A screw has a wonderfully brief job description: hold things together. The business surrounding it is less obliging. Someone must choose the specification, buy the stock, organize the assortment, deliver the box, and make sure a customer can find it. Jon Michael Adinolfi has spent much of his working life moving through those responsibilities. The object remains small. The number of things that can go wrong around it grows considerably.
Adinolfi, usually called JMA, became Hillman’s president and chief executive on January 1, 2025. His route there included auditing, finance, fasteners, hand tools, and retail. It is a career that makes more sense when read from the hardware aisle backward. Every apparently simple purchase depends on decisions that the shopper has no reason to consider. For the executive responsible, those decisions are the work.
A builder’s family, an accountant’s education
He grew up in North Haven, Connecticut. His father was a carpenter; his grandfather was a builder. Working around the family business gave him an early connection to the trades, and he still describes his father as a central influence. The lessons he recalls concern effort, treating people well, and doing a job properly. They are modest principles to carry into a corporate office. Modest principles can be demanding company.
Asked whether that background made his career inevitable, Adinolfi resisted the tidy explanation: “I don’t know about destined.” He credited work and luck. That answer leaves room for the actual turns in his working life. He studied accounting at the University of Connecticut and began his professional career as a senior auditor at Arthur Andersen. The builder’s son had chosen a profession where a different kind of fit mattered: the relationship between a business and its numbers.
His subsequent positions brought those worlds closer together. At Stanley Works, he worked in finance for its Price Realization Center of Excellence. In 2005, he joined HD Supply as chief financial officer of Crown Bolt and its Repair & Remodel business. The following year brought the CFO role at White Cap Construction Supply. These were financial jobs attached to physical products and practical customers. The spreadsheets had hardware behind them.
“I don’t know about destined.”
Jon Michael Adinolfi, on following his family into the industry
Learning the business from both ends
From 2008 to 2011, Adinolfi was president of Crown Bolt. Moving from finance into a presidency widened the assignment: the numbers were now part of a larger operating responsibility. His next move took him back to Stanley Black & Decker, where he became CFO of the North American Construction & Do-It-Yourself division in 2011. By October 2013, he was president of Hand Tools.
That sequence is useful to keep in view. Finance and operations are often presented as different temperaments. In his career, they became successive ways of understanding a related set of businesses. A tool needs a customer. A product line needs an economic rationale. A business leader has to keep both in sight, even when one appears more urgent than the other.
His hand-tools responsibilities included bringing together industrial automotive repair and construction do-it-yourself businesses. Then, as president of U.S. Retail from late 2016, he worked on the Craftsman retail rollout and the launch of more than 1,200 stock-keeping units. A brand launch can sound like an exercise in advertising. That many products also make it an exercise in coordination. The attractive announcement still has to arrive in boxes.
The next promotion was a larger assignment
Hillman hired Adinolfi as its U.S. divisional president, effective July 15, 2019. He arrived with experience on several sides of the hardware trade. The assignment covered the legacy U.S. business, including fastening, home hardware, and access solutions. It put him inside a Cincinnati company whose everyday business depends on making complicated assortments manageable for retailers.
In June 2023, Hillman created a chief operating officer position and promoted him into it. His remit expanded to Hardware Solutions, Protective Solutions, and the Canadian business. Doug Cahill, then chairman and CEO, publicly emphasized Adinolfi’s execution, customer relationships, and ability to manage complexity. The description is revealing for its choice of virtues. These are qualities tested repeatedly in running a business, rather than demonstrated once at a launch.
The succession followed. Announced in August 2024, it placed Adinolfi in the president and CEO roles at the start of 2025, with Cahill becoming executive chairman. Adinolfi joined the board on February 13, 2025. The arrangement preserved a connection to the previous leadership while widening his own accountability. By then he had spent more than five years inside the organization. He knew the business he was being asked to lead.
The shelf is part of the strategy
Listen to Adinolfi describe Hillman and the conversation soon reaches the store. He points to more than 1,200 sales and service professionals across North America, people who help keep assortments ready and products available. He also emphasizes distribution to more than 40,000 locations. These details give customer service a physical shape. Someone visits. Something gets replenished. A retailer can get on with serving the next person.
