Steve Celuch's Biography

Mr. Celuch, originally from Detroit Michigan, is the son of two immigrants from Eastern Europe. He was raised with a strong work ethic, a healthy respect for religion, a love of reading, and an intense sense of fiscal responsibility.

Mr. Celuch’s first business in high school was designing and coding radial polygon graphic maps for flight simulators, building his high school’s network and grade keeping database, while keeping a part-time job. The realities of life soon interrupted his life. As a senior in high school he started to work full time as well as attend classes. Upon graduating from high school he went on to attend Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan as an Electrical Engineering major while continuing to working full time. These engineering classes are where the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principal was drilled into him. During college, he joined Mensa as well as started another business building and selling personal computers. Nearing graduation from Wayne State University he was offered an incredible financial opportunity working for Chrysler as a Network Engineer. Mr. Celuch completed his degree in August 2002.

After working at Chrysler for a couple of years Mr. Celuch joined the not-for-profit charitable institution Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) as a Network Engineer. Mr. Celuch worked there for 11 years ending as the manager of a large team of people who maintained and grew HFHS’s 57 locations that hosted LANs, WAN, and servers. Those first engineering lessons in KISS from Wayne State University, provide to be invaluable. It was also at this time that Mr. Celuch developed the mantra of “make the plan, test the plan, trust the plan, work the plan”. In addition to the first full roll out of Novell Netware Servers, token ring (and then Ethernet), and T1 & T3 WAN networks, this time frame also included addressing the Y2K issue. As a committee member, he worked to ensure that all of HFHS’s networks and servers functioned come 01/01/00. Following the success of the Y2K bug he also served as a committee member for the massive implementation of the then new federal HIPPA rules. With so many varied duties, the only way to keep everything understandable for others was to find a simple method for each step for each of the tasks at hand. It was also during this time frame that Mr. Celuch met his bride to be, Gina, where that same initial engineering term came into play, but not as an acronym.

Mr. Celuch’s path down the rabbit hole of working for not-for-profits continued in 2005. When his in-laws moved to Central Florida, Gina and Steve felt it was best for their growing family to be near Gina’s parents. Thus Mr. Celuch and his family moved to Kissimmee FL where he started to work for United States Specialty Sports Association, another charitable organization. Initially starting as a Network Engineer, he quickly took on many new and varied responsibilities. In addition to ensuring that the servers, websites, domain names, and network remained online, Mr. Celuch took on other tasks from sponsorship procurement, online advertising, contract writing, HR management (including establishing and managing a compliant 401k plan), and countless other duties that an undersized HQ staff of a not-for-profit needed to have done. With so many varied duties, the only way to keep everything understandable, so others could handle it was to create, test, and document a plan that worked for each of the tasks at hand. This ensured that when a task was handed off to someone else to handle, the day-to-day operations, they were able to do so successfully.

During the past three decades, after years of maxing out his retirement plan funding, saving on personal expenses wherever possible, and having been able to time the housing market to perfection, he has found himself with a nice nest egg. That nest egg of mostly tax deferred (compliant plan) investments has grown thanks to Mr. Celuch’s 15 year friendship with Mr. Evaul. It was time for the next stage in Mr. Celuch’s life.

Thus, we find Mr. Celuch in Plano Texas, working with fellow Principals David Evaul and Richard Adkisson at VALAD Plus®. 


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