Famed and feared in the 1980s as “Irv the Liquidator,” Irwin L. Jacobs was among the most notorious of that decade’s breed known variously as corporate raiders, leveraged-buyout artists, greenmailers, or—as we said when we inducted him into the Twin Cities Business Hall of Fame™ in 2002—“champions of shareholder value.” He made hostile runs at companies that he believed were underperformers, including Walt Disney, Kaiser Steel, and auto-parts manufacturer BorgWarner, buying up chunks of their stock and then selling at a profit. From 1986 to 1988, he was on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.
"We had $400 million in debt in the company. And we had about $400 million in revenue. So we were leveraged to our total sales," Jacobs says of Genmar in the early '90s. As the bottom dropped out of the recreational boat market, Genmar lost $100 million from 1990 to 1993.
Since then, however, Jacobs, now 65, has devoted his time and considerable energy to a side of his career that got little notice in the ’80s: building companies rather than breaking them up. His flagship enterprise is boat manufacturer Genmar Holdings, Inc., in which he owns a 40 percent stake. Minneapolis-based Genmar is now the country’s second-largest builder of recreational boats, after Brunswick, and the largest private one, with about 5,000 employees and $1 billion in 2005 revenue. Its 12 brands run the gamut from Ranger and Larson fishing and recreation boats to Carver and Marquis yachts. Marquis models range up to 86 feet, with price tags of more than $1 million.
Genmar is the centerpiece of several businesses that operate under the umbrella of Jacobs Management Corporation, the holding company that fills the 28th and 29th floors of the IDS Center in Minneapolis. Two other businesses—a publishing and television-production operation for the fishing industry and a manufacturing-technology firm—were acquired to serve Genmar’s needs.
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