Mark Zweig grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri. He started his entrepreneurial career selling bicycles on the street corner of his childhood home at age eight or nine. He also cut lawns. By the age of 12, He got his first “real” job working at Kirkwood Cycle Shop. From there, he worked for three other bike shop owners in about ten different stores. He also bought and sold cars and motorcycles.
As a young child, Mark thought he wanted to be an architect. He would go to the library and check out books of house plans and then draw his own houses on graph paper. But he quickly got seduced by the world of business. He went to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he got his business degree in three years and MBA in one.
His first job out of grad school was working for a consulting firm in St. Louis. He was then recruited by a client (The Pickering Firm), and moved to Memphis, Tennesse, first as Director of Project Development and Human Resources for their operations in Memphis and Little Rock, and shortly after, for the whole firm. He became an owner there at the age of 26, and was next recruited by another former client (Carter & Burgess) in Fort Worth—first as head of HR and then shortly after as Director of Marketing as well.
In 1988, Mark moved his young family to the Boston area where about six months later, he started Mark Zweig & Associates—the management consulting, publishing, research, media, and training firm that is today known as Zweig Group. The firm grew by 30% annually for 13 years in a row, and was twice named to the Inc 500 List of Fastest-Growing Privately-Held Companies. In 2004, the company was sold to a private equity firm, Cardinal Growth, and Mark relocated to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he had started shortly before teaching entrepreneurship one night a week at the Walton College of Business. In 2005, he started Mark Zweig, Inc., a design/build/development company. It grew rapidly throughout the real estate recession and was named to the Inc 500/5000 List in 2014.
In 2009, Zweig Group was taken over by its mezzanine lender, and in 2010, Mark was recruited back to turn around his old company. With the help Sonya Stout, who later became Mark’s wife, they got the firm back on track and bought it back from the lender in 2012. Zweig Group was once again named to what was now the Inc 500/5000 list in 2013, as the firm grew by more than 60% between 2010 and 2012, and went from losing $1 mill+ annually to becoming very profitable.
Over the last half of 2000 and throughout the 2010s, Mark expanded his teaching role at The Walton College, first to a ¾ time post and today as a full-time as an Entrepreneur in-Residence. In 2021, Mark assumed the chairmanship of the Vistage NWA Groups, taking over the two groups assembled and led by Chuck Hyde over the last several years.
Throughout his career at Zweig Group, Mark has worked with several thousand CEOs and managers of AEC firms throughout the US as well as foreign countries, and helped them with every problem from strategic planning, to ownership and leadership transition, to mergers and acquisitions, marketing, and more. He has written several thousand articles and authored a number of books, with a new book coming out shortly, entitled,
“Confessions of an Entrepreneur.” He still writes his weekly editorial for The Zweig Letter, read by owners and managers of AEC firms worldwide, and has done so for more than 30 years. He is also a leading contributor to the “Walton Insights” blog on The Walton College website. He is additionally a regular contributor to The Northwest Arkansas Business Journal. He has given hundreds of talks at a wide variety of national, state, and local events, sometimes to crowds as large as 2000 people.
Additionally, Mark has been a founder or co-founder of several other private companies besides Zweig Group and Mark Zweig, Inc., including a reading clinic, baby products company, and bike shop. He has served as an outside director or advisor on the BODs of at least a dozen private companies, ranging from $0 to $200 million in revenue. He has also served on three university boards for two different universities, the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce Board, and he is currently on the Board of Directors of Miyamoto Relief, a non-profit that provides a wide range of projects in third world countries struck by natural disasters.
Marks interests—besides his businesses and family that includes five daughters—are in art, architecture, antique and special interest cars, motorcycles, and bicycles. In his youth, he participated in a wide variety of motorsports racing. In how middle age, he modified and restored a wide variety of cars, hot rods, and motorcycles. He has owned more than 400 cars and 300 motorcycles, including a number of prize-winning restorations. His houses have appeared in Better Homes and Gardens, At Home in Arkansas, Renovation Style Magazine, Citiscapes Magazine, and many others. He has received many awards for his buildings, including “Developer of the Year,” “Best Historic Restoration,” “Best Adaptive Reuse,” and more.
email::mzweig@zweiggroup.com
direct::479.387.7811
title::Chairman & Founder
