Bill Treneer

Warm, steady, and quick to see what someone could become, Bill has carried that way of looking at people through more than two decades in technology, and it is the reason people who have worked alongside him tend to describe him not by what he has built, but by what he helped them see in themselves. A friend who has worked alongside Bill once said he had always looked up to him for the kindness and generosity he brings to the community, and that he has known him as a coach, a mentor, someone who is always helping somebody do something. He is a teacher at heart. Trained as an electrical engineer at Washington State University, he found his way into networking when the company he now leads, International Communications Management, first hired him to teach Cisco classes. More than twenty years later, he is still explaining how the internet actually works, guided by a belief he states simply: once you understand the foundation, you can build just about anything.

You can see that belief at work in how Bill builds his team. Few things catch his eye faster than the person standing right in front of him, and what a few months of good training could unlock in them. He wanted, in his own words, to be "a bridge between companies that needed work done" and people who were not the perfect fit yet, but who could be, given three to six months. He has built much of ICM around that idea, with a special heart for veterans returning to civilian life. He likes to tell the story of an ordnance officer whose job was loading bombs onto planes on an aircraft carrier, work where every item on the checklist has to be right, and how that discipline translates beautifully into technology. When he heard that some 270,000 veterans transition out of the military every year, his response said everything: "let me have all of them." The same thinking reaches all the way down to a tutoring company he also owns, where junior high and high school students learn coding and robotics on Saturdays, and where some of his best math tutors, once trained in coding themselves, grew into his best consultants.

Spend a little time with Bill, and you discover that everything he has built rests on something deeper. "I'm a child of God, a believer, a father, and a husband," he once said, "and those are the most important things in my life." The company is not separate from that; it is one of the places where those commitments come to life. He serves on the board of a church ministry that houses people recovering from alcohol and drug addiction, gives them work, and trains them for a year, and he and his wife both preach there. It is, he says, some of the most rewarding work in his life. Which, for a man who has spent his career helping people become more than they thought they could be, sounds exactly right.

Bill Treneer is the kind of person who seems to measure success not only by the company he leads, but by how many people are standing a little taller because they crossed paths with him.