Question: why spend over $5000 for five days in a beach resort on the other side of the world? Answer: business is all about people and at Tropical Think Tank you’ll meet some of the best business people.
Conferences and meet-ups are great but you can,t speak to people for a decent amount of time. Tropical Think Tank is a “boutique” event in a resort in the Philippines for five days with around 50 attendees and 10 speakers. You could dig deeper into business and relationships.
The speakers included well-known entrepreneurs in the content marketing space such at John Lee Dumas, Chris Ducker, Darren Rowse and Lewis Howes.
However, the attendees were even more interesting: people who had $5k to spend going halfway around the world on a just few days networking will be committed to their businesses.
People have asked me how it was, who I met and, most importantly, what I learned”¦
What was it like?
It was a great experience. As an introverted wallflower, going to a conference like this put me outside my comfort zone at times. However, the other attendees put me at ease.
Did somebody say “group hug”?
There was something special about this group of people. There are some things in life you can,t fake, and I felt that they were trying to help others as much as they were trying to help their businesses.
The format was talks in the morning and masterminding in the afternoon. I think there wasn,t enough time for the masterminding. At Chris Ducker,s one-day masterminds (and I,ve been to two) you get around 40 minutes discussion on your business when you,re in the hot seat. At TTT we only had only 10 minutes on anyone’s business at any one time.
What did I go there for?
Other than the networking and the talks, I went there for the masterminding. This is a great cure for my “entrepreneurial loneliness” and my tendency of working in my business with blinkers on and not spending enough time thinking on my business strategically.
What’s my biggest business problem? Selling products on my own site.
I,m very conscious that about 60% of my passive income is coming from one platform – Udemy. I,m happy that I,m getting $5-7k a month coming in passively from various platforms around the web but not so happy about my membership site failures.
What I learned from Dan Norris
“You don,t know your audience well enough”, Dan told me. I must admit, considering that I,d only earned $3-4k on a launch I,d worked very hard on and had some idea that this might be the case, I was somewhat taken aback by this blunt but apt assessment.
I resolved to do four free 15 minute Skype calls a week with anyone who,d want to pick my brains. I have added this free consulting offer to my main auto-responder. If anyone’s interested get in touch.
What I learned from John Lee Dumas
This was further expounded by “Mr Entrepreneur On Fire”, John Lee Dumas. He regularly did free Skype sessions and found out what his followers wanted as well as the language they were using. This language goes directly onto the sales pages.
Another word of advice from Jon Lee Dumas was unequivocal: “do one webinar a month!”
I know people are going to say, “you spent $5k to go half way round the world to hear Mr WebinarOnFire guy to suggest you do webinars?!” But I was impressed with John Lee Dumas,s thoughts on many subjects, and there,s something about the way he said that webinars opened up another level to his business.
What I learned from James Schramko
James Schramko was the unofficial star of the event. Everybody had a good word to say about his talk, his masterminds or his contrarian advice. His philosophy to “question everything” and to “be ruthless with your time but gracious with people” really struck home with a number of us.
Schramko is the king of recurring monthly revenue. I remember somebody asking him if they should do one-off payment as well as recurring monthly payments on their membership site and he said “either recurring or not recurring; you can,t be a little bit pregnant”.
He prompted me to think about offering a high priced product. Maybe $399 for access to courses with two 40 minute Skype chats separated by a month. Maybe $999 for website set up and content coaching.
What I learned from Darren Rowse
I resisted behaving like a teenage groupie when I met Darren (OK, I didn’t) and I got a lot of value from him. One important bit of advice I got (from Amy Schmittauer as well) was to create a timetable for your content creation.
Just look at his week! Writing, creating, social, exercise, thinking, production – everything has its set time. If you want to put out content regularly – and you must – you have to do this.
I learned a lot more from Darren. But too much to go into here.
I learned a lot more about myself, as well …
“Monthly income envy” syndrome
Before the conference I was pretty happy with myself. My company was averaging $7500+ a month passive income profits, mostly from the sales of e-books and video courses on various platforms.
After the conference, having met so many amazing entrepreneurs (the attendees more than the speakers!), I developed a bit of a sad male ego feeling of “monthly income envy”.
