July 24, 2026 – The Value Creators Hunter Hastings and Pendulum Event Community Magnolia Sevenler

Intro 1 0:00
The AMS Radio Network, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning school for startups radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Yes, I do believe that creativity, risk, and passion are not requirements to be an entrepreneur. I’m going to talk a little bit about that in a few seconds. So I will defend that. I have to do it every month or so, or I start getting emails. Got a great show for you today. First up, we have Hunter Hastings. He is with the Value Creators, and we’re going to have a great interview. And I hope that you listen to this interview on two levels: one, to enjoy the interview and learn from him and things like that, but number two, count how many times he puts an exclamation point behind his thesis during this interview. His thesis, if you pay attention and listen, start with the customer and serve the customer. Count how many times he says that or an equivalent of that during the interview, and then reminisce and reflect upon: Will I remember that now? Is that good advice that I’m going to remember forever? And you will say yes. And it’s just an interesting exercise. But he does a great job of beating his point into our heads that you have to do what start with the customer. Then we have another incredible entrepreneur, Magnolia Sevenler, is with us from Los Angeles in New York City. She has built a really amazing curated event organization for LA and New York City and some other places every once in a while, to London, Austin, and she is just doing a great job building a event company. I in this interview talk about one of the first businesses that I remember interacting with as a child. It’s called Skylarks. I’ve talked about it several times in the show. It was an amazing travel club that I learned about when I was like seven or eight years old. My father started taking trips with them, and I learned about business from them because I met the owners, and the owners were talking about raising money and what they were going to do with their new money and the plane they were going to buy, and we were talking about their marketing because we were part of their marketing plan. We got brochures from them in the mail. This was the ’70s before there was the internet and all that. So anyway, that is one of the things that I was referring to with Magnolia. Great interview. Now I want to defend my thesis for just a second here. Yes, I believe creativity is awesome, but you don’t need it to be an entrepreneur because 90-3% of businesses are copies of existing businesses. That data comes from the London School of Economics and Babson University, and so it’s good data. Most businesses are copies of other businesses, and if you give me a business, I can pretty much always find something that predated it. The dumbest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is say, “I’ve come up with a new idea that no one’s done before. You will look stupid soon if you do that. Risk. I’m not let you spend more than $5,000 That’s all you need to start to test a business. If you can’t prove the model is going to work with that amount of money, you probably can’t make it work, and then risk is awesome for the bungee jumper, but we want to reduce it. And then passion is awesome for the church, synagogue, and the mosque. But as an entrepreneur, I don’t need to love it. I just need to like it more than working for the man. Anyway, we’ll defend that more as the months and years go on. Thanks for being with us.

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Jim Beach 4:40
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another incredible guest. Please welcome Hunter Hastings to the show. He is basing his entire career on Austrian economics. We’ll have to ask him about that, but he has built an incredibly successful entrepreneurial career. Doing so, he is the host of the Value Creators podcast and the founder of the Value Creators Online Learning Community. He is the co-manager of the Biala Venture Partners. How did how do you pronounce that, please, Hunter?

Hunter Hastings 5:15
That was pretty good, Jim Biala. Biala

Jim Beach 5:16
Venture Partners, and is also the executive director of the Center for Individualism. He is the author of seven books. We will talk about that. Incredibly impressive, Hunter. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Hunter Hastings 5:32
I’m doing great, Jim. Thank you for inviting me.

Jim Beach 5:35
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Let’s start off with the Austrian economics. How is that a basis for your entrepreneurial career? Is it sort of about value creation, like Munger and Buffett used to do? Is it value creation?

Hunter Hastings 5:54
Well, it’s a different kind of value. So let me let me start in a different place, Jim. I grew up in the outed in Vienna in Europe by coincidence. That’s why it’s called Austrian. But it’s the reversal of all the economics they ever taught you. They tell you about economics is about big numbers like GDP and the employment level and the price level, what they call aggregates, and it can be managed by institutions like the central bank and the treasury, and that’s all 100% wrong. And what our kind of economics is, I call it entrepreneurial economics, is it’s about people, it’s about individuals. It starts with individuals, individuals who have ideas and concepts and start businesses, interact with each other, and those interactions add up to markets and prices and improvement and progress. So it’s all about people, and it’s not something that’s managed. It’s something that people work at and imagine and create for themselves. That’s that’s a kind of quick summary of my form of economics, entrepreneurial economics.

Jim Beach 7:00
Okay, is it sort of similar to Ayn Rand?

