Life of the Party Life's a party--if you're an event planner, that is.

By the time he was 18, Dylan Marer had his own event planning business, which he ran from his frat house. "I'd be on the phone with clients from AT&T or IBM, and I'd have to tell my frat brothers to be quiet because I was working," recalls Marer, now 30.

The Costa Mesa, California, entrepreneur, who started his career as a caterer's assistant at age 14, earned enough money to put himself through California State University, Long Beach, where he earned a marketing degree in 1992. But the days of coordinating spring break vacations and student ski trips--and frantically searching for stained corporate client files in stacks of papers at the frat house--are long behind him.

Today, Marer is president of Innovative Meetings and Events Inc., a full-service event planning and project management service with expected sales of $4 million this year. He and a staff of 14 are responsible for corporate executives feasting at a Hawaiian luau or doing crazy beach Olympics in Cancun.