Mark McEvoy

Mark McEvoy traded natural gas for a living, then walked away and started teaching people how to stop being afraid of their own dogs.

McEvoy moved to Georgia 23 years ago and Brad Banyas was one of the first people he met, on a youth football sideline. They coached together for years, and before that against each other. Brad still tells the story of a playoff overtime where McEvoy would not speak to him at the coin toss, then told him where to go at the second one. McEvoy's version is that he does not enjoy being reminded he lost. He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about dogs and spent most of the hour talking about people.

McEvoy does not look at, touch or talk to a dog when he meets it. He stands still and lets it smell him, because the handler's nerves are the actual problem in the room. He says it takes him minutes to balance a dog and hours to train the owner, and he has never found a way around that, since he cannot move in with the family. His sessions run about six hours in a single visit, against an industry norm of forty five minutes once a week, and he says roughly 97 percent of his clients need only the one. Nobody has ever refused to pay him, and if he decides a session went badly he knocks two or three hundred dollars off the bill himself.

His wife Tammy told him he could not be a gym coach, so he took economics and management degrees instead of teaching. He traded commodities at New York State Electric and Gas for five or six years, then Southern Company recruited him to Atlanta, where he once closed a deal worth about half a billion dollars that changed how gas moves through the Northeast. Then Enron collapsed and the rating agencies came for every energy company behind it. His firm lost its credit rating, had to prepay for everything, grew too fast and filed for bankruptcy. He spent five years being paid to do almost nothing while it reorganized. When it moved to Houston he stayed, went into business with partners he describes as lazy and not especially ethical, and lost time and money on ventures that never panned out. He started over training dogs for free at a vet's office, handing himself 25 and 50 dollar raises, with his hands getting chewed up.

McEvoy has turned down a TV pilot and a line of people who want to build something around him. He says he would get death threats for correcting a dog and has no interest in any of that. There is no website. He will not start a YouTube channel, on the grounds that he would get too popular. The business runs off a Facebook page and a waiting list that has been four and five months long. He has a couple hundred reviews and has never had one under four stars.