Ep. 187 - Your SaaS Isn’t Broken—Your Execution Is

Why SaaS companies stall at $10M, how execution breaks down, and what founders must change to scale  

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Guest: Mark Abbott, Founder & CEO at Ninety  

Most SaaS companies don’t hit a wall because demand dries up — they hit it because execution doesn’t keep pace with growth.

In this episode of SaaS Backwards, Mark Abbott, Founder and CEO of ninety.io, explains why SaaS companies predictably stall as they grow and how founders underestimate the leadership and operational shifts required at each stage. Drawing on decades as an operator, investor, and board member, Mark walks through the five unavoidable stages of company growth and why stage three is where most companies get stuck.

The conversation explores why speed becomes a liability, why leadership requirements change as teams scale, and how operating discipline and culture quietly determine whether a SaaS company breaks through its ceiling or plateaus indefinitely.

Mark also unpacks the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), the mindset shift from lifestyle entrepreneur to long-game founder, and why operational systems are not overhead — they’re a competitive advantage. This conversation is essential listening for SaaS founders navigating product-market fit, team scaling, and leadership complexity.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps software CEOs and go-to-market leaders, accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Mark Abbott, founder and CEO at ninety.io. Software that enables teams at more than 17,000 organizations to implement the OS method of running a business.

 Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark Abbott: Hey Ken, glad to be here.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I'm really excited to dig in deep with you. But before we jump into the episode, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Mark Abbott: Yeah. So, the real short version is I started in banking back in the eighties, and ultimately ran a business that lent to and invested in companies being acquired by private equity firms. The whole journey ended up, enabling me to have a lot of perspective on what it takes to build a great company.

Ultimately, I sat on dozens of boards and I came up with this idea of writing a book and creating software that simplifies the hard work associated with building a great organization. I used to get a bit frustrated with some of the CEOs that I sat on the board with in terms of, to me it was always pretty straightforward, having done this as many times as I've done it, lent into or invested in businesses or sat on boards, it's like, look, building a great company is just like building a great house. You need a compelling vision. You need plans, you need tools, you need disciplines. And then you need to just recognize there's a whole process associated with going from, you know, the beginning all the way to having something that you can, you can exit with confidence and competence, whether that's to transfer the leadership to another leader or to, you know, exit the business entirely.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean the pattern recognition is a really important part of, I guess, being an investor and also, going back from investor to running your own business, you probably have a good idea of what the best operators did to meet each stage of the business.

Mark Abbott: Yeah. And, and I also, you know, sat in a president slash CEO seat, uh, let's see what, three, four times and you learn a lot. I'm still learning, right? But yeah, you do start to develop a lattice work of the things that you think are critical, for success.

Ken Lempit: You know, it's interesting, I've noticed, like I'm thinking about the guests on the podcast and other execs, I know there's a fair amount of going back and forth almost between the PE role and a and an operating or founder role. Is that something that, would you ever go back the other way and be an investor again, or are you happier as an operator?

Mark Abbott: No, you know, honestly, I would say that I'm very good at looking at companies and understanding the economics models and risk reward and, you know, what's the likelihood of success and all that good stuff, right? What I really didn't enjoy was just, you know, running around the country looking for deals, honestly.

 I'd much rather, build things. 

I'd much rather, you know, build and run things than I would honestly, you know, being a private equity, investor, it just wasn't as fulfilling for me personally and so, yeah, this is what I do.

Ken Lempit: So ninety.io kind of feels like it was built in response to this work you did as an, as an outside investor, right? You, you saw smart leadership teams. But would they'd still fail at execution, right? The people who looked like good bets maybe didn't, didn't get the job fully done.

So what are the patterns you saw? What, what was so consistently broken in how these SaaS companies actually run themselves? That you felt software and not advisory services was the answer.

Mark Abbott: you know, as I said, I built and, and ran sort of a debt oriented merchant bank and, you know, we invested across all sorts of industries. We actually, I stood up a software lending business focused on SaaS, believe it or not, back in the, early nineties.