Money is a funny thing. We use it as a metric to evaluate our business,s performance, and yet, it is an insignificant metric when evaluating our happiness or value as human beings.
Would I be happier if I was making over $25k passive income profit a month? I,d have a greater sense of achievement maybe, but would that make the world a better place? No!
What I’d do
I also was thinking about how I would do a similar event in Thailand.
I would like to do an event where there wasn,t a difference between “speakers” and “attendees” – there were just “attendees” – and more masterminding and less speaking. This is in no way a criticism of Chris Ducker and the team at TTT.
“Monthly income envy” is a bad thing. But wanting your business to move forward isn’t. That’s why I’m glad I went to Tropical Think Tank. Even though it made me feel hopelessly inadequate at times, I came away with a thousand great ideas to implement.
What would you do?
Would you go to an event like this?
Would you put on an event or a conference?
Would you be interested in a conference or a retreat in Thailand hosted by yours truly?
Let me know in the comments.
Photos: Chris Ducker
Nice write up Rob.
I’m learning more and more, being around the right people truly motivates you to go harder. Your talk in London @ the 4 hour work week meetup definitely was inspiration for me.
And regarding the questions at the end, would I be interested in a Thailand retreat hosted by you? Absolutely. I first want to move my business out of its embryonic stage first,
Cheers
Amit
Hey, Amit, I’m glad you liked it and I’m so glad you like my talk at the 4HWW meetup in London – feels like a long time ago for some reason but it was only a year ago.
I’m sure you will get your business out of its “embryonic” stage very soon, if you haven’t already. Thanks for the kind words. 🙂
Hi Rob, great article thanks!
I have had revenue envy in the past, and was always thinking about ‘how could I make more’.
It took me a while to realize that no matter ‘how much more’ I made – I wasn’t getting any happier.
TTT transformed me with the realization that I ‘can’ be happier by ‘making more’ if I do awesome stuff with the ‘more money’. And by awesome I mean helping awesome organisations like kiva.org ‘do more’. By using my expertise and help other businesses that ‘do good’ to do ‘more good’.
Hopefully I can amplify my impact on ‘doing good’ – for example, if I can help 100 businesses that ‘do good’, say helping people live healthier lives, and they help 100 folks, I’ve just helped 10,000 folks get healthier.
We will also be donating $1 of our resources to volunteer run non profits, for every $1 of revenue we generate..
And finally, I also want to inspire others to ‘do good’, or ‘do more good’. I’m going to launch a podcast highlighting businesses that ‘do good’ and I am going to produce a monthly Inspiration Report – showing our revenue, our donations, and our impact.
I’d love to attend your event in Thailand. 🙂
Cheers
Gary
Thank you, Gary, you’ve brought us back to the most important point of all: I have to feel as though I’m helping people in some way with my business otherwise I’ll get demotivated. I’ve made this point elsewhere. If your goals in life are centered around helping others and not just yourself then they are 10x easier to work on and achieve.
I’m totally with your ambition. Well done for finding it! It was a pleasure to meet you and a great pleasure to see you smiling when you told me that you’d just discovered what you will be doing with your business for the next few years.
Wow, I never knew about Kiva.org – I love that website! Thank you.
Let’s stay in touch.
Hi Rob –
A retreat of peers was what WDS aka World Domination Summit started off as. We did something similar with a national dance event. Both grew beyond the original intent of intimate exchanges between like-minded folks.
So, I’d caution against getting too big (I know, that seems more like a problem you’d like to have right now!) But it’s true that bigger isn’t necessarily better, as a comment you made alluded to this. There are, of course, ways to balance experience quality and your own needs / goals.
Hey John, it’s great to hear from you and welcome to the site. Thank you for your interesting comment. Yes, I completely agree that bigger is not necessarily better. I would like my business to be better, to help more people (and maybe for me to work a bit less doing it!) and I wouldn’t like to put on a big event (I would like to start with small intimate gatherings at first).
I’m rambling, excuse me. But, yes, it’s all about quality. Again, thank you.
No worries, Rob – it’s just funny because I’ve had the same idea for some time.. not just a “networking” or a rah-rah type event but a real business / life-changing event.
