2330 - Key Insights for Building High-Performing Organizations with Ninety's Mark Abbott

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Mark Abbott. Mark, you are the founder and CEO at 90. You're found on the web at 90.io. And yes, that's N-I-N-E-T-Y.io. Mark, it's a pleasure to have you. Hey, Josh, it's a pleasure to be here. Yes. See, listen, before we get into what you do and what 90 is, you know, I always love learning what high-level business leaders do when they're not at work, you know, what they kind of are fascinated with or kind of geeking out on. What have you been into lately on your free time? Yeah. So geeking out on, I'm a pretty voracious reader, and I'm fascinated by culture, and not just business culture, but culture period, right?

1:49And actually wrote a book called Work 9.0 that we haven't kind of formally brought to market, but it's actually out there already. Um, and, uh, and so I, I, I do a lot of deep diving on culture all the way from, you know, the, the world and, and why climate is actually a really important driver of culture, um, drove it at least initially. And, um, and so I geek out on, on, on that kind of stuff. Um, obviously these are very interesting times for geeking out on culture. Uh, yes, yes, they are. They are quite historic. They will likely be written about in many a history book. Yeah. You know, and it's like, you know, even for my friends, you know, who could be, could look at what our experience is, and I'm being a little US-centric right now, and say, even though, again, there are big kind of things going on around the world, but I said, I'm not, you know, I remember having one conversation.

2:58I hope, is my personal view, we don't experience this again. But that said, I think we are in a laboratory right now of which I don't think we'll, I guess my view is I don't think we're going to experience everything that we're experiencing right now ever again. So get your fill. If you want to see things like human behavior, sociological behavior, epistemology, how people are developing their views and things, where they side on, how they show up in certain situations. It's fascinating for someone who appreciates culture like you, I'm certain. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot going on for digging into and trying to understand and explain.

3:39And yeah, so that's what I geek out on. I don't blame you. You and me both, my friend. We'll talk later. All right. So Mark, let's talk about 90. What is 90? So 90 is a software company for small and mid-sized businesses who want to figure out how to get their act together and sort of confidently and competently make it through what I like to call sort of the five sort of fundamental stages of development that every sort of business goes through on its way to becoming, you know, a pretty, pretty nice company that couldn't be confidently and competently passed on to the next generation of owners or, or, or, or, or leaders.

4:28And so, you know, it's this, it's, it's all the sort of the core concepts, tools, and disciplines that you need to master as you make your way through those first five stages of development. Excellent. All right. So when we think about, do you mind just, let's give a little bit more of a foundational for those who may be unfamiliar with what EOS is. Do you mind just giving us a quick primer on that? Yeah. So, you know, the biggest operating system that we support, right, is EOS, and that's the entrepreneurial operating system that was made famous by a book called Traction, and there are almost 900 coaches throughout the world who help companies get up and running on EOS, and, you know, that book was written in 2008.

5:23I actually had an idea for creating my own operating system and writing my own book back in 2005. And then I discovered Gino's book and met Gino and said, hey, I was going to do something similar, but I really want to do the software side of this big idea that you have. And he was comfortable with us doing that. And so that's a bit of the background here. But as I said, there's these almost 900, they call them implementers, EOS implementers, and that's the entrepreneurial operating system. And, and they help companies sort of understand where they are and how to get their act together. And it's predominantly around companies that are at stage three.

6:05So that's the stage where all of a sudden you start to have experts in sales and marketing and, you know, and customer success or, you know, finance, et cetera. And you're bringing these people in and you're all trying to get on the same page, right? And, and, and, you know, everybody brings their own set of tools and perspectives and they bring their own culture, you know, ideas. And now you got this kind of this little bit of a mess. And so the EOS implementers are really good at helping sort of the senior leadership team get its act together because as goes the senior leadership team, so goes the rest of the company.

