I’ve attended two Empire Flippers events in Thailand.

They asked me for my comments and made this testimonial video from the interview. See the transcript below the video and if you haven’t watched my interview at the Digital Journey Podcast also at a prior Empire Flipper’s Retreat click here.

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I liked it so much I came back again. I was in the first group. If I go back in my corporate career, I went through two of Wall Street’s finest training programs. Back in the day, large corporations trained people incredibly well. You spent six to eight months in training before you ever went into the field. Those days are over. If you get hired by a corporation out of school today, you’re lucky if you get to spend time shadowing someone who is senior. It just doesn’t work like that.

In this industry, e-commerce, technology, or whatever it is you have opportunities to attend these big conferences and hear the big time speakers that write the books that we all know of. You go into the conference, and you hear the speech, which you can probably listen to on YouTube a day later, then you break, and everyone goes out and gets coffees and doughnuts and you hang out with the people that you already know.

What Empire Flippers has done is that they have flipped, you have flipped everything, and you have made this incredibly interactive. What I think I, and my colleagues from the first retreat found, was that we got to know each other incredibly well. While there are so many different disciplines of types of monetization here, and people with different backgrounds, and people with different business focuses. We established relationships where, if six months from now, I come up with a question that I can’t answer, I know exactly who I can ping on Facebook in Messenger, and they’ll point me in the right direction.

I was thinking about this last night when I looked at my Facebook friends. I don’t keep track of anybody from high school, college, or from the states where I lived for so many years, but I keep track of everybody in all of the various e-commerce groups  that I’m in. Particularly the ones I stay in touch with are the guys that were at the last retreat. I think it could be the exactly the same way at this retreat. We’ve got another couple of days, and I’ve already got targeted folks that know things about areas that I’m very interested in.

I don’t believe in being a generalist. I think you have to focus. My focus is on physical goods, on physical products. So things like SEO are very important, but I can’t spend a lot of time doing that. Things like pay-per-click, again… Amazon FBA, an area that I’m close to, but some of the nuances there are, some of the guys there are absolutely crushing it. I want to know more about what they’re doing, how I can add that to my repertoire. Obviously the whole world of content is incredibly important.

I think what Empire Flippers has done is create a paradigm where there are real relationships being built, and it’s only going to create a network effect over time. The example I give is the guy with the first fax machine didn’t have many friends. The guy with the thousandth fax machine had a lot of opportunities, a lot more. I think as this gets bigger, and more and more people come back, they get plugged into each other, so it’s great.

I hate Joe Magnotti. This guy beats me up every time I come. I’m being facetious. I have gone through two Masterminds. They have both been incredibly helpful.

I think that this is a lonely pursuit, e-commerce. I think that we spend a lot of our time in our own heads. I think we spend a lot of time debating the stuff that we have the ability to see ourselves, and very little time getting perspective from the outside. I’m a huge believe in Masterminds, but I think the fact that it’s in person, with a group of very, very highly credentialed people from different fields, they just see things you just wouldn’t see yourself. Huge fan of the process.

Last year I went first. This year I went last. I can’t tell you which one I favor more. They both were massively positive to me. I’ve got great feedback. I have to give myself a pretty low score at following through last year. But I can guarantee you that next year, when I come, or this fall, when I come, I will have followed through. I overthought it and kind of took it as a general recommendation. I’m taking it much more seriously now.

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Ian Bond