How to Build a Resilient and Empowered Company Culture with Mark Abbott

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host Gray McKenzie from Zenpilot. And this week I've got the pleasure of bringing on Mark Abbott who is the founder CEO of 90 90IO is the website. We'll talk all about what it does today. But Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks Greg. Delighted to be here.

Mark, you've got you so your career, from my understanding you spend time in finance, NPE and stuff. That sounds a little bit bigger than the world that I live in in the SMB space with agencies. And now you're running this company that's known most widely. We've been doing a series on the podcast here lately around the entrepreneurial operating system. And so 90's super well known as one of the platforms to run. If you're running on EOS, you use 90 to power a lot of the back end of that. I would love to know what was the story to getting you involved with 90 and starting 90.

Yeah, so like you mentioned, I started in banking and started in workouts and so I early on learned what you know, a poorly run company looks like and what happens to lots of different stakeholders, you know, when it runs into trouble. And, and it was fascinating. Right, right out of school. So in my early, early twenties and I sat on boards and creditor committees and all these different things. Can't believe I got all that responsibility at early age. But I did and, and then I, I actually helped start the group that lent to companies being acquired by private equity sponsors in the 80s. Right. So I was part of the leverage buyout industry birth and it was all focused on small and mid sized businesses back then and then fast forward I got recruited to another kind of lender and investor in small businesses and became actually the president of that business by the time I was 36 years old. So yeah. And we it was you know, multi billion dollars in lending and investing every year once again small and mid sized businesses. So I basically been around small mid sized businesses my entire career and we took that company public and ultimately GE CC bought it for and investors made a lot of money on it. It was awesome. And that company today is still one of the leaders in the industry. The business that I help lead and, and, and really you know, sort of develop and you know today it's like 50 billion under, under management and stuff like that. But you know, so my entire career has been around small midsize businesses as an investor, as a lender and as a board member.

Right.

And so when I transitioned from being in the lending and Investing world to being the private equity world, became a senior partner. I started sitting on a bunch of boards and I had a suspicion that they weren't as well run the companies when you get really up close and personal as I thought they could be. And that suspicion was confirmed. And I was kind of surprised that most of the companies, most of the boards I sat on, the people just did understand the fundamentals of building a great company. I mean, all the fundamentals, even including, like how you structure your year in terms of meetings and, and checking in with your customers and all, and obviously employee stuff and all the things that are associated with building a great company. And so it is what it is. And I'm like, well, you know, I can help these people learn the fundamentals. And so, you know, as a board member, I try to coach, but I was frustrated because it seemed like I was, what I was trying to teach would go in one ear and out the other ear. And so I had this crazy idea back in 2005 about writing a book and creating software to help make, you know, the journey to mastery. Right, to journey to becoming a master sort of company builder a heck of a lot easier than it. Than it appeared to be. So that's really the beginning of the story. And then I was investing in a bunch of companies personally, and one of the companies I invested in started to run on EOs. And that's like 2010, I want to say maybe 2011.

And.

And I read Traction. It was going to be a better version of the book I was going to write. Mine was called Connecting the Dots. And really loved what Gino had done. And then I found out, you know, they were setting up this, this whole coaching practice and. And then I was like, I wonder if they're going to build software. And. And the answer was they kind of tried and they did. And they said it's not their DNA. And so I was like, hey, you know, could I join the community and maybe help, you know, know, build this software product to support eos? And so the answer was yes. And so that's over 10 years ago. And, you know, that's kind of the. The origin story in a nutshell.

Wow. Summer of 2015, had our first summer intern with a software company that we were building. Her name is Becca Kern. Shout out to Becca. She's awesome. And she's a software engineer in college. And one of the things that she built that summer was our own internal EOS tooling. That was the, like the big project.

Yeah.

But at that time I thought it was something that should exist and should exist better. And there were, you know, like the early stabs including 90, you know, at, at that software. But I didn't see this massive market opportunity. So what was, I mean, was it capitalistic on your end thinking hey, this is going to grow and take off and this will be a big market because at that time obviously there were customers. But it's not a massive market. Even today it's still early in the, I think in what this market will be, but they're certainly large enough. Tam, what was your vision in building software for it?