Hunter Hastings 7:04
You know, she’s in our community. She believed in people. She believed in entrepreneurship. She believed that entrepreneurs create progress and create greater good for everybody, and the government shouldn’t get in the way. So she’s she’s kind of in the community. Yeah, I’m an Ayn Rand fan.

Magnolia Sevenler 7:21
Okay, excellent. Let’s switch this toward entrepreneurship.

Jim Beach 7:29
When you got out of school with an economics degree, did you anticipate becoming an entrepreneur, or did it happen by accident?

Hunter Hastings 7:38
Well, let me let me go to the point where entrepreneurship is going to become the dominant mode of activity for everybody in this in this new age. Not that everybody will start a new business, but that everybody will have the entrepreneurial mindset. And the entrepreneurial mindset, Jim, starts with one simple idea, which is it’s all about the customer. What you’re trying to do is find customers, empathize with customers, find something that will serve them, make their lives better, and in return they’ll pay you for it. That’s that’s willingness to pay is the is the pivot. So that’s how we all need to think. And I was lucky to start off in life at Procter and Gamble in the in the household products business, and my customer was mom, and my and so that was that’s an entrepreneurial mindset, and my job was to make mom’s life better, and then you you take that into different businesses with different customers, but it’s always about the customer. That’s the first thing. But the second is you can’t plan on that future business that you’re going to create and innovate. You can imagine it. So the first step in entrepreneurship is imagination. Imagining a better future. What would be like if mom had an easier life, or if she could get her house cleaner, or her clothes softer and brighter. Yeah, what what is that like? And then there’s the second step, which is all about commitment. We call it expectation. I think I can do this, and I’ll find a way to do it. And then the third is experimentation. So entrepreneurship is not planning. You can’t plan that future, but you can run lots of experiments, and the market tells what works and what doesn’t, and the customer has the verdict. Jim, they decide what is winning and what is losing, what is right and what is wrong. So we call that the customer sovereignty. They’re the boss. They’re the queen. They’re they’re the most important, and that’s true in every business everywhere in the world, you got to start with that customer mentality.

Jim Beach 9:46
Couldn’t agree with that more. Let’s talk about your new book. I believe it’s number seven or eight. Venture Mode: Escape the Administration Trap by Finding and Unleashing Entrepreneurial Leaders. It starts off talking about the incredible value of the MBA,

Hunter Hastings 10:06
right? So we we’re talking about this this mindset we’ve got to get everybody into, and we’re taught the wrong mindset, which is administration, the A at MBA. But it’s also true in lots of entrepreneurial education. It’s about how we teach our kids in high school that businesses are to be administered, that to be managed. They have rules and planning and processes and all those kinds of things. And a good businessman is a good administrator. And because of what we’ve been talking about, Jim, we we think the opposite. Myself and Mark Packard, my co-author, who’s a professor at Florida Atlantic University, and you know, teaching the first kids on the beachhead about venture mode, which is what we describe. First thing is find a customer, have the ethic to want to serve that customer, have the expectation that you can find a better way to do it, and then run all of those experiments. And administration tends to be bureaucratic. It tends to have lots of rules. It tends to have lots of processes. It has a limited frame, and venture mode has an unlimited frame. The possibility space is huge. I’ve just got to experiment my way through it, and so that’s that’s a mindset. And we think everybody, not just business owners, are going to have to think that way, Jim, because there aren’t going to be jobs in the future. Jobs are an old-fashioned concept based on division of labor. You know, each of us can only do a few little things, and therefore we’ll put you in a job with very specific framework in it. In the future, everybody’s going to have a customer. So I’ll give you an example. If I’m in the marketing department, my customer is the sales department. My job would say develop them a marketing plan. But invention mode, you say, what do they need? What’s getting in their way? What are their aspirations? How can I help them? They’re my customer, and my customer gives me feedback. I’ve got success in sales. I’ve got a good response from my customer. I’m I’m able to do my job better. So I’ve been enabled by you in the marketing department, and that feedback loop continues to be how we’ll work. Not did you hit your KPIs? But did your customer feel like they could achieve their aspirations? Did they feel enabled by what you’ve done? So that entrepreneurial mindset is going to apply to everybody in all businesses, big, small, growing, any business at all.

Jim Beach 12:37
So everyone is going to be an entrepreneur, even if I work for a Fortune 500 customer,

Hunter Hastings 12:43
yeah, you’ve got to have the entrepreneurial mindset. Yes, everybody’s an entrepreneur, and the entrepreneurial society, Jim, is going to be much much better than we we have today. If you want to think in in big frames, which is it’s everybody’s committed to that ethic. I’m serving a customer, trying to make their lives better, whether it’s an internal customer or an external customer. That cycle is a much better society than hitting KPIs and making a profit. Profit is a reporting device. Does my customer approve of what I’m serving them? It’s not a a goal to be achieved. It’s a result of serving a customer.

