Get to Know Your PARTsolutions Team: Mike Cotton

Introducing Mike Cotton, Our Newest Business Development Consultant!

Welcome to the CADENAS PARTsolutions Team, Mike Cotton!

Mike has worked in the industrial B2B space for most of his career with experiences in marketing and sales management. He has worked for several manufacturing companies (four of them were Japanese) and a few contract machining companies.  Fun Fact: Mike was one of our first customers!

He will be working remotely out of the Illinois/Wisconsin area. He and his wife Rhonda have been married for 29 years, and they have three sons, Michael, Daniel, and Nicholas and a beagle/border collie mixed dog named Maggie. He’s a big fan of the Beatles, Chicago-style thin crust pizza, and he coached his sons’ in-house baseball teams for over 16 years.

Where did you grow up/ go to school?

I grew up in Chicago and lived there until I got married. I graduated from Loyola University Chicago where I majored in Psychology and Pre-Dental studies. I attended dental school for 1 year and went back to graduate school to get an MBA in Marketing Management from Loyola (while working full-time!).

Fun Fact 2: In high school and college, he worked on the ground crew at Soldier Field (home of the Chicago Bears)!

Tell us about your role at CADENAS PARTsolutions:

As the Business Development Consultant for the Mid-West (specifically Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin), I’ll be educating and assisting customers about our eCATALOGsolutions platform. This digital solution is all about making it easier for industrial component manufacturers to make their 3D CAD files readily available to engineers for new product designs.

What are you most looking forward to in this new role?

I’m excited to still be in the industrial sector but with a different product offering that I’m rather familiar with. Since I was a customer of PARTsolutions, I can share some interesting stories because I’ve lived through the issues that many of our customers and prospects are going through now with trying to grow sales and get more components specified into new designs.

The “Lightning Round”

Favorite movie: The Godfather with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Both Godfather 1 and 2 are must-see movies!

Best vacation ever: My wife and I took our family to Maui for our 25^th wedding anniversary!

What do you do for fun? Through our sons’ high school Track and Cross-Country teams, we have made friends with a few couples that get together regularly. Now that our sons are in their 20’s and are seriously dating, we also socialize with them and their girlfriends and even their girlfriends’ families.

Food you can’t live without: Pizza – I’m a big fan of Chicago-style pizza, especially Rosati’s (my uncle is one of the founders).

Favorite TV show: Breaking Bad is a great series to watch. Sneaky Pete is another series that we’re working through on Prime. Our sons provide Rhonda and me with a lot of viewing recommendations on Netflix and Amazon Prime. We’re not very good at marathon viewing.

Favorite band: The Beatles – especially the White Album.