On a Friday afternoon, Brent Beshore decides to play a game of pingpong because, well, he likes to play pingpong. This isn’t your average game of table tennis, however, because Beshore is technically at work—a term he would probably avoid using to describe his “job,” which isn’t exactly the right label either.
Eight years ago, Beshore was a graduate student at the University of Missouri, studying law and business. Before long he realized he had no desire to become a lawyer and really wanted to “do something.”
“I was kind of at a point in my life when I wanted to do something, like I’d been talking my whole life about doing stuff,” Beshore said. “I wanted to test myself.”
This testing began when Beshore started an event marketing company with a friend.
“Like most first businesses, it was not a success,” he said.
Eventually, Beshore sold the business and started an ad agency called Pure. The company experienced much greater success and eventually was acquired by St. Louis-based company, MediaCross. The merged agency still operates today out of Missouri.
By this time, Beshore had learned his fair share of business lessons. He became more and more interested in problem solving and investing. For his third go-round, he wanted to focus on creating a community instead of just founding a company.
In 2007, those goals came together as adventur.es, a company that develops and invests in ideas from technology to communication.
“In terms of life’s work, we really wanted to build a community of people who were focused around solving problems in the world,” Beshore said. “That’s kind of what we do now.”
The company has 17 active investments and works with nine companies day-to-day. In 2011, Inc. magazine ranked adventur.es—previously AdVentures—No. 28 on its list of fastest-growing companies in the country. Between 2007 and 2010, the company grew from a revenue of $103,211 and fewer than 10 employees to a revenue of $6.8 million and 62 employees, according to Inc.
In 2010, this community-based approach led to the company’s purchase of a 16,500-square-foot furniture store. The space was converted into a co-working and event space called Museao, or “The Fort” as Beshore calls it. The open space features a putting green, hammocks, nap sheds and that pingpong table Beshore enjoys so much—in college he was an intramural pingpong champ.
Adventur.es’ employees are free to work, or play, as they please, and Beshore invites community members, thinkers, university faculty and just about anyone else to explore their passions at the Museao space.
“We’re less concerned with sort of classifying people and putting labels on them, and more concerned with, ‘Are they cool? Are they awesome people who are sort of intellectually honest, and do they want to do something?’” Beshore said. “Are they passionate about the thing they’re doing? And if we find that, we figure something out.”
This welcoming environment all stems from the company’s non-traditional business methods. Adventur.es looks for passionate people to help develop new ideas. Often, employees aren’t the only thinkers behind the company’s investments and new ideas.
Startup Weekend Columbia, in which community-formed teams develop new businesses over the course of a weekend, is another example of the company’s commitment to community. Adventur.es will sponsor the third-annual event this coming weekend.
In the meantime, Beshore will play several games of pingpong if he feels like it, but will most importantly continue to focus on solving important problems.
“We want to build a really amazing community of people who think deeply about the world and how the world needs to change,” Beshore said. “And then, try as close to fearlessly as possible, we do have fears, but as close to fearlessly as possible be fearless in our attempts and acknowledge when we fail. The purpose is to positively impact people’s lives: the employees that work for the company, the community at large and the world.”
Read more of Brent’s thoughts in his contributions to Forbes.
Credits: Photo courtesy Brent Beshore.
