On December 30, 2020, Josh Smith did something most people would consider reckless. He walked away from his job as a journeyman lineman for the power company — a union position, with union pay, in the middle of a pandemic — and bet everything on a knife company he’d been dreaming about for two decades.
He was 39 years old. He had a garage, some equipment, and a business name he’d registered 20 years earlier and never used.
Four years later, Montana Knife Company did $50 million in revenue.
“I think in order to get rid of me, he said, ‘If you want to be a knife maker, you have to have your own shop,’” Smith recalled, speaking with Fortune from his office in Missoula. That knife was made by his coach and passed down personally, he said. “It was inspiring to me that he could turn raw materials into a knife and then also use that knife as a tool. I just loved the idea of being creative and making something that another person could use.”
That same year, he hatched a plan and waited. “I registered the name Montana Knife Company when I was 19 years old, and I didn’t launch it until I was 39.” It would take another 20 years of making knives until he was ready.
When COVID hit, Smith was still pulling shifts as a lineman, still making knives in the garage. But he’d been getting requests for years from hunters, butchers, and working professionals who couldn’t afford his $5,000 custom knives and wanted something to pass down to their kids.
The early days of Montana Knife Company were, by any measure, improvised. Smith had no supply chain, no employees, no manufacturing infrastructure. What he had was deep product knowledge and enough humility to know he’d need help with everything else.
“It shows how fast this is evolving,” Smith said, “that even our own PR agency can’t keep up with it.”
That day, Smith walked to a whiteboard and wrote a number: $50 million. He never erased that number but his company hit the goal the week before they outgrew the building.
The company has since moved into a 51,000 square-foot facility — built on the site of Missoula’s old stockyards, with reclaimed barn boards that Smith’s son personally dismantled and salvaged lining the interior walls. (When told that reclaimed wood is quite an attraction in the hipstery neighborhoods of the northeast, Smith shrugs: “Right, that’s basically what it is.” His company now employs approximately 125 people.
If Josh Smith’s story is about the founder’s bet, his first hire is proof it paid off for others too.
Richter was 18 when Smith hired him — a good student with scholarship options, an uncertain college plan, and COVID scrambling the usual calculus. Online dorm life didn’t appeal to him. The knife company, improbably, did.
He said he was lucky to be actively shopping for real estate in one of the most expensive small cities in America, where the median home price sits around $535,000. “I’ve been able to consider buying real estate really before many other people my age, which has been cool,” Richter said. “But the biggest thing that is valuable to me is that I have the security to be able to continue living in the place that I love and the place that I grew up, where a lot of people are either being forced to leave or don’t have the opportunity to come here.”
“I was someone that really enjoyed school, and I did and still do have very high aspirations and pulled myself to a high bar,” he said. “In some ways, the rhetoric, especially nowadays, is still that if you don’t go to college, you’re leaving opportunities to make a lot of money and be really successful behind.” Instead, he found himself at the ground floor of a company that was taking off.
