On June 3, 2025, more than 175 guests gathered for a ribbon cutting in Midtown Hattiesburg. There was a new four-story building to inspect, 80,000 square feet of space and the customary occasion for congratulating everyone involved. Jonathan Jones, the chief executive of Jones Capital, used the moment to talk about something a building cannot manufacture: curious people.
His companies needed more talent. Nearby were the University of Southern Mississippi and William Carey University. The headquarters brought the employer closer to the graduates. For Jones, this was also a way to give people a choice about where to build their working lives. A commencement ceremony need not double as a farewell party for the state.
The building contains a useful clue to his ambitions. Jones runs a private investment firm whose family history begins with a hardwood sawmill. He has spent his career widening the range of businesses that history can support. Yet he keeps returning to a geographically specific question: what would make a capable young person choose Mississippi?
01The family business had sawdust on its shoes
The first enterprise was tangible enough. In 1949, his grandfather Lloyd Jones incorporated Jones Lumber Company as a single-site hardwood sawmill in Sandy Hook, Mississippi. His father, Brett, created Dixie Mat and Hardwood in 1976. The family was learning what could be made from timber, and what other businesses might need it for.
Dixie Mat’s later history leads to Yak Access, which supplied temporary access roadways for industrial projects. The product has a wonderfully literal answer to a business problem: people and machinery need to reach places where a permanent road would be impractical. The road itself can be rented. Infrastructure sometimes begins with figuring out how to get to the infrastructure.
Jonathan entered the family enterprise in 2003. His starting point was assistant controller. An accounting qualification from the University of Mississippi gave him a vocabulary for the numbers; the operating businesses gave those numbers things to describe. He worked his way to CEO as the company’s ambitions broadened.
He has been explicit about the influence of his father. Brett supplied an example of entrepreneurship tied to hard work and a moral compass. His mother, Lisa, pressed the importance of education. These were different contributions to the same upbringing: learn how a business works, and go somewhere that expands your understanding of the world.
Jones’s own operating experience included helping develop and recapitalize Yak Access. Temporary roads rented to utility companies may sound a long way from private capital. In his career, they are connected. A business can begin with an everyday difficulty, build a service around it and eventually require a different scale of ownership and resources.
02A single is still a hit
In 2018, Jones Capital was formed to formalize the family’s investment activities. That distinction matters to the chronology. Jonathan founded the investment firm; the family operating history was already almost seven decades old. His task involved giving accumulated experience a structure that could travel beyond the businesses in which it had been acquired.
The portfolio’s variety makes the point. The family history includes freight, recycling and cold storage alongside lumber. Later investments brought software into the picture, including Foundation AI in 2022. A sawmill and a software company require different expertise. Holding them within one investment business makes the choice of managers, and the support available to them, consequential.
Jones describes growth with less theatrical language than such a list might invite. When Southern Miss selected him as its 2022 Boardman Distinguished Entrepreneur of the Year, he reached for baseball. Small, repeated advances explained what could look from the outside like sudden expansion. He also credited his team.
“At Jones, we strive to hit a ‘single’ every day.”Jonathan Jones · 2022
There is a pleasant absence of fireworks in that metaphor. A single is respectable work. Someone must still hit the ball, and someone else must move the runner along. The image suits a portfolio in which performance depends on many people completing tasks that will never make a ribbon-cutting speech.
The practical support Jones Capital offers gives the metaphor some substance. Its toolkit includes recruiting, employee development, strategic planning and business systems. Pricing, sales resources and acquisitions also receive attention. The vocabulary is plain because the work is specific: find people, give them useful information and make a plan they can execute.
His investment criteria also give an idea of the businesses he wants to work with: companies with annual EBITDA of $2 million to $20 million, strong management and the possibility of further growth. EBITDA is a measure of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The range describes an operating scale, rather than an invitation to fund every promising idea.
