Brent Beshore – AdVentures ranked 28th on the 2011 Inc. 500 list

 

 
Brian: Hi everyone. This is Brian Null with MO.com. I’m sitting here with Brent Beshore in his building Museao here in Columbia, Missouri, and we’re going to talk with Brent about his recent inclusion in the Inc. 500, some of his other businesses that’s he’s ramped up, like Digital Talent Agents. Instead of me going through the list, it’s hard to keep track, I’ll allow Brent the opportunity to talk a little about that, maybe do his own introduction:

Brent:
Yeah, I’m Brent Beshore, CEO of AdVentures. AdVentures is a company that basically acquires, partners with, and launches communication based companies. We have about 11 companies in our portfolio right now, and we provide operations management. We do a lot of strategic planning, marketing with different companies, and we do a lot of entrepreneurial focused things I guess would be the best way to describe it. Yes, we were recently, as of I think today it’s public, ranked in the Inc. 500. It’s been a wild ride recently.

Brian:

Not just in Inc. 500. He’s actually at number 28, so that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment. First I want to start off by saying I am happy to announce that Brent is our most recent investor in MO.com, our most recent partner that’s joined the efforts here, beyond just infusing the capital and to helping us do what we do. He’s also been a great sounding board to run ideas past, and we’re just happy to have him on board.

Brent:

Thanks, Brian. I really appreciate it.

Brian:

This is going to be a more casual interview than we usually do. It’s going to be conversational. We want to talk to Brent about one of his companies, which is called AdVentures. The big announcement for AdVentures is their recent inclusion on the newest released Inc. 500 at the 28th spot. So Brent if you could tell us a little bit about AdVentures and what that’s about.

Brent:

Yeah, thanks Brian. AdVentures is really an adventure in a lot of ways. It’s kind of funny. The name really serves two purposes. We really look at the communications world, which is really where we get into tech and communications, anything that is going to help people communicate better, as being sort of in our wheelhouse. We buy companies, we start companies, we partner with companies that are all in the communications sphere, digital communications in particular in a lot of ways. MO fits that profile very, very well and we’re happy to be investors.

For us, AdVentures started about four years ago. We never know where things are going to go, but we just try to do what makes sense. We go out and we buy advertising agencies and PR firms and invest in tech companies. Really the synergistic effects of what we’ve seen is a lot of these companies they really can work together in helping each other in a lot of ways that’s pretty unusual in that world.

It’s been a fun experiment, and obviously being included on the Inc. 500 has been a real honor this year. I was the one who founded it, but I’ve got to be honest. It’s the absolutely incredible team that we’ve got across all of the different companies that really makes it go.

Brian:

I’ve noticed since our first fateful coffee session . . .

Brent:

Didn’t I just randomly stalk you on the Internet or something?

Brian:

You had stalked me through LinkedIn. I’m like who’s this guy in Columbia?

Brent:

That’s right.

Brian:

Since that first meeting when we sat down, I think you have more than about anyone I’ve met in my years of doing business, you’ve got this incredible ability to hear about what people are up to, see what businesses are doing, view that from a big picture, and almost instantly I had experienced it with you so many times, seen ways to leverage, partner, or improve the business model or take things to another level. Were you born with that, or is that something you just learn? Just a crash course over the years.

Brent:

Thanks. I don’t know if I deserve all that credit. No, I’m just really passionate about entrepreneurship and about business and about really helping people. That kind of dates back a long time in my family and the people I’ve been around, and it’s just sort of part of who I am. I remember the first time we had coffee. I was like, “Oh my gosh, Brian, you need to do this. And have you thought about partnering with this person?” I think you were scared and maybe thought about running out of Panera or wherever we were.

Brian:

I think I was scribbling notes down as fast as I could.

Brent:

I love every morning I wake up and love what I do. I mean that’s at the end of the day. I don’t think I have worked a day in my life because I’ve just loved every minute of it.

Brian:

Another characteristic I’ve noticed with you as you build new companies, grub existing companies, find partnerships, is you have a real knack or a habit of taking folks, recognizing and identifying folks that have talent and drive, and putting them in a position to excel. You empower them, and I mean that at the truest level where you put them in a spot and say go.

Brent:

Yeah.

