Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

This week’s show is kinda a de-brief of our recent in-person event in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Dan chats Jeff Pecaro, who has worked with us for nearly a decade, and continues to do an amazing job helping our speakers deliver the kind of presentations that our attendees tell us they want to hear: “It’s not a traditional business conference audience in the sense that they don't want to hear your theories, and they don't want to hear your grand success story, they're looking for the things that they can take, and give to their team on Monday morning to help them grow. So it's really much more of a community of peers than it is a captive audience. And I think that's a big adjustment for a lot of our speakers. Expect to hear: thoughts on PDC as a venue, some common themes that we’re seeing in our community as its revenue aspirations continue to grow, and some takeaways from the awesome on-stage presentations.

Have you ever wanted to get a regular review process going but just never get round to it because it seems so overwhelming? This show is for you. Dr Anthony Gustin, chiropractor, e-commerce entrepreneur and farmer, has been honing his annual review system for over 10 years. It’s available, completely free, online and has greatly influenced people like former AppSumo CEO, and recent TMBA guest Ayman Al-Abdullah. So, why not click on the link and follow along as Dan talks to Anthony about the six steps he suggests for those struggling with identifying and achieving goals in both business and personal lives. “A year is such a long time. It goes by like that. When you look back at what you can get done in your day to day, it seems like you're not making any progress but you look back on the year, it's insane how much you can get done”.

One of the themes of this show has always been ‘learning by doing’, and evolving your businesses based on that. But what about when your circumstances change and, through necessity, that places different pressures on what you need to achieve? Dan first met Dana Lindahl a decade ago when Dana was just starting out as a 21 year old copywriter, creating a decent amount for living in Bali. In today’s episode he shares why feedback from that resulted in him starting Legendary Leadgen, plus how a move back to the US led him into the podcast industry with Legendary Podcasts, which has seen such rapid growth that it quickly showed up some of his personal challenges: “I just had this sort of lifestyle agency, that was a good job for me, and I was happy there. And then all of a sudden, I was thrust into this situation where I needed to employ a level of skills that I hadn't quite developed And that's what I'm spending a lot of my time this year doing”.

On this week’s show Jeff Fruhwirth talks to Dan about how a failed foray into e-commerce, and a change in personal circumstances, caused him to pivot into real estate investing with little capital or experience. Today he has a portfolio of multi-unit buildings, which he’s expanded by learning about the hidden potential within different sorts of properties: “One of the best ways to make money is to kind of take on deals that no one else wants to touch. I looked at a building last summer that had been hanging on the market for quite a while. And the main issue was .. there was a five unit apartment building and a two bedroom house, but they were on the same tax lot and share the same water tap. So there was plenty of money in there, as long as you are willing to pay to dig up the water and sewer line, and then pay the $13,000 to the water utility to get the water metres separated … then you could sell off the house, you could fix up the apartments, and functionally double the rent”. Jeff also shares some inside stories and insights from the very first DSki, which took place in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

This week Dan and Ian share updates about progress at ‘Dynamite Jobs’. Drawing on some sage advice from recent guest Ayman Al-Abdullah, they’ve been focussing on the ‘P’s that really matter, namely breaking through plateaus by building strong foundations through ‘product, promotion and process’. The idea being that will enable them to move on to the next stage in their business, from ‘player to coach’: “One of the points that Ayman made is, ‘Look, you are the last star player, you're ever going to get on a rookie contract’, everyone else is going to work less hard than you, is going to care less, and is going to demand more money”… So when you're ready to pick up the clipboard, you have to have a rock solid legacy in place in terms of product, promotion, process and people … And now all of a sudden, we're not jumping the gun. I want to flag this up because I see a lot of people trying to get to that mid eight figure seven figure business by jumping the gun on bringing in the executives that are kind of doomed to failure, because there's no clarity on how the business will grow”. And stay tuned to the end to hear Dan and Ian’s thoughts about resume gaps and ways to fill them.

The last time Allen Walton was on the show he talked about the origins of his e-commerce business SpyGuy grew out of a difficult period when he was living in his parents’ basement struggling to make a living. Today Allen talks to Dan about some of the challenges he’s had which, despite the considerable success, has caused him to consider if it’s time to re-orientate what he’s doing and focus more on his new venture FlyGuy: “Spy Guy is a hard business to run. Like a lot of e-commerce businesses we've been facing supply chain problems, shipping shortages, our costs have really gone up … And I think about Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness’, he talks about poker playing, and how you could sit at a table and you might just keep losing, losing, losing against the people you're playing with. One of the best things you might do is just get up and move over to another table. You might find out that you're playing way better there. And I kind of feel like that might be the case for me”. And, later in the show, Allen gamely agrees to play our favorite fun challenge: ‘Donate A Business Idea’.

One of the biggest challenges we discuss on the show is how to take businesses over the “five figure” hurdle. Today’s guest Ayman Al-Abdullah has done that in his time as former CEO at AppSumo, and he shares his major takes on achieving that with Dan. “You're essentially crafting your rock band. What more important job than who I'm hanging out with on a daily basis and hanging in the tour van, I think the most important job of the CEO is: ‘Who is in the van?”

On today’s show, GrowthHit’s Jim Huffman talks to Dan about the pros and cons of running a successful agency, and how he’s recently been encouraging and enabling his team to create new products via an internal ‘startup studio incubator’. Interestingly, he’s done this, in part, to incentivise people, and offer a creative and rewarding work environment in this increasing competitive job market: “It’s potentially a path to allow really good team players and employees to make their own decisions and part carve their own path within a company, maybe without taking on some of that initial risk .. how can you create this hybrid that meets those people where they're like, ‘Hey, I want to work remote, I want to like do my own thing, but I'm down to have this structure’. It's like, ‘Ok, we need the agency work to get done. But we have a budget to allocate if you have a good idea and if that becomes something, then you have a significant stake in it.”

‘Side hustles’ are a long running theme on this show: those ‘weekends and evenings’ projects that many entrepreneurs have in their back pockets. Many don’t work out but when one does, it’s a great opportunity to run with something which has the possibility to evolve to the next level. But how do you decide when that tipping point is? In today’s show Ben Dowling joins Dan to describe how coding a simple API, to solve a problem he was experiencing while working as the CTO of Calm, lead him to found a Software as a Service called IPinfo, which create datasets about IP addresses: “So many projects I shipped .. felt sort of uphill pushes. And some of them had some moderate success, but it was always an effort. Whereas IPinfo, the traction was sort of straightaway .. And so I think if people are struggling with a project, ‘Hey, do I just need to keep working hard on it?’ It may be best to try something different .. I had no expectations for IPinfo .. but it very quickly sort of started going in that direction”.

Back by popular demand, Dan and Kyla Gardner blow the dust off their bookshelves, and fire up their Kindle and Audible libraries to share some of their favorite recent reads. In this episode, they’ll be talking about what sustained them through the long months of COVID containment. And Kyla also shares her experiences of writing fiction under her pen name Kyla Sharp. “There are so many people making so much money from fiction. Obviously, anyone can self publish, so it has a bad rap and there's a lot of junk out there. But sometimes you can't tell the quality difference because people hire professional editors, they get professional cover designers. They run it through their readers to make sure everything makes sense and they don't have typos. And then they self publish it and they get 70% of those royalties from Amazon instead of traditional publishing where you have to pay back your advance and you might be getting something like 5%”.