Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

Agencies: creating them, the opportunities they offer, and some of the issues running them can create has been a long running theme on this show. Today Dan talks with Matt Gartland who ran a successful creative agency for eight years before partnering with one of his then clients, Pat Flynn, and eventually becoming CEO of Smart Passive Income (SPI). Matt discusses how he’s helping SPI develop further as a diverse media brand, ways of managing a growing team, and how he sees online communities evolving: “The primary value of these community based experiences is less the content, even though the content is important. It's more the network, the network of the people, the peer to peer interactions, the habits and experiences that you ritualize within these communities based on experiences. You need good people to be able to facilitate and foster those.”

Business processes and systems have been an emerging theme on this show recently, and today Dan reflects on why, and where they fit into the entrepreneurial journey. This often starts with personal growth through things like maximizing your health, reading, making connections, and maybe therapy. The second stage of advancing small businesses is frequently through different sorts of coaching. But, at some point, owners tend to hit roadblocks that can only be overcome by deploying systems rather than constantly fighting fires. Today’s guest, Aaron Lynn, has dug deep on this, at colleges, in businesses he’s founded and as a business systems consultant. He joins Dan to talk about the importance of quick wins as well as long term strategy, the difference between personal and business productivity systems, the importance of meeting cadence, and a whole lot more.

Happy 2023 to all our listeners. The focus of this show has always been freedom, whatever that means to you. This pod is a judgement-free zone. It might be freedom to travel, to spend more time with family and friends, to work in a certain way, or with certain values, to give back to your community, or to support loved ones. Or just not to have a traditional J-O-B. Today’s guest Davis Nguyen initially founded My Consulting Offer, which helps people get management consulting jobs, to raise some ‘money in hand’ to pay a family member’s emergency medical bill. But it’s grown into so much more than that - a business that allows him harass his skills and to live life on his own terms, terms that just weren’t open to him when he was working for top consulting firm Bain & Company: ‘I loved the management consulting job. I love the fact that you get to work with really smart people … I just didn't like the fact that I couldn't take time off as much as I wanted … I remember my first year I literally went to negative vacation days because I wanted to take a trip to Japan. And, by the time I came back, basically HR said, ‘Alright, Davis, you have negative five days. Now basically, you can't take vacation for the next year.’

2022 has been the year that we all got on the road again. Dan and Ian spent the summer in Barcelona, Spain and hundreds of members of the Dynamite Circle met up to forge new friendships and partnerships, socialize, swap stories and strategies, and a whole lot more. Through it all, we have been fortunate to talk to some incredibly captivating entrepreneurs on this podcast. In today’s episode, we are revisiting some of our favorite moments and themes from the podcast this year, including thoughts about investing, the challenges of systemizing your business and motivating a team, what bootstrappers can learn from private equity firms (and vice versa), thoughts about the ‘anti-work movement’ and the amazing opportunities offered by living in a place with a lower cost of living than the West but equally great resources.

As 2022 draws to a close Dan and Ian are in a reflective mood. In this week’s show they ponder the ‘lifestyle business take’ on ‘The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman’ and come up with an alternative interpretation involving YouTube. They also discuss some the positives and negatives of their own business year including the results of their ambition to scale Dynamite Jobs, the power of reconnecting in person with colleagues, friends and mentors, and why alignment between founders is critical: “I think we can up the leadership game a little bit. And a lot of that is about figuring out these concepts and ideas that scale through the organisation and create alignment. It’s creating empowerment and autonomy in each individual actor to know that they're doing meaningful things on a day to day basis. That level of leadership is a tough nut to crack”.

On this week’s show Dan and Ian respond to some listener comments and questions including non-competes and potential conflicts of interest with your current employer when you’re thinking of starting an entrepreneurial side-hustle: “You’ve got to understand that, hey, there's three lawyers sitting in that office down there. If I take this vulnerable idea to them they're gonna say, ‘No’. I am not going to allow my life to be affected by a Mall Cop, or whatever .. when we say risk in entrepreneurship, it's the emotional risk of owning that and not asking for permission”. They also give their takes on the rewards of creating B2B versus B2C business, and why SOPs haven’t been mentioned on the show for quite some time.

On a recent show Dan and Ian touched on ‘the lifestyle ladder’, and what different levels of personal wealth can mean in your life. Following that they received an interesting email from today’s guest Matt Paulson who today shares why he’s found that achieving substantial personal wealth raises fundamental questions about how you want to spend that money, especially in relation to assessing investment opportunities, raising a family and contributing to a community you value: “My strategy is to create as normal of a childhood as possible for my children. So our house cost half a million dollars … I walk my kids to elementary school every morning. We fly private sometimes, we stay in fancier hotel rooms but the day to day is pretty normal .. I think if I can not set unrealistic expectations about what life is like when they're young, they'll carry over to when they're adults”. Dan and Ian also discuss the incredible opportunities opened up by the recently launched Open AI tool ChatGPT, and some exciting news about their latest product DC Scale, created out of their own frustrations establishing operational management systems within their own businesses.

When Johnathan Solorzano, founder of Solo Media Group, joined us on the podcast just over two years ago his agency focused on broad ‘white label work’, which he aptly described as ‘doing all the work and then someone else passes it off as their own’. Today, through what he learnt from doing that, he’s niched Solo Media to focus entirely on Shopify clients. Jonathan talks to Dan about how this evolution has provided him with a much more stable portfolio and revenue, and also why he feels ‘got distracted’ and wasted a year trying to develop some ‘Software as a Service’ products. He also discusses how creating a social media presence has helped his personal and agency profile, and why you don’t need to have thousands of followers to achieve that: “I’m not doing it for clicks. I'm not doing it for likes, and I'm not doing it for followers. I’m literally doing it to answer questions that I know people have. So some of my videos are like, ‘Whoa, this was like a $20,000 question’. If the right person sees this and sees they can save so much money .. To me, that's enough.”

Some call it ‘revenge travel’, others just call it ‘getting back to normal’ but people in the location independent community are, for sure, hitting the road again. In this week’s show, Dan and Ian look at what factors feed into creating ‘digital nomad hotspots’, and the possible new emerging cities suggested by listeners of this podcast, and members of the ‘Dynamite Circle’. They also discuss how they are going about implementing systems in their newest business, ‘Dynamite Jobs’, the pros and cons of those prescribed by ‘Traction’ and ‘Scaling Up’, and why they chose to work with a facilitator: ‘We did some of the exercises wrong. It's not that we didn't understand them. But maybe we didn't understand the intent and how they fit into the bigger part of the picture. So I found it really helpful to do the exercises with someone because we were exposed to a bunch of exercises, and now we get to pick and choose based on the way that we filled it out. So I felt, in a lot of ways, we condensed it by having a facilitator help us’.

It’s been three long years since DC members were able to gather in Bangkok to share great food, experiences and talk business. And DCBKK2022, our ten year anniversary event, with almost 400 attendees, was not only our biggest event but also such a blast. So this week Dan, Ian and Jeff Pecaro get together to talk about not only the highlights of DCBKK20220 - one of which was definitely a 100 strong Tuk Tuk parade which ferried people through the streets of Bangkok to the closing party - but also takeaways, trends spotting from the conference floor, and things that are up for improvement next year: “We're always gonna have speakers, we're always gonna have meetups, we're always gonna have presenters, we're always gonna have structured conversations. But one of the pieces of feedback that we've been getting for years is: how can we bring people together to just do things?”