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Andrew: Hi everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious up-start. How does a 28 year-old who looks like he’s 17, build one of the fastest growing, private companies in the country? Brent Beshore is the founder of AdVentures, which creates and acquires companies. His holdings include, Media Cross which offers recruitment management and Bookd, an online booking options website. Brent, welcome to Mixergy.
Brent: Thanks a lot Andrew, I appreciate it.
Andrew: I had a little fun with that intro that’s your description, but I have to tell you I looked at you too and said, ‘Boy, this guy looks so young compared to what I was reading.’ One of the things I was reading was the Ink magazine article about you that said you were one of the fastest growing companies in the country, based on revenue. What were the revenues that they brought up?
Brent: The core revenues that actually flow up to AdVentures sales is about $6.8 million last year, should be significantly higher than that based on our revenues this year.
Andrew: Let me repeat that. 2010, $6.8 million. 2007, what was the revenue?
Brent: I think a little over $100,000 and again, it’s tough to say because we’ve got a lot of investment in companies that obviously have revenues that far exceed that, but the revenue actually flows up through us based on the profits and different things that make it go on.
Andrew: It is impressive and I have to admit that it’s probably not the best metric to use to explain to my audience how big or small the company is. Because if you’re investing in other businesses, revenue isn’t what your after, is it?
Brent: Right. We’re looking for, we like cash flow, everyone does, but we definitely like sales as well. I would say a good metric is we have 65 people that work real hard on the businesses that we own and operate. Sometimes we act like a VC firm in some ways and sometimes like private equity in other ways, it’s more of a start up, sort of incubator. Revenues a tough thing to peg.
Andrew: Frankly, even the number of people on the team, 65 is impressive, but I’m not sure that’s the great measure. Number of portfolio companies also not a great measure, but taken all together we’re going to give people a sense of where you are and then we’ll go back in time and figure out how you got here.
Brent: Sure.
Andrew: How many companies in the portfolio?
Brent: Thirteen active investments, right now.
Andrew: Thirteen active investments.
Brent: Some we’ve owned as little as 10%. Some of them we own a 100% of so, it really just depends on the mood that we’re in and operating them.
Andrew: I was reading one of Warren Buffets letters to share holders the other night and he goes through this too, he doesn’t know exactly how to value the assets that he has inside his company. He explains why he uses book-value and he also talks about why book-value is not the right yard stick. Taken overall, we’ve given people a sense of the size, let’s give them a sense of what you do before we go back in time and figure out how you got here. I brought up the companies, Bookd, and I gave a very small description of what the company does. Bookd is a company… What’s your investment there? What kind of investment do you have with them?
Brent: We have an equity investment. We also do advising for them. I invest some resources as well. Really, Jamie Stephens who is the founder of Bookd, is just a wonderful human being. I’m just making a bet on him as well as the company itself, Bookd. It’s poised for a lot of growth. It’s in the open green field area, the booking sphere and obviously we’ve seen a lot of the start-ups recently that approached these different areas, whether it’s booking your house with Air B&B or a lot of these areas. Bookings are a hot space that a lot of people really paid attention to too much in the past.
Andrew: What are some of the things that we will be able to book on Bookd?
Brent: Boy, I’ll tell you what. Right now, booking your time is the main thing. My companies use it to be able to book conference rooms and everything like that. In the future I really see that space, and the discussion we’ve had recently with Bookd. Our focus is on booking a lot of different things, almost anything. In the future it would be wonderful, whether it’s Bookd or not, being able to take the assets that anybody has and being able to let other people book and use them would be a wonderful thing.
Andrew: OK. All right. Where did it all start?
Brent: Boy, it all started when I was two years in a JD MBA program at the University of Missouri. I came back to the Midwest. I love the Midwest, and came back. Before I was in the MBA program, I was in the top in my law school class and was bored to tears. School came fairly easily, and so really I had an opportunity to get involved in an event marketing company called Events Solution to start, and I was really desperate to get into the business world. I was tired of talking about business and ready to get in.
I got involved with that, and that business was a pretty big failure. For all the reasons that first time start-ups usually is, and you learn a lot.
Andrew: All right, Brent. Let’s slow it down and understand exactly happened there because I have already talked about your successes. I also want to acknowledge the failures and figure out what you learned from them, and more importantly, what my audience can learn so that they don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Take me through the mind set that got you into the Events Solutions business. What was the opportunity that you saw there?
Brent: Well, the opportunity was… This is back five years ago. The event business and especially event marketing, experiential marketing was a hot, hot topic. It’s still obviously a hot area in the marketing sphere, but particularly back then it was sort of the newest thing.
Andrew: What’s event marketing?
Brent: It’s experiential marketing, being able to set up events and setting up real world, touch and feel things that can help get a brand’s experience across to a user. And so, we went into that business thinking that there was a need there. Obviously, when you first get into it, I’d like to say that I always had the same principles that I operate from today. But really, when you’re on the other side of it, any business looks good, so being able to really start as a local company. And to be honest, there just wasn’t the need there we thought there was. It was low margin.
Andrew: Let’s slow it down and really explore this. I want to understand the story behind it. I know that this is a tough story. You burned through a lot of money through it, and you also talk about how you burned through a relationship there. I want to find out about both of those, but more important to me is the process that you went through.
Event marketing is, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s where soda says we’re not just going to plaster billboards everywhere, we’re going to create a race where people get to drink the soda. A high energy soda might do that, maybe soda’s not the perfect thing for it. Am I right, or do you have a different vision for it?
Brent: Any type of experience that you would have associated with the brand that would give you brand impression, correct.
Andrew: So, you would see and you say that this is going to get bigger and bigger. What’s the first step that you take?
Brent: The first step we take is trying to figure out where we’re going to have an office which was absolutely the wrong thing to start thinking of.
Andrew: Why did you think about that first then?
Brent: I think it’s because I didn’t know any better at the time. It was two people that had never really started a company before. Any time I talked to any first-time founders, I always relate back to my experience being a first-time founder and really focused on the wrong things and spending time and energy on the wrong things. In terms of what we initially went after, it was, well, if we’re going to be a company, we have to have an office, right? That’s the only way.
Andrew: I see. It just goes hand in hand. There are a few things that you do when you first have a company. Get an office. Get business cards. File your LLC or Corp. papers. I see. So, was it, just, as a matter of fact, because you were thinking you needed office space, not because you felt internally that it was good for your ego. It was just one of the steps?
