HI, I’M MARK HAYES

A calling does not expire.

I help leaders find what they were made to say, and build a body of work worthy of it.

THE QUESTION THAT STARTED EVERYTHING

I have spent most of my life at the intersection of story, enterprise, and meaning. As an entrepreneur, I have built companies. As an educator, I have taught hundreds of students how to bring ideas to life on screen. As a real estate professional, I have worked inside some of the most remarkable properties and with some of the most accomplished people in Central Florida. And through all of it, one question kept surfacing in every room I walked into:

Why do some leaders leave a legacy that outlasts them, while others, just as talented and just as driven, leave almost no trace at all?

The answer, I eventually discovered, was never about talent, resources, or even accomplishment. It was always about story. Specifically, whether the leader had ever built their story into anything — or whether it had simply lived and died inside them.

WHAT THE RESEARCH CONFIRMED

I did not arrive at that conclusion casually. I spent years researching it. My doctoral work, grounded in narrative inquiry, explores the relationship between vocational calling, meaningfulness, and the stories leaders tell about their own work. What the research keeps confirming is both simple and urgent: calling is not assigned at birth and discovered overnight. It is excavated — through lived experience, through failure, through the years that felt wasted and the rooms that felt wrong.

And here is the part that changes everything for most leaders I work with: those years are not wasted material. They are the material. Every wrong turn, every pivot, every season of invisibility was the construction of a story that someone else desperately needs to hear.

People I work with have often spent thirty years in the wrong room. They are not broken. They are overdue.

The Work I do Now

I founded Stockworth Institute to give leaders and organizations the infrastructure to do something most never do, take their lived experience seriously as a professional asset, build it into a Narrative Estate, and deploy it in ways that create measurable trust, authority, and legacy.

Through Stockworth Studios, I also produce the films and media that bring those stories to the screen. I teach entrepreneurial film and media at the University of Central Florida. I serve on the board of the Winter Park Institute, where I have had the privilege of working alongside some of the most influential thinkers and leaders in the country. And I have completed a doctoral dissertation on the very framework I use every day with clients.

This is not work I stumbled into. It is the convergence of every season of my life — the enterprise, the education, the research, and the conviction that story is the most underutilized asset in any leader’s portfolio.

Who Am I?

DOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Published a dissertation on vocational calling, meaningfulness, and narrative inquiry — the academic foundation of everything I build with clients.

FOUNDER & PRESIDENT,

The Stockworth Group of Companies

A Central Florida-based organization spanning luxury real estate, film and media production, and thought leadership development.

PROFESSOR

University of Central Florida

Teaching master level entrepreneurial film and media studies — where story meets enterprise in the classroom.

BOARD MEMBER,

Winter Park Institute

Serving alongside leading thinkers and civic leaders to advance meaningful public discourse in Central Florida.

FILM & MEDIA PRODUCER

Through Stockworth Studios, producing documentaries and narrative content that bring leaders’ stories to the screen.

ENTREPRENEUR & REAL ESTATE LEADER

Decades of experience building companies and working with high-net-worth clients across Central Florida’s luxury market.

WHAT MATTERS MOST

Husband, Father, and lifelong student of meaningfulness, in my family and my work.

This is what I know for certain after a career spent at the intersection of story, enterprise, and meaning: you have lived something worth preserving. The question is not whether your story matters. The question is whether you will build it into something before it disappears.

The Stockworth Group

Some of Our Clients