“We sell through distribution,” he explains. The phrase is plain, but the relationship matters. Hillman’s work supports other businesses that serve the eventual user. Retail partnerships and distributor relationships are therefore part of the product’s route to usefulness. A packet of fasteners can be perfectly made and still fail to help anyone if it is unavailable when the job begins.
There is an appealing lack of glamour in that proposition. An orderly shelf rarely receives a standing ovation. Its value is that the customer does not have to think about it. Adinolfi’s emphasis suggests a view of leadership rooted in making those ordinary encounters dependable. The visible product carries a considerable amount of invisible organization.
More customers for the same practical habits
His growth agenda gives those habits a broader application. At Hillman’s March 2026 investor day, the company described a business still drawing more than 80 percent of its activity from retail, alongside an opportunity to expand in professional channels. Adinolfi’s remit includes protecting those established retail relationships while building business among customers working in different settings.
The connection to his upbringing is easy to recognize, although it does not by itself settle any business decision. Professional customers bring requirements of their own. The operational question is how Hillman’s assortment, service, and distribution capabilities can serve them. His career offers relevant experience: construction supply, fasteners, tools, and the work of getting products into retail.
September 2026 supplied a concrete example. Hillman completed its approximately $315 million acquisition of Kanebridge, a master distributor of industrial fasteners. Kanebridge supplied more than 44,000 commercial and military-grade fastener SKUs to distributors in the United States and Canada. The deal established Hillman’s first U.S. industrial fastener master-distribution platform. Adinolfi described a broader customer base and a larger industrial presence. The purchase gave the strategy an operating business to work through.
A closing date settles the ownership question. The next questions concern execution: how the acquired business fits, how its customer relationships are maintained, and how the broader organization supports it. Read against Adinolfi’s career, the transaction brings familiar responsibilities together. Financial judgment sets the terms; operating work determines what customers eventually experience.
Approximate purchase price, subject to customary adjustments.
44,000+Fastener SKUs supplied by KanebridgeA growth plan with a loading dock
Another part of his agenda is taking shape close to Hillman’s Cincinnati roots. In June 2026, Hillman and Hillwood marked the groundbreaking for a planned multipurpose facility at the former Forest Fair Mall site in Forest Park, Ohio. Hillman will lease and occupy the space, bringing several Cincinnati-area operations into one location.
The planned building is approximately 715,000 square feet, primarily distribution space with offices and operational support. Adinolfi described the project as a commitment to employees, customers, and the local communities. The choice connects a regional presence with a continental business. For a company selling thousands of small items, room to organize and move them is a substantial strategic consideration.
The operating results provide another measure of the task. For the second quarter of 2026, Hillman reported net sales of $442.3 million, up 9.8 percent from a year earlier. Adinolfi pointed to hardware demand, new business including professional distribution, and the MinuteKey 3.5 rollout. The portfolio stretches from familiar hardware to automated services. His responsibility is to make the collection work as a business, across those different kinds of purchase.
The trade continues
There is a smaller, local connection worth keeping beside those expansion plans. On October 23, 2026, Hillman announced its second annual Trade School Discovery Day with FC Cincinnati at TQL Stadium. More than 100 local students took part in career exploration involving construction and other trades. It was a company partnership, with local professionals providing demonstrations and practical introductions.
Set alongside Adinolfi’s own background, the event offers a pleasing continuity: young people encountering the work of building, with a hardware company helping create the introduction. His path shows one possible direction such an early connection can take. It can lead through an accounting degree, finance departments, product portfolios, and eventually the CEO’s office, while remaining attached to the usefulness of the original work.
A long-term ambition for Hillman is a path toward $2.5 billion in sales. Reaching it will require decisions about categories, acquisitions, customers, and operations. For Adinolfi, the immediate work remains more concrete than the target: teams to organize, relationships to maintain, products to move. Somewhere at the end of that effort, a person needs the right screw. Holding things together is still a respectable occupation.