Marc Elkman’s story starts with discipline.
He grew up in Fort Lauderdale with a mother who played in the LPGA for nearly 20 years. By age three, he was at Gold’s Gym in Fort Lauderdale, scurrying around the front desk. By ten, he had a personal trainer. That early routine shaped how he thinks about effort, consistency, and pressure.
Years later, that same mindset helped him build two very different businesses.
A fitness problem that turned into a fast-growing company
After graduating from Florida Atlantic University in 2011, Marc was juggling a full plate: personal training at a high-end country club in Boca Raton, bodybuilding, and even a brief stint playing college baseball.
Then he noticed something small but telling. Gym coolers were packed with meal prep bags.
At 24, he partnered with a 50-year-old chef he knew through the country club and launched a meal plan company for fitness-focused customers across South Florida. They bootstrapped it with $10,000 each, bought used equipment at auction, and started out of a Quiznos location. Marc took the meals to where the customers already were, local gyms, and let the product do the selling.
The business grew quickly. By 2015, it ranked 70th on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies. Marc shared that they reached $18 million in sales within three years while staying profitable and eventually grew to around 200 employees.
What made it hard was not the food. It was the delivery.
Marc described their model as “Uber Eats before Uber Eats,” delivering thousands of meals overnight with dozens of drivers. Missed deliveries and last-minute fixes were part of the daily grind, and there was no software that fit what they needed. So they built their own.
In 2016, Marc sold the business to a private equity group.
A home build that revealed the next move
After the sale, Marc bought a dream lot in East Boca Raton and designed a home he had pictured for years. As his family grew, the home no longer fit the reality of life with three kids, and they sold it for a strong profit.
Then he made a deliberate test.
Marc bought a waterfront lot and built a spec home as if his own family might live there. If it did not sell, they would move in. It did sell.
Marc said the home went under contract within 30 days of breaking ground in 2022.
That success became the foundation for Empire Development, where Marc now focuses on luxury waterfront homes in East Boca Raton. He shared that the company has more than $100 million in active development underway.
Doing it with the right people and the right partners
Marc credits the people around him, especially Andrew Weissman, Empire Development’s Chief Operations Officer, who joined us for the podcast recording and has known Marc since ninth grade.
On the financing side, Marc prefers community banks. He pointed to the personal attention, the strength of relationships across multiple deals, and the belief that the right banking partner will do what they say they will do while still staying competitive on rates.
The throughline
Even with the pivots, Marc keeps returning to one idea: health is wealth.
He talked about staying grounded in fitness, giving back through youth sports involvement, and creating opportunities for younger people to learn by spending time in the office and seeing how business works up close.
And when he zooms out, he comes back to momentum.
Marc put it simply: momentum is hard to start and hard to restart once it stops.
Watch the full episode to hear how he built through growth spurts, logistics headaches, and big bets, and why he still treats discipline as the real edge.
Article images courtesy Empire Development.
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