Mark Hodges took the customer’s next request seriously

A garage is an economical place to start a business. It offers storage, low overhead and very little opportunity to mistake the premises for an achievement. In 2007, Mark Hodges was supplying payment equipment from his garage in Lubbock, Texas. The business had the satisfyingly literal name Lubbock Credit Wholesale Equipment Co. He sold the hardware. His customers supplied the next idea.

Merchants wanted help with the whole business of accepting cards: processing, pricing, technology and someone to call. Hodges worked with Greg Bernstein to turn that request into Wholesale Payments. The equipment business became a processing business. A customer asking for another service had, in effect, handed the founder a larger job description.

That beginning is a useful way into Hodges’s career. Today he is Wholesale Payments’ co-founder and chief executive, responsible for its strategy and policies. The distance between a garage and a national merchant services company is considerable. The thread connecting them is rather modest: listen to what the person across the counter needs, then organize a business capable of providing it.

The customer enlarged the brief

The garage belongs in this story because of what happened inside the business, rather than any romance attached to the building. Selling equipment puts a supplier close to a merchant’s practical concerns. A terminal has to work within an actual shop, alongside its staff, customers and routines. There is a considerable difference between delivering a machine and becoming responsible for the relationship around it.

Hodges and Bernstein chose the broader relationship. Wholesale’s model combines payment services with local representatives. In that arrangement, the person selling the service has a continuing human role beside the technology. For a founder, it creates a particular management problem: the company’s promise has to survive many individual conversations, far beyond the office where its policies are written.

The name Wholesale Payments has the brisk efficiency of a warehouse sign. The business underneath it depends on people. A merchant can compare a device’s specifications on a screen; deciding whether someone will be useful when a problem arrives is a more personal calculation. Hodges’s route into leadership began on the selling side of that calculation.

A chief executive with field experience

Before the executive title came work as an account executive. That detail matters to the shape of Hodges’s job now. An account executive experiences a business through the questions customers ask and the objections they raise. A chief executive has to translate those encounters into decisions that other people can repeat. Experience in the field gives those decisions a practical reference point.

Wholesale operates as an independent sales organization, commonly shortened to ISO. The initials are tidy; the work involves coordinating sales, merchant requirements and payment services. The model places representatives between a complex industry and businesses that have plenty of other things to do. Making that relationship useful is an operating task, renewed with every account.

The company’s range shows why the conversations differ. Restaurant terminals may need tip editing and tab forwarding. Online merchants need gateways and shopping-cart integration. Petroleum businesses have pay-at-the-pump requirements and fleet-card acceptance to consider. Wireless acceptance serves people taking payments away from a conventional counter. A generic sales pitch would have an unusually busy time pretending these were all the same customer.

For Hodges, the leadership challenge follows from that variety. Strategy has to leave room for the merchant’s actual working day. Adding services increases the number of things a company can sell; it also increases the number of things a representative must understand. The useful measure of expansion is whether the broader offering makes the relationship easier to maintain.

David Hodges’s quieter influence

There is a family line running through Hodges’s professional account. His father, David Hodges, influenced his regard for hard work and discipline. Away from work, Hodges enjoys time with his family and teaching his sons the lessons he learned from his father. The connection is direct: something received in one generation is being passed into another.

Those are ordinary words, hard work and discipline, which is perhaps their advantage. They demand less explanation than a fashionable management theory and rather more repetition. Within Hodges’s story, they sit beside a career built through sales and the continuing work of running a service business. They give the garage beginning a personal context without requiring it to become a legend.

A founder’s biography can become crowded with the company’s milestones. This family detail gives the page a different scale. The executive makes decisions for an organization; the father spends time with his sons. Both belong to the same person. The latter has no ranking attached to it, and seems perfectly capable of retaining its importance without one.

The ranking and the people behind it

Wholesale Payments appeared at No. 800 on the Inc. 5000 in 2022, followed by No. 51 on the Inc. Regionals Southwest list in 2023. In 2025 it placed No. 686 on the Inc. 5000. Inc. names both Bernstein and Hodges in the company’s leadership. These are company distinctions, earned during a period in which the original equipment venture had become a national operation.

Company rankings. The regional list and national list are separate comparisons.

Hodges’s public LinkedIn activity around the 2025 recognition put attention on the team’s work: calls, doors knocked and merchants helped. The vocabulary remained close to sales. Even when the occasion supplied a large number and a congratulatory moment, the underlying units were individual efforts. It is a revealing choice of emphasis for someone whose own title sits at the top of the organization.

His recruiting language is similarly direct. In a public search for a national sales director in Fort Worth, he looked for someone able to recruit, develop people and produce consistently. The opportunity involved building and leading a team. One short phrase gave the advertisement its character.

“this is a builder role.”

Mark Hodges · LinkedIn recruiting post

That description makes the next layer of management sound like work in progress, which is what building a sales team is. A leader has to help other people become effective, then sustain the result. The advertisement’s emphasis on development connects the chief executive’s own selling background with the kind of leadership he wants to hire.

More to do after the payment

In November 2025, Wholesale announced the acquisition of Strategic Mobile Solutions, doing business as textLIVING, in an eight-figure transaction. The announcement described a merchant base above 40,000 and plans to add SMS engagement, marketing automation and loyalty tools. For Hodges’s company, the business surrounding a payment was getting larger again.

The proposed expansion has a recognizable relationship to the garage beginning. Equipment led to processing and service. Payment processing now provides a route into helping merchants communicate with customers and encourage repeat visits. The commercial question extends from how a business accepts a purchase to how it maintains contact afterward. Those are connected tasks, although each requires its own execution.

Bernstein, the president, spoke publicly about the acquisition alongside chief financial officer Blake Pyle and textLIVING founder Joe F. Brannon III. Brannon retained an ownership stake in the new textLIVING entity. The plans also included white-label tools for ISO partners. This was a company initiative involving an expanded leadership and product network, rather than a solo founder announcement.

The strategic logic is understandable: an established merchant relationship can introduce another useful service. Its success depends on merchants finding that service worth using. Software adds possibilities; someone still has to make those possibilities practical. That is a familiar test for a business whose first expansion began with customers explaining what they wanted next.

A birthday with very little ceremony

For a less formal view of Hodges’s working world, consider the birthday video Wholesale shared in November 2025. Colleagues appeared at desks, around the office and together in a group. They offered thanks and good wishes, along with teasing about his age and a question about the party. The chief executive received the sort of tribute that seems unlikely to have passed through a committee devoted to executive dignity.

One contributor thanked him for advice, encouragement and belief when they started. Others kept their messages brief. Taken together, the greetings offer a glimpse of how colleagues address him when the occasion permits affection and a little mischief. An organization chart can tell you who reports to whom. It seldom tells you who feels free to make a birthday joke.

The video sits comfortably beside the more formal record: the garage, the sales work, the partnership with Bernstein, the rankings and the acquisition. These details describe different distances from the same person. From far away, Hodges is a chief executive in merchant services. Closer in, he is a former account executive hiring builders, a father passing on lessons, and a boss whose colleagues have prepared several minutes of birthday wishes.

The garage has long since ceased to describe the size of the business. It still provides a useful point of reference for the work. A merchant asked for more help. Hodges and Bernstein built a company around the request. As the offering grows, that original conversation remains a rather demanding standard: make the next thing useful to the person who has to use it.