Balancing family life and being an entrepreneur: Mindgrub CEO Todd Marks

By several measures, Catonsville-based Mindgrub Technologies is a successful, local tech business.
Founded by two-time entrepreneur Todd Marks, the mobile and web development company has established sales offices in several Northeast cities, expanded over the last several years to employ more than 50 people and recently launched a mobile gaming division.
But as Marks reveals in a Huffington Post interview, starting up Mindgrub meant losing his marriage.
The first company he was a part of in the late 1990s didn’t take off during the dot-com boom. Marks, “on the brink of foreclosure” and married with a family, left that startup for a corporate job. Incessant corporate travel pushed Marks back toward entrepreneurship — starting a company in the basement of his home, he thought, was a better alternative than being away from his wife and daughters — but beginning a new venture didn’t change much, as he says:

By that time, my wife was no longer in support of a new endeavor — with good reason. We were poor again, and I was working and traveling constantly. There was a year I only saw my family on the weekends.
She was lonely and resentful, and told me she wanted a divorce. At the beginning of Mindgrub, we didn’t have enough money to pay for the attorneys. We had to wait sometime. She was one foot out the door — and that was the end of my marriage.

In the Huffington Post interview, Marks lays out three tips he now lives by to balance his life as CEO of a growing business and father. Here’s one:

• “Find a balance for family time — include them in what you’re doing, or take time from what you’re doing so you can include them. The key is staying close — physically and emotionally. For me now, once a week, we shut off all devices, talk over dinner, and then play Xbox together. It’s family night.”

Read the full interview here.