Brian:

You really give them the keys to carve out their own thing. You don’t just give them keys. You give them a gentle little push right off the floor and you say go.

Brent:

Yeah.

Brian:

And not everyone has the confidence to cut people loose in their business.

Brent:

Yeah. It’s really interesting, You talk about I think it comes down to what you can control. I think a lot of particularly young entrepreneurs, I definitely went through a phase where I felt like I would hold on to things as tight as I could, right? People need to be working. They need to be at their desks. They need to be doing stuff. I definitely went through a phase like that, and God I can’t imagine working for me when I was like that. It must have been pretty miserable.

One day I kind of woke up and realized that the less that I tried to control people, the more control I actually had. Our philosophy, across all the companies, if we acquire a company, we don’t try to force our culture on them necessarily. We try to have shared values. Before we ever look at investing in a company or acquiring a company, the three values we have are innovation, entrepreneurship, and altruism. We want good people who are smart, self-driven, and who are really going to think about the world in a different way.

So as a result of that, we attract people who don’t necessarily need to have this tight rein, be told what to do every day, have such a strict schedule. So actually, for one of our companies, we pretty much have the most progressive employment practices in the country or in the world I’ve ever even heard of. We basically have no set hours. We tell people we don’t care when you work, we don’t care where you work, and we don’t care how many hours you work. We have unlimited paid leave and no vacation policy.

Brian:

That’s not bad.

Brent:

Exactly. It’s not bullshit. It’s actually real. What we do is we say, “Look, we trust the employee.”

Brian:

One of the new companies that you recently launched is Digital Talent Agents. It’s a company that we’re excited to have a business relationship with at MO.com. Can you tell us a little bit about Digital Talent Agents (DTA)?

Brent:

Yeah. DigitalTalentAgents.com really was founded from this confluence of a few different things. One, I’ve been out there enough and published enough online, and I’ve interacted with enough people and you being included as one of them, that we started to see this need that websites need content. Cash is king. Content is also king for sites. It’s the thing that causes readership, that helps with search engine rankings and all of that. So we saw this real need where sites were having a tough time developing great content. A lot of that great content that they were having a tough time with comes from niche experts. So we had this other pool of niche experts over here. HARO is a great example of that. There are tons of people. If you post something on HARO, tons of people all of the time will come back that are niche experts that want to be published. So you seem to have this lack of a marketplace or a lack of a connection between these two groups. You’ve got publications who really need valuable content, not regurgitated content farm stuff, but actual valuable, original content.

Then you have niche experts who have a lot of expertise and want to grow their domain in their niche expertise and don’t have an outlet for it. So they sort of toil away. Maybe they start their own blog. They toil away in obscurity for a long time. Then we started getting together and thinking about it, and we’re like why wouldn’t we just connect those groups. I know a lot of niche experts personally. I come in contact with a lot of people that have amazing amounts of knowledge and know a lot of publications. So we were like why wouldn’t we just offer a clearing house and an ability to really help make that happen?

So that’s where DigitalTalentAgents.com was born. We’re still in the testing and formative stages of it, but really the response has been absolutely fantastic.

Brian:

What a phenomenal resource too. As a publisher, to have great content being available to you via this resource is phenomenal, but also as an entrepreneur to have the assistance to get published on some great online publications, that’s a gem.

I did touch on your recent inclusion in the Inc. 500. Not just in the Inc. 500, but in the top 30, at number 28. Phenomenal. What does that mean to you as a new entrant on to the list, and how does that feel? I mean, that’s pretty amazing.

Brent:

Yeah, it’s fantastic and obviously we appreciate Inc. Magazine for doing what they do and helping really bring to the surface a lot of very different and innovative companies. It’s a great company to be included in. As I said in the beginning too, I may have started the company, but we’ve got an amazing team that really drives the success of the organization. It would be a huge mistake and very, very different than reality if it was all put on me.

I would say that I’m hoping that we can take that – in some ways it’s sort of a stamp of approval or that you have made it to at least a certain level to be in the Inc. 500 – really take that and help bring some of the approaches that we’ve had that were a success to other companies. That’s when we partner with people, when we invest, and even when we don’t, I love to help out entrepreneurs and businesses in general to maybe see opportunities where they wouldn’t have otherwise and to make connections with other people that they wouldn’t have maybe had otherwise.

