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If you order the tuna mignon at Local Ocean Seafoods, a restaurant in Newport, Oregon, the albacore most likely came directly from Brett Montague, captain of the Jo El. You might even see the 12-meter-long troller docked nearby. Local Ocean’s Dungeness crab, lingcod, and salmon also come from the local fleet in this town of about 10,400 residents.

This is no small feat. The Oregon Coast Visitors Association estimates that 90 percent of seafood sold in the state’s coastal towns doesn’t actually come from the region. At Local Ocean, offering the local catch is an intentional economic model that’s been part of the restaurant’s mission since it opened, says cofounder Laura Anderson.

Anderson, the daughter of a commercial fisher (whose dad was also a commercial fisher), and her business partner, Al Pazar, founded Local Ocean at a time when salmon and tuna prices were in the tank.

While low commodity prices hurt fishers, they can also depress the local economy. When fishers have fewer dollars to spend in town on groceries, gear, and everything else, the pain spreads, Anderson says. If prices are too low for too long, it can cause a communal downward spiral.

So two decades ago, Anderson and Pazar decided to open a business that would buy the highest-quality seafood from the local catch. “It was our intention to be a showcase for local seafood species and to offer a different market for fishers to sell to—a better market,” she says.

It worked. Local Ocean Seafoods became the kind of restaurant that locals loved and visitors raved about. It even survived the pandemic. By that time, though, Anderson was the sole owner, and she was tired. She was looking to sell and get out of the restaurant grind. But she had worries. Would a new owner continue buying local fish? Would they treat her employees well and nurture the same community-minded spirit she and Pazar had worked so hard to build? Day after day, she wondered, How do we maintain that legacy?

It’s a dilemma faced by the owners of many small- and medium-sized businesses.

Finally, Anderson hit upon a little-known solution: a business structure called a Perpetual Purpose Trust (PPT).

Patagonia, the US $3-billion outdoor goods brand, adopted a similar structure in 2022. The approach has also been successfully used by large European companies for decades—including Bosch, makers of everything from home appliances to agricultural machinery parts. But according to Susan Gary, a professor emerita at the University of Oregon School of Law who helped write the state’s PPT statute, this kind of structure can be great for small businesses, too, because it can preserve local control and values. That’s a big deal for “small communities, where the business is really important to the community,” she says.

A PPT works differently from other business structures. Instead of selling to a person or another business, Anderson sold Local Ocean Seafoods to a purpose-built trust. Like a new country with its own constitution, this trust has specific values written into its founding documents. Even though Anderson has departed, Local Ocean is legally bound to continue operating under those values throughout the life of the business.

A PPT like Local Ocean is still a for-profit business, Gary says. Managers still have to worry about the bottom line, and workers still have to keep customers happy. “It’s still about making money,” she says. “The difference is how the profit is used.”

Typically, a business’s owner, whether an individual or a suite of shareholders, takes some (or all) of the profit. When Anderson was at the helm, she had living expenses to pay like everyone else. But a trust doesn’t have those needs. “When you take that out of the equation, all of the profit now can get reinvested for the good of the company,” Anderson says.

In addition to laying out founding values, PPTs are required to identify beneficiaries. In general, these beneficiaries get to share in any profits beyond what’s needed to keep the business healthy. At Local Ocean, employees are the first to benefit through measures such as equitable profit-sharing. But the trust also enshrines its commitment to local seafood as a value, so the restaurant will continue buying seafood from local boats.

Crucially, the trust structure ensures that the restaurant can’t be sold to an entity that’s more focused on sending profits to absentee shareholders than providing income to the local folks whose labor makes the business run. To keep everything on track, Local Ocean is overseen by a board.

When Patagonia’s owner put his company into a trust, he essentially gave his company away. But Anderson, like most business owners who create a PPT, walked away with a nest egg. The transaction was financed by a lending institution that helps support alternative ownership models. Now, she’s starting a new project, feeling confident Local Ocean will stay true to its coastal values.