This 39-year-old quit his lineman job during the pandemic and built a $50 million company in his backyard

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. A childhood obsession, a lifelong credential The story doesn’t start in 2020, though. It starts in 1992, when an 11-year-old Josh Smith got a knife for Christmas and his Little League baseball coach invited him into his shop to make one. “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.” So Smith started a lawn-mowing business, worked for his parents’ excavation company, saved up, and bought a grinder. Through junior high and high school, he ground blades with the single-minded focus of someone chasing the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice that Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, identified as the threshold for world-class expertise. By the time he was 15, Smith said, he’d been an apprentice with the American Bladesmith Society for three years and successfully tested into the journeyman level — a grueling practical exam requiring a blade that can chop a one-inch rope in a single stroke, split two-by-fours without resharpening, and still shave hair off your arm, then bend 90 degrees in a vice without breaking. At 19, he became the