It’s been a pretty wild ride. We took basically about six weeks off there for a while with the Joplin stuff that happened, and that was definitely interesting, right in middle of everything to have that happen.

Brian:

Would you be willing to talk a little bit about that experience?

Brent:

Actually, I wasn’t personally, the Joplin, Missouri tornado recovery page which I started has got 170,000 people following it.

Brian:

170,000?

Brent:

Yeah, and the best number is that we’ve raised about $1.7 million for Joplin tornado relief. It’s a lot of people and that’s good. We want to raise a lot more and keep the spotlight on Joplin, because I tell you what, for those of you that don’t know, Joplin was hit by an absolute horrible F5 tornado. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Twister,” at the very end they have the pinnacle tornado, the big one, the F5. Well, that was what tore through basically the middle of Joplin. It was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen in person in my life. So much death and destruction, I know family friends that died. An amazing amount of people lost their homes and were injured. It actually amazing that more people didn’t die.

We’re in a position, we’re in the communications world, and people needed information and people needed an outlet to help and get involved. So we were able to offer that to them, and it really caught traction. We were up for a 2011 VH1 Do Something Award. It actually aired last Thursday. It was a good experience. The best thing was being able to help keep the spotlight on Joplin. It’s going to be a 10 year rebuild down there, and we just want to make sure we keep that on there.

Brian:

You’re listening to Brent, and you hear about his business ventures and you hear about his efforts with Joplin. It doesn’t stop there. Since the time that I met Brent at the coffee shop, he doesn’t just talk the talk about entrepreneurship and his complete insane passion for entrepreneurship. He walks the walk, and in doing so, he actually purchased the building we’re sitting in four or five months ago.

Brent:

I’d say six months ago.

Brian:

But again, we’re sitting in Museao, which is in Columbia, Missouri, and it’s been a huge plus, a huge impact on the culture in Columbia, which is a thriving community. You’ve got the University of Missouri here, a lot of great student entrepreneurs, but a lot of awful great businesses here too. Brent has provided a vehicle for . . .

Brent:

Oh, a playground.

Brian:

He likes to call it a playground. It is. It’s been fantastic. He pulled me. I’ve been working from the basement for over a decade now, and he pulled me out.

Brent:

This building happened through the grace of God. There’s no other way to describe it. We had an opportunity to purchase a building – 16,500 square feet – glass, steel, concrete, it’s absolutely awesome. Really the ability to offer a playground in some ways, a gathering place for innovative people, entrepreneurs, business people to be able to come in and work together and play together and listen to speakers together. It’s been a really, really great thing. A league of innovators is a main driver in that. So people can actually come in and buy different packages that include office space here and the ability to come in to events and a lot of stuff, including Startup Weekend here in a few weeks, which is pretty exciting. Really just again, trying to create that entrepreneurial orbit in where we live to be able to get the talent out that we know is here. But really, anybody across the country or across the world, I would advise you guys to do the same thing. Band together, create a consortium with people that are interested in entrepreneurship that have some resources to be able to put towards it, and create a gathering place where people can go and mingle and really just interact in a meaningful way.

Brian:

Is there anything that I haven’t touched on in the conversation that you would like to hit on before we call it a wrap and start the editing?

Brent:

No, I think that for everyone out there who’s watching, interact with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of business people. The biggest thing is just stop talking about doing something and do something. I think that’s the biggest thing I can tell people is great companies are not built on ideas, which is actually an interesting thought. Ideas obviously spark and having a new opportunity to address a problem in meaningful ways, how every business gets started, but your ideas don’t matter unless you do something with them. So you may be the person who has great ideas your entire life and you can’t ever figure out why you’re not successful, whatever that means to you. I would say that you should do something.

That’s the whole things with Startup Weekend. It’s 54 hours. You start a business in 54 hours. I mean most people will watch some TV, do a little work, play with your family. Take 54 hours out of your life, even if it’s not a Startup Weekend, just take 54 hours and do something, start something. Interact with people in a meaningful way. That’s my biggest thing.

Brian:

Fantastic. Thanks Brent for joining us. Brent Beshore, we’re out at his building Museao in Columbia, Missouri, and this has been fun.

Brent:

Thanks, appreciate it, Brian.