They make $30m per year selling software to the EOS community, Ninety CEO

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Well, I don't want to bury the lead, but 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.

Awesome. Thank you. All right. So good afternoon. I'm curious, how many of you are founders and/or CEOs? All right. I'm curious, during your journey as a founder and/or a CEO, how many 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 our growth, because Nathan always likes to hear people talk about their numbers.

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 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, alright, so that's the next 20 minutes.

So a little bit of background on me, I started my career back in the 80s. 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 how it hurts lots of people, not just the investors, but the employees, the community, and even 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 build a company and a platform that was pretty successful, helped take company public, to this day the company is over 50 billion, pretty well-known in its 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 loved understanding things and why they are, I ended up being on a bunch of boards and 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 I got frustrated and 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 extraordinarily productive and humane 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. 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 navigate the stages of 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 were going to go down, our numbers were going to go down this year, and they actually went up. And we made it on a number of Fortune's Best Places to Work 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 them master what we call the nine core competencies.

I won't get into all this, but 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 becomes 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 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 want to become masters of being great company builders. So first thing is, in our process, is to 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've decided you really want to build a great company, the 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 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 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 started the company, first revenues were 2017. We grew, you know, like a lot of smaller businesses, 100%, 100%, 100% plus. 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 going to 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 and learning. 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 Gen Z wanting to understand things. Well, we all want to understand things a lot better 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 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 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 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 at 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, how to give

hard, how to have hard conversations, all this different stuff, right? And 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 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. All right, I mentioned earlier, I believe what it's all about is useful information, not artificial intelligence, useful intelligence.

All right, 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, at a certain stage of development, 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 you. Not only that, we'll give you the KPIs, not just for your company, but for every single seat. All 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 then the fifth stage is you've gotten to the business to the 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 the 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 we deeply feel good about, because wouldn't it be great to love your companies forever even after you've sold them?

All right, so now talking about the humans in the company, right? How are we going to use AI there? We're building out a mentor bot. I've been working on it for a year and a half now. Its name's Maz. I struggle sometimes with the gender thing, but its name's Maz. And ultimately, it's going to meet every one of our employees where they are. It's going to help them understand themselves, it's going to help them understand others, it's going to help them interact with their teammates, it's going to 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, be 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. All right. 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 in the organization understand what's not working, what's not working, 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, et cetera. But there's a, I'm super excited about the things that I see us being able to do for our clients and, and I'm extraordinarily optimistic about how AI is going to help all of us build companies that we'll ultimately love forever. And that's all of my prepared remarks. Any questions?

Here, hit my mic, yeah. Mark, I'll fire a question at you. It won't be about, it won't be about revenue. How did you identify, because you built this around traction. A lot of people have problems identifying movements to build around it. We saw it with Chili Piper. They tried to build a movement around meeting automation and 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 in the business?

Yeah, no, no equity in the business. So it goes back all the way to 2000 and, so the idea for 90 actually started before I ever heard about traction. So it goes back to 2005 and I was going to write my own book called Connecting the Dots and then create the software. And then I actually invested in a company that started to run on 90. I personally invested in it. And so I read the traction book and I was like, that's a better book than I was going to write because 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 Not know there are over 800 EOS, 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 read the book, then I met Gino and I said, hey, right? I was going to do something similar. I wasn't going to do the coaching community thing. I really wanted to do the software thing. And could I possibly join the community and build the software? And his answer was, we tried it. It's not in our DNA and the rest is history.

It's not in our DNA. So like I said, a part of the thing I try and do is 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 diligence, hundreds of data rooms at Founder Path do these debt deals is, starting as an agency is a hack. It's totally a hack. The most successful software companies we see that are most underwritable, bankable, they usually launch an agency. Another way is they get 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.

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.

What kickback do you pay them?

Beg your pardon?

What kickback do you pay them?

We're just sponsors for Vistage, so we don't kick them anything.

No revenue share?

No revenue share. And with regard to EPI, we do have a revenue share.

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

I'm smiling. It's between 10 and 20%. I'm not exactly.

Okay. What's the average customer pay for 90 per year? The average customer pay for 90 per year?

About $2,500.

Okay, $2,500. So let's just make the math easy. If someone, if they, 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 dollars per year, as long as the customer stays active.

Yeah. And I should have mentioned earlier, you know, we have 13,300 companies now running, running on 90 and, you know, several hundred thousand people in those companies.

Well, 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 90. Mark, thank you. That was great. Thank you.