6:41So help me understand that a little bit better now that we know what EOS is, why is 90 an important part of that? And again, you had mentioned EOS is the biggest operating system that you adapt to. Do you mind defining that a bit as well? Yeah. So, yeah, if you look at the world of the business operating system, the business operating system, you have EOS. You've probably heard of scaling up. you have there's E-Myth which is really kind of the the granddaddy of them all in some respects right and then you know you have the great game of business Jack Stack's approach to it there's a group called Pinnacle Guides so there's there's like the BOS industry probably has I want to say five yeah I want to say 10 to 15 different coaching groups that are out there basically all trying to help you master the same thing.

7:38They have different words, different trademark terms, et cetera. But it's an industry that, you know, that, that goes back. I mean, geez, I'm trying to remember when, you know, E-Myth Revisited came out. It's, you know, a long time ago now. See, I've got it sitting right here. Nope. Need my reading glasses. Can't tell you. But it's been a while. It's been a while. Yeah. And Michael's still kicking. He's 89. Yeah, he is. So we think about how typical EOS implementation or, again, kind of business operating systems function. Yeah. What's typically missing? What's typically missing when a company sort of decides it needs to go upgrade its operating system?

8:23Yes. Well, you know, so it really depends where you are developmentally, to state the obvious, right? Right. You know, a lot of times the founder, you know, or, you know, or even CEOs who have taken over from founders, they really haven't done a good job of figuring out even culture. Right. They don't even have core values or they haven't done a great job of figuring out who their ICP is or what their unique value proposition is. Maybe they don't. Maybe they struggle with figuring out how to structure the organization. They really don't understand the principles associated with sort of structuring an organization in an intelligent and scalable manner.

9:00A lot of times, you know, they haven't gotten their act together in terms of, you know, KPIs and understanding the power of being able to see what's working and what's not working through the lens of math, if you will. Almost all of them are struggling with process and processes. And so they got to figure out what the core processes are so they can go back to Michael Gerber, right, so that they can create, you know, a system that scales as opposed to constantly doing all the work. And so, you know, EOS, as an example, has six key components to it. There's the vision component, the people component, the data component, the issues component, the process component, the traction component, which is setting goals and running meetings and making sure everybody's on the same page.

9:45So, you know, you can literally measure how strong, you know, you are in terms of each of the six key components, as an example. And then you can take a look at where you are developmentally and say, hey, at this moment in time, these are the things I really need to be focusing on. These other things are like, yeah, you would love to be great at it. But as an example, you don't need to be documenting your core processes when you're trying to get product market fit, just to make an obvious statement. So, you know, the big idea is it really depends where you are developmentally. I used to be an EOS implementer.

10:18I still coach some companies from now, you know, now and then. And one of the expressions I like to use is sometimes you'll see what I refer to as you'll see a six foot five, you know, 11 year old male. Right. So physically, it looks like a fully formed adult maturity wise. It's a little bit mature. Right. So developmentally, it's it's it's not quite there. And, you know, when you get to the place where you're kind of larger than you, employee-wise, you're kind of large, but developmentally, you're kind of young, then you just, you know, you just have all these issues, almost always people issues.

10:57And you're just trying to, you know, like grind your way through some developmental issues. And every company goes through the same thing, right, developmentally. And so, but, you know, a lot of us weren't taught the stages of development, as an example, you know, in business school or in college or whatever. And so, you know, it helps to have a guide to say, hey, this is what's going on. You're normal. Here's what you got to focus on. Get that good. And then here's the next thing, et cetera, et cetera. Mark, I'm following your sub stack right now, which I highly recommend. And you speak a lot on culture.

11:33Do you mind sharing a few things? Well, one in particular is you just wrote about forgiveness. And would you mind sharing a bit about what you penned on Substack on that topic and how it relates to the workplace? Yeah. So in terms of forgiveness, you know, there are people who will forgive you for anything, right? And then there are people who won't forgive you for anything. And then there's in between. Right. And if you look at the that particular substack piece, what I was trying to convey is and it's part of sort of my worldview is, you know, if you if you look at the classic.

