06/08/2026
I’ve noticed something about business owners who have started thinking seriously about generosity. They don’t usually walk in and say, “I want to give my business away.” They come in with a technical question. Estate planning. The kids. A foundation idea they read about somewhere.
The question on the surface almost never captures what’s really going on underneath.
Alan Barnhart built Barnhart Crane and Rigging into a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars. From early on, he believed the business belonged to God. When the estate planning pressure became too great, he and his wife did something most people would call radical: they gave away 99% of the non-voting stock to a charitable trust. “We weren’t giving away the company,” he said. “We were just changing the holder of the stock.”
Jeff Rutt, founder of Keystone Custom Homes, heard that story and followed a similar path. He gave 89% of his non-voting stock to a national Christian trust. His motivation? He saw the global need. He had resources. He wanted to deploy them for something larger than himself.
Neither one of them arrived at those decisions through a spreadsheet. They arrived there through a shift in how they saw themselves. Not owners. Stewards. The business was never theirs to begin with; they were just making it legal.
One of the things that freed both of them was removing wealth from the center of the family conversation. When the business isn’t the inheritance, the family can focus on what actually matters: passing on values, faith, work ethic, and a sense of purpose. The question “how much is enough for the kids?” gets a lot easier to answer when the equity isn’t sitting there as the default answer.
