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Lineman turned entrepreneur builds $50M knife company

Josh Smith transformed his lifelong passion for knife making into a successful business, Montana Knife Company. After years of honing his craft and working as a lineman, he launched his company in 2020 during the pandemic. Four years later, Montana Knife Company achieved $50 million in revenue by offering high-quality, American-made knives at an accessible price point, filling a gap in the market. AI

IMPACT Niche tooling improvement; minimal industry-wide impact.

RANK_REASON Significant revenue milestone for a product company. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=0.1]

Read on Fortune →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Lineman turned entrepreneur builds $50M knife company

How we ranked this

Signal score
0 / 100
Composite score across the factors below. Higher = stronger signal that this story matters right now.
Newsworthiness bucket
Research
Significant revenue milestone for a product company. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=0.1]
Source corroboration
Single-source cluster
Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
Topics
product, funding
Editorial topic classification. Feeds into how the story surfaces on /topic/<slug> hub pages and into the per-entity coverage mix.
AI-industry relevance
Low
Off-topic or adjacent — cluster remains reachable but doesn't surface in AI-industry rankings.
Story freshness
126 days old
Aged out of breaking-news scoring windows; ranking reflects the durable signal from the full source set.

Full methodology in our editorial standards.

COVERAGE [1]

  1. Fortune TIER_1 English(EN) · Nick Lichtenberg ·

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

    Josh Smith registered the name "Montana Knife Company" at 19, spent 20 years mastering his craft, then walked away to pursue his American Dream.