Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Dan Andrews co-founder of the Tropical MBA podcast and blog.
In 2009, Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen started an innovative e-commerce venture, pioneering remote work and lifestyle entrepreneurship. Through the Tropical MBA podcast and blog, they shared their journey, attracting listeners eager to build their own online businesses. This led to the formation of a tight-knit community sharing a vision for location independence.
In 2011, this community moved from online to in-person, meeting on a tropical island, laying the foundation for the Dynamite Circle—a network now boasting over a thousand members. Over the years, this community has flourished, driven by mutual support and the shared experience of navigating the entrepreneurial path. Dan Andrews' role in this movement has been crucial, not just in business, but in creating a platform for lifestyle entrepreneurs worldwide to connect and grow.
Tropical MBA Website: https://tropicalmba.com/
Dynamite Circle Website: https://dynamitecircle.com/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Dan Andrews co-founder of the Tropical MBA podcast and blog.
In 2009, Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen started an innovative e-commerce venture, pioneering remote work and lifestyle entrepreneurship. Through the Tropical MBA podcast and blog, they shared their journey, attracting listeners eager to build their own online businesses. This led to the formation of a tight-knit community sharing a vision for location independence.
In 2011, this community moved from online to in-person, meeting on a tropical island, laying the foundation for the Dynamite Circle—a network now boasting over a thousand members. Over the years, this community has flourished, driven by mutual support and the shared experience of navigating the entrepreneurial path. Dan Andrews' role in this movement has been crucial, not just in business, but in creating a platform for lifestyle entrepreneurs worldwide to connect and grow.
Tropical MBA Website: https://tropicalmba.com/
Dynamite Circle Website: https://dynamitecircle.com/
If you can generate money on the internet off of a website, you're not like your neighbors.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Dan Andrews. Now, Dan is the founder of the Tropical MBA podcast, the Dynamite Circle Business Network and Dynamite Jobs, and today we're going to be talking about the importance of community how community can help you grow your business faster, ways to use your network, how it can help you to stay sane. We're going to talk a lot about the DC, which is the network that Dan founded and I joined back in, I think, 2015, something like that.
Speaker 2:Now, before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you of how much your support means to us. We're here to make your podcast experience even better, and you can help us with just a quick favor. If you just take a moment to rate and review our podcast, you're going to give us priceless feedback that helps us shape future episodes. Has the show helped you make money? Has it helped you to grow your business or improve your courses? If it has, share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom.
Speaker 2:Slash online courses. Nothing would make me happier than to hear how this show has helped you. I have people come up to me at conferences sometimes and they say, oh, I heard your talk or I heard your podcast and I started doing this thing and I make an extra $10,000 a month. And I'm like if I hadn't bumped into you at the conference, I would never have known that. So take this opportunity and if you have implemented some of these tactics, let us know about it. We've done over 100 episodes of the show today. I'm dying to know which one was your favorite, which guest you enjoyed the most. Who'd love to hear as an X, yes on the show? So let us know in a review. Go to ratethispodcastcom slash online courses and let us know. Dan, welcome to the show man.
Speaker 1:Hey, john, thanks for having me. If I look distracted it's because I'm at rate my podcast right now and I'm like that's great, that's that's so cool. So I was just trying to figure out like the fastest way to rate the podcast.
Speaker 2:And for me.
Speaker 1:I think it's going into my podcast app and clicking five stars, yeah, but then. So I guess ratemypodcastcom is kind of like a link tree.
Speaker 2:Is that what it's like?
Speaker 1:And so then you get specific instructions on Apple iTunes podge. That's really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's easier than remembering, like going to a web some random place on your domain. Yeah, just get your instructions there. I love that Very cool. I will rate it.
Speaker 2:Start off with kind of the broad topic and I want to dive into some of the history of the DC. Can you talk us through? Why do you think community is so important?
Speaker 1:I'm trying to figure out where to even begin. I'm thinking about this topic that we've been talking about the last few weeks, about shiny object syndrome. Baracuda the concept of my cohost deemed people who love our podcast. They love opportunities, baracudas. They see shiny things in the ocean and they want to swim after it, and I think so many of us start businesses because we see opportunities everywhere and we see what other people are doing and we say, wow, that person is growing money on trees.
Speaker 1:I read about it on Facebook. They must be. I saw their YouTube channel.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to go do that. And then you start doing it and you realize maybe it's not working out as well for you as it was for them. And part of the value of community is if you have some equity with that person. You can just call them, you can just see them in person, you can jump on a call or you can fly to their city or you can go to an event where they're going to be. You can corner them and say, hey, I saw your YouTube video, what's the real thing behind that? And invariably they will share it with you. You know eight times that attended.
Speaker 1:Depending on the community context, they will actually just tell you the information that you're seeking and they're building equity with you. In return, they're saying all right, I see you, you got a good vibe, I'm going to share this piece of information with you. And then you start to build trust, and for me, the internet can be an inefficient way to exchange knowledge, and community provides a shortcut to that and helps you see at the front lines of the people who are making moves, seeing what they're doing. That's one of my favorite parts of community. A lot of other benefits too, but that was the one I was thinking about. That was the one I was thinking about this week.
