How Ninety.io Reached $30M Revenue and 13,300 Customers by Riding the EOS Movement (Interview with Founder & CEO Mark Abbott)

Host Introduction and Revenue Teaser

Nathan Latka

00:00Well, I I don't wanna bury the lead, but I I rarely see someone take advantage of a movement and build into a $30,000,000 revenue software company as quick as you did. So, guys, buckle up. Mark, take it away.

Mark Abbott Opens to the Audience

Mark Abbott

00:10>> Awesome. Thank you. Alright. So good afternoon. I'm curious. How many of you are founders and or CEOs? Alright. I'm curious, during your journey as a founder and or a CEO,

00:29>> how many of you have actually kind of hated the journey for at least a little bit? If you raise your hands.

Overview of the Next Twenty Minutes

Mark Abbott

00:40>> Alright. You're my audience. Thank you. Alright. So over the next twenty minutes or so, I'm gonna talk about, our growth because, you know, Nathan always likes to hear people talk about their numbers. And then I'm gonna 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

01:08>> gonna go a little bit different, than most of the other speakers. I'm gonna 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 in to it. Right? We want to ride the wave, not fight the wave. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about where the world of work is going. And then finally, I'm gonna talk

01:30>> about how we're leveraging AI to help our clients ride the wave. Alright. So that's the next twenty minutes. So a little bit background on me. I started my career back in the eighties. Alright. So I'm an old dude, and 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

Mark's Background and Career Origins

Mark Abbott

01:57>> how it hurts lots of people, not just the investors, but the employees, the community, 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 leveraged buyout finance business. Started sitting on a bunch of boards, and I became fascinated with the art and science of building companies. Helped

02:22>> build a company and a platform that was pretty successful. Helped take company public to this day, the company is over 50,000,000,000, pretty well known in space. And part of my journey was I loved data and collecting data and understanding why things are the way they are. This takes us to the next thing because I like understanding things and why the way they are. I ended up being on a bunch of boards. And I actually got frustrated

02:48>> as a board member because I thought building a company is not this hard.

What Ninety.io Does and Its Mission

Mark Abbott

02:55>> Not that complicated, I should say. It's hard, but it's not complicated. So I got frustrated, I thought I should be able to help people with this thing. That's really the big idea behind Ninety, 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 Ninety? We're an innovative cloud

03:20>> based platform that simplifies the hard work of building extraordinary productive, humane, and resilient organization where people are focused, aligned, thriving. Now you'll see up there we've got Great Place to Work certification. We came in at 98% this year. 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

03:48>> development of a company. We went from having about 10 different departments reporting to me, to me hiring a c 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 are gonna go down. Our numbers are gonna go down this year, and they actually went up. And we made it on a number of fortunes, best places to work list this year. And so

04:13>> we've been able to sort of walk the talk, if you will. So I'm proud of the team, proud of our organization. Alright. So what do we do? We basically just help people master the fundamentals as I mentioned earlier. And we do this by helping them 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

04:36>> 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 becomes so much easier.

04:48>> Alright. 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 ninety days forward. Right? All hitting about 90% of what they wanna do. So those are the goals. And we help people communicate, ideas, and come together.

The Nine Core Competencies and Platform Tools

Mark Abbott

05:15>> 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 all 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 wanna become masters of being being great company builders. So first thing is in our process is just assess whether you wanna build a great company. You know,

05:39>> I'm not a magician. If you don't want it, I can't help you get it. But if you really do wanna try to build a great company, we can help you figure that thing out. Once you decide you really wanna build a great company, next thing you need to do is get everybody in 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

05:57>> are all on the same page in terms of what you're trying to build. Then the next thing is to make sure everybody else in the company is aligned around where you're going to take the company. And then ultimately, what you're gonna get it to is where everybody in the company genuinely loves being there. One of the speakers talked about it earlier. You wanna be surrounded by people who genuinely care about one another and wanna work together