Brent: Yeah, it probably was an ego thing, also. I’ve got to be honest. It was saddling the company with too much overhead from the very beginning. It was really a challenge being under funded. It was a challenge. It’s all about…
Andrew: Where did the money come from?
Brent: Basically, it was friends and family. Basically, that’s it.
Andrew: How much money did you raise from them?
Brent: Let’s see here. I had saved some money. All told, I think we put together $160,000, $150,000.
Andrew: $160,000.
Brent: Yep.
Andrew: OK. All right. So, you raised $160,000. You then get office space. You said you did a few other things that just seemed like the right things to do when you’re starting a company. What else did you do?
Brent: [laughs] We tinkered for probably two months with the logo. We had a hell of a time trying to get a website up. Gosh, I feel like everything in the book, we did wrong which really I owe a lot of my future success to all the mistakes I made and all the things I learned from that. But we were focused on the wrong thing. We were focused on talking to the wrong people. We weren’t focused on finding the right channels, partners. We focused too much on things that didn’t matter. That’s really the bottom line.
Andrew: OK. You had at some point get a customer. How did you pursue customers?
Brent: It was the tried and true, knock on a door, beg people to work with you sort of mentality. Really, it was pretty much banging on doors, trying to talk to as many people who would talk to you.
Andrew: There was a time when banging on doors literally meant you go door-to-door as a salesman and you sell. You don’t mean that? You mean cold calling strangers and trying to convince them to buy, right?
Brent: Yeah, correct. Absolutely cold calling is what I’m saying.
Andrew: Who would you call? How did you call up with your list of prospects?
Brent: Boy, I’m trying to remember back five years ago. How did we come up with it? I’m reading the local Business Times, looking for any referrals that anybody would give that was sort of in your network, and at that time unfortunately, as we found out quickly, experiential marketing wasn’t something that a lot of people wanted to spend much money on, especially the lower the marketing budget. It was the last thing in line that would ever get any money.
And so, yeah, we cold called people, tried to get in the door. I look 17 now. I probably looked about 14-1/2 then. And so, it was myself and another partner. She looked a little bit older but not much and tried to convince people. We got a fair number of customers to start. We did a couple with real estate companies doing some experiential stuff at some of their housing projects.
Andrew: How did you get one of the first customers to say yes? Pick one and let’s talk about a specific one to give me an understanding of it. I see your pain, by the way, in this. You and I have talked now a little bit in the pre-interview, and we talked for a few minutes here in the interview itself. I can see when you’re excited about something we’re talking about, and I can also see that the way you’re looking when we’re talking about this is completely different.
Brent: Yeah.
Andrew: I want to acknowledge it, and I want to thank you for doing it and push through because it’s important. When we go this deep, is when we give the audience something they can really relate to and use. When we just talk about numbers and ink, they’re proud, but they’re not getting as much out of it.
Brent: Yeah, yeah. I’m happy to talk to you.
Andrew: I appreciate what you’re doing.
Brent: I would say one of the first customers, I’m not going to give the exact title or the name of the business, but it was a real estate company. And they owned commercial properties, a variety of commercial properties in the region. We literally went to them and said… I think they had a $200,000 a year, $250,000 a year marketing budget, and we told them, we basically convinced them that they should stop spending on radio and should stop spending on all the other, the print ads that they were doing out there and should dump a bunch of money into event marketing. It was just a hope and a prayer. At that point you’re selling air. You’re selling just a hope and a dream.
And so, the managing partner bid on it and said, “Let’s try one” and we walked out of there and said, “Well, crap, now we’ve got to actually deliver.”
Andrew: What’s the event that you sold them on?
Brent: It was an experiential event at one of their properties they were trying to get additional development in, and we did an experiential event about what the property would look like when it was fully developed and really meeting people and selling them on their dream is really what we did. We put together some materials that they could interact with and really see the property. There was food and beverage there and the typical things.
Andrew: I see. You had food and drinks, and you dressed up one of the apartments that they were trying to sell or one of the properties they were trying to rent, I should say, and had guests come in and check it out and live through it. Is that what it was?
Brent: Yeah, I hate to say it, but pretty much. It was not a sexy business at all and let me tell you…
Andrew: We’re not talking about races or jets or clowns or anything like that.
Brent: You know, I wish we had jets and clowns at the event, but I can’t claim that we had jets and clowns at the event plus when you’re pretty much doing everything on a shoestring and trying to convince somebody to switch their budget to something they don’t want to, we were fighting to even get hamburgers and hotdogs on the menu.
Andrew: All right. By the way, look at the examples I’m coming up with, jets and clowns. It’s been so long since I’ve gone to an experiential marketing event.
Brent: I was going to say, whatever events you have gone to I want to go to jets and clowns.
Andrew: Actually what are they? They’re usually cocktail parties, at really cool places, with interesting guests that’s about the sound of it. Maybe they’ll reserve a museum or something for us, but that’s about it where I’ve gone to. So your putting this together for them, how does the day go off?
Brent: It went off well. They were pleased with the event. They sold a few units as a result of it and they said it was sort of the; that-a-boy, you guys did good, and we appreciate you, we appreciate what you did, let’s get a few more on the books. Then we realized that we technically made money on the event, but when you take into account all the time, effort, and energy we put into it, we came to the conclusion that we actually lost money on that event. It’s tough, when you’re in business anybody who will pay you to do anything. Now when the first time you have a customer, there’s sort of this infatuation that occurs and then you realize that, boy, it would be nice to actually make money doing it as well.
Andrew: One thing that strikes me as I’m listening to this story, I’m actually right now on your blog, on InnovateandCurry.com/about and here’s the first sentence from your About profile, you say, ‘My name is Brent Beshore, I’m 28 and my plan is to create $1 billion in value by the time I’m 40.’
Brent: Right.
Andrew: You go on from there, $1 billion so, this is an ambitious person I’m talking to who couldn’t of at 28 decided to have this kind of big dream, you had it early on that’s why you got into business and that’s probably why you got bored as a law student.
Brent: Right
Andrew: How does doing event marketing fit into that? It doesn’t seem like a business [??]. It doesn’t seem like a business that’s going to create a huge billion dollar value. So you saw something, what did you see there?