Speaker 2:What got you to start it? I told you once I think we saw each other at like a DCBKK and just for context for everybody, dcbkk is one of the DCs like flagship big events. It's probably the biggest one. It's out in Bangkok once a year in October and we were hanging out in the exec lounge and I told you that I'd been listening to your podcast from the beginning again.
Speaker 1:You were like I'm sorry to hear that it's a bad life decision.
Speaker 2:And it was so fascinating to me, Like the hearing you kind of going through some of the steps that obviously happened before starting the DC. So it was you were talking to, you were getting people who were listening to podcasts emailing you, and then you were having calls with them and you were like chatting away with them Back then. Why was that such a big deal? So here's my kind of thinking on this right. So for the person listening, this is what I want to kind of hopefully get across. If you're not in some great business network where you connect with loads of other people, I want to try and get across some of what you can get out of that, whether you're joined the DC or some other group. It's like I have no shares in this, by the way, I just love the DC, so I get no benefit from this, but like I want people to try and understand why they should be doing this. Why is it going to help them with running their business? So for you, back then, why was that such a big deal?
Speaker 1:I had some early experiences of bumping into people who ran businesses that were like ours at the time and they were. They still are so unique. If you can generate money on the internet off of a website, you're not like your neighbors typically and bumping into other people who do that and, you know, are taking on the challenge. For me in the entrepreneurial space, the incredible dignity and anxiety and challenge of hey, I'm not just showing up and someone's paying me Like I got to figure that out every single day, and for me that felt like the most exciting thing in the world, but also terrifying, and so when I would bump into the rare individual who was doing the same, it felt like a treasure chest was unlocked and it became instantly obvious to me that that's what we needed. We needed to get more people in the room, and it was a terribly difficult thing to do.
Speaker 1:When I lived in San Diego, I would go to business meetups all the time, and this could be in any niche. It could be if you're searching for a new church or a new pickup basketball game. You know like you want to play with players that have the right think of the game the same way you do and maybe a little bit better than you, and some people you can teach. And and I found the same sort of principle applied in the business world is that you wanted to be around people, that you could kind of support each other because what you're doing is difficult, and that's what it felt like for me. It's like there was so many difficulties and so much excitement that I wanted to share it with other people, both the angst, the fear and the excitement of what we were embarking on.
Speaker 2:I think so for me. So I started my first business in something like 2008, something like that, and I was just anybody else on you who ran a business. I was like, oh my God, we must talk and I would talk, try and talk about business. And most of them did not want to talk about business, they just like doing their thing, you know. So I had a friend who was a builder and, you know, hired four people, four guys who came and did all the work. And I had a friend who was a hairdresser and I would just talk to her about the how she ran the hairdressing.
Speaker 2:You know the salon right and they were like they clearly weren't that fussed about it. They weren't trying to really grow the business, they just liked she just loved running a really lovely hair salon. That was it.
Speaker 2:You know she liked cutting hair and she was like I guess I have to manage some other hairdressers, because you can't just have a salon for one person kind of thing. And you know she just like liked the way it looked and nice plants and nice music and whatever. It's, just like she didn't want to talk about that. And I remember desperately trying to find some things, some other, you know some way of connecting with my people and I probably wasn't wording it quite like that and I tried out a whole bunch of different Facebook groups and I think I tried some stuff in person in London and was just like oh, this isn't it.
Speaker 2:And then one day and I think I've told you this before one day I googled is the four hour work week scam or something like that, right, because I was like it's just too hard, not as easy as Tim Ferriss said it was going to be, and I found an episode of your podcast, the tropical NBA, and it was one where it was either the one where you got Justin from Empire Flippers and maybe Joe from there as well I forget who you guys had on and you kind of went through it chapter by chapter. It was either that one or it was the Dreamline one that you guys did.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I listened to it and I thought I don't like these guys and I just like deleted that.
Speaker 1:That was gone.
Speaker 2:I was not in a great mood and about a year or two later I searched for the same thing again and I found it again and I was like yes, somehow I don't know what I'd gone through in between.
Speaker 2:But, like I was like, yes, these are my people, and I was like I have to join this. I was so excited about it. So that was 2015 when I joined and it was just like, oh my God, there's other people out there who are doing the same kind of thing as what I'm doing and this is like this is invaluable, this is so good. I need to be spending time hanging out with them. You know there wasn't a big group in London at the time, but I went out to DCBCN, the event out in Barcelona, and was just like, oh my God, this is phenomenal, like this is so good. And then so that's why I kind of started setting up the whole London chapter. So shout out, if anybody listening is in London and running their course, business, message me. I'm John at datadrivenmarketingco and maybe you can come along and hang out with us in the London group.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you guys you've built the most vibrant group sub, like the most vibrant chapter in the DC. So if you want to meet like have that experience, london's the most happen in city in the world right now for that. So you're in a great position to meet handfuls and handfuls of incredible founders hanging out in London. It's actually quite remarkable. I don't think London would be the first thing on. You know, like in America, for example, a lot of bootstrap founders move away from New York City because it's so expensive to live there. They'll just go down the train line somewhere to a little bit more affordable. Why do you think London has retained so many of the founders in the UK?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, I think a bunch of people did move away or would have moved away, but like now people are making bank. You know is a people who are running seven figure businesses and have sold seven figure businesses and doing just fine and they're like, yeah, london's baller man.
