Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

Today's guest has been massively influential on Dan and Ian from the very start of their journey. Seth Godin is something of a legend in entrepreneurial circles, and he hardly needs an introduction. His books about marketing, creativity, building companies and personal development include Purple Cow, Meatball Sundae, The Dip, and Linchpin. They are frequent recommendations on this podcast and have...

“This is an exciting podcast about traveling to tropical islands. And we're talking about employee scorecards. Why?” On this week’s show Dan and Ian share why they’ve introduced employee scorecards to their business, and how they’re helping establish more accountability, creativity and legibility in many different ways. They discuss the practicalities and principles of scorecards, the reasons they...

As Dan recently reflected in the annual TMBA review, he and the Bossman saw their business almost double its revenue last year. On this week’s show Dan and Ian reflect on some simple principles or strategies that might help them and other business owners achieve the same in 2023. Now, as this is the TMBA podcast, they have to come in 5’s. Dems Da Rules. They include niching down to blow up, why pl...

As Dan prepares to leave Barcelona after a month-long stay, this week’s show is all about being able to take time away from your business. Because that is, after all, one of the reasons many listeners to this show are creating lifestyle businesses - whether it’s for parental leave, to pursue a sport or hobby, or perhaps some very necessary mental health wellness. Both Sam Floy, founder of Cofruiti...

Agencies: creating them, the opportunities they offer, and some of the issues running them can create has been a long running theme on this show. Today Dan talks with Matt Gartland who ran a successful creative agency for eight years before partnering with one of his then clients, Pat Flynn, and eventually becoming CEO of Smart Passive Income (SPI). Matt discusses how he’s helping SPI develop furt...

Business processes and systems have been an emerging theme on this show recently, and today Dan reflects on why, and where they fit into the entrepreneurial journey. This often starts with personal growth through things like maximizing your health, reading, making connections, and maybe therapy. The second stage of advancing small businesses is frequently through different sorts of coaching. But,...

Happy 2023 to all our listeners. The focus of this show has always been freedom, whatever that means to you. This pod is a judgement-free zone. It might be freedom to travel, to spend more time with family and friends, to work in a certain way, or with certain values, to give back to your community, or to support loved ones. Or just not to have a traditional J-O-B. Today’s guest Davis Nguyen initi...

2022 has been the year that we all got on the road again. Dan and Ian spent the summer in Barcelona, Spain and hundreds of members of the Dynamite Circle met up to forge new friendships and partnerships, socialize, swap stories and strategies, and a whole lot more. Through it all, we have been fortunate to talk to some incredibly captivating entrepreneurs on this podcast. In today’s episode, we ar...

As 2022 draws to a close Dan and Ian are in a reflective mood. In this week’s show they ponder the ‘lifestyle business take’ on ‘The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman’ and come up with an alternative interpretation involving YouTube. They also discuss some the positives and negatives of their own business year including the results of their ambition to scale Dynamite Jobs, the power of reconnecting...

On this week’s show Dan and Ian respond to some listener comments and questions including non-competes and potential conflicts of interest with your current employer when you’re thinking of starting an entrepreneurial side-hustle: “You’ve got to understand that, hey, there's three lawyers sitting in that office down there. If I take this vulnerable idea to them they're gonna say, ‘No’. I am not go...

On a recent show Dan and Ian touched on ‘the lifestyle ladder’, and what different levels of personal wealth can mean in your life. Following that they received an interesting email from today’s guest Matt Paulson who today shares why he’s found that achieving substantial personal wealth raises fundamental questions about how you want to spend that money, especially in relation to assessing invest...

When Johnathan Solorzano, founder of Solo Media Group, joined us on the podcast just over two years ago his agency focused on broad ‘white label work’, which he aptly described as ‘doing all the work and then someone else passes it off as their own’. Today, through what he learnt from doing that, he’s niched Solo Media to focus entirely on Shopify clients. Jonathan talks to Dan about how this evol...

Some call it ‘revenge travel’, others just call it ‘getting back to normal’ but people in the location independent community are, for sure, hitting the road again. In this week’s show, Dan and Ian look at what factors feed into creating ‘digital nomad hotspots’, and the possible new emerging cities suggested by listeners of this podcast, and members of the ‘Dynamite Circle’. They also discuss how...