Jim Beach 13:21
So, do you call this the venture mindset? How do we designate this?

Hunter Hastings 13:26
Well, we call it venture mode in the book, and I I would go with that. That we all have to operate in venture mode, and we mustn’t operate in administration mode. So, step back and say, yeah, which which of my activities are in administration mode, where there are rules and plans and best practices, and it’s all being done before, and I’ve got to stay between the guardrails and stick in between the lines. How much is venture mode, where I’m imagining a different future that nobody else has imagined, and then figuring my way out to make that achievable, and then I’m I’m committing through experimentation to bring it about, I I love to use the analogy of of Elon Musk. I know he’s overused as an analogy, but his catching of the the rocket back in the in the chopsticks in SpaceX, somebody had to imagine that, Jim. It’s never been done before. So where did it come from well. It came from imagination. Then you go develop the expectation. I can do this. You know, Elon calls it first principles thinking. It’s about physics. There was always gravity. There was always rocket propulsion. We’ve reused planes for a lot of time. Now we’re using a rocket, and then you run all the experiments to get it right. And there were hundreds of different circumstances had to be just right before the the flight leader could say, “Yeah, we’ll do this. So that’s the experimentation part. So I think that’s a good example for people to think of. It came from imagination. Imagination is the engine of the economy.

Jim Beach 14:57
I love it. I love it. Very well said, and great. Analogy makes a lot of sense. So, is there any value to the education anymore? Do you still believe in post-secondary education, and can entrepreneurship be taught?

Hunter Hastings 15:20
We think entrepreneurship can be partially taught, Jim, and what I mean by that is we would divide our new solution. We call it the MBE, the Master of Business Enterprise. Your enterprise being what entrepreneurs do. So there’s two parts to it. One is learning principles, because principles scale, tactics don’t, and rules don’t, and methods and best practices don’t. But principles scale. If I, what Elon called first principles. So the first is understanding what value is. So value is in the mind of the customer. So we get that orientation. Then the customer decides what is valuable. They evaluate. That’s the basis of a business, and so if you start from there and you understand the experimentation process, you can learn those principles. So we teach those could be in a classroom, could be online, could be distance learning. But you got to learn the principles. Then the second part is experience. You can only learn entrepreneurship through the experience of running the experiments, doing the work, seeing what happens. So we would have the second part of the NBE take place inside the corporation, the hiring corporation, and have them take our principals, educated undergraduates or even high schoolers, and put them in a real team with real resources and real challenges, and see how they how they perform in that experience. So if they have the two parts, principles plus experience. So we believe that’s valuable. We don’t believe the MBA and similar kinds of approaches are valuable because they’re backwards looking. That you know, there’s a best if there’s a best practice, it just means everybody’s done it, and so we would reframe education. I don’t think this will be done in a university. There’s no reason why universities should be teaching people about business, and so we do it in you know different kinds of organizations. But education is learn the principles, get the experience.

Jim Beach 17:24
And what about business school in particular-the finance classes and the marketing classes, HR classes? Any value in that? If I plan on becoming an entrepreneur,

Hunter Hastings 17:34
the short answer is no. And so we have a line in the book.

Jim Beach 17:41
The

Hunter Hastings 17:43
we have a line in the book that business school is killing business, and and we yeah we make that point for a reason. And again, if you can go to our alternative route, which is learn the principles, not the tactics, not the processes, not the accounting, not the HR compliance, and then learn the experience. However, you can get the experience, ideally in an existing corporation. HR is one of those things that’s going to go away in the AIA, Jim, because it’s all administration, right? It’s all about salary levels and compliance levels, and you know, getting promoted and getting a job and all those kinds of things-that’s not going to be the entrepreneurial future. You can see out there now, HR departments in some cases are getting merged with IT departments because AI can automate all of that process work. So if AI can become if HR can become something different, nurturing entrepreneurs than it has a future, but it doesn’t have a future as it exists right now.

Jim Beach 18:48
I love it, and I always found the HR people to be sort of the most obnoxious people at the company too.

Hunter Hastings 18:54
One one of one of the people I interviewed on my podcast said the purpose of HR is to keep a lid on a boiling pot. In other words, everyone’s dissatisfied, everybody’s disengaged, and and HR tries to keep them inside the boiling pot. So you know, there’s no future for that.

Jim Beach 19:14
That is so funny. Well, what about technology and AI? How does that affect the venture mode.

