Ingram Leedy

I grew up around my father's buildings. Gene Leedy was one of the founders of the Sarasota School of Architecture and one of the shapers of mid-century modernism. He built the places people lived, worked, and played: houses, doctors' offices, banks, schools, garden centers, city halls. Precast concrete and glass, long beams you could see, nothing hidden and nothing extra. Honesty in materials. But what people remembered was how it felt to be inside: the light, the openness, the sense that someone had thought about how you would live there before you ever walked in. I did not become an architect, but I took the idea with me. Show the structure. Waste nothing. Build it so it lasts. Make it an experience. Real. Human.

I have been running technology for Central Florida businesses since 1996, from the same block of downtown Winter Haven, and from our own streets in downtown Orlando and Tampa, where our people live and work. Our clients are everywhere from Orange Avenue in Orlando to Bayshore in Tampa, and everything in between, which is the part of Florida I have lived in all my life. It started as one of the region's first internet providers, in the dial-up days. Then it became secure email for people with a lot at stake, public companies and government agencies here and abroad, which taught me something I have never forgotten: the businesses that need technology most are the ones that least want to think about it.

In 2004 I started Protected Trust with one idea. I wanted to build the Four Seasons of IT: the experience Isadore Sharp built his hotels on, and the same feeling I grew up with in my father's buildings. Treat people the way you would want to be treated, know them by name, and be excellent at a few things without ever changing them. For a business, that means when something goes wrong, you should not have to figure out who to call, how we are organized, or explain yourself twice. You reach out, and someone who knows you takes care of it. And whatever you bring us is ours until it is finished.

Some of the people who answer that call have been with me since the dial-up days. That is on purpose. A client's team should be the same team five years later.

Off the clock I am a pilot, and I fly the way I work: checklist, preparation, instruments, and then the freedom to go anywhere. With my family, that usually means the real Florida, the places people drive past. I have spent most of my life on the Winter Haven Chain of Lakes, and some of it working to protect them. Ask me for a place. Better yet, tell me yours.