Speaker 1:You've got some money. London is a place to be.
Speaker 2:There is cool shit going on here every day of the week, totally, and so I think that's that's a part of it. You know, like eight, nine years ago this probably wouldn't have been the same thing, right? Because our whole community people in this group generally weren't making so much money back then I think part of it.
Speaker 1:You know, when I was thinking about I was in a very similar position where there's people with more traditional small businesses that I was trying to kind of nerd out with and they weren't nerding, yeah, they were making a living. And part of what the web did in those early years maybe looking back, I can see this a little bit now is, like, you know, being an entrepreneur I don't know would have been available to me like pre Internet, you know. I don't know like what that hustle would have looked like if I ever could have gotten there, because I'm not incredibly talented or incredibly motivated to the degree that business Titans are on the one hand, you know, and also wasn't particularly well positioned. I probably would have just had to go make a living. But because the web came along, it democratized entrepreneurship. There was like a shift where now, okay, it's not available to everybody, but there's a percentage of populations in these sorts of countries with these sorts of backgrounds that now you can do this, you can focus on value generation and building organizations and stuff like that, and you can do it when you're in your 20s.
Speaker 1:And that, to me, was the opportunity that we saw and sort of took it up and then looked around and it's like it was not super common, you know, and so I think, seeking out the people that took up that torch and, like you said now, it's been fascinating, because at the time it was like, okay, well, you don't want to nerd out, you don't want to nerd out. I guess I got to call some people on the internet, you know, all around the country and world who want to nerd out about the stuff, and still can only find 10 or 12 of us that I can find. And then fast forward 15 years and it's like we're balling out. We're living in London.
Speaker 1:And maybe, maybe somebody that's a generation older than me would say, well, that's how, it wasn't our generation to. You know, there's there's always those folks who kind of get to the edge of possibility and say, well, I'm not going to get a. The good, good school, good job thing seems to be breaking down to a degree. What, if you know? I looked into some Google real estate in terms of shirt search rankings, or looked into building a YouTube channel, or looked into some of these new things that you know.
Speaker 1:I remember it Only like a few years ago, very respectable business people making fun of YouTube. You know like you're gonna like make YouTube videos, Like I thought you know you're gonna be a serious person or something.
Speaker 1:And there is a little bit of that, whereas, like the, I'm imagining most people that listen to this show are, like YouTube's a great Opportunity. Well, that's still kind of a rare opinion as of just a few years ago, hmm, and so, anyway, I just think that it's. It's fascinating that a lot of us who gravitate to entrepreneurship, also we gravitate to opinions that might not be shared by the mainstream, and it makes finding a Community that normalizes and perpetuates that what line of thinking like a even greater superpower. I.
Speaker 2:Was chatting with someone the other day. I think it's Christopher Sutton. You know, Christopher, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and he was saying how he'd heard somebody I don't know on you know, instagram or whatever, saying you think starting a business is hard. Well, what's harder starting a business or doing something you hate for the rest of your life? He said. Christopher said to me I thought about that and the answer is starting a business. This is, however unpleasant that might be, this is still harder. This is still harder to do, which is, I think, one of the reasons why it's like it's so important to be around other people.
Speaker 1:I must, I have absolutely must steal that from. That is so fantastic. I've been thinking about that because we are 15 years in now.
Speaker 1:I am in my career, yeah and you know, I'm interviewing For a new position for a podcast producer right now in fact, and it's interesting to see people in the mid and late parts of their careers and you see what they've accomplished. They're writing on their resumes, on their applications, and that's what they've accomplished. You know, like there's no argument for, well, I'm gonna do more next time or whatever. It's like you had 20 years and that's what you got done. And I'm starting to see that in my entrepreneurial career too and see the difficulty in essentially producing your own retirement.
Speaker 1:Which that's an enormous challenge, like how are you gonna retire, how are you gonna make money, you know, indefinitely, until you and your family ages out. And it's such a big challenge that I do think it's easier to outsource it to, especially a world-class company. If you can get a job at, you know, a premier brand right, maybe they have a better Grip on how to retire you in terms of financially than you do yourself. And that's an enormous challenge that I didn't quite see when I was 25 and thinking, wow, the internet, you can shake it and money comes out of it, you know. So I do think that is a genuine challenge that the sort of excitement of new businesses and shiny objects Don't necessarily contend with. So, yeah, it's hard.
Speaker 2:One of the things. I've had a lot of conversations about this recently. You just gonna have to trust me, this is gonna connect back in a sec Is around how many people that run businesses online are Neuro divergent in some way? This is the new trendy term that's going around.
