Title: President and Owner
Company: Leach Company
Location: Arlington Heights, Illinois, United States
Jeffrey W. Leach, retired president and owner at Leach Company, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Business Owners for dedication, achievements, and leadership in system analytics.
With a career spanning over four decades, Mr. Leach has established himself as a
multifaceted professional excelling in business, technology, and community engagement. His career was marked most notably by his reliability and high level of service, having availed himself on behalf of several chief information officers (CIOs) at several top Fortune 500 companies. Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in managerial economics from Syracuse University in 1978, he supplemented his academic pursuits with coursework in computer science at New York University.
Growing up in Port Washington, Long Island, New York, Mr. Leach’s ancestors were Anglo-Saxon Protestant and came to America in 1645 from Wales, England. He is a member of Sons of the American Revolution, and a graduate of Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York. His life story was published in the Chicago edition of The Wall Street Journal on October 25, 2023, as a Distinguished Business Leader chosen from a hand-selected 1.5 million listees. His life story is in Fortune magazine’s April/May 2024 issue.
A seasoned information technology (IT) professional with years of expertise in executing social strategies and managing IT costs, Mr. Leach retired in 2015 and now provides consulting services in the areas of Cloud integration, mobile security, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things. Prior to his retirement, he worked as a WebSphere industry solution architect with responsibility for pre-sales, architectural and technical support to prospective clients and customers. Through IBM, Mr. Leach worked with several industry giants, including Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young, Capgemini, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Additionally, he was honored with the three Vice President Awards, multiple 100 Percent Sales Club Awards, a Technical Treasurer Award, the Opportunity Noticer Role Model Award, a Team Award, a Director Award through IBM, and a Computerworld Smithsonian Award from Chicago Mercantile Exchange, leading his designs to be stored at the Smithsonian Institution for future generations.
Mr. Leach was also asked to serve as a worldwide spokesperson for WebSphere MQ, a family of message-oriented middleware products by IBM, which called him to speak before approximately 130 CIOs in Mexico. Mr. Leach was on YouTube in 2009 for IBM’s “iPhone Zos Modernization Demo v2.0,” where he demonstrated using an iPhone 10 to view and change data on a mainframe in a cloud in another state. This was presented to the IBM Senior architects and engineers and to the public at IBM’s Global TechXchange Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Marquis Who’s Who lauded Mr. Leach for his excellence in the IT industry and presented him with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award, a Distinguished Leader Award in the Wall Street Journal, a Top Professional Award in Fortune magazine, and a Humanitarian Award in 2023. During the early stages of his career, he gained valuable expertise in the field as a senior systems analyst for Chicago Mercantile Exchange through which he designed, programmed, and maintained the conversion of the Data Collection and the Trade Management System to IBM’s WebSphere MQ. Due to his considerable knowledge, he was also selected by IBM from the company’s staff to implement IBM’s message and queueing as one of the first ten companies in the world. Likewise, he served as a presenter at various industry conferences and seminars, including IBM’s Global TechXchange Conference, IBM’s Modernizing and Optimizing the Enterprise Seminar and the IBM System Z: Lean and Green WebSphere Application Server Seminar.
While his career has been filled with highlights, Mr. Leach is most proud of giving back to his community by volunteering with intercity children to help them do their homework. He continues to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, The Arlington Heights Historical Society and he packs food for starving children. He has been a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois for 32 years; he was a deacon, a trustee, an elder in charge of church membership where he reported to session and he and his wife were adult advisors for high school youth. He also provided transportation for and served a church-sponsored Thanksgiving dinner to church elderly who were shut-in and did not have a family for a church-sponsored Thanksgiving dinner.
The cornerstone of Mr. Leach’s success lay with Friends Academy Locust Valley New York and his mathematics teacher, who inspired him to think outside the box. Within the next five years, Mr. Leach, in his retirement, intends to continue volunteering to help individuals and families in need and packing food for starving children.
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