Yeah, so from the very beginning, I mean literally going all the way back to 2005, so my career, right, small mid sized businesses and I actually grew up partially overseas. So you know, I look at the world, right, not just at the US and, and then also having grown up overseas, particularly like in high school and college, you know, you, you start to develop an appreciation for stuff. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I probably, you know, when I'd come back from home leave, I was even more of a, you know, I stood up straight with the national anthem, right at ball games and stuff like that. So just a huge deep believer in, in, in, in, in free markets and in freedom and, and in the, and, and, and helping the small and mid sized businesses across the world because I think they're sort of the lifeblood of a healthy society, right? We get into politics and all that good stuff. I, I'll try to not go too far over in that, in that realm but the reality is, is that, you know, the small and mid sized businesses are all subject to the positive and negative feedback information loops. And so, you know, they're sort of, they're closer to sort of the pure.

Right.

Marketplace, if you will, right. So they're not really out there with lobbyists and all that kind of stuff. And, and that's where, you know, over time that's where you get the vibrancy, right? You know, all the, all these companies started at zero. And so I really, really was just a huge believer in supporting small and mid sized businesses. I'm also a huge believer in supporting, in helping these companies just become better stewards of capitalism and better stewards of humans. And you know, it seems a little, you know, almost far out or something to say, but Even back in 2005, I envisioned that someday there'd be this thing called AI and it would help people become better and better versions of the best versions of themselves and as leaders and as colleagues and as community members. And so, you know, it was, it really was kind of a mission driven thing as opposed to just like there's this market, I know we're going to go out and make lots of money. You know, we still lose millions of dollars a year right now and we don't anticipate that changing for several years because of what we want to do and how we want to help and all the different ways we know we can eventually help. So you know, I, as a someone who has been around for decades and was involved with the private equity industry and building a company that went public, I don't have to work. Yep, you see, they get what I mean. And so yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a, a sort of a, a mission esque part to this and you know, not all of our investors love to hear that, but they do like our performance and so.

Yeah, that's awesome. What, did you raise money right from the start or did you self fund it until you get some validation?

Yeah, I bootstrapped it basically with some friends up until, so we started it in earnest lane code in 2016 and then we went all the way to 21 and we weren't actually looking for money in 21. I had a point of view on at what point I would be willing to raise sort of institutional capital. And so you know, I knew I wanted to get it to the revenue size where we could talk to almost anybody. That was pretty darn, you know, good. So that's, that was our goal. And, and, and then those people started to chase us in, in the really heavily at the beginning of 21. And we said, hey look, this is where we are and this is what we want. This is when we think we're going to raise in terms of our ARR. And, and several were like, hey, we'll give you credit for getting to that point. And we listened and so Insight Partners came in as an investor. They bought, they invested $20 million in us in the summer of, late summer of 21.

It's a good time to raise. Yeah, well executed.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Know what we know now. Can you give us a sense of the scale of 90 customers?

Is it. Yeah, sure. You know, it used to be that every single day I knew the number right off the top of my head. But I think we're right around 8, 700 companies that are paying, paying users. So and then, you know, and then obviously inside of those companies, you know, we have in total there's you know, you know, well over six figures of Paying seats. And then if you look at this, the size of the, you know, of the companies in total, people wise I should know this number but you know, you know, you're close to a million.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

What. So I think half the listeners know about, most of the listeners will be familiar with the term eos. Now probably half of people or some number of people have heard the word 90 or get what a like tool to manage EOS is and other people don't. So I'd like to kind of talk a little bit about what the tool actually does tied to that. I'd also love to know what percentage of your users are running on EOS and they're explicitly doing that versus there are users and customers I would imagine who don't run on EOS and are still having access to the platform.

Yeah, so, so you know, when we started the company we were just what called quote unquote EOS compatible software. So.

Right.

So if you were interested in basic concept of eos which is, you know, the, the term that's being used mostly now in the industry is a business operating system.

Right.

So if you, or a boss or a bos.

Right.

So yeah, so we have, the vast majority of our companies literally are sort of using the EOS terminology.

Right.

