Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

http://www.tropicalmba.com/apprentice/ One of the most frustrating parts of the entrepreneurial life script is that when you first hear about it and understand the benefits, you probably aren't ready to start a business. You know the answer is starting a business, but you aren't quite sure how to get there yet. We have long been advocates for seeking out an apprenticeship, but it's not always that easy. How do you get an apprenticeship, where do you go when you find one and what happens after you get one? Over the last couple of years, Vincent Nguyen from GrowthNinja.com has gone through all of these stages himself. I've invited him on to the show to talk about his experiences as an apprentice at Empire Flippers and how he has managed to transition from being a successful apprentice into owning his own business.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/swas/ I recently came across an article on TechCrunch that caught my attention, all about the rise of "Do-It-For-Me" businesses. Big businesses have been doing "Do-It-For-Me" for decades, but small businesses remain a relatively unconquered frontier. This is essentially about selling time to entrepreneurs, and I don't know anyone who does that better than Mat Newton from The Web Agency Podcast. He recently started what he calls a SWaS, or "Software With a Service" business called Tourism Tiger. Mat is joining us this week to talk about what the SWaS business model is and how it has changed the way that he does business.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/art/ Is it possible to build a business and monetize your art? This is a question we get asked a lot. One of our listeners got in touch with us this week and challenged us to speak about how we would apply some of our entrepreneurial principles to a career in art or music. If you are an artist of any kind, this is the episode for you. We'll be talk about what we believe it means to be an artist, how to support your art through a job or business, and how you can leverage 1,000 true fans to build a career doing what you love.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/studentloandebt/ Last week I was on vacation in Southeast Asia with my family, and we are all huge Penn State fans. I spent some of my most formative years around State College in Pennsylvania. I was thrilled when one of who listeners named Brian, who teaches at Penn State, reached out to us and asked us to answer some questions for his students at the university. In this episode Ian and I lay out a three-part plan to become a location independent out of college, talk about how why you should be looking for an apprenticeship instead of a job, and finally answer one of the questions we get asked the most: why cat furniture?

http://www.tropicalmba.com/dropshippinglife/ http://www.tropicalmba.com/dropshippinglife/ Podcast 29:33 | Download | Stitcher | iTunes | Comment This week Dan is on vacation in Asia with his family, so I’ve invited Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel onto the show to talk about what it means to be a bootstrapper and the differences between a bootstrap business and funded business. We also share our thoughts about the...

http://www.tropicalmba.com/workwithus/ Today we are gonna do a Tropical MBA first, as we've decided to record a podcast about a new job listing. If you're interested in coming to work for our team, we encourage you to listen to this episode. We're also taking this opportunity to talk about team building and the back story of the Tropical MBA. The first blog post that we ever published on this website was a job offering. We're gonna talk about what inspired that and the position that we were in when we made that decision. We're also gonna debate the value of having team members in-person versus a location-independent team and whether or not it's a good idea to support your employee's side projects.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/bizquestions/ We've received a ton of great feedback from last week's Q&A session on relationships and lifestyle. This week we've decided to reach out to our listeners for questions pertaining to business. Ian and I are gonna be talking about everything from productized services to offshore business, management philosophies and our own personal outlooks on the future of our business.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/behindthescenes/ This episode is a pretty unique one. In this week's newsletter we reached out to our listeners and encouraged them to ask us just about anything that was on their minds. It turns out an overwhelming number of people wanted to know more about our lifestyles and what goes into the creation of the show. Ian and I are going to take you Behind the Scenes on this week's episode. We'll talk about the difficulties of having relationships on the road, what it's like to live as an expatriate, and we'll even answer a few gossip questions about what we do with our time.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/gimlet/ Ian, Taylor Pearson and myself can't stop listening to Alex Blumberg's new podcast called Startup. If you haven't heard it yet, stop reading this and go listen to it. If you listen to a lot of podcasts or radio at all, you've probably heard Alex's work on shows like This American Life and Planet Money. We decided we wanted to create an episode that would serve as a companion piece to this fantastic series. The three of us are talking about how the show inspired us, what we see as the ironies in the venture capital world, the distinctions between being and artist and an entrepreneur, and what this series represents in the podcasting world.

http://www.tropicalmba.com/meaning/ In a nice bit of serendipity, I was in Singapore last week and I ran into my friend John McIntyre. John is The Autoresponder Guy, but today he didn't want to talk about email marketing or autoresponders. We got to talking about what you do when you've gotten through those first few years of running a business and you've reached a certain level of comfort. How do you choose to live once you own your own time? We'll also talk about John's experience scaling in year three of a productized service business, and what you can get out of living in Chaing Mai.