Diverse JTO Quietly Celebrates Five Decades in Business

There might be a lot of people who marvel at .’s 50 years in business, but the company’s president isn’t one of them.

Jerome T. Osborne III has no expansive anniversary gala planned, and his spare time does not include reflections on the business’ beginnings or its familial legacy. He’s so focused on his firm’s upcoming construction and building design projects that he can barely tell you why he got involved in the family business as a teenager nearly 40 years ago.

“I still don’t know what the heck I wanna be when I grow up,” he said in between chuckles.

“You don’t think about it. You just get up every day and go to work.”

The man known to many as Ossie said that attitude has been more prevalent in the last few years. JTO’s 50-50 split between public and commercial construction now means more than ever, as the pace on many retail and office projects remains stagnant, he said.

School funding is scarce too, but JTO has low-bid its way into a few upcoming high school stadium projects, including Mayfield and Hudson high schools. The company’s first stadium renovation took place about six years ago at Mentor High School’s and its Jerome T. Osborne Jr. Field, named after Ossie’s grandfather and father, respectively.  Ossie’s father, Jerry Jr., founded Osborne Brothers Tree Services in 1961 with his brother, Richard. It became JTO in the '70s.

Ossie immersed himself into the family business as a boy before he could envision himself playing in such a stadium. He said his father gave him little choice in the matter. JTO began as a tree and excavation service. Ossie learned to operate loaders and dozers as he entered his later teens.

He eventually became vice president, and became the top man when his father passed in 1992. From the late ‘70s up until that point, Ossie says industrial designing and building were the company’s specialties. Jerry Jr. planned to expand that with his purchase of the land where Diamond Centre now sits.

“The biggest reason, he felt, was to offer all the services to users and tenants on the Heisley (Road) corridor, which he primarily developed,” Ossie said. “At the time, you had like 4,500 or 5,000 employees who had nowhere to go to lunch. Primarily, that was the goal, to provide services for the industry and their employees.”

At 27 years old, when his father died, Ossie began his quest to take that vision and balloon it into a reputation as the go-to company for various contracting jobs at hospitals, colleges, restaurants, highways and municipal properties. He needed to educate himself on banking, potential liabilities and other issues his dad previously handled. He did so by recalling Jerry Jr.’s steady, strong and serious brand of leadership.

“He didn’t tell me much, but I owe him everything,” Ossie said of his father. “He treated everybody great, he was a man of honor. I have employees here that have been here for 30 or 35 years, and I’ve only been at the helm for 20 of them.”

One of those workers, office manager Lorraine Mauk, is especially impressed that Ossie not only took over the business, but turned it into a 22-division conglomerate that purchases and leases property, engages in Earth material recycling and receives jobs from Walmart and Burger King as well as neighborhood subdivisions.

“He had some big shoes to fill and certainly did fill them,” she said. “He took our company into directions that his father had visions of and completed all those dreams.

“It went further, and he created his own divisions and developed those divisions with his own insights. He’s come a long way.”

Even though his company has a success model that entities in various industries continue to employ, Ossie keeps most of JTO’s projects within an hour of the Mentor headquarters and don’t foresee offices elsewhere. He says he’s too much of a micromanager for that

He’s also too laidback to make a big deal of JTO’s 50^th anniversary.

“I’ll probably have a company clambake or something to that effect, but that’s all,” Ossie said. “I’m not too big on that.

“I like to fly under the radar.”