Building Alongside a Founder

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 fractional leadership and outsourced engineering, the farm outside Atlanta where every quarterly planning session ended around a six-hundred-pound cast-iron fire pit, and the hard-won lesson that culture is built by the people who care enough to solve the problem behind the problem. At the center of it all is a simple idea Mark keeps coming back to: your job is never just to do your job, it is to help the team win. It is an honest, reflective look at what stays constant when a company reinvents itself every six months, and what it actually takes to do work that matters.

Key topics:

• The Craigslist hire and the earliest, scrappiest days of building Ninety (90)
• Why fractional leadership and a "different company every six months" are so hard to scale
• Building a culture of service that was never written into the core values
• "Your job is to help the team win": the mindset that separates who thrives from who struggles
• COVID as the turning point that made both the platform and the relationships matter more than ever
• Mission versus job, and the real cost of a founder stepping out of every interview

About Michelle Rose:
Michelle Rose is one of Ninety's longest-tenured team members, joining Mark Abbott as a part-time assistant more than a decade ago and growing alongside the company into a leader across its implementer and client relationships. She is known internally for a deep commitment to service, relationship-building, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to help the team win.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Kolbe A Index (the assessment Mark references in the hiring process): https://www.kolbe.com