Eddie Woodin: "People who give back have more fulfilling lives"

Eddie Woodin stands in front of the “Wall of Fame” he
 keeps at the offices of his Scarborough business, Woodin
& Co. Store Fixtures, where each photograph depicts one
of his charitable or spiritual successes. Woodin’s goal is
to inspire others of his generation to follow his example,
and to learn from his experiences.

SCARBOROUGH — Outside the Woodin & Co. Store Fixtures showroom on Gannett Drive in Scarborough stands a pole flying the American Flag. No surprise there, a lot of businesses like to sport their patriotism. But there also is another flag, one featuring a white field with a red Latin cross on a blue upper-hoist canton. It’s called, quite simply, the Christian Flag.

“I think,” says business owner Eddie Woodin, “that mine is the only business in the state of Maine with one of those.”

Woodin, 64, is about as charismatic as they come. A short man with a big heart and the winning smile of everybody’s favorite uncle, he instantly puts people at their ease. He’s unafraid to give tours of his shop in stocking feet, or to wear his Christianity on his sleeve.

Or even on a flagpole, as the case may be.

“My philosophy is, I only manage the business, God owns it,” he says, explaining the flag. “That’s been fundamental to it, and everything’s tended to work well.

“We give back a lot,” he adds, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial tone, as if God might hear him committing the sin of pride. “We give a lot in terms of time, money and encouragement.”

Woodin gives away his money as fast as he earns it – between $100,000 and $200,000 a year, he says. Scarborough’s Project GRACE, Maine Audubon, the Boy Scouts of America, the Southern Maine Agency on Aging and the Center for Wildlife, all have benefited from his generosity. In recent years, as the recession has put a crimp in company profits, Woodin has dipped into his own pocket, too.

Now, he’s hoping to teach others of his generation to practice the same philanthropy he’s made a way of life, starting from a time when his checks were more often of the $5 and $10 variety, “because that’s all I could afford at the time.”

Woodin is currently working on two books. One is about his faith-based philosophy of giving back, the second about “developing a fulfilling, rich life through a relationship with God.”

The former book has a finished draft Woodin plans to proof over the winter, and publish sometime next year, while also fleshing out the 14 chapters of its follow-up, now in outline form. The hope, he says, is to parlay those books into a speaking tour, through which he can inspire others of his generation to follow his example, and to learn from his experience – as a believer, a community booster and a board member of more than 30 service groups – as they cast about for thing to do during their retirement years.

“People who give back live longer and have more fulfilling lives,” he says, adding with an almost wistful air, “A philanthropy coach. I like that concept. I would like to do that.”

A lifelong devotee of The Word, Woodin was born again in 1988, but he’s had at least two additional turning points since then.

The first was in 1990, in a faraway hotel bed. As a VP for Pittsburg-based Child Store Fixtures International, Wooden spent a lot of time on the road. At one point, he woke up not being able to remember at first what city he was in.

“I was gone from home all the time and at that moment, I knew I was done. I had hit a wall,” he says. After two years of trying to limit himself to New England area calls, Woodin got a call of his own.

“God said to me, ‘It’s time to start a business,” he recalls, with a laugh. “I said in reply, “‘But what about my steady paycheck?’”

No matter. Unable to land a bank loan, Woodin founded his own company in 1992 with $20,000 he managed to scrape together, loading the rest on five personal credit cards.

“Today,” he says, “We’re a $6 million company.”

His is a “virtual business,” Woodin likes to say, explaining that rather than make fixtures himself, he places orders with manufactures (sadly, he admits, none in Maine) on behalf of his clients, some as big as Polo Ralph Lauren and Barnes & Noble’s college bookstore division.

Woodin credits his faith for his success, along with an unrelenting quest to put his profits to good use.

The second turning point came four years ago when Woodin approached staffers at Project GRACE, announcing that God had sent him to create a fuel-assistance fund.

“They were like . . . OK,” he laughs, imitating the way people might react to a man with two heads and one hat.

But Woodin soon won them over, not just with a $2,500 check, but with his infectious positivity.

“Anything and everything is possible,” he says, reciting his impromptu speech that day. “Dream big, God’s the dream-maker, and we can do this.”

Woodin’s dream was that Project GRACE could leverage his “challenge grant” into a $10,000 fuel fund. They collected $40,000.

The same was true at the Center for Wildlife, where Woodin’s $2,500 check grew to a $22,000 fund to rehabilitate injured owls back into the wild, once others caught his spirit.

Woodin puts as much time as money into his community service, if not more. Adding two books to a regimen that includes “floating” across denominations to attend church services from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every Sunday, on top of running a multi-million dollar business, would surely tax the soul of most men. But Woodin simply shrugs it off. When the work is good work, he says with a smile, it hardly seems like work at all.

“Everyone toils,” says Woodin, “I just try to bring people together in good will, joy and energy.”