Brent: To be honest at that time, I think any entrepreneur you pivot in what you’re doing, and back then I can’t say that my goal was to create a billion dollars of value. I got to say that’s happened as a result of that experience. I had learned things from scalability, about margins, about time, and the value of your time, and maximizing the use of the value of that resource. I got to say back then, it was just to get into business and figure out what in the world making a dollar is about and instead of making a dollar I think I lost $100,000. I consider it sort of a slightly more expensive a real world MBA, I guess you can call this.
Andrew: OK. I get it and actually, frankly if I had to pick between one or the other I would pick the real world MBA that costs money, over the more conservative MBA that costs money and doesn’t’ deliver nearly as much. OK, how many clients did you get?
Brent: Let’s see here probably 15, 12 to 15 clients. We were doing all kinds of things, the bottom line is that it got to the point that we realized it wasn’t’ scalable. We weren’t going to be able to compete in other markets in an effective way and ended up just selling the business off. When I say burned a relationship, I ended up parting with my co-founder and partner on it, who had a different vision for where they wanted to take the company. More in an event management sort of direction. [??] part ways, burned the relationship unfortunately, even though I felt I did everything I could to salvage that relationship. It was a really valuable, personal, relationship for her and her husband, who was one of my good friends, yeah, sort of a downer.
Andrew: Did she go on and create a new business or hold on to this one?
Brent: No. She got a job.
Andrew: I see. OK.
Brent: Yeah, she left and got a job and I think still works in that job today.
Andrew: The company though was losing money. Why was there a difference of opinion about what to do? At that point it seems almost like a natural that you close it up and move on to do something else or you raise more money is that what it was?
Brent: Yeah. It was a difference of direction. It was a difference of how that was going to go about and who was responsible for what. At the end of the day, when you have enough differences between co-founders it is sometimes addition by subtraction.
Andrew: I see. I even, I’ve burned through more than $150,000 and still kept going, and still kept going foolishly thinking that you have to have that never give up attitude.
Brent: Right.
Andrew: You knew to cut your losses at that much money. It’s a lot of money, but you knew to cut your losses. How? How were you able to stop right there?
Brent: I just didn’t see a future. I feel like I was fortunate enough to realize, sort of as an entrepreneur you have to be delusional in some ways, to even be an entrepreneur. I feel like though, at some point you got to call your own bull shit. I think at that point I was calling my own bullshit and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got greener pastures.’ It gave me an amazing view inside the advertising agency world, PR agency world, marketing world in general. It really propelled and allowed me, I knew I loved the industry, I just knew I was in the wrong portion of the industry. To this day I will never touch another experiential marking firm.
Andrew: OK. Do you remember how you felt the day that you closed up and decided to move on?
Brent: Actually in terms of closing up, I actually brought on — and we didn’t actually close the doors, we actually took the company and sold it off to somebody who wanted to use the brand and didn’t sell it off for much, but sold it to somebody who could continue on with at least a little bit. Then I moved on to, I started, I founded a company called Pure, which is one of our portfolio companies still today. Then the vision kept going and expanding from there.
Andrew: OK. Friends and family didn’t get a payment back yet?
Brent: We refunded a portion of the money, based on the cash that we had left over. They were fairly supportive of that, I mean, I think that they love me, which is the nice thing. As I say on the blog, I have a hurricane like enthusiasm about things and I think that sometimes I convince other people to buy into some bullshit that I create. I think that was one of the early instances of that and an expensive lesson for me in making sure I don’t buy into my own bull shit.
Andrew: How do you keep from doing that? Because to some degree you have to kind of invent this non-existent world for yourself so that you can sell it to other people. When it works, it works great and when it doesn’t, we look back and call it bull shit. How can you tell the difference between this world that you’re about to create and bull shit world that’s never going to happen?
Brent: Yeah. I think it’s about opportunity. I’m just going to consider where there is no opportunity and you spin opportunity out of fantasy land. I think that’s bull shit and I think where there’s real opportunity, and a need in the market, and maybe whatever reason it doesn’t work out, that’s not bull shit. That’s just failure. Actually, part of entrepreneurship is failure. It’s a guarantee in entrepreneurship. I’m a big fan of people failing, which is a kind of ironic thing to say, but I fail many times since then and will fail many times in the future. It’s not necessarily about failure itself, it’s more about the reasons behind the failure.
Andrew: All right. Pure, next company, you launch. It again, deals with the ad world. Just tell me about the opportunity that you saw there.
Brent: Yeah. Well, we saw a world in the advertising agency world that we didn’t understand why it was structured the way it was currently structured. We saw a lot of people faking value and the clients then constantly churning through a book of clients that — what’s the old adage? That you know 50% of my marketing works, or my advertising works, I just don’t know which 50% it is. That sort of gives cover or at least used to give cover to a lot of entities, that they wouldn’t really have to create them value over the long-term. You could just sort of fake it for awhile and make a living doing so.
When we came in we wanted to be accountable. We started as a local firm in the mid-Missouri region and then grew from there. Then we started adding these unusual talents. We added a motion media department that actually, we were one of the earliest adopters in the country of a technology called, Red One. It was by the founder of Oakley Sunglasses, where it’s a digital film, digital cinema technology. It’s actually the gold standard now in the industry in terms of really motion media production. It’s what Spielberg and [Scorsese] used and we were one of the first adopters in the country, really in the world of this technology.
Staked a lot of, it was a good bet that we made, staked a lot of our livelihood on that investment and it paid off. We added a programming team to where we could attack a lot of digital projects in house. We added a research department, anyway just added a lot of capabilities that were very unusual for a small regional agency. Then we started, really the evolution of that started doing more work for other ad agencies and that’s actually the focus of it today is, we transitioned that successfully. It’s been one of the things, its nice when things work out like you hope they would. Where we transitioned that out of working directly with clients and actually doesn’t actually work directly with clients anymore, only works with advertising agencies, PR firms, media companies to make them better.
Andrew: Let me slow, let me go back and slow down the story
Brent: Yeah, yeah. I get excited about things.
Andrew: No, I’m glad you gave the overview of it. Now I want to go in and really understand every part of this process. The first thing I wonder and maybe I’m taking too far of a step back, but I’m curious how do go from this defeat as an entrepreneur to picking yourself back up and saying, ‘I’m going to start again,’ instead of saying, ‘I’m going to go back to school or I’m going to go get a job,’ which you’re partner did and other people have done, which is a legitimate next step. How were you able to get yourself to go this way?