Hunter Hastings 19:24
Yeah. So one of the points about technology is it develops on its own. Jim, there are there are two pathways through the economy: the entrepreneurial one, but also technology. Technology just it creates itself from itself. So the way to illustrate that is think about Elon’s reusable rocket. Everything existed before Elon imagined a new future. The rocket existed, the steel existed, the rocket propulsion existed. All of that stuff it evolves, right? If you create a rocket engine. You create it from things that already existed. You just recombine them in different ways. So the entrepreneurial relationship with technology is to recombine it, put it together in a way that’s never been done before. And so that’s the role of technology. It’s it’s developing along its own track, people are tinkering. You know, Edison’s enveloping the the light bulb and all those kinds of things, and then somebody figures out how to apply that entrepreneurially, how to make light a value for people in homes that previously were lit up by by candles or kerosene. And so the the combination of technology and entrepreneurship, they live in two different worlds. But the entrepreneur combines those things in ways that have never been done before. That’s the relationship.

Jim Beach 20:51
And will AI speed that up, or how does, or simply eliminate all of these jobs?

Hunter Hastings 21:00
Well, it’s the same process speeded up, so nothing’s nothing’s changed in entrepreneurship. You can certainly automate a lot of things that are step by step processes. So certainly AI will do that. That’s a good thing. That’s efficiency. But the entrepreneur, the imagination, the commitment, the experimentation, the creativity-that’s all going to be human. So the new unit of work is going to be an individual person with an AI, and that has much more capability and capacity than the human on its own, or the AI on its own. So that combination is still super, super valuable, and that’s the source of entrepreneurship. It’s it’s now reinforcing the individual. So I give you a little story from China. There’s a registration classification out there called OPC, the One Person Corporation, and that is typically one person, or maybe more. But it’s AI enabled. You’ve got AI doing a lot of those automations of accounting and all those things that it can do. But it’s also plugged into an ecosystem. So the one-person corporation is typically in one of these big industrial parks in Shenzhen or somewhere like that, and it’s connected to that ecosystem. So there are there are people who make parts. There are people who supply services. There’s all kinds of of support that you can get. So this one person corporation can get up to many many millions of U.S. dollar equivalents with that one person’s status because of AI and because of plugging into the ecosystem. So instead of thinking about a firm that combines all of these these technologies and services together, you can think of a person doing that, and there’s no limit theoretically to how that can grow. So it’s all going to help. It’s all going to create value. That’s the point. And AI will speed it up. It doesn’t really change the process.

Jim Beach 23:12
How does the system, academia, and all of that respond to their cash cow MBA being told that it’s no longer valuable.

Hunter Hastings 23:26
Yeah, so systems are adaptive. That’s the scientific phrase. So when they get feedback from the market, people saying, “Hey, this MBA is worthless. I’m not going to do it anymore. They will figure out some kind of of customer serving response. either they’ll reform into some different kind of education, or they’ll go away, and those those components of technology and people and and resources will be plugged into to other activities. It’ll change. Is the point, and you can’t predict the future; you can only imagine it. There is no place for business education in in universities. That’s my personal imagination. It might be wrong, and so they’ll find other ways to to make money. But the problem is, with all big systems, they resist change until it’s until it’s forced upon them until they can no longer succeed, so they’re going to be resisting for a long time. But ultimately, they’ll they’ll change. I don’t think it’s a big future for the university as we think of it today.

Jim Beach 24:32
And as an aspiring entrepreneur listening to this, Hunter, how do I change my startup that I’m about to do. I’m about to start the world’s greatest chitlins business. We make the greatest fried intestines of anybody. Our chitlin is better fried than anyone else’s chitlin. Hunter, how do I use this? Information to run my business better.

Hunter Hastings 25:04
Well, you start in a different place than Chitlin’s, Jen. You start with a customer. Who is the customer out there? What do they want? What do they need? What’s wrong with the Chitlin’ supply of today? And what are they dissatisfied about? Because it’s in the right place, or it’s the right price, or it fits their needs. But much more importantly, you’ll probably find consumers are changing. Maybe they’re thinking about more health, so you need healthy chitlins, not better fried chitlins. They might be thinking about calorie controls, so you need low calorie chitlins. You need to think about the customer first. What is the unmet need, and what is that unmet need in the future? Because that’s where I’m going. So you got to know about trends. You got to know about possible changes. So start with the customer. Then imagine a possible situation where those customers are going to buy your chiplings. Now I personally have a hard time imagining that, but that’s the point about entrepreneurship. You can imagine it. What what is that? It’s not a better chitlin. It’s a better service to a customer. And then what they call the total addressable market. How many of those customers are they? Where do they live? How can they reach them? All those kinds of things. Always start with the customer. It’s always about the customer, not about the chitlins,