Speaker 2:You know, adhd, autistic, something kind of along those kind of lines yeah some way, and I was chatting with our friend eat more about this and he said, because he's Diagnosed ADHD, and which I never would have guessed but he said for some people, for starting a business, no, he said, starting a business is incredibly hard, running a business is incredibly hard, but if your Brain works that way, then having a job might be even harder, and so you kind of have to get through it with running a business because you, like I, just couldn't face going back to having a job. I was like, oh, that's a, that's an interesting one, almost like a. You're not doing this as much out of motivation, out of as much as or the other things even harder, the other things even less pleasant, sorry, even less unpleasant. It makes total sense to me what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean a lot of us end up starting businesses because we can't hold it down. A job it's not always, or the pain of the job is so extreme, for example. You know Just that you feel controlled by a boss and there's negative emotions that come from the sensation of somebody controlling you. So eventually you're like go pounds and get out of here. Now I'm gonna go start a business. And then, when the business gets some traction and you have team members showing up that now have their own ideas and they want things from you and they're bringing you problems and stuff, you start to feel controlled again and now you're back to where you started.
Speaker 2:That's not why I thought you were going with that at all.
Speaker 1:Okay, well and and the challenge is if Because it a lot of the a lot.
Speaker 1:One of the things I love to think about is how the best things about a place are often the worst things about a place, and the same with individuals and the same with our personalities.
Speaker 1:So if you're a rebel, you know and you don't like to take instructions from anybody, that can be the best thing about you, but it also can be your Achilles heel, and so a lot of what inspires people to jump into entrepreneurship, like risk-taking, for example, as a classic example, you're a risk-taker but then, as your business gets bigger, you keep taking risks and it Implodes. So one of the challenges I see for a lot of folks in our community neuro divergent, a lot of extreme personalities to people just with interesting backgrounds, weird backgrounds, just like like to take adventures, whatever. A lot of different Weirdos, I think, like the people that are want to do things that are interesting and unique. Protecting that downside as you scale, I think is an interesting psychological challenge that the thing that makes you special, the fact that you have a new idea every week Back to shiny object syndrome Could be an enormous Achilles heel when you're managing a team of 15, 20, 25 and you show up to the meeting every week and you have a new idea about how the business should run.
Speaker 1:I've tried it. It doesn't make for a happy team. They don't think it's cool, you know, like. But if you go to your entrepreneurial Hangout in London and hang out with John, check out this new idea, we're gonna have a blast, you know, but the team hates it. So another value of community is you know we were working on an event today and I was like the part of the advantage of going to this community event versus like a team retreat, is it? You get to like shed your normal team and take on a temporary board. You know, and you get to try on some fresh things that in the team environment you have to be more responsible. I think typically so anyway, another thing with the community is it can be that kind of those board members If you're trusting and you bring people in to take a look and to give you a gut check on what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things going back to what you just said about, about Having these new ideas and always turning up and the team getting sick of it I realized that I did that and I was that. You know, barracuda Heading off after the shiny new thing, and so I banned myself from ever doing of those things.
Speaker 2:I was like no, you just not allowed to. So I decided I was gonna do the whole business through my team. I was like I'm just gonna work through my team and I'm gonna coach them and support them to do everything. It worked to an extent. In terms of the whole business runs pretty much without me, right, but the Flipside, the thing I lost there was I'm really really good at Turning up and looking at something, one specific thing, one, you know whether it's the whole business or a specific part of it and being like no, we could do this better.
Speaker 2:And then being willing to throw everything out, try a new thing, throw everything out, try a new thing. Just again and again and again, until I'm like that's it, that's working, and no one is willing to do that, like employee wise, that I've found right, that's just, that's not normal. And I don't know if it's because, well, it wouldn't be willing to, because it's not their business, and like they don't have the right to do that. But I think it's more a personality thing, like I think just very few people Thinking that way act in that way, and because I decided I knew that I did that and it was the downside. I Stopped myself from doing it. But actually it's useful sometimes.
Speaker 2:And so what I started doing is I said to my team right, what thing is there? What's the bottleneck? What's the thing? What's the point in the current business? Not my crazy new idea, but like a specific thing that needs to work better. Or I'd go look in the business and I'd find something. I'd be like, all right, cool, that's what I'm gonna work on. I'm gonna try again and again, and again and again, until I find what that thing is, what the, what, the perfect, the amazing version of that thing is. And then, at that point of like, cool, now Let me go work on the next thing.
Speaker 1:I think what you're talking about is like a Such Fertile topsoil for founders like I could just hang out there and grow a garden for years in terms of what's available in the literature. There's so many ways to think about that challenge, because it's your good taste and your intensity that typically gets us into the like. If you're a course creator, it's like, hey, I've looked at all the materials and it didn't work for me and like I know what's wrong with these other courses and I'm gonna create the one, you know, and it's that taste and intensity that drives us to start businesses.
Speaker 1:Mike Michel it's talked about this recently talks about in his book called clockwork, which is a book about bridging that zone to like I'm making a living with my business, to it's on the trajectory for wealth and it's being run by a team, and he talks about walking away from the business to basically find what the kind of homeostasis of the team in terms of like quality and execution, without some founder Kind of like banging on about this and that. And I find myself doing that all the time. Right, you get angry, I do. I get angry, I get frustrated and I show up and I vent to the team about why didn't you notice that you didn't meet this standard that I have right now?
Speaker 2:In my head.