Brent: I saw opportunity. That’s the bottom line. Any entrepreneur when they got to get back on their feet, you dust yourself off, you have some down months, and down moments, you dust yourself off and say, ‘Now, wait a second. I learned things from that previous experience. I learned [??] an industry that I think was valuable and I see opportunities to make more value out of that.’
Andrew: I’m sorry to interrupt Brent, the opportunity that you saw was, they’re spending a lot of money and wasting a big chunk of it on ads that aren’t working?
Brent: Yeah. The quality wasn’t there either. I think the creative quality . . .
Andrew: What kind of ad agencies are we talking about?
Brent: Say that again?
Andrew: What kind of ad agencies are we talking about, guys who buy print media, digital?
Brent: I would say that a lot of the agencies that I sort of modeled after, were doing some B-to-B work some B-to-C work. We’re doing sort of a smattering of digital. You go to most agencies that are in the mid-tier range and they say we do everything under the sun. We’re a good digital shop. We know social media. Even experiential event stuff, we sort of do it all. We said, that we saw that, that model and said, ‘You know what, we do want to do a lot of that, but we want what we do to be very transparent about what we do in house, versus what we’re subbing out and where the main expertise lies.’ We were able to go back to the [??].
Andrew: You started out by buying a digital agency?
Brent: We started off with more of a generalized agency and then it really started spinning into more of a digital combined with motion media. I think would be the best way to describe it.
Andrew: With this business, did you get yourself an office?
Brent: Yeah. We did actually, we used the same office that we had gotten for Events Solutions and shared that office space with Event Solutions for a time being. It worked out well. We took the sum costs of what we already had and actually rolled them into our next venture.
Andrew: Some costs meaning office, desk, that kind of stuff.
Brent: Phone system, all that.
Andrew: Phone system, right. Now it’s time for you to go out and get your first customers, again. How do you find your first customers?
Brent: We had developed some good relationships through the event experiential marketing stuff that we had done. We knocked on a few of those doors. Then went out and beat the street again. It’s tough, the agency business is a grinded out, competitive, what do you call it, red ocean type of business. We went out, to be honest the first, I’d say for the first seven months, just really trying to out-compete people you already had the business. The interesting part about it was because of the economy at the time, it actually was a huge benefit to us.
If you look back on that being the time where everything was going in the shitter and with Agency World people were really evaluating their relationships and saying, ‘Hey, I need to maximize the value I’m getting. I don’t have as much money to spend. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ We would come in and actually be able to, in some ways undercut them in price, which we learned was really bad tactic in the long-term. Short-term would get us more clients. Long-term would really destroy the value that we built with them. I went out there and just grinded it out.
Andrew: We were talking about at first, the clients that worked with you on events or the ones who you talked to about events, essentially told you events aren’t right for us, but we do this other stuff already you should do that. That’s what it was and you said, ‘Oh you do this other stuff all ready and you’re talking to me maybe I can take that other stuff for you.’
Brent: Yeah. It was very much that as well as . . .
Andrew: Was it real estate companies again?
Brent: Yeah. We did some real estate work although at that time it was at the beginning of the end, we didn’t stick in that vertical for long. We picked up just a number of local, regional accounts and then started working with them. Truly, I hate to say it now, looking back on the beginnings of it, you always learn, and the value obviously, provided down the road is a lot better than the value that’s provided back then. It was learning on the job in a lot of ways, which is something we all do in some ways, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it all the time.
Andrew: I’m visualizing my audience and thinking they probably don’t yet understand fully what [??] did. Do you have a specific example of what you did for a client that [??] if they existed or magazine ads if that’s what you did. Take me through what you created for them.
Brent: A good example would be there’s a regional drug store chain that we worked with and they had a moderate budget I’m not going to get into cause people can actually figure out [??] exact numbers, but they had a moderate budget and they had worked with a lot of agencies in the past that really said, ‘Hey, just go out and buy radio. Go out and buy TV. Go out and buy print.’ It had always been very disjointed. What we did is we came in and really did a full sale appraisal of what they needed. We added in search marketing. We added in really high-end motion media production. We did very, very creative out-of-the box for — I would still consider top notch creating, even back then.
As far the things that have come, it’s still really creative and we really just tract the results, which is something that a lot of agencies weren’t doing. We were able to show them ROY. We were able to show them, not just the awards we won, but able to show them what was going on and what we were doing. It was really just out competing in a very competitive market start.
Andrew: Do you use the same ads that they had before on radio and print?
Brent: No. No. We redid everything.
Andrew: Redid everything. I see.
Brent: We redid everything from their web presence, to the media, to everything they did and started over and really got them really great results.
Andrew: So, the description that I’ve got here in Pure, I always ask my researchers for one sentence, here is what Arial put together, she just said, a capabilities and capacity management company for strategic communications. Now essentially, that’s what you told me in the pre-interview. What do you mean by capabilities and capacity management company?
Brent: Right. One of the interesting things from an AdVentures level, we go out and we purchase PR firms, ad agencies, media companies and Pure is, I would consider it evolved into our secret weapon. We actually, about a year ago we made a decision that Pure is not going to grind it out any longer in the regional agency business or even in the national agency business. We were going to focus, we started working with other ad agencies, PR firms, media companies and discovered that we did better work for them and we had better relationships with them than we did with direct clients. Pure’s evolved into making PR firms, ad agencies, and media companies better. Is the only firm out there, that we’re aware of, that really focuses on injecting resources, injecting knowledge.
Andrew: What do you mean by, can you be more specific than better resources and logic? What specifically do you do on their behalf?
Brent: Yeah. There are five key service lines. We inject motion media capabilities. It’s really high-end motion media work, film work, 30 second ads, anything motion media related, online web series. That’s one department and one key service line is motion media. The second one is digital. So, doing not only front-end web design and development, but also systems development, mobile development a lot of this really heavy back-end stuff as well as, social media. We’re injecting really portfolio digital capabilities into them.
The third key area is Search. We have a strong SEM, SEO team injecting search capabilities, reputation online, reputation management services things like that. Agencies basically take these services and use them as we say, a building capacity and building capabilities. It’s if they don’t have the capability, we’re giving them the capability and if they already have the capability, we’re building capacity in that area.