Jim Beach 26:22
but my invention is-I didn’t. But my invention, Hunter, I invented this thing. It’s the coolest technology ever. You can’t tell me it’s about the customer. I invented this cool thing. My widget is better than any other widget ever. It’s-it’s about what I invented. Can’t tell me. Yeah,

Hunter Hastings 26:40
you-you have brilliantly described the trap, Jim, which is that’s what we think the product centric approach. It has better features. It’s it’s cheaper. It’s you know it’s sleeker than it’s ever been done before. But that’s not the point. It is absolutely not the point. And invention is not innovation. And innovation doesn’t count until the customer says it counts. They have the final verdict. So, what you’ve described is the the inventor thinking from the inside, and we’ve got to get them to the outside and see how this interacts with the customer.

Jim Beach 27:16
Okay, so I have my widget right now, and I still want to start a business. So, what do I do now? Do I go at take my widget and show it to 25 customers?

Hunter Hastings 27:28
That’d be a good place to start. So we always say you don’t need 25 Talk to five, and you know, pick them, make them different, but just talk to them. That the initiation is the feedback loop. So that’s the big, powerful tool that we all have. Having imagined this future, we go out and talk to it about the to the the customer, and you get feedback. I hate that. I love that. This is great. Why is it purple? And then that’s when you’ve got to interpret that feedback. Why did they say that? It’s they can’t articulate what they are going to want in the future, but they can give you feedback about how satisfied and dissatisfied. You know, there’s a famous saying that’s supposedly made by Henry Ford. He said, “If I’d ask customers what they want, they would have said faster horses. And so he probably didn’t say that. But his point is, customers can’t articulate. They they’re used to horses. They’re slow and they have problems being managed and so on like that. I would love it if they didn’t take so much of my time. And he interpreted that in a different way, merged it with technology, and got a better solution, which is the automobile. So talk to customers by absolute all means, but then interpret what they say. They can’t invent something for you. They can’t improve your invention. But they’re not. They can say why they don’t like it, and then you got to figure out why that is the case.

Jim Beach 28:52
Great advice, Hunter. How do we find out more about you? Follow you online and get a copy of the book.

Hunter Hastings 28:59
I would go to VentureMold.biz. So. so that’s venturemode all one word, all lowercase.biz, and you can buy the book there. You can find about me there. It’s got links to other websites, and then go to thevaluecreators.com, which has got our first online course about creating value, and it’s incredibly low priced and it’s good for everybody.

Jim Beach 29:25
Fantastic, Hunter! Thank you so much for being with us. Congratulations on the book, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot,

Hunter Hastings 29:32
sir. Good. Invite me any time. Thanks, Jim.

Jim Beach 29:35
We will be right back.

Intro 2 29:52
Well, that’s a that’s a that’s a wonderful place to actually do. Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s that’s a that’s a. You know that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 30:14
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, travel these days has just gotten so complicated and difficult, and it’s hard to find great events that are actually real events and are not fake. And I’m excited to welcome someone who is tackling this and providing great travel experiences for people like us. Please welcome Magnolia Sevenler to the show. She is the founder of a company called Pendulum. It is a private members community, but provides lifestyle events for accomplished professionals. Magnolia, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Magnolia Sevenler 30:51
Thank you. I’m good. Thank you for having me, Jim. Excited to be here.

Jim Beach 30:55
I’m excited to learn about what you’re doing. So, tell me about Pendulum.

Magnolia Sevenler 30:59
So, Pendulum is a curated events company. Essentially, we’re a services business that’s turned into kind of like a member community, throwing events in New York and LA. We do a lot of lifestyle events, events around F1 Fashion Week. weeks, and we also have a more business driven side of things, which is the monthly panels that we host for our members.

Jim Beach 31:35
Excellent! I love that. So only for people in LA and roof city.

Magnolia Sevenler 31:42
So. the consistent events that we’ve been hosting are in New York and LA. However, because of some of our sponsors, we do get to do events in London and Miami and Austin. We’ve done events in Singapore. So those are usually around cultural calendar events, which are f1 We’ve done London Fashion Week. We’ve done a lot of things around some of the music festivals that are happening across the country.

Jim Beach 32:22
And do you work with the festivals, or are you just an add-on layer that you don’t really work with them, but you provide the service? You get the tickets.

