What Radical Stewardship Actually Looks Like

Most business owners spend their careers building equity. Alan Barnhart spent his career giving it away and then gave the whole thing away too.

When Alan and his brother Eric took over their family’s small crane and rigging company in Memphis, Tennessee, they made a decision that most people would call reckless. Before the company had even proven it could survive, they committed to giving 50% of profits to charity every single year. Their first year, they gave away $50,000 wich was more than Alan’s salary at the time. He said it was awesome.

That commitment didn’t change as the money grew. It grew with it. The company expanded at about 25% per year for decades, and so did the giving. By 2005, they were giving away $1 million a month. Every month. Then in 2007, they did something almost nobody in business history has done: they transferred 100% of ownership to the National Christian Foundation. A $250 million company. Gone. They still run it daily — but they will never see a dollar of its accumulated value.

What drove this? Alan came across verses in Scripture about wealth, stewardship, the dangers of money, and took them seriously. He set what he called a “lifestyle finish line” capping his personal income at the level of a middle-class church member, no matter how profitable the company got.

He also built the generosity into the company culture. A group of 55 employees and their spouses, called “GROVE”, decides together where half the profits go each year. Giving isn’t the owner’s private philanthropy. It’s the whole team’s calling.

Alan describes the company’s purpose in three parts: do good work, share faith, and generate as much resource for the kingdom as possible. That’s not a mission statement on a wall. That’s a company structurally redesigned around the belief that God owns everything.

Including the business.