The things that I've learned are across all the, you know, different industries and across a bunch of different stages as well, because I've also started businesses several times. There's a lot of answers to the question, but fundamentally, I really like investing in founder led businesses where the founders, have learned the nature of the game and the nature of the game is that, you know, every single. Business passes through what I call the five unavoidable stages of development. And so each stage frankly is, are things you just have to win.

If you think about strategy, all strategy means is winning, right? So strategically, you know, you'll, you'll have a vision, you know what market you're gonna enter into and who you're gonna serve and how you're gonna serve them. You know, your unique value proposition, the three uniques as the OS would say, or your compelling value proposition, as I like to say.

 And then why? Why the company exists. You know, how do you make the world a better place? So that's that purpose, passion cause stuff. So the founders need to, you know, get that stuff locked in sooner rather than later. It doesn't always get locked in stage one, which is just product market fit.

You know, you'll start to lock it in, in stage two, which is your, now you've proven product market fit. Now can you build a machine that can actually generate value, right? Almost always that's cash flow revenue. But in some situations, like if you look at 

Open AI early on in its years, it was demonstrate value so that it could go raise more money.

But the point is, you know, you're, you're just starting to now build out the operations in, in stage two, stage three, you get to the place, you know, where you have, department leaders. Stage four is where you work really well and scale well together. And stage five is where you, you know, sort of move into the stewardship stage.

So the reality is, is that each of those stages has different priorities. There's different sort of competencies that you need to master. And, almost every founder struggles with, in my opinion. You know, they, they read a lot of books and they think they gotta be great at everything, almost from the beginning.

But the reality is, is we don't need, people development. A lot of work to be invested in having a people development department when you're in stage two or even stage three as an example, and early on, you know, people think that you gotta get the core processes documented. No, there's not a lot of value in that, but there is value in starting to document some of the core journeys, the people journey, the product journey, the customer journey.

So it's really about winning the stages and understanding the stages and, and then, you know, the whole whole, you know, we all talk about how culture eat strategy for breakfast, right? Drucker's, famous line. And then, you know, that's a, a thing that I think most of us, struggle with a little bit, which is the people stuff, right?

The right people, right seat. The reality is, is the nature of the business changes as you walk through these stages and what got you here won't get you there. And that includes some of the people that you have in leadership positions. So, to me it's, instinctually or have you found a coach or have you joined a peer group, or have you read some decent, books that help you understand where you are developmentally and what you need to prioritize: because, you know, resources.

Extraordinarily scarce starting and building a business. And so, you know, whether you're wasting your time or you're wasting your money, you want to avoid either of those as best you possibly can.

Ken Lempit: Sure. And as you think back on that, like that landscape, I guess the observation and learnings you've had over time, how did that kind of drive you to start this company? Like what was the aha here?

Mark Abbott: Yeah. The ahas as I shared a little bit, it was that, it's not that complicated guys, right? Number one. Number two is I am deeply American. And what I mean by that is I deeply believe in the United States of America, what was behind its building, right?

So I believe in unalienable rights and, and commercialism and free markets and, taking care of, you know, of ourselves and, and putting ourselves in, in positions to be successful and all sorts of, you know, the things that I think are pretty American values and, and one of the things that I think is a extraordinarily important part of America is the small mid-size

business community. I think it's the lifeblood of a free society. And I also, you know, everybody knows that, you know, all the big companies we know where it's one point. Small companies. Right. One point, they were just ideas. And so I deeply believe in helping people build, exceptional companies.

 And I think it's a shame when people struggle with things that they shouldn't struggle with. And you know what I didn't share with you is when I began my career, I began doing workouts, right? So I saw what happens when people. You know, sort of fail at building a great company.