Magnolia Sevenler 32:32
So both, actually, we we have our curated events, and then another side of the business is Pendulum Live, which is our production division. We actually started doing after parties and kind of like the pre parties around some of the Halloween events and also Burning Man. And then two years ago, we launched our own music festival, which is called Worlds Away. So that one we had kiesto and chain smokers headline, and that was in Monterey, California. So that was something that we fully produced and created, and that because of that, we’ve kind of had that community now, and we do pop up events around other cultural things like the Super Bowl. So we did the Super Bowl, one of the Super Bowl after parties. So, but. both.

Jim Beach 33:44
Okay, and when you have an event, say in London, do you all travel together as a big group, or do they just show up in London and meet for the events?

Magnolia Sevenler 33:54
Yes, so we we our our team travels. A lot of our people that are in the community have traveled to them, and then we’ve we have a strong community in London too. So it’s not it’s it’s a little bit of both.

Jim Beach 34:13
Okay, and how do you get invited to join?

Magnolia Sevenler 34:19
So some of the, I think, like our community and people that are already a part of the events, it’s kind of an open platform. You kind of RSVP, and if you get accepted, you know you’re kind of a part of the community, and you can come to all the events. Some of the more curated ones that we do, like the f1 stuff, is a bit more exclusive. So those are paid events, and you can you know request to purchase tickets for those.

Jim Beach 34:58
All right, and how much would an event. Cost like the

Magnolia Sevenler 35:03
f1 for a member or to produce

Jim Beach 35:06
it? Oh, for a member. Yeah, to show up and have fun.

Magnolia Sevenler 35:10
To show up and have fun anywhere from 10,000 to 35,000

Jim Beach 35:19
Okay.

Magnolia Sevenler 35:19
Yeah. So it’s like a full experience that we provide members if they want to, you know, go to Miami F1, if they want to go to Austin F1, and they want the full experience. We’ve done everything from private travel, their hotel hotels, the A to Z experience, the after parties and everything that goes on.

Jim Beach 35:45
Excellent! What a great idea.

Magnolia Sevenler 35:47
Yeah.

Jim Beach 35:48
And so, are you working hard to grow it by having more events, more members? What is your business plan?

Magnolia Sevenler 35:57
Yeah. So right now, we’re slowly just growing the community with these micro events that we have in their their networking events, and it’s part of our what we call our founder series. So our founder series is basically it’s it kind of started from doing these bigger events, and we had a lot of like interesting individuals that were like creating their own businesses, and you know wanting to meet investors, and so we started a founder series to kind of bring together these people, and and that’s in New York and LA, so we continuously grow that. And then every few months we’ll have a bigger party event that brings everyone together. And those are usually themed from like those kind of start from our like we have a sponsor. We have a a sponsor Next Vodka, so we’ll do a lot of events with them and F1.

Jim Beach 37:14
All right. How did you get started in this? What was your background before you started Pendulum, and yeah, how did you get ready?

Magnolia Sevenler 37:26
Yeah, so I actually started a influencer marketing platform when I was in college, and that was a we managed. campaigns for brands, so we built our own proprietary software and onboarded different brands and onboarded influencers. And it was kind of when the influencer marketing industry was booming, and so I started off doing that, and through that, I did a lot of events as well. And how I got started with eventually with Pendulum was I was doing business development as well for other startups, and one of my clients was a dating app, and his investors decided that they wanted to kind of like create like a lifestyle events company. And at the time, I was also doing biz dev and events and everything for this client, this dating app called From, and it kind of just organically started like that. I so I kind of fell into it.

Jim Beach 38:55
Okay. Well, how did you get the idea for this? What was the was there an initial light bulb moment.

Magnolia Sevenler 39:03
Yeah, I think I don’t know if there was like a light bulb moment, but there was definitely you know an idea to create events that that are were lifestyle and kind of build a community through it, and it it eventually to create more curated events. We had to add that like member side of things to create more exclusivity for the for the members. So it it kind of grew into different branches over time,