The firm says it looks for people it respects and would enjoy working alongside. That is an unusually domestic-sounding consideration in an investment brief. It also makes practical sense in a long relationship. A spreadsheet can tell a buyer many things. It cannot make the next difficult conversation pleasant.
03A portfolio that still touches the ground
The investment record retains physical connections to the family’s starting point. In 2019, a Jones Capital portfolio company acquired approximately 55,000 acres of Mississippi timberland and timber reserves from Anderson Tully Company. The property involved hardwood stands and an ongoing management task: harvesting, reforestation and stewardship. Trees are quite unmoved by the urgency of a quarterly presentation.
Logistics presents another kind of recurring test. When Jones Capital appointed Doug George to lead Jones Logistics in December 2023, Jonathan highlighted both his handling of daily problems and his attention to longer-term strategy. The pairing is revealing. An operating business must meet today’s obligations while making decisions whose consequences arrive later.
Recycling carried the family story into another transaction in October 2025, when FV Recycling acquired Chicago-based Mid America Paper Recycling. The announcement projected more than 900,000 tons of recyclable material handled annually by the combined business. Jones connected the transaction to Brett’s founding of FV in 2000, and to Mid America’s own multigenerational history.
Those are businesses with customers, equipment and accumulated relationships. Their usefulness is renewed every time something moves, gets processed or arrives where it should. Jones’s public career keeps circling that sort of work, even as the portfolio adds newer technologies. The investment firm changes the range of possibilities; operating companies must give those possibilities a daily form.
04The classroom end of the deal
Education brings a more personal dimension to his decisions about capital. Jonathan was a first-generation college graduate. In October 2024, a $10 million gift from him and his wife, Paula, was announced toward a new academic home for the University of Mississippi’s Patterson School of Accountancy. The planned building would carry the Jones name.
The proposed Jones Hall was described as a 100,000-square-foot facility with classrooms, auditoriums, study space and offices. The gift supported the kind of setting in which he had prepared for his own career. For someone whose working life started in accounting, the connection requires very little ceremonial explanation.
His university ties also extend into the firm. Jonathan Duhon and Tom Caughlin, his partners at Jones Capital, are fellow Ole Miss alumni and Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers. A campus acquaintance can become a long professional relationship. In Jones’s case, the university belongs in the business story because some of the people stayed in it.
His contact with students continues beyond the gift. The Ole Miss Finance Club described hosting him for a conversation attended by more than 150 students. Southern Miss lists him on its Business Advisory Council, which he joined in 2023. These are smaller commitments than a building donation, but they put an executive within reach of people still deciding what work might look like.
05Give curiosity an address
When Jones Capital’s Hattiesburg building was topped out in July 2023, Jones said the design process had occupied roughly six years. He spoke about graduates being able to work and establish adult lives in the city. The eventual opening in 2025 gave that ambition a workplace shared with several portfolio companies, including Jones Logistics, Jones Lumber, FV Recycling and Codaray Construction.
His advice to the Ole Miss Class of 2025 carried a related expectation for the graduates themselves. He urged them to act professionally from the beginning, accept responsibility and combine confidence with humility. Opportunity, in this account, asks something of the employer and the person walking through the door.
“Stay curious, keep learning and take the initiative.”Jonathan Jones · advice to graduates, 2025
The public speaking continued to connect him with that next generation. The September 2025 Ole Miss family-business symposium listed a keynote Q&A with Jones and entrepreneur Abb Payne. William Carey University named him as the scheduled keynote speaker for its May 2026 small-business leadership luncheon, an event that raises scholarship support for business students.
Across those appearances, the school gift and the office project, a coherent concern emerges. A state can educate people and still watch them leave for work. Jones has chosen to put resources into both ends of that journey: where students prepare and where they might earn a living afterward.
The family’s first business turned Mississippi timber into something customers could use. Jonathan’s own project has become broader, involving capital, companies and people whose abilities are still taking shape. Its most human ambition is easy to picture: a graduate finishes college, considers the options and discovers that a future might be available close to home.