Andrew: I think I see it. Right. If I’m running an ad agency, kind of like the one you had before, and I don’t concentrate on mobile, my guys don’t know search engine optimization, we don’t have to figure it out ourselves we farm it out to Pure. Pure handles it for our customers. We get to look good and you guys do the work.
Brent: Yeah and you make more money doing it.
Andrew: We make more money by adding more work.
Brent: Absolutely. We say it deepens the client relationships. It increases the quality of the work and it’s easier and more profitable. It’s sort of the Holy Grail for agencies.
Andrew: You grew the business that helped fund everything else afterwards.
Brent: Yeah. Pure, we rolled a lot of the profits from Pure into almost everything else we did and being able to acquire other firms and then really got into the AdVentures model, which is being opportunist in the communications world. We sort of, like I said, act as a private equity firm in some ways we’ll go out and completely purchase a firm. We’ll act as a venture capital firm in some ways being able to inject some capital, and then we’ll start or own companies based on the advantage and perspective we have.
Andrew: What portion of the sales, that we mentioned at the top of the interview, come from Pure.
Brent: Well, not a lot of the total sales come up through Pure. Just because we only count at the AdVentures level, the revenues that come from the management and from the profits of a lot of the firms. Pure, in itself, has its own revenue structure and things.
Andrew: Pure is, excuse me, AdVentures is profitable?
Brent: Oh yeah. Yeah, thank god.
Andrew: How profitable are you talking about?
Brent: We do well. I hate to be coy, but it allows us . . .
Andrew: Over $3 million in profit a year?
Brent: Part of the thing is from an AdVentures level we try to be fairly opaque about exactly how our investments are doing because we have a perspective where we can tip off a lot of things in the industry.
Andrew: If you let other people know what you guys are doing?
Brent: Yeah. Look, the bottom line is we are profitable; we do well; we take a lot of those cash flows and roll them into other opportunities. And so, yeah, by the nature of the fact that the way we finance, we self finance a lot of the deals we do. And so, we do have a good free cash flow.
Andrew: Have you taken money out of the business yet?
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: You have? I’ll ask this one last question, but it’s important. Have you taken over a million dollars off the table for yourself yet?
Brent: No, not over a million dollars off the table. No, not yet but I could, but mostly because we want to put everything back into growth right now. I think that’s always the conundrum that just any owner of any business in general has, is do you take profits out and stow them away and put them in stocks and bonds and keep yourself comfortable, or do you take the money that you make now and put it back and reinvest in the business and really save the opportunity for the future.
Andrew: And the place that you’re calling me from… First of all, thank you for doing this. You went home where the connection is better than at the office and more consistent because you don’t have people around the house who are downloading, uploading media.
Brent: Correct.
Andrew: So, thanks for doing that. The connection has been spectacular. That’s the place that you bought yourself.
Brent: Yeah. This is my house. We have a beautiful… We love Columbia, Missouri. It’s where we’re based out of. We do a lot of travel…
Andrew: Who’s we?
Brent: Oh, my wife and I.
Andrew: How long have you been married?
Brent: We live on a beautiful championship golf course here and a big, beautiful home that we were fortunate enough to be able to buy last year.
Andrew: How long have you guys been married?
Brent: Let’s see. We’re coming up on our third year anniversary, October 18th. Look at that. I hope my wife, when she sees this, knows that I remembered.
Andrew: Just to give people a sense of perspective, the business was launched about four years ago.
Brent: Correct.
Andrew: Let’s continue here with the narrative. You mentioned several times buying companies.
Brent: Right.
Andrew: Running a company is tough. Buying a company takes an entrepreneur out of his core competency and makes him learn a whole new skill, especially the first one. Tell me about the first company you bought.
Brent: Boy, yeah, the first company that we really pulled the trigger on. We bought a few smaller companies that really we were buying more for the people. The first company we purchased was really an older main line company, MediaCross. We purchased that almost two years ago, and MediaCross provides recruitment, marketing services to private companies as well as the government. It was almost 25 years old when we bought it.
Boy, I’ll tell you what, it was an interesting experience. Talk about going through due diligence and all the stuff. It’s very different knowing how to start a company than how to buy a company, and you were absolutely correct.
Andrew: So, MediaCross is the company that I mentioned at the intro to this interview. It does recruitment management. How do you go from doing ads to recruiting new people?
Brent: It’s communications. That’s the tie that binds everything we do is communications.
Andrew: I see. So, recruitment really is where are you going to place your ads to hire or to search for the right people? That’s what you’re saying.
Brent: Yeah. Absolutely. For some of the clients we have, we actually provide end-to-end recruitment, meaning it’s our people who are out there manning certain booths at trade shows, doing everything from communicating not only just the overall branding message but actually shepherding them through the on-boarding process.
Andrew: Was MediaCross a client of yours?
Brent: No. MediaCross was a firm that I had a connection through a friend, too, and found out that the owner was possibly looking to get out of the business, and it was sort of one of those things. I look like I’m 17, so I can remember the first conversation I had with this gentleman. His first words that came out of his mouth were why am I sitting here? You talk about not understanding the abilities. It was an interesting process.
Andrew: Take me through it, actually. You have this idea. MediaCross is in the communications business.
Brent: Right.
Andrew: It’s a business that you can do well in. You want to start looking into buying and going through the process of acquiring it. How does that work?
Brent: To start, we were really looking at what are the risk and reward opportunities that are associated with it. It had a long history, a good client base, really good relationships with those existing clients and really evaluating the employee base in terms of… Your worst fear is you buy a firm, and for some reason people feel like they’re not loyal anymore to the company they work for and sort of jet.
And so, looking at who were the key people in the business, what was the profit margin for the business units they had, and how were we going to continue to retain those? The retention thing is the thing you look at first.
And then, second of all how were we going to grow it, and what opportunities do we have to inject resources through Pure, right? That’s what it does for a living, right? Into that firm to make it better, more profitable and better opportunities all around.
Andrew: OK. And then, it’s time for you… Actually, is it an asset buy? Is that what you did?
Brent: We actually did a stock purchase on that.
Andrew: Stock purchase.
Brent: Yeah.
