Tropical MBA – Location Independent Entrepreneurship

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.

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.

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?

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 drop-shipping model and where we see that headed in the next few years, and we discuss the community that Andrew's building over at eCommerceFuel, where he has been helping entrepreneurs build online eCommerce stores. Listen to this week's show and learn: When you should be getting venture capital and when you should be bootstrapping. How Andrew started his first eCommerce business. How and why Andrew reinvested about $50,000 back into his business. The drawbacks and benefits of drop-shipping as a business model. Why Andrew decided to start his own online community. What we have learned from running communities of our own. People on this episode: Ian Andrew Mentioned in the episode: The Dynamite Circle Call us at 888-554-8428 TropicalMBA Listeners Our 10 Episode Series on Productized Services eCommerceFuel Right Channel Radios LeadPages WP Engine Crutchfield Vanilla Forums Discourse Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes. Listen on Stitcher Radio. Android users can grab our RSS feed here. Right-click and "save file as" for direct download. Or click here to get sent to the top of the page where the on-site player is. Thanks for listening to our show! We'll be back next Thursday morning 8AM EST. Cheers, Dan & Ian  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not all of us came out of the womb wanting to start a business. Some of us were attracted to the personal agency and the freedom of being an entrepreneur. This week's guests all have a few things in common. They all had this similar dream of the freedom that comes from quitting their jobs and starting their own businesses, and all three of them have chosen Spain as their home for that journey this summer. Barcelona has recently become kind of a hotbed for the entrepreneurial community. I reached out to Chris Reynolds, Cristina Ansbjerg and Robert Brandl to get some insider info about what it's like to live in the city and why they have all fallen in love with it.

This weekend Ian and I shared the room with 30 high-net worth individuals. We held our first ever wealth event for some of the most successful listeners of this podcast. It's not very often that you get to hang out with so many interesting and successful people in one weekend, so we've decided share some of the lessons that we learned from that event on this week's show. We'll be talking about how we got the idea for this event, why this is my favorite event I have ever attended, and the nine things that surprised us the most coming out of this conference.

A few weeks ago we did a show called "An Episode For Those Who Need a Business Idea". We got so much great feedback from that episode, and looking back at it, we realized it has become part of a series that we have developed about productized services. This episode is the natural progression of that series. The first person that I thought of when I wanted to continue that discussion was Tristan King from ShopifyNinjas.com. Tristan has a lot of thoughts on how you can build productized marketing services and scale them. He will also be sharing his view and advice for getting started from somebody in their third year of a productized services business, and a few of his business ideas that he believes could be winners for the TropicalMBA listeners looking to start a business.

I love books. I love to read and I know that many of you do too. This week we're going to have a simple, fun episode where we talk about our favorite books. I will be sharing five books that I think people might enjoy reading for inspiration or pleasure and our good friend Taylor Pearson will be sharing five timeless business books that he believes are worth reading more than once. If you are looking for new stuff to read, this is the episode for you.

In April 2013, Ian and I cut a deal with Jesse Lawler to found ValetUp.com. Nearly two years later we find ourselves on the other side of the looking glass wondering what went wrong. In today's episode, we're going to talk about what we learned from that experience, how we failed, and what we are going to do about it in the future. We're also going to hear from Jesse about his new project, PodcastPop, and how it is going to benefit podcasters who are looking to build a more organic connection with their audience.

Today's episode is all about facilitating high level masterminds, and nobody does it better than Taylor Pearson. It can be hard to figure out what it takes to succeed. Masterminds put you in a position to surround yourself with people who have common goals and will not allow you to fail. This is old school block-and-tackle business strategy. We're talking about what is important to consider when structuring a mastermind, success stories from the groups that Taylor has spearheaded and some of the most useful tools for organizing an effective mastermind group.