Speaker 1:And Mike's like great, that's what got you to start a business, cool, but that's not your business. Like that's you running around being a maniac in the world, mm-hmm. And so I thought that that's really interesting, and I'm kind of combining that with thoughts that so many business coaches have shared with me, which is, at the sort of seven figure mark, you have to move from player to coach, mm-hmm. And how do you coach an organization to be excellent, and how do you define excellence in a way that other people understand so that they can systematically Meet that standard? That you believe, I think, in my heart. I believe, like, because we cared about the stuff is why we exist, like you need to care now too, where else it's all gonna go away, you know, and that's a very challenging thing. I don't have any easy answers for that, but I do think hanging out there for a while is really productive territory well time that whole thing back into the community angle.
Speaker 2:I think that one of the things, one of the advantages I've got First is someone in my team who was, let's say, you know, I got team members who are way smarter than me, who are way more talented than me at what they're doing, but they aren't hanging out with all these other business owners and Seeing, oh, that's what great looks like, or that's what doing that thing really really well looks like. You know, like I've got friends who are youtubers and I'm like, oh, okay, let me go talk to them about what running a really good YouTube channel looks like. Now, let me aim towards that. Okay, I know people who are doing direct outreach, cold outreach, to try and bring clients and again, what is it? What is the best of all of that? Look like. Okay, now we've got something to kind of aim towards.
Speaker 2:So, even though I don't know how to do that thing to an excellent standard, I've got more of an idea of what excellent looks like because of being surrounded by all these people, just getting, you know, um, kind of picking some of her up by osmosis from people in terms of, like this is what this is, how well you could do this thing and we currently suck here. I can see that we suck. That hurts and it's unpleasant, and I'm not blaming you guys. You haven't done I you know done a bad job or anything like that. You've done the best that you could with my, with my Poor quality coaching, because I suck at this thing as well but I know that we could do this thing about five times better.
Speaker 2:Now let's so. It's worth us going after it now. Let's do that. You know, and I think that's a thing that community is Phenomenal for that. I don't even know how you would like. I don't know how you would package that in some other way well.
Speaker 1:I think it's fascinating topic because it's it's an enormous challenge and every founder is gonna face it as essentially, you're scaling and you can't afford world-class people to do the thing that you want to be world-class, or like niche class or, you know, delivered in the way that you want to be delivered. A lot of popular, I think you know, on this topic is about sort of Reducing your surface areas, simplifying your execution, really focusing on what battles you want to win when you're under capitalized, and your job as the founder is then to capitalize the, the company, well, so that you can essentially afford professionals that are in communities of professionals. So ideally, you know, I'm hiring a podcast producer right now, I would hire somebody from Gimlet or from the ringer and they are in a community of podcasters.
Speaker 1:They do fly to a podcast and I'm Purchasing that expertise into my company. However, to do it, I need to be well-capitalized. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah and that's the challenge for founders is, most of us can't fight that battle at that level across all functional areas of our company, and so we're cutting corners and that's our job is to, you know, get, get the most out of very little. But often I think we just take on too much and realize like that One of the things I do constantly in business that's not served me well. It's just think that we can do so much and not really.
Speaker 1:I'm always amazed when I say like, well, how much would this cost for like a quote real company to do like if you actually bought these things on the market, and then how would I make margin on that? And Often, as founders were so dynamic and like love the space and can find shortcuts all the time that we're not actually we're like basically covering costs with our effort, engine effort and ingenuity, and maybe that window won't last that long. And so I think it's an interesting exercise to kind of like back out and say, well, if you're gonna cut corners, ken, do you see a world in which this is capitalized well enough that you can bring in those experts? Yeah, or like it, does it always depend on some like arbitrage Band-aid play that won't hold up over time?
Speaker 2:Mmm, yeah, I mean, that's one of the things, right. This thing's just so hard about starting a business. So you got a skill right. Let's say, you're good at something. You can get people to pay you to do that thing. That's cool. So then you want to turn that into a business. This is, and that's how a lot of people start what they're doing, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah skill and then expand after that. Certainly that's kind of the agency model. Certain extent it's the product model as well, maybe the trash thing as well. So you then hire a team, but you can't afford to hire a team who's any good, because you're not making enough money and you somehow. So you have to get good enough great people horrible at their jobs, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like then, you have to Just brute force that enough For however many years until you get to the point where you're making enough money that you can then go Okay, we're gonna up level a little bit and up level a little bit. Some people go, right, we're gonna, we're just gonna put loads of money into this one role as your crucial, the crucial thing, like Mike McCullough X's Queen B role, I guess that kind of thing right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just be like we're gonna get that leveled up and then I'm just gonna brute force all the other ones and see, can I, can I manage to somehow, you know, get this to the point where the whole thing does run and I can hire professionals who can come in and do this at to the right standard. But it's like that's such a that bridging that gap is so difficult.