Revenue Growth History and Numbers

Mark Abbott

06:18>> and wanna 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. Alright. So from a revenue perspective, we've started the company. Rev first revenues were 2,017. We grew, you know, like a lot of smaller businesses, a 100%, a 100%, a 100% plus. Last year, we're 85%. This year, we're not gonna quite hit 85%, but we're gonna still perform pretty darn well. And

06:47>> I know Nathan's probably gonna ask me question about that later on. So let's jump into work now. So the ages of work. So we're gonna talk about the ages of work. I'm gonna talk about the future of work and learning, and I'm gonna talk about what I like to call useful intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence. So I've got a book coming out called work9.o, and it talks about the seven ages of work we've been through,

The Ages of Work and the Future of Learning

Mark Abbott

07:12>> 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 or someone was talking about a bit earlier about the gen z wanting to understand

07:40>> things. Well, we all wanna understand things a lot better than than we have been. Right? We wanna understand what's real, what's not real. This is why I talk about useful information. So I deeply believe that COVID started this transition and that ChatGPT 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

08:07>> 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's a major transformation taking place in the world right now. And 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

08:29>> years writing this book that hopefully will be out the very beginning of next year.

08:35>> So trends, future of learning, lifelong learning. Alright. 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.

08:59>> 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 90 u. 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, how to give hard how to have hard conversations, all this different stuff. Right? And

09:24>> we give it away for free because I believe information wants to be free. We try to protect it sometimes, but the reality is it deaf it desperately wants to be free. And so every team member should have information that they that we can give them and make it digestible, and all this results in a workplace where people feel like they matter and they're being appreciated and they're trusting and we're trusting them with their information. Alright. I

09:50>> mentioned earlier, I believe what it's all about is that is useful information, not artificial intelligence, useful intelligence.

How Ninety.io Uses AI for Org Charts and KPIs

Mark Abbott

10:00>> Alright. So how are we helping companies navigate this new era that we're going into with AI as an example? Well, let's just say you've come to 90 and you are in a certain industry, a certain stage of development, and at a and have a certain number of people. Well, within plus or minus a year from now, you can give us that information, and we will immediately give you what a likely organizational chart will look like for

10:29>> you. Not only that, we'll give you the KPIs, not just for your company, but for every single seat. Right? So this is an example of us leveraging artificial intelligence to help you navigate your stages of development. First stage is just figuring out survival. Second stage is getting things up and running and moving. Right? You've proven product market fit. Third stage is starting to scale the organization. Fourth stage is you're succeeding. This is predictable. It's consistent. And

10:58>> then the fifth stage is you've gotten to the business to a place where you actually don't need to be there anymore. That's scary for some people, but the reality is we need to get our companies to stewardship stage. This is a place where we could gladly hand it to the next generation of leaders, or we could sell it to someone who we would genuinely be happy selling it to. Ultimately, we want to have that something that

11:19>> we we deeply feel good about because wouldn't it be great to love your companies forever even after you've sold them?

The AI MentorBot Maz

Mark Abbott

11:27>> Alright. So now talking about the humans in the company. Right? How are we gonna use AI there? We're building out a MentorBot. I've been working on him for a year and a half now. His its name's Maz. I struggle sometimes with the gender thing, but its name's Maz, and ultimately it's gonna meet every one of our employees where they are. It's gonna help them understand themselves. It's gonna help them understand others. It's gonna help them interact

11:52>> with their teammates. It's gonna help them collaborate and make decisions taking into consideration the unique characteristics of the individuals. So as an example, if I'm a high fact finder and someone's a low fact finder, it'll help us meet in the middle in terms of sharing information. Helping introverts understand extroverts. Extroverts like to think and process out loud. Introverts want to have time and wait and be able to think about something. Introverts want to have a be

12:18>> able to go home at night and think about it and then come back. So really helping people to better understand one another so that ultimately we can reduce the level of friction associated with doing work and just loving working together. Alright. So that's the big idea around some of the ways we're helping we're incorporating AI into our platform is to help people understand where they are, what's important, what to focus on, using assessments to help everybody

12:44>> in the organization understand what's not working and what's not working, so so they can prioritize properly, and so they can also decide on what they're not going to worry about. Maybe it's for another quarter, maybe it's for another year, etc. But there's a I'm super excited about the things that I see us being able to do for our clients, and and

13:06>> I'm extraordinarily optimistic about how AI AI is gonna help all of us build companies that will ultimately love forever. And that's all of my prepared remarks. Any questions?

