How Marshall University President Brad Smith Became West Virginia’s Richest Person by DurotMatthew
rad Smith was six years old when a plane carrying the 1970 Marshall University football team crashed a mile from his home near campus in southern West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board. His cousins rushed to aid their dying neighbors as volunteer firefighters. “I watched the flames burn outside my window,” Smith remembers. “And then I watched this community rise from the ashes.”
Smith, whose ring never leaves his finger to this day, followed in his dad’s footsteps, landing a sales job at PepsiCo after receiving a master’s degree in management from Aquinas College of Michigan in 1991. Despite an early boss’ insistence that he attend corporate communications courses to rid himself of his West Virginia twang, Smith quickly climbed the corporate ladder at 7-Up and direct-mail marketer ADVO with the “inherent flaw” of his accent proudly intact.
According to Intuit’s billionaire founder Scott Cook, Smith’s impact on the company goes beyond business results. “He is the ultimate servant leader, focusing on those he serves and solving their most important problems, which inspires teams to be the best they can be,” Cook says. “His spirit of integrity and teamwork changed our customers’ lives and our employees’ lives forever.”
Smith and his wife Alys, a lawyer from Ohio with a shared love for Appalachia, founded their education, entrepreneurship and environment-focused Wing 2 Wing Foundation in 2019, but their philanthropy in the region goes back even further. Since 2015, they’ve donated $35 million to Marshall to establish a scholarship that gives preference to first-generation students from West Virginia and Ohio and to transform its recently renamed Brad D. Smith Schools of Business.
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