So accountability chart, level 10 meetings and all that. But we do have you know, a real percentage that are either running on someone else's bos like other coaching communities like Empire and Pinnacle are two well known ones. There's one in the legal industry called Fireproof and there are a couple other ones out there as well that are circling the hoop with us. So there are a number of different boss that run on 90. We built the platform so it's configurable. So if you want to use certain terminology, you can use their terminology, you can use your own terminology. If you want to organize like what EOS calls the Vision Traction Organizer differently, you can do that. And as your, you know, listeners may or may not know, we had, there was a moment in time where EOS tried to get rid of us and, and, and you know, they wanted to lean into their own tech platform called EOS1. It didn't end up being as robust and sort of, you know, sort of resilient and, and scalable as they had hoped. And so they came back and, and asked us it would renew our license. And so with that moment we transitioned our relationship from being exclusive with them to being, you know, to supporting other, other boss. And we had to because it looked like we were going to no longer be affiliated with them. We had to create our own sort of educational material. So. And our own OS, which we call 90 OS. And so, yeah, so we've got people running on Eos and we've got people running on their own version and running on empire, running on 90 OS. And so, yeah, there's a number of different. You know, ultimately the, you know, it's, it's EOS is amazing. I'm a huge, huge fan. I was a coach, you know, for almost a decade there and very close to all the coaches and huge amount of respect for them. So it's an amazing platform, an amazing coaching system and I believe coaches are really, really important because it's difficult to read the inside out, you know, the label from inside of a jar, right? It's just difficult for us to be objective on ourselves. So, huge believer in the coaches and all that. But ultimately, you know, fundamentally, what we're really talking about is the parallel or analogy I like to use is, look, if you're a home builder, there's just fundamentally certain tools you need to build a great home. You need saws and you need a hammer, you need a level, right? You need a screwdriver. And, and so they're just. There's just like core tools you need to build a house. And the same thing goes for a company, right? There are just core tools you need to build a company. And ultimately what you need to do is, you know, you just need to master those tools. And, you know, US has certain names for its tools, like the accountability chart is what it calls an organization chart. You know, know they trademark that. I love Accountability chart. I'd love to use it myself for 90os, but we can't. So we call it a responsibilities chart. But, but fundamentally there are all these tools and, and ultimately, you know, the best of the systems like eos, bring it all together. The mastery, right, the cadence, the what tools you masters first, second, third, fourth, fifth. So there's a whole process to mastery in there. And, and, and you know, that's where it's, it's, it's really powerful. Um, and so, so, yeah, so. So, you know, we all have the same tools, we use different words, but fundamentally, you know, a toolkit's toolkit. Right.

I just finished up. You've probably read or seen this one, but the great CEO within. Yeah, and I haven't sitting on my desk, but same, same type of thing, you know, as you read through it, you've got. I actually had a similar reaction reading through it that I had to reading through Traction for the first time, or the E Myth for the first time, or Built to Sell for the first time, which is like a moment two chapters in where it's like, I'm going to put this down. This is so rudimentary and basic that why would I keep reading this? But the truth is, you stick with it and realize it is pretty basic. These are the simple tools. But I need to read this because I've not mastered this yet. This is not the. The devil's in the details and in the execution of this. And yeah, all of these. Everyone's got a different name for it and a little bit different terminology, but it's all the same principles that you need to have working together to. To scale successfully.

Yeah.

And I think, I think you know the point on mastery, right? So what is mastery? And mastery fundamentally means you can teach it to someone else, right? So it's one thing for you to read the book and say, yeah, this all makes sense. It's another thing, can you go out and teach it?

Right.

And, and can you explain why this stuff is, you know, is so important? Because ultimately, you know, I've got blogs that are coming out on this soon. But, you know, a company is a complex adaptive system, right? And now when I say company, I'm very specific with that word, right? So you got businesses. And a business is an. Or is. Is this entity that if the founder, you know, decides to quit or gets hit by a bus or, or, you know, it's gone, right? Whereas a company can survive the loss of a, you know, the founder. And so, you know, so companies, not businesses, but companies are complex adaptive systems. And good companies are built to, right, to endure. Because if they're not built to endure, then they're not going to attract and retain great people because then, you know, they're going to be sitting there going, well, what's, you know, what's in this for me over the long run? You know, I have to say that your vision's got to be big enough to house all the vision. You know, your dreams have to be big enough to satisfy the dreams of everybody in your company. And so, you know, ultimately, it's a complex adaptive system, number one. And then number two, the best complex adaptive systems are explicit, right? This is the stuff we care about. These are the words we use, these are the processes we follow. And then it's a bunch of stuff, right? It's your vtr, it's your process, it's your scorecard, it's Your meetings, right? It's, it's, it's, it's all the components of your vision, see? So it's just stuff. And it's got to be coherent, right? So it's got to be explicit. It's got to be coherent. It all makes sense individually and together, right? So you're, as an example, your incentive package is not like, all about rewarding people for just going out and destroying everybody else, right? If, if you're, if your culture is team culture and you've got these incentives that basically are the opposite of team, then that's not really coherent. Does that make sense?

