In this week’s episode of the Lifestyle Business Podcast, Ian I discuss in some detail the broad outline of a product we’ll present in a few weeks. It’s basically a “start a business this summer” mentorship product, with a full 2 weeks of in-person work and mastermind sessions in the Philippines…

Incubators seem to work well for start-ups– companies that have the potential to offer a huge return for investors. Unfortunately for my incubator dreams, I don’t know anything about start-ups.

Thanks to the McKeegan family, who run an exceptional business preparing expat tax returns, for one of the coolest housewarming gifts I’ve ever seen.

In 2011 we’ve made it a top priority to improve our network of like-minded people. That’s the reason we’ve pulled together the house, started a mastermind group (currently closed), and started organizing summits.

My last call for people join my mastermind phone call got way more response than I expected. I thought a few dudes would write me an email, I’d toss them on the call and call it a day!

Dan: confirmed in person as the real deal! I really love this reader’s attitude and approach to business and life, I wish he would start a blog! .The post came about just from someone doubting whether you can actually make a good living online… I do and here some key lessons I’ve learned while building my online business.

I’m always nervous to write these posts. As our business grows and number of people involved continues to scale, I’m simultaneously struggling to make things happen faster (why aren’t we millionaires yet!!!?) and wondering how the hell all this happened (did we really sell $250,000 worth of goods this year?!!?!) The TMBA has been an incredible highlight for me in the process of growing our business. It started with what I thought at the time was a silly idea– but quickly evolved into an opportunity to work with some truly exceptional team members.

Way back when I was fresh out of college, working at my first real job, I used to come home at night and scan the Craiglist wanted ads. I had this crazy fantasy that some jet-set entrepreneur would need an assistant to help super charge their business.

The two Tropical Sean’s and myself got together this past week to brainstorm ways to run the next semester of our program and to review the applications in detail. We read every word of every application, and let me just say– the applications were incredible.

Semester 2 of the Tropical MBA is going to be structured a little differently. That isn’t because we don’t believe in our 1st round model, in fact, Sean and I have talked seriously about doing something on it later this summer.

I’ve been SUPER busy trying to orient my actions on revenue-focused activities. Sean, Ian, and myself often use that sentence as a rubric for planning our days out. “Are these activities revenue-focused?”

I spent the day visiting an impressively ambitious internet startup here in Manila. I found myself missing my office days– a little. It was tons of fun to see office comraderie, leather couches, power lunches, killer work stations, and big LCD screens.

I got inspried (in part by Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA program) me to put aside all my work for 2 days, and put up an open letter inviting would-be digital nomads to apply to work with me for 6 months and see first hand how I run my business.

We are still alive and kicking and will be accepting applications until the last hour of November 30th.

Things get kick started December 1st. Stay tuned until then!