More than just sharing knowledge but connecting with ourselves and each other on a deeper level.
I think a few people would like an event like that. 🙂
Can’t you do that conference in Poland? 😉
I travel to Prague this weekend to a meetup (for the first time in the real world) with a few guys who run online businesses. I’ll spent about 10% of my monthly income and travel 18 hours by train just for that. “Entrepreneurial loneliness†and “blinkers on” are very real dangers.
I think the money and time spent travelling to Prague will be well spent, Michal. We can learn so much from meeting people in person that do the same sort of thing as us.
You could start your own MeetUp.com group on Poland – I don’t know if you live in a big city or a small town but you should be able to find entrepreneurs almost anywhere! 🙂 Hope you have a good time 🙂
Great to see this follow up. Sounds like it was a great experience. I really enjoy hearing of your experiences.
I feel a imposter on this post. I would not attend a meeting like this. Having escaped a job that focussed on attending and running workshop I am enjoying the isolation. I’ve needed it to start finding my own focus. Also these are big serious content marketeers. so I probably would not relate to them.
I think you would be great doing your own event. I get the impression your audience is made up of many who don’t want to have high income bragging rights, but want to be free to do valuable work we love.. I wonder what percentage of your audience are still WordPress designers who flirt with the idea of doing a bit of passive income (that me really)
Maybe you won’t attend an event like TTT but you did come to my short-lived meetups in London a couple of times!
Interesting to hear you’re enjoying isolation at the moment. It may be that you’ll need a bit of interaction at some later stage.
Who are my audience? Well, there’s a question. Based on the people I’ve met both online and offline through my blog there are a mixed bunch. Yes, some of them are from a graphic and web design background who’re “flirting” with the idea of passive income. That’s probably the biggest sub-group but really they include allsorts! 🙂
Rob, you are right – the isolation phase will wear thin, To be honest when I bumped in to an ex-pat Brit on line recently who worked like me we were on Skype for hours on end. I might just be a tight fisted old bugger.
I certainly will be interested in what you put together – if you go for it. Incidentally this is coming to you from Chiang Mai. Loving it already!
David, Chiang Mai is the perfect place to meet like-minded people. You don’t even have to do Skype. Try Coffee Monster or the FB groups. You probably are already 🙂
Hello Rob.
Thanks for letting us know about your TTT. Good stuff. It seems like a lot was learned for such a short event. I think it was nice to see so many of the bloggers I follow there with you (Darren Rowe, John Lee Dumas, Chris Ducker, and Shane & Jocelyn Sams). Very nice to see some of blogging friends. I’m not sure if I would be interested in such an event, but I do like the idea of hanging out with you for a few hours over dinner and a few beers talking about business. I also like the Skype calling idea. I have been looking over your web site and now that I am working on my web site (quickeasycharts.com), which is still not ready yet, I see your web site differently. I am beginning to see your web design and the choices that you have made for your site in a whole new way. I am here for the content, and that’s is why I buy your books and your courses. It’s all about the content. But now, I am looking at your web design, and your web design courses have so much more meaning to me. Like you, I will be buying and using Genesis, and I am thinking about the Magazine theme because I heard you can use that theme when you need to work with a lot of pictures. I know I will be using a lot of pictures because my site will be about teaching people to create charts quickly and easily, with just a few clicks. I still have a lot to learn, and I heard that you will learn by doing, so I am on my way. I will reveal my site to the world soon, later this year. I have a lot to learn about SEO and copy writing. I need to think about content, freebies and premium products, but first I must continue working on my first few posts and my first electronic product. Thanks so much for all your content, here on your site and in your courses and ebooks. I find them all very valuable.
All the best my friend. I wish you more happiness, more money and more free time to enjoy life. LOL.
I like nothing more than a few beers and talking about business.
With the website, Rene, you just need to launch it and create content. Design is of secondary importance and remember I was a graphic designer once (still am, sort of). As you say, “it’s all about the content”. It certainly is. Think about content first of all – freebies, premium products and design will all come later.
All the best and thank you for your comment.
make sure that $999 coaching program is MONTHLY Rob!
Wow, OK. Thank you, James! 🙂
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