Speaker 1:It's so difficult by the numbers, like, if you just look at the numbers, like two to three percent of businesses do it or whatever, I don't know the actual, it's less than 10% of businesses Get to a. I call it the adults phase, when you can like, hire Industry professionals at market rates to perform the work. And it's still the business, still is profitable.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I think the reason for that, john, if I had to guess and having observed a lot of businesses, is that Most businesses just don't have like the fundamental Business model mm-hmm and power in the marketplace to actually do that, and so they depend on the founder doing all the things you're describing, and that's what a lot of people would deride as like a job at scale, you know, which I think is fine, right, because you're you're in a position to solve that problem. You know what I mean, if you know about it and if you continue to work at it. So, but it is a. I think the reason we're kind of hanging out here is I Found it to be like where so many of us get stuck, myself included, and it's really challenging. It's really challenging to get out of that space where you have a job at scale and you're cutting a lot of corners, you have a profitable thing going on, but it might not last for five or ten years and figuring out how to get through that event horizon. The rewards are so enormous.
Speaker 1:The two rewards that I see that are enormous are number one Bringing in the adults, like we talked about earlier, and then number two, exiting for what would be generational wealth and or like a number that would shell financial questions for a lifetime. If you can be one of the few businesses that gets through that level and pushes to say somewhere around 10 million dollars a year with a Profitable, sustainable model, I mean you don't your financial questions can be shelved at that level and I think the payoff is so huge it's worth attempting to get there. Hmm, you can also do the opposite and polarize the opposite direction and optimize for cash flow and then, if you're not spending all your money on Horrible employees who aren't, you know, solving the business model question, you can get really lean, drop cash to your personal bottom line and then put cash in the hands of professional managers.
Speaker 2:Hmm why?
Speaker 1:why put cash in the hands of some affordable person on the you know Some side part of your business that they want a career? Why not put it into you know a professional company in the stock market, for example, where they can build your cash for you and you can focus on your lifestyle and doing great for your clients in a really simple, focused way so you don't want to get stuck in the middle. I think if you're gonna like traverse into that middle space, we're starting to grow a team and things are getting expensive. I think it's incumbent on us as founders and I'm talking kind of like you know, between like 700 and 2 million and revenue like this is sort of the death zone.
Speaker 1:And it's the death zone and the reason is is because you take your salary out, yeah, and then you start to like you have all these like complicated business operations that demand people to run them and there's not much money left over at the end of the day. And how are you gonna scale to where you can get professionals, you can perpetuate the business to so you can become a coach or you know someone else can drive the business that is, you know you can't afford to both pay yourself and that person. That's why that's the death zone and so and this is like is one of these kind of like the medic things that just keeps coming up in the literature, like everybody finds it like, this is where good businesses go to die. So the good news is, if you know about the death zone, you can still have a 1.5 million dollar business. That's incredibly lean.
Speaker 1:We know friends who have them and your profit margins are excellent and you're not spending money on headcount as a means to push through without clear answers. So in fact, I'm speaking with regard. There's a great book about this topic called. I'll hold it up, since we're on YouTube this book right here. It's a. It's a fantastic and fantastic book. It's called simple numbers, straight talk, big profits and it. What it does is all the things, theoretically, that we've been talking about. It puts numbers to these concepts and and forces you to contend with the real numbers we're talking about here.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:And so if you're curious about the things we're we're sharing, this is a cool kind of case to like Make sure, as you press through the death zone, to maintain profitability and makes a strong case why that's important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've taken on recently the Profit first advice. After having heard it and not listen to it for a long time, I was like, alright, okay. So I messaged my accountant Maybe November? And I said what I want you to do from January is take 5% of the revenue.
Speaker 1:So what is profit?
Speaker 2:first ones Profit first is a very straightforward concept, which is that, instead of it being Revenue minus expenses equals profits, it's revenue minus profits equals expenses. And you take out of the business the profits from the beginning, some percentage, he said. He suggests starting with 1%, maybe it then goes up to 5 or 10 or 20, whatever the number is, and then whatever's left that's the money you've got left to figure out. How do you make the business run after? Yes, because otherwise what ends up happening is you run the business and you don't really get paid for it because you can always find something else to spend the money on. Yeah, so you take the profits out and you put that aside. And so I decided I'm gonna listen to that and I'm gonna give that a try and see.
Speaker 2:Okay, well then let's figure out how do we? What do we do with the rest of the money? So I've only done 5% for now and I haven't actually taken the profits out yet, but I'm fucking excited about it. I'm so excited. I'm like I once I used to give my team bonuses based on Certain points that they would hit, and I realized after a while I was giving them bonuses and I wasn't getting paid a bonus myself, and so I paid myself a bonus. It wasn't very, you know, not huge amounts of money, and with it I bought a Bluetooth speaker and, among some other things, right 100 pounds it's like an insignificant amount of money, right.
Speaker 2:And I love that Bluetooth speaker.
Speaker 2:I love it more because I got I paid for that with my bonus. I got that as extra. That wasn't my wages for doing the job, that's a bonus. And I'm like, oh, I feel like I might feel the same way about the profits. It's like, right, this is extra money I got for owning the business, you know, which I've never had. I've got paid the salary. I've never got paid anything else for owning the business. So I'm kind of on board with that concept. I'm gonna try that one out.