 And it impacts not just the employees, it impacts the vendors. It impacts the investors, right? It impacts a lot of different stakeholders. I saw what happens when, you know, when companies are poorly built and learned a lot from that. And so, you know, it's a, it's a combination of believing in, 

the importance of the small mid-size business community as well as believing that I can help people avoid some of the things that are kind of obvious in terms of mistakes that you can make at each of the stages of development.

Ken Lempit: How are you taking that learning in your own business, the really career's worth of learning at this point. How is that impacting your, your style as a leader? What kind of entrepreneur are you choosing to be? How are you running that business? How has that informed you?

Mark Abbott: we have, including in our free accounts, we have over 20,000 companies, running on 90. And, as I said, I've invested over a hundred companies and sat on dozens of boards, and so I've learned a lot about. Entrepreneurs and I sort of have my own model for thinking about entrepreneurs. And there are basically five types of entrepreneurs. There are visionary entrepreneurs, the ones we all talk about know, right? The Elon's, et cetera of the world. And then you have legacy entrepreneurs. And the difference is legacy entrepreneurs are building a company in an already existing industry.

They just think they can do it better. And Sam Walton is a classic example. Hewlett Packard. There's a bunch of great examples of legacy entrepreneurs. Then you got lifestyle entrepreneurs. And that's, really the majority of all entrepreneurs, right? They have a company because they don't wanna work for someone else, right?

They're smart people. They're capable of, of dealing with the, things associated with building a company, the risks, the ambiguity, et cetera. But fundamentally, they're, they're doing it for themselves and they're doing it for the lifestyle. Then you have accidental entrepreneurs.

There are a lot of them, right? Quote unquote. You could be someone who just. Didn't have a job and next thing you know, you've got a, three car washes as an example. Or you know, or you ended up, getting, inheriting your family's business or something like that. And then there's opportunistic entrepreneurs, and I met a bunch of those in my life.

And those are just people who are trying to figure out how to make a buck off of a moment. And so, I consider myself, don't mean to be arrogant, but in the visionary category. You know, I've had a point of view about where things will be in 10 years.

When I was running my merchant banking business in 1999, I had a vision for 2020. And that business today is, I don't know, $70, $80 billion in assets under management. So, it's done reasonably well. So, you know, I'm, I'm on the visionary side number one. Number two, I'm still learning, right?

I mean, last year was a, was a tough year for us. And it made me go down some rabbit holes in terms of things that I thought I understood well, but I, I just didn't have a strong enough framework to really understand what happened, and because of that, because of sort of the things I experienced that I didn't want to experience last year, I learned some new things, in particular about culture and so, you know, I'm still learning.

 I think I'll, if you're not a little bit embarrassed by who you are in three short years, you know, you're not learning. And so, you know, I'm just one of those perpetual learners and I'm gonna make mistakes because, you know, we're trying to do something pretty hard and, and we're going at a reasonably fast speed, so, it's gonna happen.

Ken Lempit: Oh, it's a lot of companies using the software to implement the EOS method. I mean, is it worth. Just like a short diversion. If people aren't familiar with EOS, what it is?

Mark Abbott: Yeah, so the real quick story on EOS is, you know, when I came up with my vision for Ninety, I wanted to write a book and create software that was literally 2005 about five years. And I was also recruited to run a business for a hedge fund. And so a bunch of things. You know, it happened, but about 2010 or so, one of the companies I personally invested in was starting to run on EOS and Gino wrote the book Traction.

I think he published it in either 2007 or 2008. And he was just beginning to build out this coaching community. And so, I studied it for about a year and then I actually met with Gino and said, Hey, you know, I was gonna write this book and create this software, and you wrote a great book and better than I would've written, and I wasn't thinking about setting up a coaching community.

 Would you have any issues if, you know, I joined the community and stood up a software company and he said, no, it's not in our DNA. I'd love you to do it. So, so I joined. So, you know, the big story on EOS is, you know, it was based upon a book that Gino wrote. Gino was an entrepreneur who then sold the business.