Andrew: The reason companies do asset buys is because they don’t want to worry about that it’s off the books or that it’s recorded properly or other liabilities. How do you get yourself comfortable with that?
Brent: Yeah, we did a lot of due diligence.
Andrew: OK.
Brent: We did a lot of due diligence as well as indemnifications from the former owner. So, we chose to do that for tax reasons for him. It allowed us to pay a little bit less than we normally would have for the firm, and we felt pretty comfortable with the basis of it.
Andrew: OK. What kind of due diligence do you do? Obviously, you look at your records. You look at their books. What else do you do?
Brent: We spent, boy I’d say, probably 450 hours, 500 hours reviewing everything from verifying past tax records, going through employee files. I feel bad but the endless list of questions I sent over and answers I got back, some of which I felt uncomfortable about and dug deeper. It’s almost like you go in, and it’s almost like going to the doctor and getting a full examination. You try not to leave any rock unturned.
Andrew: 4-500 hours, I’ve talked to entrepreneurs who have gone through the process of raising money for their businesses, and just that time that goes into raising money distracted them from their business. How do you keep focused on Pure, your main business, while you’re looking into a brand new business?
Brent: Actually, I’m fortunate enough to have a management team that actually runs all the existing businesses that I own. So, my full-time job is merges and acquisition work these days. And it was really that way back then. I had a very, very strong co-leader of the firm that is a wonderful man called Craig Brace. Craig and Susanne Bylund is our Chief Operating Officer and really offered me the ability to look for bigger and better things and not be focused on the day-to-day.
Andrew: Craig is the co-founder?
Brent: Craig is not a co-founder. Craig, we actually acquired his firm prior to Media Cross. We really acquired his firm mostly for him, was the reason we acquired it.
Andrew: How do you transfer then, if that’s a key to your ability to go out and acquire companies, I’d like to learn about that. How do you pass responsibilities to someone else, someone who you didn’t grow up; who you don’t know as well as you might know a co-founder; who now has to come in and take over your responsibilities.
Brent: Yeah. The short answer is its tough. I think Craig probably wanted to kill me at multiple times, and it was a painful process to go from holding the reins to passing off the reins and not wanting to grab the reins at every turn. It really is a challenge. I think that trust was a major, key issue. I got to see Craig in a lot of different situations. I saw him handle situations in a lot of ways better than I would handle them myself.
I’m pretty fiery and passionate as a person, and Craig is… We call him the Zen master. He’s in his 50s and has a sort of calmness, and he’s seen it all and been around a lot of people and done it.
Andrew: I’m hearing that systems and organization helped pass responsibilities. Did that help at all? Did that come into play?
Brent: Yeah, it did. We did build systems, but at the end of the day…
Andrew: Can you give me an example of one thing, one tactic that helped you transfer? And I’m asking for selfish reasons, too, because I’m trying to pass responsibility to other people, too, and it’s really hard. You wind up in the E-myth dilemma where an entrepreneur passes responsibility to someone else. That other person doesn’t do it right, and instead of going in and correcting, you want to pull back the responsibility and do it yourself.
Brent: Yeah. I would say that setting up reporting systems really was the most important things, so I wanted to be comfortable that they were aware, both Craig and Susanne, were aware of what needed to be done and what was being done. Even in the beginning, I would get pretty detailed reports back from them about cash flow, about challenges we had with employees, with clients and really just a generalized – gosh I don’t know how to describe it other than a report card on a weekly and bi-weekly basis in varying levels of detail.
Andrew: Can you give me an example of what you might have… How do you do this? I want to know how to do it without actually seeing the report. I know it’s a little tough, but tell me, like what would be on a report?
Brent: Yeah. I can actually walk you through.
Andrew: Yeah, in the early days.
Brent: I can actually walk you through. So, it’ll have what our accounts receivable is, what our accounts payable are. What our ongoing net income is.
Andrew: And this is on a daily basis?
Brent: This is on a weekly basis.
Andrew: OK.
Brent: So what our net income is both on a cash basis and on a draw [sp] basis, which are obviously very important for different reasons. You know, we’ll have sort of an area on employees. What employee challenges we’ve had or successes. I mean, I don’t want to just know about the crap, right? You want to know, you also want to be engaged in and hear about the good things as well. We had an area for client challenges as well as client successes. Really, just different organizational things that were going on so that there maybe would be, if we were implementing a new software system, there would be a paragraph or two about sort of how that integration was going and anything they needed from me in terms of oversight or management or leadership in different areas.
Andrew: And are there goals that they have to hit, like a certain number of phone calls that need to be made, or certain projects need to – nothing like that, you’re smiling.
Brent: No, no, no. I mean, if [??] going to – look, they run the companies. They’re in charge of a lot of people, but set those types of goals for-, but when I say management, I mean literally they’re not the person out there beating on the street trying to get new business in the door. I mean, this is-, they’re trying to make sure that things continue to run well, that they help varying different types of employees to be able to understand what they need to be doing. So.
Andrew: I see, OK. Let’s talk maybe about one other company. Should we talk about Digital Talent Agents?
Brent: Yeah, I mean that’s-, that’d actually be an interesting one. That’s one of our new start-ups. You know, like I said, we have this interesting vantage point being working on the media side as well as on the advertising agency side and we saw this need in the marketplace for content, right? I mean, one of the life bloods, and I shouldn’t have to tell you, the lifeblood of any online property in particular, but any media property is obviously the content. And with the proliferation of the online media, we saw a real need for good quality curated content. On the other side, we saw a need that there was a lot of niche experts that had a lot to say, and didn’t really have a means to be able to say it. Knocking on the front door of a website and saying, “Hey, I’d love to write a guest post for you.” I mean, I can only imagine how many times a day you get poked for an interview. It’s very, very tough to understand who’s real and who’s not, and…
Andrew: You know what? When we talk about coming up with systems, we need a system for that. I can’t tell who’s real and who’s not. I can’t tell who has a good enough story to do an interview or not, and I don’t know how to pass that responsibility to someone else, but I would love that.
Brent: Yeah, it’s a-, so actually DigitalTalentAgents.com provides that. We go to a site and say, “We have a bank of niche experts which we’ve curated, which are legitimate and viable, here are their on-line press kits, here are the things that they can tout about themselves. They’re all real. We’ve poked, touched them and feel them, they’re legitimate, and they will provide content to your site. That content is actually edited by our team in-house. So really it works on both sides. The revenue model though is driven by the talent themselves, so they pay us on a per-placement fee to place them into different opportunities. And so it works well on both sides.
