Jeff Chase is Vice President of Sustainability at Freeman for the past 7 years. With more than 30 years in the events and exhibition industry experience, he is a passionate driving force for economic and environmental sustainability. Jeff learned this business from the ground up. Spent his first five years in the industry as a general services contractor working in Nashville and Washington D.C. with Andrews Bartlett. He accepted a position in California as show director of a small show held in San Jose, CA and helped grow the Networld+Interop show to become one of the largest tradeshows in the industry, and over the eight years he helped grow the show to max out the GWCC in Atlanta and the LVCC in Las Vegas and launched it in Paris, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo Japan.
In 1998 he left the show organizer side of the business and started his own event production agency, Chase Marketing Group which he grew to be hugely successful for 10 years working with clients such as eBay, SemiCon, Intersolar, PayPal, Visa, Google and many others. In 2008 the Chase Marketing Group was sold to Wachovia Capital Investors which rebranded them under the name of Wheelhouse Solutions Group. In 2011, Freeman purchased the group and today it has become part of the FreemanXP division. At the time of purchase Jeff asked the Freeman Family if they would consider adding a new role at Freeman to support sustainable. They agreed and he helped to develop the sustainability department within the Freeman enterprise and in his current role as Vice President of Sustainability at Freeman, he works closely with many Fortune 100 companies such McDonalds, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Autodesk to help them meet their goals for sustainable events and community impact. He has been a featured speaker at PCMA, IAEE, EDPA, ESCA, IMEX and other global international events. In his long history of supporting the industry he served as the local Chapter President of IAEE Northern California and was a featured traveling speaker for the IAEE Foundation. He currently serves as the past chair of the Events Industry Council Sustainability committee formerly known as Green Meetings Industry Council (GMIC).