Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

We've shared a lot of stories on this podcast from entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses, but one strategy we've increasingly seen to accelerate the path to wealth is to purchase a business that already exists and to leverage debt to do so. Today's guest is an expert at that. Shakil Prasla has been acquiring businesses through his company SZ Ventures for nearly a decade. He started with a loan from the Small Business Administration and now has a team of roughly 80 people who are managing niche eCommerce companies. They are selling anything from high-end business cards to their most recent acquisition, Gloves.com. In today's podcast, Shakil shares the story of how he purchased his first business, how he has grown to where he is now, strategies for taking advantage of Small Business Administration loans, and much more.

Today's episode is all about creating content, in particular, how to create written content that people actually want to read. David Perell is the co-founder of an online writing school called Write of Passage, and he is an expert at teaching people how to cultivate ideas and distill them into writing. He's also an extremely savvy marketer, with tons of important insights into the future of social media and internet marketing. David joins us on today's podcast to share specific writing strategies that have worked for him, what it really takes to grow a Twitter account that has the potential to change your business, and a whole lot more.

This week's podcast is a little bit out of the ordinary. While we have been busier than ever this month over at Dynamite Jobs, we still can't help but find things on the internet to get worked up about. We thought it would be fun to take a look at five specific news items and ideas that have recently come across our desk that we just can't stop thinking about. These topics range from how to deal with FOMO, why it's important to get powerbrokers involved in your business, the "muddy middle" of freelancing, and so much more. We hope that these five topics can help inspire you to make the next great move in your location-independent business.

Welcome back to another episode in our long-running series The Re-Readables, where we revisit some of our favorite business books to find out if they stand the test of time. How to Get Rich was written in 2009 by author and entrepreneur Felix Dennis. Felix was the founder of Maxim magazine, and he aimed to create a book about getting rich from "someone who didn't need to write it". The result is incredibly funny, direct, and thought-provoking. Joining us this week is our good friend Coran Woodmass of TheFBABroker.com, who has just read the book for the very first time and is eager to share his thoughts. We'll be discussing the finer points of How to Get Rich, what we believe has aged the best and what has aged the worst, some of our favorite quotes, and much more.

This week's episode features insider knowledge on the processes behind hiring and recruiting remote talent from someone who has been deeply involved in the industry for over a decade. Greg is the Senior Recruiter at Dynamite Jobs, as well as one of The Bossman's closest friends. Avid listeners might remember his name from the "ferret story" that we've shared on this podcast in the past. (We'll touch on it again in this episode as well) His addition to our team has been pivotal as we've been developing our flat-rate done-for-you recruitment services. Greg joins us on the podcast this week to talk about his history in the job recruitment industry, how and where he finds the best candidates for jobs, which skills are in the hottest demand right now, and so much more.

This week's episode is another installment of "The Re-Readables", a series in which we revisit some of our favorite business books to find out if they stand the test of time. Greg Gerber has become something of a regular contributor here on the Podcast. Greg is the founder of BitLift, and he is our go-to guy for all things blockchain and cryptocurrency. Greg joins us this week to talk about a book that has become eerily prescient, particularly among the cryptocurrency crowd. The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg was published back in 1997, but the insights and topics in the book were not only far ahead of their time, but they remain eerily relevant today. In today's podcast, you'll hear our thoughts on why this book is still so important, why it's important for entrepreneurs to be able to see into the future, and how we can consider the ideas within The Sovereign Individual when attempting to look to the future ourselves.

We've been seeing some truly explosive growth at Dynamite Jobs since the start of 2021, and we've been helping more businesses than ever find great remote talent for their teams. When our friend Brendan Tully reached out to us on Twitter recently with some suggestions on how we could help candidates find better jobs, we knew we had to talk to him. Brendan is the CEO and founder of Robotmedia, which helps small businesses get more traffic and better conversions. He has been doing quite a bit of hiring recently, and he has developed some strong opinions about the hiring process, particularly in how we can better educate job prospects who are applying for remote positions. Brendan joins us today to talk about what he looks for when browsing candidate resumes, what a great resume looks like, and what he believes that candidates can do to have a better chance of getting a great remote job.

What if your knowledge as an entrepreneur could benefit you as an investor? We've talked about cryptocurrency and unorthodox investments in the past on this show, but the traditional financial system is still something of a mystery to a lot of entrepreneurs. Enter Simon Stock. Simon is a longtime friend of ours, who cut his teeth as an entrepreneur running eCommerce businesses. These days, Simon is a full-time investor, and his approach to the stock market is not unlike the way that many of us have run our own businesses. Simon joins us this week to talk about what entrepreneurs can stand to gain from investing in the stock market, what investment strategies have worked for him in the past, and how our entrepreneurial skillset can help us when investing in the traditional financial system. Disclaimer: The ideas discussed in this podcast are for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered financial advice.

Our good friend Noah Kagan recently published a video that caught our attention. Noah is the founder of AppSumo.com, and his YouTube channel has been one of our favorite destinations as of late for thoughtful content about entrepreneurship and creating wealth. That video was called 10 Surprising Things About My Richest Friends, and in it, Noah outlined some specific habits that he has seen time and time again among the wealthiest people in his social circle. We were so enthralled by some of the unorthodox ideas that he presented in that list, that we knew we had to talk to Noah to dig a bit deeper into what he had learned. In today's episode, Noah joins us to discuss the types of habits that the super-wealthy have cultivated, how people become wealthy in the first place, and what we can do to emulate some of these behaviors ourselves.

We always love receiving thoughtful questions from Tropical MBA listeners around the world. A few weeks ago, a winter storm in Texas forced us to re-run one of our favorite episodes of this show called 7 Things to Consider When Selling Your Business, in which Dan and Ian describe the process of selling their eCommerce business back in 2015. Our decision to revisit that particular story elicited a ton of responses from those of you who had never heard it before, and from those who were listening to it with a fresh perspective nearly five years later. This week we are responding to several listener questions about that story, discussing our feelings on the exit nearly five years later, addressing how long it really takes to "fire yourself" from your business, and a whole lot more.