Side-Hustles, which - with a lot of hard work - evolve into full-time businesses are a theme of many entrepreneurial journeys. We’ve covered a fair few on this show. But Brenden Marquardt’s story is particularly interesting for a few reasons: even though he was in a well-paid finance job, and knew he wasn’t great at ‘ideas’, he did the groundwork to be ready for when the opportunity he was looking for presented itself. On today’s show Brenden, Co-Founder of Homestead Brands talks to Dan about how a chance click on a website led him to buy Lori Beds, his methodology for working ‘on’ not ‘in’ the business “When I hired my first executive team member Dodes, who manages our product - the manufacturing, relationships, logistics and things like that. Even before I hired him, just talking with him, I realised we had set our goals way too small, because I didn't know how to do any of those things that he spent every day doing in the furniture industry”. And why Brenden takes inspiration for working with other family members in his business from ‘The Sopranos’.

It started as a hobby at college, and was also the way he met his wife but now ‘Dumpster Diving’ has become a major business opportunity for Dave Sheffield, Founder of Buffalo Bottle Craft. In today’s show Dave talks to Dan about how a Vice documentary, currently watched by nearly 1.5M people, and subsequent media interest has made him consider the many different ways a ‘Dumpster Diving’ enterprise could grown: from selling physical products from dumpster finds, to creating online content showing how others can do the same: “If I find some new material in the dumpster that I know that I can source at scale … I just make a video and I say, ‘Hey, guys, look at this cool thing. What do you think I could make from it? What would you make from it?’ And that's my product research right there.”

This week Dan is speaking to Andy Morgan, creator of RippedBody, a blog and coaching program targeted at committed but frustrated fitness trainees who have hit a stall in their progress. What’s interesting about Andy’s story is the way he’s found a niche not only in the fitness space but also in the market in Japan. Andy discusses why he only does bi-weekly email check-in with his clients, how a DC mastermind has prompted him to start hiring coaches, and the methodology behind his successful Instagram strategy: “The problem was I had too many content possibilities and I couldn't decide what to create each day. The solution that I came up with was to list the topics that I could talk about, the types of content that I could create and the formats that I could create in and then rotate through them. And so what that did is - it constrained my choices and allowed for tight creativity”.

In this week’s show Dan and Ian share their Q4 business updates, including the reasons why they have decided to launch an agency - Remote First Recruiting, which is targeted at startup founders, under the Dynamite Jobs umbrella. “The best customers of a job board typically have super strong hiring practices that are built over the years … (they’ve) hired for the same position multiple times. Whereas with an agency customer, which are typically startup founders, they're seeking to buy those systems into their business. They know they need to hire, they might be hiring 10 times a year. But every time it's a little bit different, and they want to purchase the systems. That's what the agency does.” Plus, responses to some great listener questions, including: how much money is ‘enough money’, the mindset challenges of living off capital, and some further reflections on ‘The Europe Question’.

Books: seeking out good ones, talking about them, and implementing some of the things we discover in their pages has long been a theme of this show. However, as longtime listeners will know, Dan is often disappointed by one category in particular: business books. But one he read recently, ‘Working Backwards’ by former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, really blew him away. And he was thrilled when one of the authors, Colin Bryar, agreed to drop by the show. Colin joined Amazon in the late 90s, and worked closely with Jeff Bezos. That time at the company covered a period of incredible innovation - Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa, and Amazon Web Services Dan talks to Colin about the principles and practices, many of them counterintutive to traditional business thinking, that drove that incredible succes, and how they can also be applied to the smaller businesses many of us are growing. They include: ditching the powerpoint in favor of narratives at meetings, why it’s essential for your best people to take on key projects in ‘single-threaded leadership’, and much more.

The summer of cycling and tapas in Barcelona, Spain has come to an end. Dan and Ian are back in Austin, Texas inspired by the conversations and feedback they’ve had over the past few weeks as listeners and friends have dropped by one of our favorite European cities. One of those people is someone we’ve had on the pod before, telling the early part of his story. So much has happened in his life that we thought it was high time to catch up with him again. Coran Woodmass’ entrepreneurial journey has spanned ecommerce, building a successful business brokerage, to multi million dollar deal maker at Billion Dollar Exits. He’s also an investor. Today he and Dan are going to discuss ‘Five small ways to go big’. These include why it’s sometimes necessary to ‘slow down to speed up’, the power of doubling down on your core entrepreneurial skill and the power of investing for cashflow. And just a caveat: as with all discussions about investing, this is not advice, it’s just some perspectives you might want to think about (or not).

Today’s show started, as so many of them do, as an in-person conversation in a dark bar in a cool city. That’s where Dan met Brent Zahradnik, founder of Amazon PPC agency AMZ Pathfinder. Now ‘the agency model’ is a recurring theme on this show because they can be spun up in a weekend, are often very profitable, and they can provide side income to what you’re already doing in a business. But done poorly, agency owners can find themselves trapped in the grind of ‘wrong’ clients and staffing woes. But Brent seems to have nailed it, and found a profitable business that also allows him to live in Montpellier, France and enjoy the great outdoor lifestyle that Mediterranean city offers. Topics covered include: the mistake of not getting ‘A players’ on your team earlier, why Brent feels his nomadic lifestyle held back his business for a while, and some ideas for agencies you could start today.

The ‘Stair Step’ approach to entrepreneurship is a recurring theme on the TMBA. Coined of course by Startups For The Rest Of Us host Rob Walling. Essentially, it describes how you can build up your business chops by for example, starting a freelance business, then parlaying some of those clients into running an agency and then maybe Software as a Service, and so on. But honestly, you can apply a similar approach in many different ways, including applying it to one brand, which is what today’s guest Ben Dziwulski, founder of WodPrep, which helps CrossFitters improve their techniques, has done over the course of many years. He talks to Dan about how WodPrep has grown into a $1.1M business that also allows him to enjoy the outdoor lifestyle he loves.

What began as a window cleaning service he started at college has now spun into a multi-million business for today’s guest Johnny Robinson. In January 2022 he co-founded Home Services Academy, a 90 day program and ongoing community which coaches others to reach five figures MRR by either starting their own cleaning business, or making an existing one more profitable. Johnny talks to Dan about their sales process, the pros and cons of implementing the ‘Scaling Up’ operating system, and why he feels he held on to his former business model for too long: “If you've been plugging away, and you're not seeing the growth, maybe it's time to take the skill set and what you've learned somewhere else … What I've realised, after building a few different businesses, is when you're in the weeds of things you start to find problems within that industry that are very, very niche. But you're like, ‘Well, that would probably be a better business than the one I’m running’”.

The COVID pandemic saw many online businesses boom, especially those centered on E-commerce. But entrepreneurs running in-person events really took a hit. Today’s show focuses on one of those stories, and narrates how one owner re-invented what his company was doing by becoming a ‘Value Added Reseller’ (VAR) software service. Dan Taylor is the CEO of AppsEvents, a ‘Google for Education’ partner whose company previously ran a huge number of conferences worldwide before diversifying into VAR: “There are different ways you can get into it. Some of the selling is direct with Google, some of that work is with a distributor but, essentially … The ‘value added’ part means you can sell your services on top. So you can sell ongoing support services, you can do setup services, you can do customization, that's kind of what the business model is.”