Jodi Wolf, CEO of Chicago’s Paulette Wolf Events, sees the world through events-filtered eyeglasses. “Events are in my blood,” she notes. “I grew up on them. When I was 10 years old, I was wrangling entertainers for my mom, Paulette Wolf. I learned from the best.”
By the age of 21, Jodi Wolf thought it was important to work in nearly every area of the events and hospitality industries. She labored at a hotel front desk, a caterer to get her mind around food and beverage, and a tent company to understand outdoor events. She also worked at The Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, where she grasped entertainment riders, production, and VIP meet-and-greets. She says of those days, “[By doing all these things,] I wanted to make sure [people didn’t say,] ‘Oh, that’s Paulette’s daughter.’ I wanted people to respect me for who I was and what I had learned.”
Today, she leads a company that produces 35 to 50 major events a year, with specialties in groundbreakings, grand openings, product launches, and big-name entertainment production. She has served as executive producer of grand-opening campaigns for pavilions at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Fort Lauderdale’s Air & Sea Show in Florida, and MLB’s Chicago Cubs. She has brought in musical acts such as Imagine Dragons, Stevie Wonder, and Sting for events, and she has arranged keynote presentations by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
With so many moving parts for complex events, things must go wrong sometimes, right? She replies, “We pride ourselves on meticulous preparation and flawless execution. We plan for every possible scenario, so if there is a problem, our response is turnkey and quick, and it is never something that the client has any idea happened. The perfect event is when you have anticipated and communicated everything, so the event almost runs itself with just our watchful eyes on it once it starts.”
When pressed to share an event that was outside of the norm, she has a ready answer about her experience working with The Oprah Winfrey Show for a live broadcast in 2004. She says, “It was shot at Fort Campbell [a U.S. Army Base in Kentucky], and it was called the ‘World’s Largest Baby Shower.’ The audience was 640 soldiers or military wives who were pregnant and due within 30 days of each other. It was just wild.”