Andrew: I see. So if I, for example realize that I’ve got a website that’s great for entrepreneurs, I might want to have more content because I know that more content means more people sign up to my programs, and to my premium program maybe, watch some ads. I come to you guys and I say, “Search engine optimization is hot. Get me an expert at search engine optimization who can write a blog post a week and be the expert on the site, and I’ll pay you for the content.” That’s the way it would work?
Brent: Well, actually, the way it would work is, you can say that, and we obviously we have some relationships with various sites that work in that way. For the most part, though, we come to you and say, “Hey, we have this bank of expertise and experts that really would like to provide content to your site.” The expert actually pays us, so the nice thing for the site owners, there’s no current charge. We may end up changing the revenue
model. You never know how you’re going to pivot. But for the time being, we’ve decided to offer that content to the site owners at not cost. And so we really act as an agent on behalf of the talent that we have that pay us on a per placement opportunity.
Andrew: Gotcha. Because the talent wants exposure.
Brent: Sure.
Andrew: Got it. Kind of like…
Brent: The talent with the highest…
Andrew: You want exposure with my audience, they want exposure with someone else’s audience. They need to be booked. Got it. I see. I see, of course.
Brent: Absolutely, absolutely. And really it works well on the site side because you’re getting curated content and as well as each talent provides promotion of that through their social media sphere. So really it’s bringing new original users and viewers to your site as well as getting good content for free, which is pretty tough to beat.
Andrew: Yeah, you know what? I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Of course, this is the company that I had met you through and I looked them up and I thought, “Really interesting.” You guys represent niche experts. You know, if you were a movie star, you’d have someone representing you. If you were an author, you’d have someone representing you. If you’re a niche expert, the company that represents you is Digital Talent Agents.
Brent: Yep. That’s what it is.
Andrew: I’ve got a few things here from my researcher that I want to ask you about. Now, I think I’ve got a sense of how you got here. Actually, by the way, what portion of that business, what portion of Digital Talent Agents do you guys own?
Brent: We own 100% of it. It’s a combination. It was a brain child of actually me personally as a result of some of the work we’ve done at the vantage point, and so we launched that under roof and in-house.
Andrew: Where was it? Where are the questions for you? First of all, here’s what she said. You apparently are the great-great-grandson of a famous inventor or an inventor whose invention is famous. What’s the product?
Brent: Yeah, the product is a bed spring.
Andrew: Bed spring.
Brent: Yeah.
Andrew: Is that the one we sleep on every night, the spring?
Brent: Yep, the bed spring. It was founded in the late 1800s, and it was actually an inventor, J.P. Leggett. If you go on Google Patents and you look at the patents that were filed, you can type in J.P. Leggett, and yeah, he founded a number of things, like the clay pigeon thrower for shotgun challenges, shooting things as well as the endless necktie which never quite caught on. I don’t know why it never caught on.
Andrew: What’s the endless necktie?
Brent: Neckties were originally to be able to shield your shirt from food, right? And so, whenever the food would get on the tie, you would just sort of change it around. Then it would be a new, fresh tie.
Andrew: I see, interesting, kind of like those towel dispensers at some men’s bathrooms. I see.
Brent: That’s exactly right, yeah.
Andrew: So, you roll out a new tie. You’re clean. You’re good to go.
Brent: Exactly. I have had a number of experiences where I wish I had the endless necktie. So, he invented a number of different things. The most famous and the most profitable, I guess, in the long run was the bed spring. And so, it really revolutionized sleep.
Andrew: And that’s the other thing that he wasn’t just an entrepreneur who was being taken advantage of by someone else. He apparently also was business savvy, am I right?
Brent: Yeah. To some extent, he was more the inventor. C.B. Platt was the co-founder of the company, Leggett & Platt. It was more the business side of the equation. The company was founded. It provided a good basis for that industry for quite a long time, and then really didn’t take off until the 1960s.
Andrew: How big did the business get?
Brent: Well, the business today, I think it’s no longer in the Fortune 500, but it was up to $4.8 billion, I think, a year.
Andrew: Do you guys get any portion of that? Does inheritance pass down anywhere to you?
Brent: No, no, no. The family’s been public since the 1960s. The family still has a portion of stock, but no, it’s not in the family control. And actually, the CEO and management team, they’re wonderful people. Dave Haffner and Karl Glassman, great guys.
Andrew: Were you guys well off growing up? Tell me this, did you father walk around with a top hat and monocle?
Brent: [laughs]
Andrew: Did you have a butler take you down the stairs and get you ready for… I don’t know.
Brent: No, I grew up very average middle class. To be honest, the company, Leggett & Platt, which my dad actually worked for and still works for today, it really didn’t strike it big, I would say, and didn’t go through a huge growth spurt until… I can remember fourth or fifth grade, but the way my family works and the way we operate, my mom drove a used car. My dad still drives like a 70 year old Ford Explorer. We’ve done better than other people financially. We try to be very level headed. We don’t need another car. We don’t need a bigger house.
Andrew: So, where does this come to from you? It doesn’t seem like there’s an expectation that, “Son, you better go and do really well in this business.” I was actually listening to a book called “Dethroning the King” about Anheuser-Busch and how when a new son was born, four drops of Budweiser beer were put in his mouth within hours of his birth to prep him to run this business because son, you have got to take this business on.
It doesn’t sound like you had that. You didn’t have the opposite either where you were shivering at night, and I said, “I’m going to earn money one day so that I don’t ever have to shiver again.” Somewhere in the middle, there isn’t enough incentive to move one way or the other.
Brent: The incentive that I had is my family is real big on helping people and trying to leave this world a better place, and I have real strong leadership from them; my mom, my dad, my grandfather, grandparents in general, to try to do good things for other people. And so, I sort of saw my ability to make money and to influence people’s lives as being the main driving factor. And I enjoy the hell out of it. It’s just enjoyment. I wake up every day and love what I do. I love the people that I get to work with. I’m just trying to create utopia every day. It’s really an internal motivation. I’m not trying to die the richest man on the planet. The billion dollars is value. I claim on my blog its value, not billionaire, right?
