UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2004

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Extended Family

Destination Divas
They know Boston like nobody's business.

–Deborah Klenotic




	Linda Simon ’68 and Ellen Burnett ’71, executive vice president and president of Best of Boston, respectively, top the charts of New England event planners.

IT'S JUST PAST SIX IN the evening, and rush-hour traffic has halted in front of the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. Thirteen hundred members of the National Rural Utilities Association, prompted by a traffic cop, stroll across two thoroughfares to the hotel’s convention center. Near the door John Quincy Adams and Abigail Adams characters heartily greet the convention-goers.

“Good evening, madam!” booms John Adams, lifting the hand of a passing guest and bowing his bewigged head deeply.

“They’re the ‘meet and greet,’” explains Ellen (Rice) Burnett ’71, standing off to the side in spike heels and a black pantsuit. She surveys the situation from behind cat-eye sunglasses.

Standing next to her in a black dress and less daring heels, Linda (Sherman) Simon ’68 adds, “Inside the doors, butlering keeps down the lines at the bar, so people can get to the food stations.” Not just any food stations, mind you, but décor installations depicting Fenway Park, the harbor, and other Boston neighborhoods.

As co-founders of The Best of Boston Ltd., Burnett and Simon have produced thousands of corporate events—for the Clinton inauguration, Deutsche Bank, L’Oréal, the State of Iowa, Campbell Soup, and Fortune 100 companies. Whether replicating a dinner given by President Kennedy or producing a standard-issue convention, they know no equal. For the last four years, The Best of Boston has been named the best event-planning company in New England by the Boston Business Journal.

“At first we did everything ourselves,” says Linda. Now they employ 11 full-time staff, including Donna (Logue) Wolfe ’67, sales director, and contract with hundreds of vendors, fetching $10,000 to $2 million for a single event.

Burnett and Simon met when they were students at UMass Amherst, back in the days when freshmen wore beanies until the football team won its first home game, and Janis Joplin gave away another little piece of her heart in the Cage. Free-spirited sisters in Iota Gamma Upsilon, they lived on farms and hitchhiked around the valley. After other careers, they started The Best of Boston in 1981 with a typewriter and stationery they bought on credit.

“Our first idea was to start a limo service for wives of executives who were in Boston on conferences, taking them shopping and sightseeing,” Linda explains. “That didn’t work, so we started organizing bus tours for people coming to Boston for conferences. Then we branched out into event planning.”

Ellen says that early on, they’d get in the door and make a good impression, “but we didn’t know how to close a sale, and we had no financial plan.” Glancing at the line still moving to the door, she zips over to John Adams, repositions him to keep people from stumbling where the curb ends, and returns. “But we worked hard to increase business.” When a friend of Ellen’s recommended her for the board of directors of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Office, they were off.

Their success has everything to do with relationships, they point out. “People can lose their jobs if an event doesn’t go well,” says Ellen. “I had a VP of an international company who kept flying into Boston to check the linens, the florals, etc., and I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ She said, ‘I could lose my job.’ We’re responsible for other people’s success, and we take that responsibility very, very seriously. After one event, our clients trust that we’ll remember every last detail.”

Donna comes out of the building and reports that dinner is in full swing. After hugs all around, Linda and Ellen cross the street, where valets bring them their cars. Then they drive away into the twinkling city—a destination they know down to the last detail.
http://bestboston.com/

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