Selling a Business, How to Invest & Building Community — A Discussion with Ian Schoen

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Wondering what it's like to sell your business? Or how much you can actually make through passive investments? Both are more complex than you might think, and it pays to hear from someone who knows both. Ian Schoen of TropicalMBA.com and the Dynamite Circle answers questions about recently selling his own small business, the idea that passive investments can build substantial wealth, and building entrepreneurship communities. Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Ian Schoen of TropicalMBA.com) Andrew: Hey guys, Andrew here, and welcome to the eCommerce Fuel Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. Today on the show, I’m joined by Ian Schoen from the TropicalMBA blog and podcast. He’s also one of the men behind the Dynamite Circle, which is a private community for location-independent entrepreneurs. I really always enjoy talking with Ian, and our conversation today covers a lot of different topics. We talk about his recent business sale, we talk about how to invest money. Both of those topics are a couple of episodes that I really enjoyed from his podcast recently, and we can get into those. And then finally, we talk about running private communities. We both run private communities for entrepreneurs and talk about some of the challenges, some of the things we really enjoy, get a little bit inside baseball on that. It’s not eCommerce specific per se, but if you're in the community or it’s something you’re interested in, hopefully it’s something that you enjoy. Ian, you and your partner Dan recently sold the business, congratulations sir! Ian: Thank you. Yeah. Andrew: Are you sick of talking about it yet? Ian: No, I’m not, I’m not actually. Andrew: What caused you guys to sell? Ian: Oh man. Well, I think essentially what happened was we started the business in 2008 – at the time I think I was about twenty-five, twenty-six years old, and you know that was a long time ago. I feel like I’m a different person than I was then. You know, I felt like I wanted different things out of my business and my life, and we just kind of reached an interesting point. I think one of the feelings, one of the emotions that I had at the time when we decided to sell was that it’s all been like high-fives and good times, essentially. I mean, there was some growing pains and whatnot, but we never missed payroll, there was always plenty of cashflow, it was just really good times. And I thought, "let’s just leave this on a high note, ‘cause I’m not super passionate about the business anymore, and I don’t wanna fake it to my employees anymore that I’m not into this business, so let’s just leave it on a high note." Ian's Insight Into Selling His Business Andrew: And you said you wanted different things out of your life and your business – what specifically were you looking for in terms of change, things that the business wasn’t fulfilling, apart from the passion aspect and selling at the top – which makes a lot of sense – what was that underlying thing you kind of alluded to? Ian: I think just change in general, you know? Like I said, I started the business when I was in like my mid-twenties and quite some time had gone by, so I just wanted to see kind of what other options were out there, you know? I felt like I had conquered that business in a way, or at least the skill set, and for me and I think a lot of small business owners, that’s kind of what you do, right? I mean we were selling like hospitality equipment and although I was passionate about that in the beginning, it became more about the process of doing business. So through the process learned SEO, learned ad words, learned how to manufacture products in China, learned how to build a team of fifteen. So kind of all these things that I wanted to learn in that business I learned; I just didn’t feel like there was much...