It’s been three long years since DC members were able to gather in Bangkok to share great food, experiences and talk business. And DCBKK2022, our ten year anniversary event, with almost 400 attendees, was not only our biggest event but also such a blast. So this week Dan, Ian and Jeff Pecaro get together to talk about not only the highlights of DCBKK20220 - one of which was definitely a 100 strong...

There are big changes in the wind at Twitter, with Elon Musk suggesting he might further open the platform to longer form pieces, and also paid content. Might this open up greater opportunities for those with established blogs, or looking to start one? On today’s show we revisit a favorite episode from our back catalogue focused on personal blogging and what it means to write on the internet. And...

When Jesse Schoberg, Co-founder of DropIn Blog, shared his thoughts about the huge benefits of living in Bangkok with CNBC, as part of their ‘Make It’ series, he had no idea it would go viral - both inside Thailand and abroad. The piece, titled ‘I live better in Thailand than I did in the U.S. — here’s how much it costs’ received lots of appreciation but also a stream of more negative comments fro...

Side-Hustles, which - with a lot of hard work - evolve into full-time businesses are a theme of many entrepreneurial journeys. We’ve covered a fair few on this show. But Brenden Marquardt’s story is particularly interesting for a few reasons: even though he was in a well-paid finance job, and knew he wasn’t great at ‘ideas’, he did the groundwork to be ready for when the opportunity he was looking...

It started as a hobby at college, and was also the way he met his wife but now ‘Dumpster Diving’ has become a major business opportunity for Dave Sheffield, Founder of Buffalo Bottle Craft. In today’s show Dave talks to Dan about how a Vice documentary, currently watched by nearly 1.5M people, and subsequent media interest has made him consider the many different ways a ‘Dumpster Diving’ enterpris...

This week Dan is speaking to Andy Morgan, creator of RippedBody, a blog and coaching program targeted at committed but frustrated fitness trainees who have hit a stall in their progress. What’s interesting about Andy’s story is the way he’s found a niche not only in the fitness space but also in the market in Japan. Andy discusses why he only does bi-weekly email check-in with his clients, how a D...

In this week’s show Dan and Ian share their Q4 business updates, including the reasons why they have decided to launch an agency - Remote First Recruiting, which is targeted at startup founders, under the Dynamite Jobs umbrella. “The best customers of a job board typically have super strong hiring practices that are built over the years … (they’ve) hired for the same position multiple times. Where...

Books: seeking out good ones, talking about them, and implementing some of the things we discover in their pages has long been a theme of this show. However, as longtime listeners will know, Dan is often disappointed by one category in particular: business books. But one he read recently, ‘Working Backwards’ by former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, really blew him away. And he was th...

The summer of cycling and tapas in Barcelona, Spain has come to an end. Dan and Ian are back in Austin, Texas inspired by the conversations and feedback they’ve had over the past few weeks as listeners and friends have dropped by one of our favorite European cities. One of those people is someone we’ve had on the pod before, telling the early part of his story. So much has happened in his life tha...

Today’s show started, as so many of them do, as an in-person conversation in a dark bar in a cool city. That’s where Dan met Brent Zahradnik, founder of Amazon PPC agency AMZ Pathfinder. Now ‘the agency model’ is a recurring theme on this show because they can be spun up in a weekend, are often very profitable, and they can provide side income to what you’re already doing in a business. But done p...

The ‘Stair Step’ approach to entrepreneurship is a recurring theme on the TMBA. Coined of course by Startups For The Rest Of Us host Rob Walling. Essentially, it describes how you can build up your business chops by for example, starting a freelance business, then parlaying some of those clients into running an agency and then maybe Software as a Service, and so on. But honestly, you can apply a s...

What began as a window cleaning service he started at college has now spun into a multi-million business for today’s guest Johnny Robinson. In January 2022 he co-founded Home Services Academy, a 90 day program and ongoing community which coaches others to reach five figures MRR by either starting their own cleaning business, or making an existing one more profitable. Johnny talks to Dan about thei...