Jim Beach 39:43
right? Let me tell you a story, Magnolia, about a company called Skylarks. They were based out of Atlanta in the 70s, and it was a membership thing. And they sent out-you know-this is before the internet, so they sent out every month a. A newsletter with all of their trips. They had a trip every week. They would usually leave Thursday and then come back Sunday. They had their own airplane and their own hangar, and you would show up and not at the normal airport, but at the cargo airport or the cargo terminal, and they would take your luggage and everything, and then you would go in the building, and the plane would be inside the hangar, and they had food set up all around the the plane, and you could go on the plane, get your seat, or eat, or whatever you wanted to do. And then they just casually said, “Okay, everyone on the plane. And then they would fly to wherever the trip is, and they would go snowmobiling in Montana or to the festivals or the King Tut exhibit or whatever, and everything was done for you. The hotels, everything. They had a a party the first night, and then some organized events and some free time and things like that. And it was huge. It was an incredible organization. They had so many trips. It was so much fun. And then they wrecked the airplane and killed everybody on a charter. Sort of ended the story in a horrible way, but it was one of the coolest travel business models that I’ve ever seen. Because you know your luggage would just show up in your room, and you know the busses were just there with your friends on it and stuff. It was just an amazing organization, but it took travel to the next level. Do you think you’ll ever organize trips like that so I can go snowmobiling again?

Magnolia Sevenler 41:25
Wow. Well, we we we did a similar experience. It wasn’t as extreme as this, but we do have a private charter partner, and so we you know got a bunch of groups together and chartered a private plane from LA to Monterey for our music festival, and so they they got that whole experience. It wasn’t. It’s not something that we consistently do. I think it’s like when we have those like flagship events. It’s like if you want that experience, it’s we we do provide that, but yeah, that’s a it’s a very cool. That’s a tragic story. I actually hate flying, so that’s a sad ending.

Jim Beach 42:14
Yeah, it was really sad, you know, because we knew the pilots and you know the stewardesses were always you know team member. It was just a lot of fun. We did, I don’t know, 20 or 30 trips with them when I was a kid, and got incredible experiences. Yeah, we went to New Orleans for the King Tut exhibit, and then we went out on the French Quarter, and I was, I think, nine at the time, and my parents got so drunk that they left me in the French Quarter and forgot about

Magnolia Sevenler 42:43
me. Oh my gosh! Wow, wild, wild times.

Jim Beach 42:49
Yes, even my mother got so horny that she forgot about me. I guess.

Magnolia Sevenler 42:53
Oh my God.

Jim Beach 42:55
Yes, wild times. Until they got back to the hotel room and saw my luggage and then freaked out, and I was right where they left me, and the drunk had adopted me and was feeding me crackers and had bought me a Sprite, and so I was doing. Oh

Magnolia Sevenler 43:08
my gosh, that’s crazy! Wow, I love to

Jim Beach 43:12
tease my mom about that. She hated that.

Magnolia Sevenler 43:15
So you’ve been on these trips?

Jim Beach 43:19
Yeah, I’ve done tons of things like what you what you’re referring to, and I also recently had a guest on the show named Adam von Adam von Hooten Gutten or something. I’m looking it up right now, and you need to listen to that interview, Magnolia, because he’s doing something very similar to what you’re doing. He has trips to this summer. They’re going to the Pope’s Summer Palace for a party. Y’all might just should join up and join together. Oh

Magnolia Sevenler 44:00
wow! His

Jim Beach 44:00
name is yeah. There’s a lot of Guten, and the show was on June 22nd, and he’s building a super luxurious travel club, sort of like what you’re doing. Yours seems more local, but you know Pan Am and Trans World shouldn’t have fought it out. Anyway, definitely, but

Magnolia Sevenler 44:20
yeah, ours is not so much like we’ll do the destination events, but there’s a lot of you know there’s the the local events, but it’s not a whole travel experience for your like traveling. I have a few founder friends that have started those kind of businesses as well because it’s really popular to just kind of go on these trips with curated people, and you get to do, you know, get go to go to cool destinations. There’s an itinerary of a lot of activities, and so it’s been a real popular business in the past few years.

Jim Beach 45:00
So, how many different divisions do you have now? The sounds like you’ve broken into several different divisions. Yes. So, so we our

Magnolia Sevenler 45:10
core, yeah, our core business is the lifestyle events we do for our partners, which is essentially we curate the entire guest list, create the whole experience A to Z of an event that you would like, and we also bring in our curated community to help support those events. So it adds on to a partner’s or a sponsor’s community, and then another part of the business is our founder series, which is just kind of you know continuous events that we do to activate the community and grow it, and you know bring interesting more and more interesting people together, and then another side of the business is Pendulum Live, which is the production side, which does production for our music festival, and and that kind of brings in more partners as well.

Jim Beach 46:22
So let’s talk a little bit more about the entrepreneurship. Did it require any money to start this business? It sounds like you kind of rolling bootstrapped

Magnolia Sevenler 46:32
it. I actually didn’t. I did. I did start with quite a bit of funding, so it wasn’t. friends

Jim Beach 46:43
and family.

Magnolia Sevenler 46:45
No, that was from a family office. So that I have one family office investor that kind of supported the entire thing.