Right.

Yeah.

Yep.

And then finally the collectiveness, the collection of the whole thing, right? The explicit stuff and the coherency, right? It's got to resonate, right? If you can get all that stuff, I call it the winner's edge. Think of it as a power cube, right? If you can get everything explicit, everything coherent and everything resonant, then, you know, especially with all of your stakeholders, your ideal stakeholders, then that's, you know, that's, that's the winner's edge. And so, you know, getting from here to there involves not just, not just becoming competent with regard to the tools, but mastering the tools and mastering the ability to explain why all this matters. You know, it's like scorecards, one of the things I see all the time, because we get feedback every single day from our clients. And, and we know, you know, like, this is coming from the who's. Who's. Who's giving us this feedback and you see all the time. And it's frustrating for me personally, you see all the time people, junior people complaining about scorecards and KPIs. It's like they're, you know, why are they doing this? And the answer is, well, if everything's going well, they don't have to ask you questions, right? If everything's going well, they can, they can let you do what you want to do and you can sort of figure out how to do this, the best way for you to do it. And so this eliminates micromanagement. It doesn't. It doesn't mean micromanaging.

Right.

And so just helping people understand why you do the things that you do and why these things matter. Ultimately, you know, that's true mastery is to be able to explain this bloody thing that's your company and where it's going and why you do these things. You do. And then, then that makes it easier for them to say, okay, I get that. And by the way, this doesn't make sense. Oh, that's an amazing point. I wish I would have seen that earlier. Thank you.

Right.

That's really a point that how. And some of that is it's got to be coherent in order. Like, coherent probably is a little bit of a prerequisite to being resonant, but something could be coherent and you could still tell a story wrong and not have it be resonant.

So let's go there for a second. Right. So you know, a tyranny can be explicit. It could be coherent and it could be completely discordant.

Right.

So no. Yeah. So just because it's explicit and coherent doesn't mean it resonates necessarily that you.

Saying that resonates with me because I think this is where we've like our last 12 years of entrepreneurial journey. Like, I think we've built stuff that a lot of things that have been or rolled out new initiatives that are explicit and at least in my mind, still coherent, but have done a poor job of making it resonant with everyone. So that's, that's helpful to, to have that picture. Thanks for painting that.

Yeah.

You mentioned scorecards and I wanted to go there with you because this is, there's some pieces when talking to teams who've implemented eos, there's some pieces that everyone is like, hey, this is helpful pretty much right away.

Yeah.

Accountability chart Level 10 meetings are often helpful right away. And scorecards are like a very polarizing topic. Some people are like, I love this. This was great for us right away. Most people say this took us quite a while to get right and it felt like a lot of busy work for a while. Some things were helpful, but we really struggle with it. How should teams design a good scorecard that leads to what you just said, which is the antithesis to micromanagement.

Yeah. So I believe that. I call it agreements based leadership.

Right.

So no one likes to be told what to do. I hate being told what to do. Just ask my wife. But no one likes being told what to do.

Right.

And so the old age, the age of management was just do it right. So that's not cool. That doesn't work anymore. We've evolved to the point where there's a better way to lead.

Right.

So we talk about leading and coaching, not leading, managing at 90. And so there's all these agreements. Core values are agreements. Roles and responsibilities are agreements.

Right.

KPIs are simply agreements. And where I disagree a little bit with my, my friends at EOS is I don't put goals on KPIs. I put targets. Okay. And the targets are targets where you and I agree there's an issue.

Right?

So let's get on the same page in terms of when there's an issue. Because if there's not an issue, Right. Then let me run, let me do this my way.

Right?

So I deeply believe that every single person in a company should have three to five KPIs and targets that they and their manager or leader or coach, Team leader.

