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December 25, 2009
Entrepreneur "paid to party"
SFU competitor wins on event planning, but will be an engineer.
PAT JOHNSON
When other young people were looking for jobs to support themselves through university, Ben Brown-Bentley started a business instead. Ten months later, he was named Simon Fraser University's student entrepreneur of the year.
Brown-Bentley, a first-year engineering student, is co-owner of Adrenalin Productions, an event planning company he started with Joel Isfeld, who is currently in Grade 12.
"We mainly focus on all-age events," said Brown-Bentley, who is also vice-president of Hillel's Jewish Students Association at Simon Fraser University. The company works with municipal authorities to remove all alcohol from a nightclub so that underage patrons can enjoy a night on the town.
"They're mostly 16- to 18-year olds," Brown-Bentley said of his clientele. "It's kids who can't go clubbing yet but want to go clubbing, so we provide them this alternative."
Brown-Bentley's business strategy seems to be working, but above all he views his work as a service that puts the safety of young people foremost.
"There's no in-and-outs, there's no alcohol, there's no drugs," he said. "They can't leave the party to drink and come back. It's a lot safer than any other event that they could be going to."
Lately, his events have been taking place at Au Bar, near the Granville SkyTrain station. Adrenalin also produces late-night events that run from 10 p.m. until the early hours of the morning, events which can attract 1,000 or more partiers. While there are many raves in the city, Adrenalin is one of just three companies running late-night events legally.
The events are on scale with a concert – and ticket prices are commensurate. Adrenalin's Halloween party drew hundreds of young people at $200 a person and tickets to their New Year's Eve event in Langley (chartered buses will shuttle partiers to and from the SkyTrain) are going for $100.
"We bring in DJs from Europe," said Brown-Bentley. "For our New Year's Eve event, we have one DJ from the U.K., we have one from the States and one from Italy."
Brown-Bentley admits he's not an expert in every field of event planning, but he knows how to find the experts.
"We're basically the people behind the scenes who connect everything else. We have promoters who sell the tickets, we have another company that comes in and does the lighting and sound set up, we find the artists, we talk to the booking agencies, we're basically the guys overseeing it and organizing it."
Organizing events was already old hat to the 19-year-old. In Grade 8, Brown-Bentley became involved in volunteer work and, in Grade 12, he was elected president of his student council at Elgin Park Secondary, in White Rock. In that capacity, he was responsible for producing school dances.
After high school, he used what he had learned to help other event production companies before he and Isfeld started their own.
"I'd sell tickets and I'd get usually about a $5 commission on tickets and they'd keep the other $70-$80 from the ticket," he said. "I thought, 'Why am I giving them $70 and keeping five? I could be keeping 70 and giving someone else five.'"
The regular events at Au Bar and the special events at other venues are steppingstones to bigger things, Brown-Bentley hopes.
"By summer we're hoping to do a 5,000-person event and then hopefully branching out into concerts as well in Vancouver and then hopefully going national and then global," he said.
Brown-Bentley stumbled upon a card on the ground at SFU advertising the entrepreneurship competition sponsored by SFU Venture Connection and Students in Free Enterprise Simon Fraser. There were two competitions – one for new businesses and one for student entrepreneur of the year. He applied under the new business category.
"I got an e-mail back from them saying that [new businesses] had to be less than six months old," he said. Organizers entered him into the entrepreneur of the year category automatically.
"Master's students are allowed to compete in this too, so I thought there's no way I'm going to win this now," he said. "But I got an e-mail a week later saying I'm one of the three finalists. I was pretty excited."
Upon winning, Brown-Bentley received $1,000, the possibility of mentorship and an opportunity to move on to the regional awards and then possibly nationals and globals. In fact, last year's SFU Student Entrepreneur of the Year, Milun Tesovic, was just named the global winner for his massively successful web business MetroLyrics, where 100 million visitors a month peruse 800,000 song lyrics.
While his future is in engineering, Brown-Bentley said he has found a great occupation for his university years.
"You get paid to party, so it's perfect for a university student," he said.
Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of programs for Hillel in British Columbia.
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