Found himself helping a lot of other entrepreneurs in his EO chapter in Detroit. Ended up, you know, sort of developing this operating system, the entrepreneurial operating system that has six key components. There's the vision, right? So let's make sure we all know where we're going and who we are, and you know, who we're serving and how we're serving them.

 And then there's the people side, so right, people, right seat structure and core values and things like that. And then you have the data side. That's the third key component. And when you got those three things strong, right, vision and people and data, you know, you can see what's working and what's not working.

That means you got opportunities, AKA, issues. And so issues is the fourth key component. The fifth key component is process. And then the sixth key component is traction, right? Just, okay, the vision's great, but you know, if you're not doing the things you need to do to turn that vision into reality, you know, it's pretty frustrating.

So vision, you know, without traction is hallucination is an older question. So, there, there's about 900 coaches around the world that help people get up and running on EOS and the vast majority of them, put their clients on Niniety.

Ken Lempit: That's awesome. So for folks who are listening, it's Gino Wickman, right? And the book was Traction, A great book and certainly worth considering implementing all or fundamental parts of the method in the business. And I think your software, you have a free tier of the software that helps people get started, right.

Mark Abbott: Exactly. Yeah.

Ken Lempit: So let's, um, let's dig into something you touched on before which is sort of stages of growth. And, and like they each seem to have, you know, unique issues associated with them, but there's also some repetition, right? They you sort of two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. So can you just share maybe two or three of

what the real constraints are. That cap, you know, growth of SaaS firms, sort of the first, first two or three stages, because I think that's where most of our audience is. They're not, you know, they're not at the 500 million mark. They're probably, you know, on the, on the other end of the scale.

Mark Abbott: Yeah, each stage has a ceiling that you hit. Right? But, I think that my instincts are based upon doing a lot of research on this, that your audience is probably, plus or minus at stage three. Stage three is where, you got product market fit, stage one product stage two is now you're generating repeat revenues and you know, you've hired some people to do the work.

Creates the value. So maybe you have a sales organization, salespeople, or maybe you have an operations people, right? Maybe you have an accountant, right? So it's just pretty much you and a bunch of other direct reports in stage two, stage three is where you start to bring on experts, whether it's a marketing expert or someone to run sales or someone to run operations.

Full-time accountant, you just start to divide. And in the beginning, you are leaning on them to, do work that may include what EOS calls rock. So, like, here's a, the thing we, I want you to do over the next 90 days help us develop, a spreadsheet, for projections as an example.

Or help us put in place, the marketing materials we need, for going out and doing sales, et cetera. So you start to get people who can help you execute on projects, rocks, things like that, right? And then and then what'll happen is they'll start to hire people and you'll start to go from having, , you know, it's you as the founder, CEO and then you got some department heads. And then maybe they've got some people who are running a cup, a team. But you start to have like these four layers to an organization. Every single layer has a time span of responsibility associated with which we can get into.

But you know, what happens is. You, once you start to do that, you're hiring people. Sometimes you're hiring people who are gonna bring in their own stuff, including their own values and it just starts getting messy in stage three, right? You got some people who are comfortable with, ambiguity, some people who aren't.

You got some people you hired who were big company people and now all of a sudden. They're grinding away, they're getting their hands dirty and they're not quite liking it, right? The idea of a startup is appealing to a lot of people, but when you get in there, it's hard, right? And so you, in stage three, you make a lot of hiring mistakes.

You find yourself having to defend the things that you thought were obvious, whether it's your ICP, whether it's your unique value proposition whether it's, it's even your core values, right? You start to find yourself wondering what the heck's going on here? Why, you know, 

why do some of these people, sort of overindex on some things that I don't think we should be overindexing on? So State street is hard, right? And I would tell you that the research is pretty clear that most businesses top out at 10 million in revenue, right? That's a hard ceiling. And it's because they get caught in stage three, right?