Andrew: You don’t want to put a billion dollars in your pocket.
Brent: I don’t want to put a billion dollars in my pocket. I want to do like we did for Joplin. I don’t know if you saw anything about Joplin tornado relief efforts, but we were able to raise about $1.7 million in about two weeks for Joplin tornado relief. I consider that creating value. I’d consider that my contribution to the world and what I can do.
Andrew: I’ve got one other question for you, and then I’ll let people know how to connect with you. But first, I’ve got to thank one of my viewers, if you don’t mind.
Brent. Sure.
Andrew: Brent, check this out. First, let me set this up before I show you the package that I just got here. I was living in Argentina, and one of the things that I loved in Argentina was yerba mate. I would just like yerba mate non-stop. Did you ever go to Argentina? Do you know what yerba mate is?
Brent: I know what yerba mate is. I’ve never been to Argentina though.
Andrew: It’s just this great drink. You drink it out of a cup. You fill it up. It looks like tea leaves in there. You put a special straw in there that sieves out the tea leaves, and you drink up just the flavored hot water that you pour through the tea leaves. Anyway, I couldn’t find the right ‘mate’, as they say.
But I got an email from Valeria. Valeria, tell me if I can say your name. I will if I can, and I’ll repeat this. She goes to Argentina, gets me the exact ‘mate’ that I loved down there. Look at this. This is like original with a hand made… I recognize its hand made because I’ve seen the guys do it, hand made, they call it bombisha. I guess the rest of the Spanish speaking world would say bombilla straw, and I’m sorry to do this to you. But I’m too frickin’ excited. And Yerba mate, this is the stuff that you pour right into the cup. You drink it.
I’m going to be in heaven here, and let me tell you how desperate I was for this. I’ve had a Thermos because you need to put the hot water in the Thermos and then pour it into here. I’ve had a Thermos since I moved to the U.S. and still haven’t had the yerba mate to drink. It’s been tough to find it. It’s been touch to find it here.
Brent: I’m glad you’re so excited about it.
Andrew: I’ve got to thank her for sending this over. If you guys see me drinking something that looks like, I don’t know, looks a little strange, you’ll understand what it is. Thanks to you, Valeria.
All right, Brent. I’m sorry you had to see that, but at the same time, I’ve got to share it with someone. To say this to myself or to my wife or to say it into the camera on my own afterwards, a thank you wouldn’t have felt the same.
Brent: I get it.
Andrew: Thank you.
Brent: I get it.
Andrew: Here’s the big question. You have said I’m not a starter, I’m a grower, right?
Brent: Yeah.
Andrew: What does that mean?
Brent: I like to help grow their business and starting something I like to do, but in terms of being able to really maximize the value, being able to connect people with opportunities, I found out that that’s sort of my core strength, whether it’s purchasing a business and being able to make it better, not just better…
Andrew: I’m a starter and often less excited about growth. I often feel like they’ll be passed to someone else or it’s a problem that will get dealt with. Help me understand what you do as a grower. Excuse me, you’re a starter not a grower. Help me understand your part of it for the people who don’t have the opposite. Apparently, I’m too busy with my yerba mate to phrase this question properly.
Brent: No, no, no. I totally understand. When I say, actually it sounds like we’re very similar. I like getting excited about new projects, but I actually like seeing the culmination of those projects really come to fruition in terms of being able to be successful. I think that’s something that the combination of starting and seeing grow is really, I like being more on the starter end of things.
When I say start, it doesn’t mean purchasing a company. That would be really an unusual thing for a starter to do, but I see this as being a new challenge. I like new challenges, and I like the combination of resources and assets that the company has. I really continue to like to see where the cross synergies are, where the new opportunities are to grow in different areas.
And so, it’s sort of the starting and the spark is what I really feel like I’m passionate about and then helping others, bringing in other people and letting them grow. What I started is really where I think the success lies.
Andrew: Then, is the answer, you start it, you get it on its way, and then you find someone else to run it. It’s finding the right person to lead it. That’s the key to keeping it growing.
Brent: Yeah. Leading it as well as providing some strategic oversight. In all of the businesses that I own, I’m still very involved. While not involved in day-to-day, I am involved in the overall strategic planning and future planning of the business. I think that’s important that I don’t just like to start and leave things alone. I like to tinker with them. I like to have fun with them.
Andrew: What kind of thing do you add to it? I’ve got a friend, who’s just a sharp marketer. He knows how to experiment small tests, see how he can push the limits of getting people to spread his ideas virally. If a small test works, he blows it up, but essentially, if you look at all his great ideas, they’re essentially that. Do you have something like that, that’s one thing that you do really well that you can implement in multiple places?
Brent: Yes. I think that, across the board, where I really look at is more of how does the opportunity that I currently have, how does it intersect with opportunities that other people don’t see? So, to give you an example of that, with PURE, you know PURE is just a regional agency, right? I mean, that’s what we were doing. We were grinding it out in the agency world, trying to win clients. Really, being able to tap the guts, and being able to have the vision to see, hey, let’s take that and lets make it focus exclusively on making communication firms better. Right? I think it’s that sort of spark. Being able to…
Andrew: I see.
Brent: see a different target audience and a different sort of way to utilize the same assets in a different way. I’d say that was probably a specialty of mine.
Andrew: All right. I feel like I could spend more time with you just talking about systems, hiring, and strategy, but I’ve already taken up the-, we’re at the end of this interview.
Brent: Sure.
Andrew: I hope you’ll come back and do a second interview with me, Brent.
Brent: I would love to, Andrew. Really appreciate you having me on, thanks.
Andrew: And let’s give people the website so that they can go and follow up with you. I always urge my audience, just as Valaria has just reached out to me and she did it in a special way. I always urge my audience to reach out to the guests here and get to know them. Don’t just be a viewer, and like, be out there on the field. What’s the website that they could connect with you?
Brent: In terms of my personal blog, it’s innovateandcurate.com or professionally from a business standpoint it’s adventures@-, it’s thead, so thead-ventures.com. Thead-ventures.com.
Andrew: All right, and of course we’ll link to it. The important thing for me to say is, first of all, contact Brent, you know what, contact all my guests, find a way to say thank you and connect with them. And the second important message is to say thank you for doing this interview.
Brent: Appreciate it, Andrew. Thanks a lot.
Andrew: Thank you.
