In 1976, a family moved from Jacksonville, Florida, to a piece of ground outside Ava, Illinois — a stretch of road locals still call the Ava Blacktop. Bill George was in sixth grade. He would spend the next seven years at Trico Community Unit School, graduating with the class of 1983 alongside 65 other seniors, five of whom went on to college. 

He was one of the five. Today, he is the Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Comfort Systems USA, an S&P 500 company he co-founded in 1997 that recorded $9.1 billion in revenue last year.

The path between those two points is anything but straight, and Bill tells it with the candor of someone who knows exactly how many things had to break right. His family came to Southern Illinois because his mother, a native of the region, wanted to be near family after his father became disabled. It was not a planned beginning to an extraordinary career. It was a family doing what it needed to do.

At Trico, Bill was a performing arts kid. He sang bass in swing choir and played the villain in both school musicals, his junior and senior years — Little Abner and Calamity Jane — productions that were only possible because the program had been brought back after a gap of several years. The teacher at the center of all of it was Gerald Speith, the performing arts director whose influence on students was broad enough that the school's auditorium now bears his name. Mrs. Hohman, who taught speech and worked alongside Speith, also left a mark. So did Mrs. Carruthers in English and humanities, and Mr. Riley, the guidance counselor who quietly changed the course of Bill's life by suggesting he take the ACT. "I wouldn't have gone to college without Mr. Riley," Bill says. "He's the one who said, take the ACT."

Bill had never heard of the test. He showed up, took it cold, and scored higher than any student Riley had seen at Trico. That score earned him a full scholarship to Brigham Young University, where he graduated summa cum laude with university honors and a degree in economics in 1988 — after two years away serving as a missionary in France for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He then earned his law degree from Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude and receiving an Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics, along with a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for his work as a teaching assistant in Harvard's undergraduate economics program.

There is a second story inside the Harvard story. Five weeks before his LSAT, Bill mentioned to his girlfriend — now his wife, who was completing a PhD in botany at Harvard — that he hadn't prepared for the test. She was from New Jersey and found this baffling. He, raised in rural Southern Illinois, had simply never known such preparation was possible. She insisted. He checked out five old LSATs from the library, sat for a practice test each Saturday morning for five weeks, and improved his score by ten points. "If I hadn't been dating someone who said you kind of have to prepare for that," he says, "I would have rolled in and taken that test, and it never would have occurred to me."

After Harvard, he joined the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray, then was recruited to serve as general counsel of American Medical Response, a publicly traded medical transportation company in Denver. When that company was sold, a board member introduced him to the group, forming what would become Comfort Systems USA. Bill moved his family to Texas, worked without a paycheck for six months on startup equity, and in 1997 helped simultaneously acquire and list twelve mechanical contracting companies in a single IPO. He served as general counsel for the company's first eight years, became CFO in 2005, and has led the acquisitions strategy since 2009 — completing more than forty deals. In 2025, he was voted the number one CFO among large-cap engineering and construction companies by institutional investors and analysts.

He has not forgotten where he started. Bill now donates to Trico's performing arts and industrial arts programs — the two worlds that shaped him most. His siblings Steve, Richard, and Brenda all graduated from Trico as well, and all are thriving in their lives as well. The Ava Blacktop produced more than one person worth knowing.