And, and some founders have to you know, they have to grind their way through and fire people. To move from stage three to stage four. Some of 'em just sort of, you know, say, well, I can't control everything. I've hired these professional, leaders, I'm gonna let them run things.

And you know, and the next thing you know, you're accepting maybe what you wouldn't have accepted, a year or two earlier because you don't know better. Maybe, maybe you don't belong to a peer group, maybe you haven't talked to someone else about what happens in stage three.

But, stage three is, is full of a mess. Each stage, you know, I like to say, and this is, I've taken this from someone else, the founder of, Infusionsoft. Leadership changes on the ones and threes. So the nature of the leadership, right. When you're at stage one, it's pretty straightforward.

It's you and you know, you make all the decisions, right? And then in stage two, right now, all of a sudden you've got some people who can manage out a month or two months or three months without a lot of close supervision. And then in stage three, you know, you need to have people who can manage out underneath you who can manage out, 

9 to 12 or 12 to 24 months without a lot of close supervision, but who, who are doing it consistent with who you are, whether it's core values or your ICP or your compelling value proposition. And they're developing relationships with their peers that are very healthy as opposed to, you know, I'm gonna do it my way and someone else is gonna do it their way. And so, stage three is, is, as I said, it's hard.

A lot of founders just, I don't think they give up, but maybe they, slightly give up, you know, because it's hard.

Ken Lempit: Yeah. Also, I think, there are very few overnight successes, right? And you get 8, 10, 12 years into it. You might also age out of your most effective, time as a, as an entrepreneur. 

Mark Abbott: I can hear me agree with that one.

Ken Lempit: Well, I mean, I think it just happens, like I, I have a long-term client where, the founder and owner had health problems that got in the way.

I mean, things happen to people other than by their own design. 

I wanna kind of move on. It's related, but we talked about pattern recognition earlier on, and I'm curious from a leadership standpoint. I mean, sometimes leadership teams present really well, they do well in a board meeting, but when they leave the board meeting, they don't perform all that well.

And I'm wondering if there are some signs that you can recognize outside in that's gonna be a problem and how do you diagnose that kind of thing?

Mark Abbott: Well, as an investor, the way you diagnose it is you go in and you look at the systems, and you look at the competencies, you look at the KPIs, right? You go and you assess the culture, right? You go and, and visit with the CEO to talk about, you know, I like to talk about A, B, C, D players, right?

Talk about what kind of leadership they like to surround themselves with. So as an investor it's, you know, I don't wanna say it's pretty easy to get in there and see what, what is, what, you know, going on. But I used to be you know, I used to specifically set up meetings so that I could go in and get a tour of the office and then sit in a meeting with the senior leadership team and then sit down with the CEO.

And by the time I did those three things, I could almost assure you of whether or not a company was well run. You could just see the energy and you can feel the energy walking through the company. When you're sitting there watching a leadership team you know, sit there and meet, you can see the, what's going on in the room, the nonverbals, right?

How people sit. It's extraordinary, right? And then when you talk to the CEO, ask him about, you know, do you have A players or B players or C players, and explain what that means. And then all of a sudden they're talking, about some of their direct reports, that's an issue.

Ken Lempit: it's interesting, there was a, an idea quite some time ago called managing by walking around, right? So like you. Know, using your powers of observation often, you know, you can glean a lot that isn't on a presentation slide, right? 100%.

Mark Abbott: Right. I mean, it's, and you almost can't fake it, right? We have this, neurotransmitter in our body called oxytocin, right? And, if someone's not trustworthy or not being open with you, you can, you can sense it, right? Because they know that they're not being that way unless they're, pretty far along on the spectrum in terms of, the triad of darkness, right?

Whether it's machiavellianism, narcissism or sociopaths and psychopaths, right? You can just sense it. And then just go do some drill down, 

Ken Lempit: we do a fair amount of interviewing of client executives and their sort of, their teams especially In messaging exercises, and every once in a while you get that like my skin is crawling kind of feeling. You can definitely tell even on a Zoom or a phone call. 