Right.

Agree on that. If this is. That kind of a number is probably an issue and we should probably talk about it. And the flip side of it, if everything's green.

Right? Right.

Let me run, let me, let me do my job.

Right.

And, and so I'm a deep believer that, that we want to. If you think about the way the scorecard's used within eos, right. It's the first thing that comes up after the segue.

Right.

And we look at it and in theory, right, what we're looking for is issues. We're not looking to sit here and make sure everything's on track to hit our numbers for the quarter.

Right.

Think about that.

Right.

You're supposed to turn that KPI into an issue if there's an issue otherwise, right?

Yeah.

Maybe you're looking at it just to have a sense for how things are going. But the purpose of the review of the scorecard is to figure out whether there are any issues. Does that make sense?

Right?

It does.

So an issue centric, target centric approach to KPIs, I think is an extraordinarily humane and smart thing to do. So we're all on the same page in terms of what looks good and what doesn't look good. So I can let you run and do your job.

Right.

Because no one likes to be micromanaged. Now, I, I coached. I still have several clients left, but you know, Coach, I don't know, somewhere close to a hundred companies and, and no one's ever been able to stump me on getting three to five KPIs per seat. So the simplest way to look at it is there's always a quality element, there's always a quantity element, there's always a process element, and there's always a show up and do good work element.

Right?

So, you know, if you think about any seat, an entry level seat, there's quality, there's quantity, and there's follow the process and there's show up and do good work, right? And so that's four KPIs right there that are always available in some form or another. And the reality is this is another area where I have a little disagreement with the U.S. you know, they say everybody has a number. I'm like, no, if you just. If you just focus on one number, it's going to be to the detriment of another. Another number.

Right.

We focus on quantity. Okay. Then you're going to have a quality issue.

Right.

So you focus on quantity and you focus on quality. But, you know, maybe the person's not following any of your processes. That's obviously going to be an issue. And obviously one of the biggest issues we talk about today, I don't know. You saw it in Gallup today. 60% of the companies out there right now believe there's quiet quitting going on in their company. Right, 60%.

Right.

So if we have good KPIs and their agreements around them, I don't think you're going to be sitting here worrying about quiet quitting.

Yeah. Can we make this a little bit more like whatever role you want to pick, but it could be a sales role. As an example, if there's an easy role at 90, what are those four? Like, what could four of those metrics be?

Yeah. So you just pick. Like I said, I haven't been stumped yet, so just pick a seat and we'll do it together.

Yeah. Account executive.

So. Account executive. So they, so they could have, as an example, how many accounts are they managing?

Right.

And you could have another one that sort of, sort of a Net promoter score associated with the accounts that they're managing. Obviously, you know, you could have just, you know, the leader and the team leader and the team member, you know, sort of our scoring in terms of, you know, let's say, processes being followed and everything being right on track. And, you know, you're putting your numbers into the system, et cetera, et cetera. And then of course, the last one, which is actually a thing that we work on a lot at 90, is. Is. Is showing up and putting in good hours. So as an example, at 90, every single person we hire knows before we ever make them an offer that at 90, everybody puts in a. Gives us a good 40 to 45 hours. Right. It's a, It's a thing we talk about very early on in the. And at some point during the process.

Right.

And if almost everybody makes it to me in the interview process, I always talk about it because it's actually our six core value, which is extra mile. And I want them to know that that extra mile really means is we're really focused on work, life balance, I mean, very seriously focused on it. We don't want you to work more than 45 hours.

Right.

We don't want you to work less than 40 hours. Give us good let, you know, right. We want to have it in that nice, right in there and very comfortable for you. But every now and then if something happens, you may have to go the extra mile for us and, and you, and because that's just the nature of a, you know, early stage, you know, fast growing company. But if you do that, right, we want you to go, you know, we want you to go. We don't track pto. We want you to just sort of, you know, bring the number back to average. And so it's a conversation we have, I said with every single employee, every single prospect that gets to the point where we're going to make them an offer. And so, so, you know, we sit and with all of my senior leaders, we talk every single week about how they're allocating their hours against the roles and responsibilities in terms of what they thought they were going to do. And if it's out of whack, is it, does it make sense or is it like, oh, you know, Joe, you're just spent, you know. You know, I'll give you a good example right off, right out of the, you know, right off the pages of, of yesterday's newsprint, right. All of a sudden someone was spending a lot of effort on this issue. And I'm like, but this issue, if you really do the math on it, it's, you know, it's on our trials, right? So our trials are off a little bit. So they're off like, and, and we're focused on it like trying to figure out what the heck's going on. And, and so they're off like 15%. But the group that they're off on is a low conversion rate group. So the, so the group they're off on is like, has a conversion rate of 20%. So 15% of 20% is 3%. It's like, I don't want you spending too much effort on this issue. It's an issue. Yeah, we're going to fix it. Yeah. But don't put one of your rocks for the quarter in harm's way. Does this make some sense?

