It started with an innocuous-looking image of a yellow aeroplane and ended with a number of threatening letters from a law firm on behalf of the travel site Expedia. In today’s episode, we bring you the denouement of the story of why we decided to remove ‘that plane’ from our branding. And, to find out whether we really needed to do it, we’ve invited back our good friend and Intellectual Property (IP) attorney Sarah Kornblet Waldbuesser from Destination Legal. You'll also hear Sarah's thoughts on the best way to protect your brand or logo, how to differentiate between "trademark scams" and what should be taken seriously, and a whole lot more.

On today's podcast, we're excited to finally reveal that our remote jobs platform Dynamite Jobs is officially a ".com business". After three years of running the company with a .co domain, that .com marks a huge symbolic change for our company, but it didn't come cheap. Enter Rob Barbour of DomainSOS.com and DomainVIP.com. Rob has worked in the domain space for over twenty years and he owns a substantial portfolio of his own domains. He also specializes in helping people acquire domains that are difficult to obtain. In this week's podcast, Rob joins us to talk about his history as a domain broker, how the industry has changed over 20 years, and how he helped us secure DynamiteJobs.com for our business.

If we had to pick one word as our greatest motivation, it’s ‘freedom’. Freedom to live life on our terms, where we want, with the people we choose. Ali Marsland is the director of ‘The Effective English Company’. Ali began chasing her own freedom at the age of 18, as she traveled around the world for a year before embarking on a successful career in corporate communications. The corporate world eventually made her feel trapped, and when the opportunity arose to become a freelancer, she decided to chase that freedom once more. Ali joins us on this week's podcast to describe how she ‘stair-stepped’ her way into entrepreneurship by first becoming an on-site freelancer to outsourcing work, and eventually growing her own successful agency.

At the beginning of the year, we recorded a podcast where we outlined some of our business goals and aspirations for 2020. We're now halfway through the year, and it's safe to say these past six months have been a period of disruption for entrepreneurs all over the world. Given the unexpected circumstances that we've all experienced, we thought it would be interesting to revisit those goals that we shared on this podcast back in January. In today's episode, we're looking back at how our business goals have played out thus far in 2020, how our plans have changed since we first recorded that podcast, and what we've learned from the last six months.

In 2009, we published an episode of this podcast called 10 Great Software and Tech Services We Use to Run Our Business. Over 10 years later, we've been challenged by one of our listeners to revisit that list and to talk about the core software and services that we are using to run our company today. In this week's episode, we are sharing ten of the most important tools and services that we are using behind the scenes in our business. You'll hear the specifics of how we are using these tools, and why they have become an everyday part of our business in 2020. 

We've talked about the '1,000 Day Principle' at great length on this podcast. The idea is that it takes around three years of full-time effort for an entrepreneur to replace the income from their day job. But what does that principle look like in practice?  Johnathan Solorzano is the founder of Solo Media Group Inc., a remote agency of web developers that are primarily based in Latin America. Johnathan joins us this week to share the story of his first 1,000 days running an agency, how he has found clients and fostered relationships with them, and where he plans on focusing his energy for the next 1,000 days.

Here at the TropicalMBA podcast we have been inspired and motivated by the stories of resilience and adaptation that you’ve been sending us. One such story that we received recently resonated strongly with us, in part because it was about an industry that we have been working in for years. William Griggs created Virtual Reality Rental just over four years ago. He built a ten-person team that brought VR experiences to conferences, parties, and other corporate events across the United States. Then COVID-19 struck and it all collapsed literally overnight, forcing him to reduce his staff by more than half. William joins us today to share his strategy for waiting out the current uncertainty in the events industry, and how he's challenging his remaining team to grow into the new roles that are necessary for these times.

What do you do when you lose over half your Annual Recurring Revenue and test positive for Coronavirus, all within 48 hours? Jim Huffman described this exact experience in a post on his personal blog titled "The Hardest Day of My Career". Jim is the CEO of GrowthHit and co-creator of FunnelTeardowns, and when we discovered his blog post we knew we had to talk to him. Jim joins us on today's podcast to share his insights on how to create a successful marketing agency that aligns with your lifestyle, the strategies he deployed to save his company after facing such a dramatic event, and his plans for the future in the 'new normal'.

"Dropshipping" is one of the most used and abused terms in Digital Nomad circles. It refers to the practice of selling items without keeping inventory on hand, relying instead on a third-party manufacturer to ship the items directly to the customer. The term recently reached a much broader audience through a widely-shared piece in Wired magazine by Sirin Kale titled “‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping”. On today's podcast, Dan and Ian weigh in with some of their own thoughts about the article, whether dropshipping can be used to create long-term success, and the pros and cons of the business model itself.

In our book Before the Exit, we reflected on many 'thought experiments' that we wished we had run before we sold our business in 2015. One of those experiments was called 'The Mediocre CEO Test', which questioned whether it was smarter to hire someone to run your business than it was to sell it. Today's guest did just that. JP Ji is the founder of Pro Teeth Guard, an eCommerce business that manufactures custom dental mouth guards. When JP decided to shift his focus away from Pro Teeth Guard, he chose to hire a General Manager to take over the day-day-day operations of the business. In today's podcast, you'll hear why JP decided to hire a general manager, the challenges of finding the right candidate, and why that relationship ultimately didn't pan out.