2020 Metal Construction Hall of Fame
After two years of college in the early 1960s, John Scarbrough had to make a decision: borrow money to go to senior college or go out into the world to get a job.
He chose the latter, got hired by Mitchell Engineering Co., Columbus, Miss., to work in its drafting department and wound up working there for the next 44 years. That company is now Rocky Mount, N.C.-based Ceco Building Systems—a pioneer in the custom-engineered metal building industry, and Scarbrough’s hard work there has placed it among the leaders in the metal building industry.
Scarbrough has helped the metal building industry attain a significant place in the low-rise commercial construction market, and he has made a substantial contribution to the growth of Ceco. His expertise in sales, customer service and management not only saw Ceco rise to the top of the custom-designed building industry, but helped inspire other players in the market to compete at the highest level for the benefit of themselves and the industry. It was his industry dedication and hard work at Ceco that elevated him from draftsman to manager of product standards to customer service manager and eventually president.
“John believes in metal buildings, the metal building industry and his product,” says Tom Robinson, CEO of Robinson Marketing, Tupelo, Miss., an associate of Scarbrough’s since 1991. “John expects those working with him to do their job and to do it well, and he shows his appreciation for a job well done. Entering the industry early, he was a pioneer in changing the function and design of metal buildings from inexpensive shade and shelter, to its significant place in the low-rise commercial structure market. He worked hard and truly helped build this industry into what it is today.”
What I like about metal building construction is its ease of construction and the versatility of its clear span area. Metal buildings can go up very fast. Clear span areas inside let you take the partitions out and change the layouts. Metal building frames can span large distances where other types of construction are not as versatile.”
John Scarbrough, Ceco Building Systems
From Draftsman to President
After being hired as a draftsman by engineering manager Gill Harris (a 2012 inaugural Metal Construction News Hall of Fame inductee), his very early days at Ceco were a struggle to learn what the industry was about, but he started doing well quickly. “Gill recognized my talents and promoted me to manager of standards,” Scarbrough says. “To build another plant (in Rocky Mount, N.C.), we needed to develop standards. Gill was real keen on computers. So, we developed software, and at the same time I was developing standard parts with piece numbers that the computer could recognize.”
After his success with standards, he was hired to work in sales in a Memphis territory and then got promoted to regional sales manager in charge of other district sales managers. Later he uprooted his young family and assisted Ceco’s struggling Mount Pleasant, Iowa, facility as the customer service manager of Ceco’s Midwest region to make it the success the company hoped it could be. As one of his peers stated later, “John came up here and helped to save this plant and the many jobs that went with it.”
He returned to Columbus in 1985 to be manager of marketing services for Ceco. In 1987, he was promoted to vice president of sales for the Southern region, and in 1992 became vice president and general manager of the Southern Region. In 2002, he was named Ceco’s eighth president responsible for the company’s three regions: Eastern, Southern and Midwestern.
From Drafting Table to Board Room
His diverse background at Ceco allowed Scarbrough to understand the business from the drafting table to the boardroom. His Ceco colleagues have found that he can talk it on the shop floor, with the client or the chairman of the board with equal ease.
“John was district manager for a brief time over our area,” says Paul Rose, president of Rose Construction, Covington, Tenn. “He did such a fantastic job they moved him up the ladder pretty quick. He was very focused on customer relationships, which matched our company because we wanted to build relationships. That’s how you build your business and John was a master of it. He did an excellent job of taking care of his clients and building relationships—working diligently to earn your business and keep your business; he never took it for granted.”
During his years of management at Ceco, Scarbrough helped his company establish a reputation for “non-standard is standard.” “That’s the market advantage [and mindset] we had when we developed our software,” he says. “The software—a very powerful program—developed jointly with the Robertson-Ceco Group gave us a big advantage in building complex buildings. Instead of a customer asking us, ‘What do you have?’, we can tell them, ‘Just tell us what you want and our computer will handle it and we can feed it right to the plant electronically.’ So, non-standard versus standard means you can tell us what you need and we can build it because of our software’s versatility. To grow the market we had to get more sophisticated venues like auto dealerships, churches, schools and commercial buildings. In the early 2000s, we were able to plug those buildings into our software and detail them as a 3-D model. If the model ran that means everything on it was detailed right down to the bolts. Bringing the architect into the industry was big too. Selling the architects on the use of metal buildings gave them a lot of flexibility and speed of construction.”
Scarbrough previously served on the board of directors and executive committee of the Metal Building Manufacturers Association. He has served on the board of directors of the LINK, which is the Columbus/Lowndes County (Mississippi) industrial development agency. While serving on the LINK’s board executive committee, it attracted a major start-up steel company to Columbus. Scarbrough and his wife Linda raised three beautiful daughters who are successful in their own right. Scarbrough made sure, although busy, he never neglected his duties as a husband and father.
