He Turned Down $400 Million For His Company Then He Gave It All Away
In 1968, Eddie Smith Jr. was 26 years old, working at his father's mail-order pantyhose business in North Carolina, when a chance encounter led him to buy a struggling boat manufacturer called Grady-White for his life savings. The company was nearly bankrupt. Smith put in 100-hour weeks, gave up golf for decades, and turned it into one of the most respected premium boat manufacturers in the American marine industry, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and building a reputation for quality and dealer relationships that its competitors could not replicate. Two years ago, offers started arriving to buy the company outright, multiple of them well north of $400 million. Smith, now 83, turned down every single one. His only son, Chris, had died from ALS in 2022, the year after his wife Jo passed, leaving him without the family succession he had once planned for. Rather than selling to private equity buyers he did not trust to preserve his company's culture, profit-sharing plan, or on-site clinic, Smith chose a different path.
Inspired by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who transferred ownership of his company to a trust and nonprofit in 2022 so that all future profits would go to environmental causes, Smith placed Grady-White's voting stock into a newly formed Grady-White Boats Perpetual Purpose Trust and its non-voting stock into a separate nonprofit, permanently locking the company against any future sale and routing its profits, which can run into the tens of millions per year, to conservation, healthcare, education, and community causes in Greenville, North Carolina and beyond. Smith will remain at the company as chief executive emeritus at an annual salary but receives no sale proceeds, no charitable deduction, and is expected to face a multimillion-dollar personal tax bill for the transfer. He said he is not focused on that. God has really blessed me, he told Fortune, to put me in a position to give away the vast majority of my net worth. He said he does not need a 200-foot yacht or winters in the Mediterranean. He is happy in eastern North Carolina. The 350 people who work for him and the dealers who have built their businesses around Grady-White's quality will keep their jobs, their profit sharing, and their clinic. All future profits will go to causes that need them. And the company he bought for his life savings 58 years ago cannot be sold away from them by anyone, ever.
