of stuff probably if you go to our website there's a we have a section called 90u I probably have thousands of pages that I've written on how to start an organization how to scale your organization understanding where you are developmentally um how to give hard how to have hard conversations all this...