How Ninety Reached $30M ARR By Empowering Teams Through Adversity

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 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 def 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 that 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 an certain industry at a certain stage of development and at a um 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 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 stages youve got into 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 Sage 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 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 him for a year and a half now his its name's Maz I struggle sometimes with the gender thing but its name's maass 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 indiv individuals so as an example if I'm a high FactFinder and someone's a low FactFinder 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 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 work working together all right so that's the big idea around some of the ways we're helping we're incorporating Ai and 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 Etc but there's a I'm super excited about the things that I see us being able to do for our clients and um and uh I'm extraordinarily optimistic about how a AI is going to help all of us build companies that will 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 won't be about it won't be about Revenue um how did you identify uh um 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 it didn't work you successfully built a movement real Revenue growth around a 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 um so it goes back all the way to 2000 so the

idea for 90 actually started before I ever heard about traction um so it goes back to 2005 and I was going to write my own book called connecting the dots and then create the software um 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 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 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 so when I heard about traction I read the book then I met Gan on 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 um and uh 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 it's not in our DNA so I guess I'm part of 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 to 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 underwrite bankable they usually launch 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 or coaching company and then boom you have a software command it's growing very quickly so you've done this very well 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 a what Kickback do you pay them beg your pardon what Kickback do you pay them um we're just sponsors for vistage so we don't kick them anything no Revenue share No

Revenue share and uh with regard to Epi we do have a revenue share okay can you share that or no you're smiling something I'm smiling it's it's it's between 10 and 20% I'm not exactly okay I don't have what's the average customer pay for 90 per year the average customer pay for 90 per year um about $2500 okay 2500 so let's just make the math these if someone if they bring if e 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 yeah and I should have mentioned earlier um 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 in 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