Founder's Framework

Ten years in, Mark Abbott sits down with Ninety co-founder Kris Snyder to talk honestly about what they built, what they would do differently, and what still is not solved. They get into why Ninety reached roughly $40M in ARR without a single salesperson, an idea Kris carried over from his first job out of college at McMaster-Carr, and why they eventually conceded that the "we don't sell, we serve" era had to end. Kris walks through the Math of Trust, the three-part model the two of th...

Most people meet a family business with a raised eyebrow, assuming nepotism, dysfunction, and the kind of dinner-table drama that makes for good television. Mark Abbott sits down with family business expert Sara Stern to make the opposite case: family businesses are among the most enduring and value-creating institutions on the planet, and the very thing critics mock is often the reason they last. Sara walks through the three-circle model of family, business, and ownership, the underrated rol...

When Mark Abbott posted a Craigslist ad for a part-time assistant back in 2015, he had no idea he was hiring one of the people who would help define the soul of Ninety. In this special episode, Mark sits down with Michelle Rose to retrace more than a decade of building the company from a one-person coaching practice and a rotating cast of assistants into a platform that helped thousands of organizations survive and grow through COVID. They talk candidly about the messy early years of fraction...

Ninety almost didn't get to build the software that now runs thousands of companies. Mark Abbott marks the company's 10-year anniversary with Christine Watts, Ninety's first full-time employee, tracing the journey from a $500-a-month marketing budget and two college-age engineers to a platform used by roughly 4,000 organizations. They get honest about the years when every feature and every blog post needed EOS Worldwide's approval, the "beautiful mess" of bringing technology into a world that...

Every leadership team thinks they're aligned. David Meyer, founder of Spoke Marketing, has run alignment exercises with over a hundred companies across 17 years, and not once have two leaders written the same answer when asked their company's single most important message. That discovery led David to develop what he calls "thresholds of change": the inflection points where a company's old story stops matching reality, whether driven by new technology, shifting buyer behavior, leadership trans...