12:30strategy for winning in war it's tit for tat right and and so you know and ultimately to be able to enter into battle you need to be able to um at least look like you know they can't just take full advantage of you right um and and hopefully you know you can just sort of have a have a detente and have peace there. But the reality is, you know, there are people who are just not great people, right? So the research plus or minus four or five, 6%, let's just say five for the sake of this conversation, are sociopaths or, you know, or psychopaths. And so, you know, forgiving a sociopath or a psychopath and then saying, hey, you know, you're forgiven.

13:19And then just assuming that you're not going to get knocked back in the head is foolish, right? So I'm not a huge fan of forgiving everything, right? I think you do need to be thoughtful. But what's also interesting, if you look at the research on trust, the research is pretty compelling. I love a guy named, he's actually passed away on this, but Dr. Paul Zak, great book called Oxytocin, where, you know, you want to assume goodwill. You want to give someone, you want to trust initially, right? And then if they violate your trust, now you got to figure out what the heck, right? But if you go into every situation and you're just a distrustful person, they're going to literally smell it, not literally smell it, but they're going to feel it, right?

14:12We have, oxytocin is like this Geiger counter that we have in our system. And so, you know, you go in, assume goodwill, assume that you can trust them. But obviously, if they end up being untrustworthy and they end up repeating the things that, you know, make them untrustworthy, then, you know, you shouldn't be forgiving them. You should be avoiding them. Does this make some sense? That book, by the way, was it The Moral Molecule by Paul Zak? That's one of them. There's another one called Trust Factor. Oh, Trust Factor. That's it. Yeah. The science of creating high performance companies. Yeah.

14:49Awesome. Your website is 90.io. And do you mind sharing just a little bit about the pricing, you know, how it works, how it's implemented within an organization for a leader who's listening? Yeah. So there's typically people either come in with a coach, right? An implementer, as an example, an EOS implementer could be a pinnacle guide or one of these other coaching organizations scaling up, as I mentioned. And they'll come in and the coach will basically sort of say, hey, this is where we are. And they'll take them through this journey and they'll have them start to use the tools when it's appropriate, right?

15:26That represents around a third of our customers. We have about 17 ,000 customers across the world running on 90 right now. And then two-thirds, they'll come on board and they'll learn about the notion of a business operating system. Every company has an operating system. The question is whether or not it's actually intelligently designed and you understand what pieces you need in the system at this particular moment of time in terms of your stage of development. But typically, people will start using the meetings tool and then they'll recognize they have a good meeting. wouldn't be great if we had KPIs and so they'll create a start to create a scorecard then it's like hey guys you know we want to go somewhere with this business right um and then start creating goals and so maybe you're going to create rocks this is we're going to be in 90 days and they're like hey you know we should really make sure we're all on the same page in terms of who we are and where we're going and develop the what's called like eos speak it's a vision traction organizer so it has what are your core values what are your big periodontist goals you know what's your icp look like?

16:26Where do you want to be in, you know, 10 years or three years or one year and get everybody on the same page? And so, you know, you just start to take advantage of the tools. We have a knowledge portal so that where you put all your training and development materials for your people, you can start putting that stuff in there. But typically it's sort of like get your act together in terms of just having meetings on a weekly basis, right? Get your act together in terms of the vision and your goals, get your act together in terms of data, as I mentioned earlier. And then over time, you can start running your quarterly meetings and having SWOT and updating things every quarter and obviously running an annual planning process as an example.

17:07And then ultimately cascading it down so that everybody in the company is on the same operating system, so that everybody has KPIs, everybody's in weekly meetings, everybody's having a quarterly sort of performance review and all that stuff's actually literally in our operating system on the website, in the platform. The website, 90.io, you can click on pricing to kind of see the different packages and there's a ton of resources as well, including trainings and a library, a blog, lots of great content. So again, Mark Abbott, congratulations on your longevity. 90's been around for a little bit of time, getting on 10 years.

17:57So congratulations on that. Mark Abbott, founder, CEO of 90. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks, Josh.

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