Meet Cody Lutz
Executive Coach for Men. Relentlessly Curious. Wildly Creative. Unreasonably High Agency.
Cody Lutz is an executive coach who works exclusively with men. He helps ambitious founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs challenge the limits of their thinking, discover extraordinary possibilities, and take bold action toward what matters most.
Over the past two years, Cody has coached more than 200 entrepreneurs and leaders, helping them navigate high-stakes decisions, reinvent their businesses, create extraordinary opportunities, and redefine what success looks like.
His clients have negotiated six-figure improvements to business agreements, created opportunities worth multiples of their previous largest deals, transformed the direction of struggling companies, and built leadership teams capable of taking their businesses to entirely new levels.
Some of the most meaningful breakthroughs, however, have had little to do with money.
Clients have described their conversations with Cody as life-changing. They've credited his coaching with rediscovering joy, peace, and passion in their businesses, finding the courage to make difficult decisions, becoming more present fathers and husbands, and recognizing possibilities they never believed were within reach.
Cody believes the greatest limitations successful men face usually aren't a lack of resources, strategies, or opportunities.
They're the assumptions, beliefs, and identities that determine what they believe is possible.
“No amount of strategy or tactics will work with a belief system that can’t hold them.”
His coaching combines an unusual blend of relentless curiosity, wild creativity, deep personal investment, and an almost unreasonable bias toward action.
Just a farm boy.
Cody grew up homeschooled on a dirt road in rural western New York, in a county with more cows than people. (Real statistic!)
He watched his dad struggle through the early stages of entrepreneurship as a kid and eventually worked for the family business as a teenager.
It was a simple and wildly unconventional childhood. Homeschool allowed him to pursue creativity and curiosity in incredible ways from a young age. (Which sometimes meant falling out of a tree and breaking both arms, snowboarding off the house, and tent-camping in the yard during a snowstorm.)
He was raised in a faithful Christian family, went to church, Bible camps, and youth group, but none of that counts for salvation. At age 18, while listening to a Paul Washer sermon, the Lord graciously opened Cody's eyes to the gospel of faith alone in Jesus Christ's perfect life, substitutionary death on the cross, and victorious resurrection.
Cody has no college degree. No impressive collection of professional certifications. Just a lifelong sense of relentless curiosity, an overactive sense of FIO (figure it out), and an obsession with the puzzle of people: how they think, communicate, and make decisions.
High-Agency Career.
At age 19, the Lord opened the doors for Cody to work at Answers in Genesis, a world-renowned apologetics ministry. He got his foot in the door at the warehouse, and then got hired as a traveling event coordinator 9 months later (without ever having flown on a plane, and too young to rent a car!)
As he traveled the country with the ministry's CEO, he got to climb mountains, got a private tour of Apple's HQ & Facebook's HQ, and had dinner with billionaires. But most importantly, he met Lucy, the Mississippi Belle that became his bride.
During COVID, the conference career screeched to an unexpected halt. With a wife and a 1-month-old baby to provide for, he took an entry-level customer support job at a technology company.
Within 18 months, he was leading the department. Over the next several years, the team he was leading tripled. He fell in love with all things leadership and business. Coaching a high-performing team felt like what he was made for.
And then, like every good entrepreneurial origin story, he got fired.
“This is the best thing that ever happened to us. That story will clearly be true 10 years from now, so that's the story we're going to tell today.”
They had a few months of runway (and zero revenue) but clearer conviction than ever: entrepreneurship was the path forward. He started Backyardshreds.com, an e-commerce brand in the fitness space, and built a successful fitness coaching program online.
Coaching. That spark quickly grew from helping men accomplish seemingly impossible goals in their health and fitness to a much bigger game: the game of coaching bigger dreams, businesses, and helping men steward their potential.
That's the game he wants to play for the next 30 years.
Relentless Curiosity
The common thread through each chapter of Cody's story is a stubborn curiosity about what's possible and an unwillingness to wait for permission to find out.
That curiosity extends well beyond business.
He's a self-taught guitarist and songwriter who has performed alongside award-winning artists.
He designed and built his own backyard gym, then created a business teaching others how to build theirs.
He's climbed 27 of America's 50 state high points, once attempting three mountains in five days while sleeping in Walmart parking lots and surviving on PB&J sandwiches. (Back in the dirtbag days!)
He's attempted one of the world's toughest Spartan endurance races, eaten more unusual wild game than most people would care to identify (raccoon is delicious), and somehow ended up in national news after someone tried to run over a nine-foot snowman he'd built around a massive tree stump. (Not what he thought he'd be famous for.)
For Cody, curiosity isn't just an intellectual exercise.
It's an invitation to adventure.
And agency is what turns that adventure from an interesting idea into a life worth living.
Interested, not interesting.
For all his unusual experiences and accomplishments, Cody will be the first to admit that he hasn't always been as secure in himself as his willingness to take action might suggest.
As a kid, he desperately wanted to be cool, impressive, and successful in the eyes of others.
And that temptation hasn't magically disappeared.
Today, he regularly works with men who have built bigger businesses, accumulated greater wealth, and achieved far more conventional success than he has.
But he's learned something that changed the way he approaches coaching: His job isn't to be the most impressive person in the room. It's to be the most present.
“Lord, help me to see this person truly and to serve them deeply.”
He believes extraordinary coaching requires more than intelligent questions, clever strategies, or professional expertise.
It requires genuinely caring about another human being, seeing possibilities they can't yet see for themselves, and having the courage to challenge them with the truth in love.
A life of curiosity, agency, and adventure.
Cody is married to Lucy, the woman he wrote a song to propose to in 2018. They have four children, whom they homeschool, and a shared conviction that their family is a far greater adventure than anything either of them could build professionally.
His Christian faith shapes the way he thinks about success, ambition, stewardship, and the purpose of his work.
He doesn't believe the goal of life is to build the biggest business, accumulate the most wealth, or become the most impressive person in the room. He believes the goal is to faithfully steward the life, gifts, relationships, and opportunities God has entrusted to us.
And he believes there's extraordinary possibility hidden inside almost every man, often far beyond what they can currently imagine.
That's why Cody loves coaching men who are resourceful, not merely men who have resources.
Men who love Jesus, love their families, and want to become exceptional at what they do.
Men who are humble enough to question their assumptions, courageous enough to pursue ambitious possibilities, and committed enough to turn powerful conversations into bold action.
He has little interest in helping men achieve goals they think they're supposed to want.
He's far more interested in helping them discover what matters deeply enough to pursue wholeheartedly.
Cody wants his own life to be an extraordinary adventure.
And he wants the same for every man he coaches.
Not just more success.
More curiosity. More courage. More conviction. More creativity.
And a life they're genuinely excited to live.
What else is possible?
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