Mark Abbott: you know, the, the question right, was leadership teams. Who talk a good game, but don't actually play a good game, right? And so, like I said, you can, it's pretty easy to diligence it, but, it's unfortunate, but it's true that, if 5% of the population in most countries are sociopaths or psychopaths or extreme narcissists, then the percentage who get to the, get into a seat in, into a leadership role or a CEO role. More so in large companies than in small companies, right? But, that percentage increases, right? And it's too bad because it, obviously creates some bad vibes for, for capitalism.

But it's true,

Ken Lempit: Maybe more. Maybe more than bad vibes.

That's a scary statistic. If it's, if you're right on on 5%, that's pretty terrifying.

Mark Abbott: So, so that's why, sometimes you'll find these people that are, I mean, you've experienced it, right? Where they're, they could sell water to a drowning man, right? And so you just gotta, open up the hood and make sure that the, the engines there and everything's, everything that's supposed to be tied to the engines there.

And they haven't done things that mask what's going on, but even the best of the best, right? In doing acquisitions on occasion we'll miss stuff, so. We're all human and we all make mistakes.

Ken Lempit: Absolutely. Hey, I wanna bring this kind of back to Gino's system and your software and like leadership decision making around making the decision to run on an operating system like EOS and using software like yours and, wrote a substack recently on building moats and I didn't really touch on internal process orientation, you know, management of the enterprise as a way to build a moat.

But I think I'd like to kind of land the episode on, why some founders consider this work overhead that they can add later versus others who consider their ability to execute, a strategic capability. And I'm wondering, what your perspective is on that. Why do you think it is that some leaders don't build this in early?

And we did discuss very early in our episode, can't do it all at one time, but. What is it about the leadership mindset where people either do or don't take on this orientation?

Mark Abbott: Well, let's go first, right? The majority of entrepreneurs are lifestyle entrepreneurs and lifestyle entrepreneurs aren't really interested in becoming what I call, you know, sort of an exceptional founder, right? My, one of my, one of my deep hopes is that I can increase the percentage of non founder entrepreneurs to become founders because I think it's actually a super big win, win, win, win, win for all their stakeholders, right?

I mean, if they don't build a company that they can pass on or sell, then what happens right? When they shut it down, employees lose a job, the community lose an employer, the customers, the vendors, I mean, you know, everybody loses, you know, because the founder just, you know, the entrepreneur decides to walk away.

So, part of my mission is to help, more entrepreneurs become exceptional founders. And to be a founder means that you know you are playing a game, a long game, right? Where, in the beginning you're working on, day-to-day, week to week problems, and then you work on quarter to quarter problems.

Then you work on year to year problems. Then you are working on 5 to 10 year problems. And then if you're fortunate enough to build something that's well beyond stage five, you're working on 10 to 20 year problems. Right? And so, so what that means is you gotta be someone who's willing to play the long game. It's hard. It's really hard. So you gotta be someone who's willing to put in the hours. I've been working 60 plus or minus hours a year for 44 years. I mean, I've never changed, right? This is just, I continue to do that, right? I grind away. I work on weekends. I've been doing this, since I was 21 years old.

So, so you gotta play a long game. It's hard. And then you have to evolve, right? As an adult, as a leader, over time, your ego needs to evolve, right? And there's a whole, I can do a whole thing on levels of ego, but you know, you want to, if you to be a really good founder and build something that can scale and that you can pass on to the next generation, you need to get up to like a level 7, if not a level 8, level of ego and basically, that's where you've gone. Level 4 is belonging. Level 5 is achieving. You want to, you wanna win. Level 6 is you start to really have empathy for people so that you can be a leader and help, bring groups together and get them all aligned.