Speaker 1:Well, greg, basically, if you love profit, first Greg Crabtree's book. He pushes deeper into that and talks about why it's so important for you to both take a salary that's market rate and Consider profits beyond that. And he makes a beautiful case for why that's critical for getting through the zone of death. And he was attached to EO, a community, for a long time, and also Verne Harnes is scaling up community. So he has, like the reps of seeing all these companies you know From an anecdotal perspective because we know like there's not a lot of scientists studying this stuff he's seen this zone of death and he's saying, like the problem is and this is comes back to profit first is that Basically you're a bad capital allocator, like that's, that's the punchline. Probably the things you're spending money on in your company Aren't growing the business and you need to contend with that, that raise you gave that person.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna get more value out of it. So so you have to contend with it. Like I know, you want to give the person a raise, but also you have to contend with the brute financial fact that you've wasted money. And and that's tough when, when business feels like 25 elemental decisions on a weekly basis like well, we need to go to this conference and we need to give this person a raise and we need to pay that vendor and we need to do this, and then at the end of the day, it turns out your business isn't fee financially feasible. You know, like it's not. It's not a good business. And what are you doing?
Speaker 1:And I think for so many of us and what resonates about the, the profit first book, for so many of us we just think, well, I'm gonna get that next deal. You know there's always like that next thing, now my table set. How many times, if I had a nickel, for every time I've heard people, myself included, say Well, with the team that we've got, we can handle this much more revenue. Right, like we're all. Like the table is set for the turkey to show up and then we're gonna feast, we're gonna feast, so, but the reality is is like we were in that position six months before. But we're spend up, we spend up, we spend up, and so yeah, I think of course you have to spend to grow. The question is, how do you do it effectively? And it's a hard question answer. Hmm, I.
Speaker 2:Want to get your input on. There's a community that I've started, which is I've got a WhatsApp group for course creators, and I set this up because what I found was there's no. If you're an e-commerce, if you want an e-commerce business, there are conferences, there are communities, there are paid communities as Facebook groups. If you run a SaaS business, there's the same. If you run product businesses I'm guessing there probably are as well and for course businesses, this just doesn't seem to exist. I just I've searched and I've searched and I've not found it.
Speaker 2:There's stuff if you want to start something, then there's a guru who'll teach you how to start a course business, but if you run a successful course business, it doesn't exist. I was like, oh, this is so frustrating because I can't go to this place to go and meet all these you know successful course creators, and I was like, no, this is a fantastic opportunity, I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna start this myself. So I started and, of course, I did it as a, as a WhatsApp group, because I heard you're on the podcast talking about how obsessed.
Speaker 2:So for anybody listening, if you are doing over 20,000 a month of your course business and you want to join the what's that group, it's free. It's got like 40 people in there. They message me, john at data driven marketingco, but like how did you? How did you get when you were getting the DC started and you were like trying to get that kind of critical mass of people in there and you're like trying to attract what people in what? How did that happen? Is it just the podcast? Like what is it that?
Speaker 1:well, question for you, quick question. I'm going to answer that question, but why doesn't exist? What's your hypothesis?
Speaker 2:I think that. No, I don't know, I haven't figured that out. Why doesn't exist?
Speaker 1:because there's a lot of course creators is it? Is it that they're not as interested in, like, general entrepreneurship as like other like? Do course creators typically stick to their expertise or do they are generally interested in courses? Could it be that, or is it that? Is there a vulnerability to course creators being around other course creators like, could they steal their ideas, or something like that, or is there any kind of?
Speaker 2:There was one group that I know of right, that that does exist, which is run by DC, or Lee Richards, or language course creators, and they all have a great time they get together. There's like 20 or 30 people in this group and they get together and they discuss their businesses, and so they're sharing ideas with each other, even though they're all in language, the language course space Okay, and the people who are clients don't seem to have a problem with sharing stuff with each other. Come across that.
Speaker 1:My guess is that it would be a net benefit for them to be around each other, because with a course business the constraint seems to be distribution, not the course itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah so if you knew a bunch of other course creators, you could get Efficiency in terms of your operation because you can even share operational partners. You could, like, swap notes about how to make your course delivery more efficient, and so you win there, and then swap notes and do collabs on distribution deals. So to me it seems like course creators would benefit a ton from hanging out with each other, so it seems like a no brainer from that respect. How is the WhatsApp group doing?
Speaker 2:It's great, I mean if it's very active. Everyone is asking an, answering questions for each other. We do workshop. I get people in the group to come and do workshops for each other. I bring in external experts, like we had Adrian Savage, who's probably the Maybe, like you know, top in the world that email deliverability at the moment certainly the top one I've ever heard of I'm going to come do a workshop for the group about.
Speaker 2:you know, there's that new updates to Google and Yahoo email deliverability. So he came and talked about that and yeah, so it's, it's great, but I feel like I'm in the ideal world. It's like two, 300 people, you know, or maybe even more, something like that I don't know about as a WhatsApp group still, but like maybe yeah, because you need more people?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, the two options are, I think, to add people for free.
Speaker 2:And have some, yeah, totally free yeah, oh, it's free now okay yeah well then, yeah, getting the right people in there, that's good.