Right? Yeah, that's helpful.

Yeah.

Going back to like the issues or target based scorecard numbers, if we try to make that one practical too.

Are.

Let'S try and do this as easily as possible. Sales rep has a target for the quarter of closing, $130,000 of revenue. That's our, that's our goal. I don't think it was a better word than target. Maybe in this case.

This is where we get to have the conversation. Right. So if, so if your KPI is 130.

Right.

You said $130,000.

Yeah. Over 13 weeks.

There's, there's, there's 13 weeks and a quarter.

Right.

So you're talking $10,000 per week right. Now, if they hit 9,800, are you going to have a conversation around it?

Yes. Not an issue to me. It's not an issue at all.

Right. If it's 9,000, are you going to have a conversation around it?

Probably still not.

Okay. If it's 8,000, are you going to have a conversation around it?

For sure.

Yeah.

Now we're behind.

Bingo.

Right.

So now the question is, do you. Is it 8,000 for one week or two weeks or three weeks in a row?

Right.

Because obviously, 8,000 for three weeks in a row, it's probably an issue that we should talk about.

Yep.

Does that make sense?

So on this. So I think where true EOS followers, the believers, struggle with this, then is. And to that, because I struggle with this, then is it's possible to be green on your scorecard, to hit your numbers every week and still come up just short of your overall target for the quarter. And I think what I've. What I've heard you say, and what was helpful for me was that's okay. It still wasn't an issue, you know, like it would. You've got that tolerance threshold of kind of some allowable variance that has to be there.

Yeah, but am I. Yeah, you are. Right. So, you know, so if you're, if you're gonna, if you're going to. The problem with, the problem with KPIs and goals is if they're not really an issue.

Right.

But it's showing up as an issue, then more and more things show up as an issue. More and more things are red all across your scorecard.

Right.

And the next thing you know, you're not paying attention to the reds.

Right.

It's that simple.

How you're not saying, or are you saying is the direct question that you're anti KPIs or goals in general?

No, no, no. I'm. No, I'm a huge believer in KPIs. I'm anti goals. I'm very pro targets.

Okay, that's helpful. How are there any things that you've picked up from coaching as Many companies running one now kind of going through this previously. Any other stumbling points around scorecards that are like, hey, these are the common things that people get stuck on that might, might be helpful for people to hear.

Well, to state the obvious, right, if everybody in the company is, has their own scorecard, right? And that's just the way you run the company, right? Then that's the way you run the company, right? Now, you know, if some people have scorecards and some people don't have scorecards, all of a sudden you now you got, you know, goose gander stuff all over the place, right? So back to explicit, coherent and resonant, right? Is this, is this how we run our business? Is this how we measure things? Is this how we avoid micromanaging people?

Right?

And so you know what I see is people are afraid of having straightforward conversations around what good looks like and what good doesn't look like and getting, and taking advantage of the math, the objectivity of a number, right? So I think most organizations take way too long to develop scorecards for the entire company, right? And the reality is, is if, if it asks me, knowing everything I know, right, I would maybe give, go 1/4 into EOS and then I'd start having every single person, right? Or you know, if there's like seven people sitting in a particular seat, put them together and say, hey, come up with three to five KPIs. That will probably tell us if there's an issue. And the reason we're doing this is so we can all, you know, run without a lot of close supervision. So what are the KPIs, what are the targets?

Right?

And just trust the people. If they don't understand what the KPIs are for their seat, what's that say to us, Right?

Right.

