Leadership
A legacy built to outlast the people who started it.
The people making decisions here have been doing it a long time, and several of them share a last name with the man who started the company in 1935.
Today
Who makes the decisions.
A short list, because the company is a short list. Nothing travels to a committee in another state and comes back a week later.
Steve Jennings
President and Principal Broker
JMI Group · JMI Constructors
Gilbert Jennings
Vice President
JMI Group
David Ord
Vice President of Finance
JMI Group
Tim LeBaron
Vice President of Asset Management
JMI Group
Austin Atkin
Vice President of Development
JMI Group
Jayson Pemberton
General Manager
JMI Constructors
The line
Everyone who has run this company.
What a good leader builds tends to outlast the time spent building it.
Lloyd Berdell “LB” Jennings
Made his way to St. George in the mid 1930s, in the middle of the Depression, and acquired land once he got here. The work started in asphalt and concrete, and it grew into a lumber yard on the land behind what is now the Jennings Blvd. Centre. That yard was J&J Lumber Company.
Most of what the company took on was infrastructure. Road contracts, curbs and gutters, bridges spanning the freeway and the Virgin River, and state overpasses. They did all the concrete work and sidewalks for the St. George Temple. His son Leon took the company over from him.
L. Leon Jennings
Took over from his father in the 1950s and incorporated the company as J&J Mill and Lumber Co. He widened what it did, selling contractors a full range of building material on top of what the crews used on their own jobs.
J&J began supplying building material across four states. The standing the company had built in the community grew alongside it, and his two sons carried that further. Mansfield took over as president, with Gilbert working alongside him.
Mansfield L. Jennings
Ran the company through the years it grew from a local supplier into a distributor reaching four states. Forty years in the building business, and a graduate of Brigham Young University in business management.
He spent as much time on the county as on the company, serving as a St. George City Councilman, president of the Chamber of Commerce, president of the St. George Rotary Club, and president of Dixie Development, a group formed by local business leaders to bring industry to the area.
Gilbert M. Jennings
A registered professional and structural engineer with a civil engineering degree from the University of Utah. He spent eight years as a project engineer in northern Utah before returning to St. George in 1979, and twenty years running operations at J&J Building Supply.
His work is why this company understands industrial development. He designed and developed the Salt Lake International Center, an eleven hundred acre business park, the Triad Center in Salt Lake City, and Fort Pierce Business Park in St. George, fifteen hundred acres that gave Washington County somewhere to put manufacturers.
Steve Jennings
Grew up around general contracting, building materials, and real estate development, and has worked at JMI in one capacity or another for more than twenty years. He holds both a real estate broker license and a general contractor license.
Under him the company separated property management into its own business in 2006, brought construction back in house, and moved from holding a portfolio to running every stage of it. Commerce Pointe and Sagestone Homes are both his.
Together
The company works as one group.
Taking a property from an investment decision through long term management asks for patience and a great deal of coordination. These people come together every day to carry all of it.
