Meet RMU alumnus Jason Christopher ‘95, owner and CEO of Acclaim Productions LLC. The comedic magician, hypnotist, and motivational speaker has been in business for nearly two decades. He’s even a regular performer at his alma mater. Most recently, he performed for 100+ students from the Class of 2024 during senior week in May, entertaining attendees with his incredible magic tricks and a wildly fun hypnosis show. 

“John Locke (Chief Experience Officer) usually brings me in for the seniors so they can see what they can do when they get their diplomas,” Christopher said humorously. 

Shortly after Jason started performing shows in the area, he caught the attention of Robert Morris University.  “I started doing shows at RMU shortly after a presentation I had done… At the time, I was just starting out as a hypnotist and I had been a magician for about 35 years. I had just added the hypnosis portion into my repertoire and one of my mentors said, ‘Hey listen, we need you to go out and find places where you can rehearse and learn…’ A technique he gave me was to go to local restaurants with banquet centers attached to them and pitch a show once a week when the space was vacant… It was a pretty beneficial arrangement, but from that presentation, my mentor told me I needed to go out and send press releases through all your local media outlets… from that press release, a local newspaper contacted me and published a story, which hit RMU’s Public Relations department. Then, someone from RMU contacted me and said, ‘Hey, it says you’re an alumni, but we can’t find you,’ but it was because I use a stage name. After we figured that out, I asked who takes care of bringing in entertainers for orientation and different campus events–that was when I was set up with John Locke and I’ve worked with John ever since.”

Jason’s relationship with RMU goes beyond performing shows on campus. He says RMU is always in his corner and willing to help anytime he needs something. 

“I’ve worked with John Locke on a number of different things–he’s a great guy and has always helped me out when I needed something,” Christopher said, “I can call him up and ask for an audience–I’d ask if he could get me an audience of about 50 to 70 people to come out for a presentation because I need something that I’m recording and I need help, and he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, no problem,’ and the media department would help me after that, but that’s how it all got started. After I met John, he kept calling me back–it’s a great way to highlight the business aspect of everything that Robert Morris teaches because it's following those steps that enables you to continue to recreate and do business with someone over and over again… similar to finding banquets in restaurants, it was a free show for the restaurant, press releases, more coverage and more connections, which gets you a paycheck and it continues and recycles through–it is business and marketing 101, right out of the RMU handbook.”

Jason’s entrepreneurial adventures did not take off right after graduating from RMU. After receiving his bachelor’s in accounting, Jason worked full-time for a local company for nearly 10 years before deciding to start his own business and work for himself.

“I realized what I did wrong 10 to 15 years earlier and realized I wasn’t doing the amount of work that needed to be done to make a business run. With that wisdom and experience, I was able to sit back and go, ‘Wait a minute, you actually have to work…”

Christopher now has nearly two decades of experience as a full-time entrepreneur running Acclaim Productions, and he says business is better than ever. Although he’s not an accountant anymore, he believes his education at RMU has helped him tremendously.

“The last several years, the business has increased, income has increased, and the workload has lowered. I have a degree in accounting, which is the exact opposite of what I do now… but the numbers are super important and they always are important,” Christopher said, “In show business there’s two words: there’s ‘show’ and there’s ‘business.’ You have to have a good show, but also, you have to have good business aspects behind everything. I remember marketing after graduating from Robert Morris and something that has always stuck with me is the fact that you have to have an approach to marketing that is not built on a diving board… but rather, like the Greek Parthenon, which has several different pillars… that stays with me to this day because if one thing fails, you’ll have something to back it up for a little bit while you figure a work around.”

Christopher’s advice to new and future alumni as well as students who, one day, may want to become an entrepreneur and start their own business is “find something that drives and motivates you, as the individual. For me, it’s always been about magic and entertaining on stage. Gradually, that’s shifted into hypnosis and magic, but that’s still entertaining–now, there is a drive from a lot of my clients to dive into motivational speaking and it’s been fun making that into entertainment as well. In a long roundabout way, I’m saying find what drives you and find what you like.”