I think, you know, one of the lessons I learned decades ago was, was I think almost the vast majority of leaders and companies way under appreciate the capabilities of the people throughout the company, right? They, they're sitting there, they're closest, they know what's going on, right? Just, you know, that's why I write about trust, right? Just develop a high trust relationship with folks. Know that you're trying to figure out what's right for all of us so that this company is growing and hitting 90% of, you know, the things that matter. And so that we're doing everything we can to, for our dreams. To fulfill your dreams, right?

What you said there reminded me of a word that you mentioned earlier. You just said it one time in our conversation so far. But I saw this. I don't remember if it's on the 90 site or if it's on your personal site, but the word humane. Yeah, you highlighted that. Where, where does that come from as an elevated value in your thinking?

Well, it's, it's, there's a long story behind this word and there's been some, they're marketing companies that don't like us using it because it, people say it reminds them of the Humane Society. But the reality is if you want to build a great company, it's got to be, it's got to be productive, right? We all know that, right? It's got, it's, it, it's, it's been given assets that, that, that, right? That they have to have a return on them. And so productivity is a thing and, and you need to do that so you can save for a rainy day and, and all that good stuff, right? But productivity and then not having an environment where people genuinely love going to work, that's the humanity, right? You know, every single human pretty much, right? Any, any and any reasonably.

Sort of.

Competent adult wants to matter, right? I would, and I would submit to you that the vast, vast, vast majority of all people want to matter, right? And so that's like core to who we are as, as, as, as a species. So we all want to matter. And so we want to, you know, we want to be in an organization that matters. We want to matter. We want our organization that matters. And you know, back to being highly complex adaptive systems, right? Great cultures are so much more, you know, productive, right? Great cultures are so much better at having hard conversations and talking about stuff that's difficult to talk, but because they care, right? The more you, as an example, at 90, every single person we hire knows before we ever care, the more inclined you are to have that tough conversation, because there's always a tough conversation, you know, around the corner. It's, it's impossible for there not to be because it's a competitive, you know, world. And so the humanity is really about creating an environment where people genuinely care for one another. They care about the company, they care about all the ideals, all the ideal stakeholders, right? They care about their customers. You know, one of the things that I think is a extremely bad slash, false choice is, you know, your employees are more important than your customers or your customers are more important than your, than your employees or your investors, right? That's just all wrong. It's, that's a false choice. You need to have high trust relationships with all of your stakeholders and you Focus on that. You don't. There's no reason to say my employees are more important than my customers and my customers are more important. There's, it's just like a weird, you know, there's nothing gain out of that conversation. It's the same thing for investors. You know, the state that, you know, people fight all the time these days, right. Milton Friedman said, you know, the shareholder comes first. No, the shareholder doesn't come first. The shareholder is important though, right? You need to make sure that you have a high trust relationship with your shareholder. That means they trust you in terms of helping, you know, creating a decent, risk adjusted return on their capital. So, you know, humanity is all about.

Right.

Is about that. And, and, and I think, I think we're moving into a new age of work. I've got a book coming out probably next year on this and I called work8do. And we're coming out of the age of information, going into the age of understanding, and ultimately to the age of actualization. And you know, now more than ever, employees have an opportunity to go work for some place where the culture's pretty darn good. So I say a great company is extraordinarily productive, humane and resilient. Because even if you're productive and you're, and you're humane, if you haven't saved for the rainy day and you've done the things to withstand a punch in your face, you know, you're not doing the right thing for all the stakeholders because you're going to get punched. It's inevitable.

Right?

So I like to say, you know, great company is a place where it's extraordinarily productive, humane and resilient, where people are focused, they're aligned and they're thriving.

Wow. I'm glad I asked the question. That's awesome. Also, I think it's a, a great place to wrap up. But also you get extra special credit for being the first person to mention Milton Friedman on the podcast My Heart a little bit. That's awesome.

We can go down to Hayek and a bunch of other days if you want.

That's right, yeah. Oh man, that's awesome. Well, this has been super fun. I want to make sure you get chatting here on time, folks. Should check out 90io. We'll make sure that all the links are in the show notes as well. Anywhere else or anything else you want to say as we wrap up here, Mark?

No, I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you, Gray, and potentially help a few people think about some stuff so they can turn their businesses into a little more productive, humane and resilient.

Amazing. Awesome. Thank you, Mark. This has been fantastic.

You're welcome.

Appreciate it.