Jim Beach 46:58
Oh, okay, very nice. How’d you get that connection, and how’d you close that deal?

Magnolia Sevenler 47:04
I had my own agency at the time with a few clients, and I met them through one of my clients. They were investors of them, so that’s how I kind of it kind of started.

Jim Beach 47:24
All right. Oh, very well done. I’m impressed. So, raised a bunch of money, and that money is gone for salaries or what? Did you bring on team members?

Magnolia Sevenler 47:37
Yes. So we have. That’s for salaries, our office, and any you know business expenses and all the events that we’ve done.

Jim Beach 47:55
Okay, and how big is the team now?

Magnolia Sevenler 47:59
We’re about eight people.

Magnolia Sevenler 48:02
Wow. Okay. Yeah,

Magnolia Sevenler 48:04
it’s a small team. It’s definitely a small team. Yeah. I mean, I don’t think you know a lot of the things that we do for events are we work with a lot of contractors, so doesn’t make sense to have full-time employees for us, like too many, at least because it’s usually like sometimes it’s catering companies and photographers, and so it’s a lot of like independent people that we work with.

Jim Beach 48:34
Right. Well, of course, those should be temps and outsourced and all that. So that makes sense. And then, what about marketing? How do you spread the word? Is it secret in that you have to have a friend tell you the secret, or are you doing real marketing, or what?

Magnolia Sevenler 48:52
It’s really word of mouth, honestly. That’s it. Kind of started off. We we did we did some PR, but it wasn’t. I didn’t want to do too much marketing. We did some social media stuff, but nothing. No paid marketing. Nothing like that. A lot of it was word of mouth. All

Magnolia Sevenler 49:15
right. That’s how. How do you prompt word of mouth. How do you encourage that?

Magnolia Sevenler 49:24
So, in the beginning, we actually would partner with brands that had communities, and so they would bring in they would bring guests, and so it kind of grew like that. And we always encourage like to bring a plus one. So, like for our founder series, if you want to attend it, obviously, like you have to be a founder and bring a founder, and so over time, kind of grows that approach. Works best because the people that end up coming back to the events usually know each other and they want to come back because they know people at the event. So pretty much like that,

Jim Beach 50:13
right? And how do you plan new events? Do you have a big whiteboard where you chalk out the the year ahead and say, “Well, this weekend is how do you plan what’s coming up?

Magnolia Sevenler 50:26
Yeah, so we plan about six months ahead of time, and for bigger events like you know, for doing something around Fashion Week, we plan. And maybe seven to eight months ahead, and usually it’s around you know what we have going on with our partners. So if they have you know if they want to activate somewhere, we’ll help support that. So it kind of depends on our partners, and then other ways that I get creative is just through the people I meet and kind of creating ideas through that. If we have you know an interesting founder, and you know I know another founder that I think that they’d have a great discussion with. Will organize interesting panels for around that.

Jim Beach 51:30
What are the panels on? What are some of the topics you’ve dealt with?

Magnolia Sevenler 51:34
We’ve done. We have a partner. It’s right. It’s a layer one blockchain, and so we’ve done some really cool panels around crypto and the new financial stack and things around that. And then we’ve done panels around brand building. So we’ve had some cool, you know, marketing folks and founders on those. So they they they they’re they’re very they’re business themed, but they’re always very cool discussions on what’s happening.

Jim Beach 52:21
Right in LA, you should have one on. Why the hell do they not have water in the hydrants?

Magnolia Sevenler 52:26
Right. Yes. Yeah,

Jim Beach 52:30
I’ve I’m blown away by how poorly LA responded to the fires a year ago.

Magnolia Sevenler 52:36
Yeah, I mean that was that was very that was very tragic. I remember my sister lives in LA, and I was like, “Come to New York. You have to get out of there.

Jim Beach 52:48
Yeah, very sad the way it’s happened. Well, Magnolia built an amazing business, and I can’t wait to see how it grows and what you turn it into. We would love to watch and have you back in the year and get an update. So, well done. How do we get in touch with you? Find out more of get apply to be in your cool world. How do we get in touch?

Magnolia Sevenler 53:10
Yeah. So we have. You can go follow us at Pendulum members on Instagram, and we have another account, Pendulum Founder series on Instagram as well. Our websites are on there. You can go and sign up and create a profile and stay tuned and receive our newsletter.

Jim Beach 53:36
I know you. Thank you so much and congratulations.

Magnolia Sevenler 53:40
Thank you, thank you for having me, James.

Jim Beach 53:44
And we are out of time for today, but you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars.