Mark Aylward

Mark Aylward coaches C-suite executives and founders through divorce. He spent nine years in a courthouse fighting for his own three children.

Brad Banyas brought him onto the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about fatherhood, divorce and the things men tend not to say out loud. They agreed before recording that nothing was off limits. Inside a few minutes they had found the overlap, both raised Catholic, both former athletes, their kids roughly the same age. Aylward had gone looking for help during his own worst stretch and found that the resources around him were all built for women.

His career was in staffing. He built and sold two information technology companies and had not reported to anybody in over 25 years by the time he started coaching. He marketed to everyone at first and learned fast that marketing to everyone means marketing to no one, so he narrowed it down to the men he had been, founders and C-suite executives used to making seven figure decisions and fixing things, who suddenly had no benchmark for the thing in front of them. He does not give advice. He makes observations, tells them what worked for him and what did not, and leaves the decision where it belongs. When he was hiring, he never cared about the resume. He asked one question. What is the hardest thing that ever happened to you, and how did you come out the other side.

He filed for divorce. His wife was served that morning, and at six that evening police were at his door with a domestic violence injunction telling him to come with them. He was escorted out of his own house. He could not see his children or come within five hundred feet of them until the trial ended six weeks later, and he says she filed the same injunction three times with no consequences. Nine years followed, most of them in a courthouse where he acted as his own attorney. He came out with sole custody and became mother and father to three kids in three different schools. Exercise held him together. He ran, played basketball until he could no longer get around men he used to blow past, then walked into five yoga studios and walked back out again before he found the one he stayed in for three years.

He knew that courthouse better than most of the lawyers in it, and he used it. He would see a man sitting in the hall, bummed out or angry or lost, walk over and ask if he could help him find a room. The thanks he got for that, before any detail was exchanged, told him there was work here. He now offers any man a free thirty minute phone call and spends most of it trying to talk him out of paying for anything. The first step, he says, should be easy.