Impact Moments
Welcome to Impact Moments Powered by Ninety. Hosts Kris Snyder and Christine Watts kick off this new series by sharing why, after 8 years working together and helping 17,000+ companies run on EOS, they're finally putting these stories out into the world.
This show is about the breakthrough moments: the aha's that land hard, the light bulbs that change everything, and the ripple effects that follow. We'll sit down with entrepreneurs, integrators, EOS Implementers, and partners who've been in the trenches. Because the struggle is real, but you don't have to go through it alone.
Subscribe to join the journey. More guests, more stories, more impact. Coming soon.
🔗 Check out our episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@90xEOS
🔗 Learn more about Ninety: https://www.ninety.io 📩
Impact Moments
The Year When Everything Broke
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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.
🔗 Check out our episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@90xEOS
🔗 Learn more about Ninety: https://www.ninety.io