There's big traps there because you can over index on care versus performance. So you gotta escape that. That's why they're stages. But level 7 is where you realize, you, you need to surround yourself with like-minded people. You need to surround yourself with people who genuinely embrace your core values, who genuinely care about your ICP, who genuinely believe in why you exist and who are willing to help you build that company. And so, part of being a founder is evolving. And like I said earlier, I continue to evolve.

Ken Lempit: Do you think that, let's say there's, you know, a dozen or 20 companies in a specific vertical market and we service mostly software firms, so if you have 20 software companies, what are the things that are gonna make winners and losers there if products are near parity? Is it your ability to execute?

Is it leadership or, I mean, let's assume products do the job, right? Where do you think the differences in those companies.

Mark Abbott: Well, as I said earlier, I think, really strong leaders whether they're founders or someone who takes over from the founder, number one, respects what the company's all about. I call 'em forever agreements, right? Core values and compelling value proposition. ICP and, and, compelling why? So you respect those things, right? but you have to have a vision and your vision. If you're just following someone else in your industry, right, you're gonna lose. because you're just chasing them. They know where they're going and you're following 'em. They may make us a hard ride and all of a sudden, you go over a cliff.

So you know, ultimately what you need to do is you have a strong point of view on where your company needs to go. You need to be really good at creating a healthy culture that attract and retain the kind of talent you need to compete. Right? And so, and you need to understand the nature of the industry you're in, not just today, but 

what's gonna happen to it, and what the implications are. In terms of, how you go about winning and, it's, yes, it's execution, but it's also vision, it's alignment. It's creating a culture where, you can have hard conversations around things where there's no like clear set of data that tells you go left or go right. You know, to me it's all about, as a founder, you need to make sure you have a team that you think can win the game you're playing, the stage you're in, and turn your vision into reality. And so you need to have people who are capable of executing on a, one or a two year idea or even, when you're larger, capable of executing on a 2 to 5 year idea, even larger 5 to 10 year idea, right?

So, it really depends on, where the business is developmentally, the nature of the industry. I think that, if you look at culture, I'll do a real quick one for you here. I believe there are nine sort of archetypical types of culture and it's a nine box based upon level of intensity that you need to work and then the level of ambiguity associated with the opportunity you're pursuing.

So, you know, if you go up to far right, which is super intense and super ambiguous, that's, a lot of the cutting edge AI stuff that's out there. You go down to the far left on the bottom and it's lifestyle. And it's a very, very clear industry where, you're just competing for, based upon reputation.

Maybe, you are the high quality player in the industry. Maybe someone else is the lowest priced player in the industry. Maybe someone else is, more cutting edge. And so people just, like the fact that they're ahead in terms of innovation and then, in software never really that big of a thing.

But, the fourth dimension that people tend to compete on is, exclusivity or status. So you know, you gotta pick which lane, you want to win in. And then you gotta be the best at that thing, right? Whether you're lowest cost or you got the highest quality and lowest cost doesn't necessarily mean it's that you're the cheapest, but, all in the value is really good. 

Ken Lempit: If people wanna learn more about your software for implementing the EOS method, how can they do that?

Mark Abbott: Well, it's pretty simple. It's, we're ninety.io, right? ninety.io. And you can check it out. You can, you know, go there. There's a lot of educational material there. So you can learn all about it. And then you can do a free trial as you mentioned. We also have, a team that's there, kind of call it Ninety Care.

If you want some help getting going, we can introduce you to coaches, 

EOS implementers. All sorts of ways that we can help. Just, show up, hit us on the chat and we'd be delighted to, to help you, turn whatever you're working on into something exceptional.

Ken Lempit: Well, thanks so much, Mark Abbott. It was great to have you on the episode. And the podcast. If people wanna reach me, I'm on Linkedin/in/kenlempit. If you need help with demand generation for your software company, my agency is called Austin Lawrence. We're at austinlawrence.com. And if Mr. Abbott hasn't convinced you to subscribe to SaaS backwards, gosh, I don't know who will? Mark Abbott, thank you so much for joining us.

Mark Abbott: My pleasure.