Speaker 1:So you have like low friction but high standards. Yeah that would be good. And then you have to have an event.
Speaker 2:Got an event, you gotta have an event.
Speaker 1:I think that's the only answer.
Speaker 2:Or that's why.
Speaker 1:I think that's the obvious answer. Well, because it just shortcuts so many of the complicated things you'd have to do virtually otherwise. Okay you know it's like it seems like a lot of work and you know how much work it is on the surface. But if you think about how much Happens at the event and then you would like figure out how much it would take to do all that virtually, the event starts looking like less work.
Speaker 1:For a second people in no, no, no, for I think creating the gel okay, and the magnetism of the community and helping your current members to really get a lot of value out of it. I think that's it's like a value delivery mechanism. So I think that's one of the challenges with communities is keeping people in them. You know, because the switching costs are really low.
Speaker 1:And so having people come to events gels them together. So I think that that, like seeding the group up to that critical mass, is there a campaign you can run or some kind of? Perhaps you could do like some kind of giveaway In terms of, like what you're doing with email deliverability, like that's like a really cool thing. Maybe you could create some kind of Ruckus around that that would where, like this is what you're doing and like there's a limit to it and you can get in Now if you take these following actions, you get to your first like 150 people, and then those can sort of be that done bar number that if they're gelling, then that could be the base for a productive community.
Speaker 2:Nice, alright, I've got plans for running an event. We run the one in London, gonna run one for this group. Since we get to, I think, a hundred people in the group, something like that, I'm thinking that kind of might start to be enough people to To put an event on and maybe 25 people or something. First time we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know the events like you could always just do with 15 people as well and have it be a day thing and like, have it be really light and for people that are just in Europe or just in America, depending on where you're at, and keep it a one day thing, and then that could then be Like some gravity toss you could use within the group. Hey, 15 of us got together. I think it's hard for that to go wrong, really, and it gives a good sense for you, like who the people are and yeah, that's. I think that's odd approach. I love the idea of having an event, so I'll take it that way more events.
Speaker 2:So I got one more question for you and then I want to just talk about where people can go. If they've heard enough about the DC. They're like holy shit, I need to be part of this. Everybody. When they tell them I am part of the show, everybody when they tell them I am part of this group called the DC. So what does that stand for? And I say it's for the dynamite circle. And they go why is it called that? And I've heard a story like third hand from somebody. But could you tell us why is it called the dynamite circle?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I'm trying to figure out right now whether I should Like create a fantasy.
Speaker 2:The answer isn't great, I mean because it's not a great name.
Speaker 1:I would go back to myself at that time. Be like you should think this through. The good part is that people say the DC and they say DC years, and so if you're going to start a community, one of the things you want to think about is there's like what do they call it? Not instructive, but like. There's like Value that's useful to people in a community. But then there's also an identity piece like what does it mean that I'm in John's course creator group, and I think that's something that's worth reflecting on. Like Okay, well, we're all going to kick ass and like learn better course techniques, but also we're teaching the world. Or like we're passionate about our knowledge set or something.
Speaker 1:There's something that, like it means something to be here too, and thinking about that in your brand and name, I think is a good idea. So I'm really glad that like DC and like the DC years has come about organically. But dynamite circle is Like a very quick name that was come up within a moment that we needed a name to put us all into a forum and I had a. This is the real story, so it's not exciting. At the time, I owned a company called dynamite, publishing with a brand name, and at our first meetup we all sat in a circle. That's it, shit story.
Speaker 2:I knew that was.
Speaker 1:I knew it wasn't an exciting story. I really wanted to embarrass you by I appreciate.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you going with me, but I'll tell you what the good part of the story was. We didn't think the name mattered at the time.
Speaker 1:You know that was a big part of it and I do remember sitting in this group and it's kind of back to the top of our call, which was we were all like completely gushing, like we couldn't believe. I believe there was like 19 of us, some of us, 20 of us, basically, like we talked about the event that you could host You're looking at 19 other people who had quit their jobs, who made money on the Internet and who just had this way about them that they were going to do it themselves and that they were going to share with you and that we were going to do it together and we just we left the event and we were like when's the next one? You know, we didn't even have time to rename the thing. We were busy on to figure out where we're going to meet up again. So that's, that's the origin of the dynamite circle. So, and if someone's interested and wants to, find out more about it.
Speaker 2:dynamite circle dot com. Yeah, absolutely. We'd love to have more course creators in the group.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic If you want to hear Dan.
Speaker 2:Expound on his philosophies about business In the long Podcast. If you want to hear about the dynamite circle, In the long forecast, more exciting stories. Want to hear him talk about barracudas.
Speaker 1:I'm on episode like 800. John, I just coming up with anything. At this point we're going to have something. I was checked with Mark Webster, who was a podcast about.
Speaker 2:it's like look, I talk about SEO. What do you do in SEO? You write good content and you build links. That's it. I got to talk about that somehow.
Speaker 1:every week I've got to find another angle.
Speaker 2:It's like that's it. There is nothing else that you do the game. Thanks so much for coming on today, man. I had a blast. This was really awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to come in my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Talk shit with me about everybody. Thanks, john, appreciate it.