Nathan Latka

13:22Here. Hit my mic. Yeah. Mark, I'll fire a question, not you. It about revenue. Won't How did you identify? Because you built this around traction. A lot of people have problems identifying movements to build around it. We saw with Chili Piper. They tried to build a movement around meeting automation. It didn't work. You successfully built a movement, real revenue growth around a movement. How did you align that? Is Gino in on this? Does he have equity

Q and A Begins: Building Around the EOS Movement

Nathan Latka

13:42in the business?

Mark Abbott

13:43>> Yeah. No no equity in the business. So it goes back all the way to 2000 and so I the idea for '90 actually started before I ever heard about traction. So it goes back to 2005, and I was gonna write my own book called Connecting the Dots and then create the software. And then I actually invested in the company that started to run on '90. I personally invested in it. And so I read the Traction book.

14:07>> I was like, that's better book than I was gonna write, cause he's really good at simplifying things. And the second thing is I wasn't planning on starting a coaching community, and Gino was building this coaching community. Today, as you may or may not know, there are over 800 e o s actually, 828 as of last week, eos coaches around the world. That wasn't the thing I was thinking about doing. So when I heard about traction, I

14:31>> read the book, then I met Gino, and I said, hey. Right? I was gonna do something similar. I wasn't gonna do the coaching community thing. I really wanted to do the software thing, And could I possibly join the community and and and build the software? And his answer was we tried it. It's not in our DNA, and the rest is history.

Nathan Latka

14:50It's not in our DNA. So I guess I'm a part of thing I try and do pull out from all these speakers like nuggets you can take. So like one of the patterns we see from 3,000 interviews and having diligent hundreds of data rooms at Founder Path do these debt deals is starting as an agency is a hack. It's it's totally a hack. The most successful software companies we see that are most unwritable bankable, they usually

15:08launch an agency. Another way is they get on on a movement. So if you can go find a coaching program with hundreds of coaches but no engineering DNA, that is a prime target for you to go build software for that community. It already exists. Then go build an economic relationship with the leader of that consulting firm or coaching company, and then boom, you have a software command that's growing very quickly. So you've done this very well.

Mark Abbott

15:28>> Yeah. And then the other thing is we now have a strategic partnership with Vistage. There's a group called Exit Planning Institute that has over 5,000 coaches that we have

Nathan Latka

15:36a What kickback do you pay them? Beg your pardon? What kickback do you pay

Mark Abbott

15:40>> them? We're just sponsors for Vistage, so we don't kick them anything. No revenue share? No revenue share. K. And with regard to EPI, we do have a revenue share.

Nathan Latka

15:50Okay. Can you share that or no? You're smiling

Mark Abbott

15:52>> I'm smiling. It's it's it's between 1020%. I'm not exactly

15:57Okay.

15:57>> I don't have What's the average

15:58>> customer pay for 90 per year?

Nathan Latka

15:59The average customer pay for

Mark Abbott

16:01>> 90 per year? About $2,500.

Nathan Latka

16:05Okay. 2,500. So let's just make the math easy. If someone if they bring if if EIR brings you a company that pays you 2,000 per year, you'll kick them back something on the order of 200 to $400 per year as long as the customer stays active.

Mark Abbott

16:16>> Yeah. And I should have mentioned earlier, you know, we have 13,300 companies now running running on '90 and, you know, several 100,000 people in those companies.

Nathan Latka

16:27Well, we're excited about the movement you're building. Thanks for showing the revenue graph, your future of AI. Congratulations on getting the book done, and good luck on the launch. Guys, give it up for Mark Abbott from Ninety. Thank you. Mark, thank you. That was great. Thank you.