Mark Abbott is the founder and CEO of Ninety, the platform powering this podcast. He was EOS Implementer number 33 back when there were only a handful of coaches in the community. He has spent decades obsessing over vision, culture, and what it takes to build companies that last. So when he looked around his own company last year and realized the culture had drifted, it hit hard.

In this episode, Mark opens up about one of the most difficult years in Ninety’s history. The company had grown fast, maybe too fast. Leaders were over-indexing on taking care of their teams instead of doing what was right for the company. People were quietly sitting on work they did not need to do and not escalating it. And when it came time to make hard decisions, the first attempt did not go the way Mark would have done it. He let it happen anyway. And he has regretted it ever since.

We dig into:

• How Mark discovered EOS in 2010 and became implementer number 33
• Why vision and culture are the foundation of everything else
• The two co-founders in Naples who were ready to break up until one conversation changed everything
• Leadership changes on the ones and threes, and why good people still end up in the wrong seats
• The three levels that matter for senior leadership: ego development, time span capacity, and levels of thinking
• What “succeed or escalate” means and why it became a mantra at Ninety
• The difference between the first reduction in force and the second, and why founder mode matters
• His three biggest mistakes: the first RIF, the Paddle/Stripe decision, and the new commercial model

Mark also shares the moment he told Christine, vulnerably, that he was not happy with the culture of his own company. For someone who has built his career around helping others get culture right, that admission carries weight.
If you are a founder wondering whether you have let things drift too far, or a leader trying to figure out when to step back in and when to let go, this one is for you.

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