Jackie Jennings knows how to use tools, hang drywall and clean up a construction site, but she doesn’t do it anymore. Now, she is president of Johnson & Jennings General Contracting, which she founded in 1981 with her business partner, Tom Johnson.

They both learned hands-on, “doing every job within the company,” she says. Johnson & Jennings emerged from a “desire to have my own business” after working in the corporate world for 10 years as a business sales manager with Chicago Title Co. “San Diego is a good place for entrepreneurs, and I knew local developers.”

She and Johnson, who also worked for Chicago Title and had a construction background, found a niche. They concentrated on tenant improvement construction, or the needs of tenants when they move into a building. “Tenant needs change as they move in and out,” Jennings says. Her company interacts with tenants and pays attention to the details they require.

Today, with a staff of 33, Johnson & Jennings is the fifth largest woman-majority owned business in San Diego. For two years it was named among the 500 largest U.S. woman-owned businesses in Working Woman magazine; and it has been named the “Woman-Owned Small Business of the Year” by the Small Business Administration.

Jennings received a bachelor’s degree in business from San Diego State University. Were she starting now, she would take more specific construction classes, she says. “But you don’t really learn a job until you start doing it.”

Active in the community, Jennings chairs the San Diego Regional Economic Task Force to advise county supervisors on the economic health of the area. She serves on the boards of St. Vincent de Paul and the San Diego Downtown Partnership, and she is active with Heart to Heart, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to providing humanitarian aid. Jennings lives with her husband, Stuart White, owner of Stuart White Designs, and their 15-year-old daughter Mallery.

— Sandy Pasqua