Our goal is to bring people together.
It is very simple - Industry events are important however they are not conducive to building new relationships. Thought leadership style events we all go to have very rigid agendas and most of the networking is relegated to 5 minutes in between panels, buffet style lunches or happy hour bar settings. These are great to high five people we already know but no new relationships are being created in our opinion. Sponsors sit at tables in the lobby or at overpriced booths and regurgitate their value prop over and over and over to people rushing to the next panel session. If you have been in business for over a year, chances are you have attended this style of event. The challenge is how do you show a return on your dollar and time invested- stacks of business cards? LinkedIN connections? Impressive expense report with the names of attendees written on the top?
ETCA events are designed to bring people together to give them space and time to listen and develop mutually beneficial business relationships/friendships. You have the freedom to curate and customize your involvement or build ecosystems of colleagues simply by showing up. The return on your time invested is you now have a colleague you can turn to for advice, invite to a meeting or send them business- because now you know exactly what they do and what they are about.
ETCA is creating events people would attend even if it wasn’t for work.
Escape The Cold Aisle is an invitation to get out of the winter weather to come together. Bringing dynamic people together in a relaxed, not over structured event leads to positive outcomes.
Fact: People do business with people they like know and trust. Fact: Chicago is freezing in February
Fact: A lot of business gets done on a golf course AND golf courses are closed in a lot of places in the winter.
Fact: Going to a warm place in February is good for your soul
Fact: Arizona has over 300 days of sunshine. Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, NYC, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia- not so much…
Industry Thought Leadership events are valuable to further self-education and become enlightened. We love to go these. The Data Center and IT industries rely on solid partnerships and these partnerships are created from relationships that take time to build. ETCA events expedite that process by curating an environment that is conducive to forming mutually beneficial business connections.
Bill began his career by spending five years in the United States Navy as a Search and Rescue Swimmer during operation Desert Shield working directly for the Admiral of the 6th Fleet and forward deployed in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf which provided experience with mission critical operations, quality controls and technology. That background proved ideal in the eight years he spent with Imprint Data Center solutions, a data center design build company. Bill served in a variety of capacities of increasing responsibility, culminating in vice president of sales. He helped launch 365 Main Data Centers into 17 Markets and led teams across the country. He then went on to Bytegrid Data Centers as VP of sales and GM leading the sales efforts and building a 400,000 sf data center in downtown Cleveland. Most recently Bill was Director of Sales for QTS Data Centers where he was hired to pre-lease, staff and launch the new QTS Chicago Mega Data Center.
Bill is the founding member of ONLIGHT Aurora a community fiber services provider developed to help improve economic development and business climate in Aurora, IL. He was he Chairman of the Board of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce. He is currently President of the Chicago AFCOM Chapter and has been Communications Director of the 7x24 Lake Michigan Region Chapter for 4 years. He is a proud Infrastructure Mason and a member of the Veteran’s Committee. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Cofluence, LLC and the Data Center Sellers Association an organization founded to help data center sales professionals develop and integrate into their communities.
A California native, Bill is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and lives in Geneva, Illinois with his wife Elizabeth and their 13 year-old twins Cameron and Caroline.
Bill Shanahan is the Founder and Owner of Delta Mission Critical Inc., a turnkey service company that represents manufacturers in the data center industry, provides data center relocation/colocation brokerage, and is a value added reseller for mission critical infrastructure.
His focus is in the data center and mission critical industry, working within all phases of construction and installation. Over the past decade the data center industry has seen drastic changes ranging from power capacity, cooling strategies, connectivity, fiber densities, cloud vs on-premise and the rapid expansion with colocation facilities. Bill and his team are able to work with customers as they navigate these improvements.
Before devoting his work in Delta MCI, Bill has spent his entire career engaged in the IT, Datacom, Construction and Data Center Industry. He began his career in datacom distribution where he learned to navigate the IT world and promoted his way through sales. From there, Bill started a successful manufacturer’s representative firm. He and his partner focused in the datacom, construction, and data center industry.
Bill is a proud graduate of Illinois State University and now resides in the western suburbs of Chicago with his wife and two boys. When Bill is not working or spending time with his family, you may find him running, biking, or playing golf. His favorite golf course played is Wolf Creek Golf Club in Mesquite, NV and he tries to play at least one new PGA course every year. Pebble Beach is still on his list.
Bill is always open to meeting new people across all industries and interests, in fact if you need an ordained minister or emcee host he has you covered. To date he has married five couples and has been an emcee for events ranging in attendance from 100 to 3,500!