The sight of Jules Belkin working the Cleveland Clinic’s second annual Medical Innovations Summit surprised friends attending the 2004 event.
The successful concert promoter had just retired from Belkin Productions, the Chagrin Falls-based business he built with brother Mike and sold to national counterpart SFX (now Live Nation) in 2001. So why, they asked, was he directing attendees to seats at the InterContinental Hotel’s conference center?
“I told them, ‘Well, I don’t have a specific income anymore, and I happened to pick up this great job that pays very well,’ ” Belkin, now 79, recalls with mirth.
Belkin eventually dropped the down-on-his-luck act and revealed the truth: He and his wife, Fran, occasionally help daughter Jamie carry on the family name in the event-production industry. In 2006, she incorporated Jamie Belkin Events, a manager and producer of large corporate conferences and nonprofit fundraisers as well as the occasional wedding and graduation party.
“We’ve come full circle,” Jamie, now 45, says as she sits in her one-room Cleveland Heights office. “I worked for my dad for 11 years; now he works for me.”
Over the past four years, Jamie and three full-time staffers have quietly built an impressive roster of clients that includes University Hospitals’ Five-Star Sensation fundraiser and Summa Health System’s annual Sapphire Ball.
Cleveland Clinic chief experience officer Dr. James Merlino goes so far as to call Jamie “an organizational genius.” He credits her with making the Clinic’s first annual Patient Experience Summit in May a success by helping develop a coherent program out of a hodgepodge of ideas then identifying a number of possible health care-sector audiences for it.
“When we started the summit, we had very modest expectations of about 125 people [attending],” he says. “We ended up having 640.”
Belkin, a Syracuse University graduate, began her career as an event coordinator for Salls & Bonda, producers of the now-defunct BP Riverfest. When the company folded a year and a half later, she went to work for Belkin Productions, eventually ending up in the company’s newly formed festival-production division. She staged summertime staples such as the Great American Rib Cook-Off and Taste of Cleveland, but she left the company in 2000 to be a stay-at-home mom.
“It was the same thing year after year after year,” she says of the festival work. “I needed a change, but there wasn’t room for change at the time.”
Over the next couple of years, Jamie limited work to producing smaller events for a few of Belkin’s corporate clients — namely country music festivals in Cleveland and Pittsburgh for Dollar Bank — with her father’s blessing. But the foundation of her company wasn’t laid until late 2003, when the Cleveland Clinic asked her to produce its second annual Medical Innovations Summit.
Jamie insists that planning a corporate event isn’t that much different from producing a concert. “There’s a rock star in every room,” she declares.
But Jamie Belkin Events has allowed her to exercise her creativity, whether it’s by moving an annual event to a new venue — she mentions transforming Summa Health System’s employee-recognition event from a traditional noshing at the John S. Knight Center in Akron to a tailgate party in InfoCision Stadium — to finding a new item to stuff in a gift bag.
“It’s taking something from nothing and creating it,” she says. “I can see the end before I get there, and I like the process of getting there.”