At one o’clock in the morning, Jeff McLendon was still playing ultimate frisbee with employees. The chief executive of a building products distributor had found an unusual place to spend his authority: running around with people whose careers he might help shape. In his telling, the laughter mattered. Time spent together gave younger employees a reason to listen when the conversation eventually turned to work.
It is an appealingly inconvenient detail. A corporate value can be printed once and distributed indefinitely. Joining a game requires showing up. Staying late makes the point without the assistance of a presentation.
McLendon runs Specialty Building Products, the Duluth, Georgia, distributor known as SBP. Its business involves moving complicated assortments of building materials through a large network. His public career also suggests a second occupation: working out how a company can keep growing while remaining a place where people know whom they are working with.
A longer horizon than technology
McLendon is an Athens, Georgia, native with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from the University of Georgia. Before entering building materials, he was president of Linmar Systems, a professional services business focused on improving processes and performance management for financial services companies. His route to lumber distribution passed through the workings of other businesses.
The connection came through Lawrence Newton, the founder of U.S. Lumber, whom he met in an Atlanta business group. McLendon was looking for something with a longer horizon than his work in technology. Newton wanted to move his family back to Alabama. Their circumstances made room for a succession.
In 2003, McLendon joined as chief financial officer. He became president in 2004 and CEO in 2016. The sequence is useful: finance first, operating responsibility next, then the chief executive’s job. There was time to learn the company before becoming its most visible representative.
Agricultural engineering, financial services and building materials make an untidy career diagram. They also give this story some texture. His qualifications were acquired in different settings; the company he would spend more than two decades leading supplied the continuity.
The acquisition has to work on Monday
By June 2025, a conversation with Benj Cohen on In the Mind of a Distributor framed SBP’s expansion as a move from $500 million to $4 billion. The discussion paired acquisitions with growth inside the businesses already owned. Both needed attention to operations and people, alongside the arithmetic of a transaction.
Those are different tests of leadership. Buying a business changes its ownership immediately. Making it work inside a larger organization takes longer. Customers still need orders filled. Employees need to understand what the new arrangement means. A financial model cannot answer every question that will arrive at the branch on Monday morning.
SBP itself has been on the other side of an ownership agreement. In December 2020, it announced a deal for The Jordan Company to buy majority ownership from funds affiliated with Madison Dearborn Partners. McLendon and the senior management team were to retain a significant equity stake and continue leading the company.
The arrangement tied management to the next stage of the business. It also placed a familiar obligation on a growing organization: explain the new relationship while continuing to serve the old ones. For employees and customers, continuity is something experienced in ordinary encounters, well after the announcement has been filed away.
“trust comes before change”
Jeff McLendon, 2022
Thirteen locations, fifty years of history
The September 2025 agreement to acquire OrePac Building Products supplied a concrete example of the work ahead. Founded in 1977 and based in Wilsonville, Oregon, OrePac brought 13 Western U.S. locations and the history of a family business approaching its fiftieth year. The announcement expected a fourth-quarter closing.
Its terms of continuity were explicit. OrePac would retain its name, locations, management team and employees after the transaction. Senior vice presidents Darin Coder and Kris Schroeder would lead it. Brad Hart, OrePac’s president and CEO, described the decision as emotional as well as exciting.
That emotional dimension belongs in the business story. A family name, a familiar branch and a long-serving team carry meaning that a purchase agreement can acknowledge but cannot manufacture. McLendon’s welcome emphasized relationships and operational execution. The public promise was to expand the business while keeping the people who knew it.
The unglamorous machinery of scale
On its current company site, SBP reports more than 5,500 employees, 63 locations and more than 23.5 million square feet of warehouse and storage capacity. These are company figures viewed in October 2026. They describe a substantial physical responsibility before anyone gets to the language of leadership.
Distribution earns its place by making an assortment available where it is needed. SBP handles products such as doors, decking, siding, moulding and engineered wood. Its customers include dealers and retailers serving new construction and repair and remodeling. The company sits among manufacturers, merchants and the projects waiting beyond them.
Warehouse space is an unusually literal expression of ambition. You have to staff it, stock it and make it useful. A large footprint can give customers access to more products; it also gives management more places where an unclear decision can become someone else’s delay. Scale supplies opportunity and a longer list of responsibilities.
A technology past returns
McLendon’s earlier technology career gives an interesting backdrop to SBP’s December 2023 collaboration with TOOLBX. The arrangement offered lumber and building supply dealers access to an ecommerce platform. By January 2024, he was talking about making SBP’s product data available through the service.
The tools connected online commerce with the systems dealers already used to run their businesses. Product catalogs, quotes, customer information and payments were part of the proposition. For a distributor, helping a dealer handle those tasks creates another way to be useful beyond the delivery itself.
At the 2024 NAW Innovators Summit in Austin, McLendon joined a discussion of corporate venture capital with representatives from UFP Ventures and Ferguson Ventures. He described the value of moving faster and trying possibilities that might fail, something difficult to accommodate inside companies operating with narrow margins.
There is a practical tension here. An operating company needs dependable execution today; investment in new technology asks it to consider uncertain returns tomorrow. His comments show an interest in giving experimentation room without pretending that the daily business can stop while the experiment runs.
A wider circle of responsibility
His work outside SBP has included leadership at the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. On April 18, 2024, Representative Mike Collins congratulated him in the House of Representatives on the conclusion of his tenure as NAW chairman. Collins highlighted educational opportunities for emerging leaders and recalled visiting an SBP facility.
McLendon’s LinkedIn profile also records service with Athletes in Action, Camp Highland and Fellowship Christian School. The University of Georgia’s College of Engineering lists him as an advisory board member. These commitments place his professional life alongside institutions concerned with education, young people and leadership.
A trade association offers a different vantage point from a company office. It brings an executive into contact with businesses facing related problems in other markets. The photograph from NAW’s 2024 summit captures that wider circle: McLendon standing with other distribution leaders while someone else receives the award.
Those overlapping responsibilities make a useful measure of an executive’s working life. The company requires decisions with immediate consequences. An educational institution asks what future entrants will need. An industry association has to find common ground among separate businesses. Moving among them puts different time horizons in the same calendar, with the next order and the next generation both asking for attention.
Six names become one
The current SBP brand transition announcement brings his long career to a new organizational question. Alexandria Moulding, Amerhart, Reeb, DW Distribution, Millwork Sales and U.S. Lumber are moving to the Specialty Building Products name. The company describes a gradual transition over the coming year.
The stated aim is to make the organization easier for customers to understand, with a common identity and clearer access to its offerings. The announcement also promises continued relationships with familiar people. A simpler name must do its work without making those relationships feel more distant.
For McLendon, it is a fresh test at a larger scale. The president who arrived through U.S. Lumber now leads the organization under which that name is being gathered. A history of acquisitions has produced a business ready to present itself more consistently to the market.
On October 20, 2026, SBP appointed Alejandro Bisogno chief financial officer. McLendon welcomed his financial experience and his approach to leading through influence. More than twenty years after joining as CFO himself, he was introducing another finance leader to the organization.
That is a fitting place to leave him: still assembling the team. The buildings, brands and ownership arrangements have changed across his tenure. The practical question remains close enough to be asked across a desk, on a branch visit or after a very late game: what gives another person a reason to trust your judgment?