Rio Scafone

Jason Huvaere says Paxahau Promotions Group, best known for its production of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, is ready to tackle another big event. View larger photo

Talk to Jason Huvaere for 10 minutes and you’ll feel like you’ve known him for 10 years.

He is candid about his life story, talking about his decision to not follow in his father’s footsteps, and how music was the only constant during his parent’s separation.

The conversation sounds more like backyard banter — with Huvaere, 34, using phrases like “man,” “dude” and “you know?”

“He’s just a really charismatic guy,” said Jason Clark, Huvaere’s business partner and creative director of Ferndale-based Paxahau Promotions Group L.L.C. “He’s not really afraid to interact with anyone at any level and become friends with them.”

Huvaere, president of Paxahau, is quick to deny his charisma. Instead, he says, it’s his responsibility to ensure the business is bigger than anyone who works for it.

“It’s really more of a pushing sensation that gets me out and gets me talking,” Huvaere said. “I want us to stay visible.” In four years, Paxahau's revenue has grown from $30,107 in 2004, when it was a part-time business, to $288,080 in 2007. This year it’s on track to hit $343,197.

He’s the driving force, he’s the engine and also the captain steering this whole thing,” Clark said. “It was his desire to move forward and do whatever we could that really makes everything happen.”

Like father, not like son

Huvaere’s father, Dick Huvaere, understands a thing or two about business. He’s the president of Dick Huvaere’s Richmond Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep and has been proudly selling cars since 1978.

Growing up, Huvaere watched his father move from manager to partner to owner. He knew the business, so it seemed only natural that Dick Huvaere, 63, would hand over the reigns when the time came.

Being close to the family business made it that much harder for Huvaere to tell his father that his interest lied elsewhere.

“It was very difficult to say, ‘Look, I totally appreciate all these lessons that you’ve taught me, but I want to use these lessons in another way and I want to go in another direction,’ ” Huvaere said.

Dick Huvaere understood his son’s difference in passion and he never laid on the guilt.

“I knew he was going to be an entrepreneur,” Dick Huvaere said. “There was not a doubt in my mind about that, but exactly what direction and where it would land, I was uncertain.”

Uncharted waters

While growing up in Richmond — a farm town 45 miles north of Detroit — Huvaere’s only connection to the big city music scene was the radio and friends who hit concerts downtown.

Once Huvaere was old enough, he too flocked to the Detroit. His first musical crush was hip-hop, then reggae, then the underground techno scene — at that point, he knew it was love.

“It was sort of like the cherry on top of all the listening experiences, and once I really experienced that it just clicked … I knew there was no going back,” he said.

But in the fall of 1995, a combination of changing musical tastes and anti-rave laws killed the underground scene. Huvaere decided to pack his bags and move to New Hampshire with his mother. He was later joined by Clark.

The two met through mutual friends. Clark, 34, from Dayton, Ohio, would drive to Detroit for dance parties and stay nights in Huvaere’s loft.

“I was attracted to his personality, his energy and his enthusiasm,” Clark said. “He was just tied into what was going on.”

While out east, Clark went to massage school and Huvaere sold cars, but neither of them got comfortable.

“It just felt very temporary in New Hampshire,” Clark said. “We weren’t making any friends; we couldn’t really relate to the people that well, we couldn’t really relate to the scene.”

So while both were biding their time, Huvaere started to save money to build an event production company. He had some experience running small, underground events, but he wanted to make it a full-time business.

In 1998 Huvaere and Clark returned to Detroit and opened Paxahau as a part-time venture. Then in late 1999, they started a computer company — Catalyst Technology Services — to build the capital needed to make Paxahau a full-time business. That happened five years later.

Breaking out

For Super Bowl week 2006, Paxahau landed parties at: Bleu Room Experience Inc., the nightclub on Woodward near Grand Circus Park; Boll Family YMCA in Detroit; Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn; and a private loft in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.

All together, Paxahau made about $25,000, but that wasn’t half as valuable as the confidence boost. Huvaere now knew that his company could go big.

Before the Super Bowl, in hopes of landing some work, Huvaere approached Kevin Saunderson, producer of the 2005 Detroit Electronic Music Festival — an annual spring event that brings techno music lovers to Hart Plaza for a weekend concert. After the Super Bowl wrapped, Saunderson announced his retirement from the festival, sans warning.

“There was so much pressure and negativity from the city, and I decided, I’m not going to do this,” Saunderson said.

Huvaere immediately submitted a formal proposal to the mayor’s office. After eight weeks of meetings, and only two months before the event, the city offered Paxahau the job.

Moving the festival forward

Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival — now dubbed the Movement — suffered from historically inflated attendance figures. As a result, the city didn’t recoup money spent.

When Paxahau took control, Huvaere raised prices from $10 to $20 for a daily pass and from $25 to $40 for a weekend pass. This year, prices were $25 and $50. Huvaere said he plans to raise ticket prices by $5 every year.

To plan and attract sponsors, Paxahau needed to accurately to track attendance. Supposedly 1.7 million people attended the shows in 2001 and 2002. But Detroit’s entire population, based on the 2000 U.S. Census, was just 951,270. In 2006 and 2007, Paxahau tracked attendance based on ticket sales: 41,000 and 43,337, respectively. The numbers were realistic but still iffy.

This year, turnstiles installed at the festival’s front and back entrances clocked more than 77,000 people. That’s almost 78 percent more than last year. Add in the 37 sponsors and gross revenue totaled $1,173,000.

For an eclectic mix of stars, Paxahau used music contacts from other events to snag mainstream artists. Previous festivals featured mostly local talent. Saunderson says that this year’s show was the most diverse in the festival’s eight-year history.

As the festival grows so does Paxahau. In 2006, Huvaere and Clark were the only full-time employees. They, along with three part-timers, worked furiously with onsite festival help from about 150 volunteers.

Now there are four full-time employees, including Huvaere and Clark, and four part timers. For festival weekend, there were 15 paid managers and roughly 250 volunteers.

What now?

On Labor Day weekend, Paxahau celebrated its 10th anniversary, but Huvaere isn’t taking time off to pat himself on the back.

After three years with the festival, he’s ready to produce more than one big event a year. To round out the calendar, he’ll try to add it to October or November. Right now, Paxahau produces around 12 events a year — everything thing is about planning and execution. It would be nice to have pockets of time to brainstorm for future events.

Despite his budding success, Huvaere doesn’t see a finish line.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get there. Now, what you’re talking about, is 15 years of evolution both in the nature of this project and as people,” Huvaere said.

This kind of drive will, of course, grow a business, but it can also consume your life.

Some may call it a success story. A man, born and raised on farmland far from Detroit’s emerging techno scene starts a company that eventually produces one of the largest music events in Southeast Michigan. Others, however, may view Huvaere as a modern-day Sisyphus, constantly pushing a rock up hill with no tangible end in sight; spurning traditional ideals of life fulfillment — marriage and parenthood — for the success of a company.

“That’s the nature of his business,” Dick Huvaere said. “And that’s something that he’s chosen to do.”

Huvaere says that he does miss having time to himself, especially for reading and self-reflection. But as a business owner, he can never arrive too early or leave too late.

As much as he misses personal time, he says he would never sacrifice his work.

“I have a lot of fantasies about later in life,” Huvaere says with a smile. “The studio will be later in life, the family will maybe be later in life, the house in the country maybe will be later in life. But that’s a dot, dot, dot that just keeps going. Right now I feel we’re just still at the beginning of how we want to manage our year.”