About Tim

headshotbwWell hello there and thanks for stopping by my little blog and learning who I am.  I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur because I started dabbling in business before I even knew what the word entrepreneur meant.  (I still have trouble spelling it.)

I started my first business in grade school selling pumpkins from the family garden at a table beside the road.   Let me tell you, that was MUCH better money than a lemonade stand!  In highschool, when the school decided to discontinue the senior memory book I setup my own publishing company and took over publication of it.  In college I had several companies, including a franchise of “Student Painters” where in one summer I grew operations in a new territory enough to have three crews painting houses.

But what really established me as an entrepreneur was when I combined my passion for business with my passion for computers.  You see, I literally went to computer camp in grade school.  Some company brought a truckload of computers to the YMCA and set them up in a room and, while all the other kids were outside having fun enjoying the sunshine, we got to sit in that windowless room and learn how to program in BASIC.  It was a dream come true!

Even before computer camp came along I had been exposed to computers at a young age. It all started in 1978 when my father, Jay Rettig, founded Software Solutions in Lebanon, OH. I grew up working on mainframes from Cincinnati Milacron, Texas Instruments, and Sperry. In the 1980s I was involved with many XENIX and UNIX installations for cities throughout Ohio. In the early 1990’s my focus moved from serial communications toward Arcnet and Ethernet with Lantastic and Novell. In 1992 I started LAN Solutions as a networking services company while in college at the University of Cincinnati.  Business quickly took off, causing me to cut my college experience short in order to focus on running my new company.

My company was involved with many challenging projects throughout the 1990’s, including Project Infoshare for the United States Department of Agriculture, and numerous Y2K projects. I also partnered LAN Solutions with Houston-based Centurion Data Services to open one of the first Internet Service Providers in the Cincinnati area.

In 2010 I merged LAN Solutions with Chicago based INTRUST GROUP and became President and CEO of the combined organization, which is now known as Intrust IT and is headquarted in Cincinnati.

In addition to the business and technical achievements listed above, I was a featured speaker at the pcRetreat seminar series for 8 consecutive years and was a co-host of the weekly radio show Max Bandwidth in the early 2000’s. I speak at numerous technology and business events every year, where I try to offend as few people as possible.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timrettig