Marks CEO Gregg Marks was featured in the Triangle Business Journal’s Executive Insights, joining President and Publisher Sougata Mukherjee as a 2025 Fast 50 honoree to talk about the company’s growth, model, and culture.
Gregg traced the Marks story back to the beginning. In 2018, his son Tyler Marks left NC State just three weeks into college to start a sitework company, with nothing but an old Bobcat and one employee. As Gregg likes to put it, “Tyler is the Mark Zuckerberg of Dirt.” Today, Marks Clearing & Grading is a full-service sitework contractor installing the utilities and infrastructure behind residential subdivisions and commercial sites, with national builders like Toll Brothers, Pulte, and Lennar among its largest customers.
What sets Marks apart, Gregg explained, is speed and quality. “We’re going to build a job faster than any other sitework company in the market,” he said, and the numbers back it up. On one large Lennar project, Marks was given 26 months to deliver and is turning over finished lots in about 13. Every month delivered early is real savings for the builder. The model works because Marks puts maximum resources on every job and never takes on more than it can manage.
That performance is built on culture. Faith, Family, Dirt is painted on every Marks truck: the company’s own take on God, family, and career. Gregg describes hiring as bringing someone into the family, supported by resources like a corporate chaplain and a genuine commitment to work-life balance; as he tells it, he’s more bothered when an employee misses a child’s soccer game or a teacher conference than when they miss work. It all comes back to one of his favorite lines: good is the enemy of great.
Looking ahead, Gregg shared where Marks is headed. Through its development arm, MCG Capital, the company is self-developing around 14 projects under contract and moving toward becoming a finished-lot provider to the national builders it already serves, controlling projects from raw land all the way through finished development.
To watch the full Executive Insights conversation with the Triangle Business Journal, click here.
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