Here is something that surprised me in this book. You can actually create value without making a single extra dollar. How? By making your business more predictable. Chapter 4 explains why, and it changed how I think about risk.
After four chapters about going where you are treated best, getting second passports, and building a location-independent life, Henderson finally arrives at the most extreme step. Giving up your US citizenship entirely. This is the nuclear option. And he did it himself in December 2017 at the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Everyone wants their business to grow. But what does growth actually mean, and where does it come from? Chapter 3 of The 12-Week MBA breaks this down in a way that makes you rethink everything.
In Part 1 we covered why anyone would want a second passport and the four ways to get one. Now Henderson gets into the messy details. And trust me, it gets messy. Fake passports, lazy lawyers, and the surprising truth that a Mexican passport might be better than an American one.
The concept of profit was once considered important enough that two superpowers pointed nuclear weapons at each other over it. The Cold War was basically an argument about whether the profit motive should organize our economy. You would think something that serious would be simple to define. It is not.
Imagine you are sitting in a hotel room in Dubai. A man with a bulletproof briefcase hands you a green passport from a country you cannot find on a map. You put your finger on an ink pad. He shakes your hand and says, “Congratulations, you are now a citizen of the Comoros Islands.”
If someone asked you “what is the purpose of a company?” what would you say? Most people go straight to “making money.” And that is not wrong. But it is not the full picture either.
“Come to Cuenca, where flowers bloom from your toilet water!”
That joke comes from Henderson’s mastermind group over breakfast in Medellin, Colombia. They were laughing about retirement newsletters that overhype cheap countries with ridiculous copywriting. You know the type. “Live on a tropical beach for $623 a month!” Meanwhile Costa Rica, Belize, and Panama have already been burned through by the newsletter crowd. Ecuador was next.
Do you really need to spend two years and six figures on an MBA to be good at business? According to Nathan Kracklauer and Bjorn Billhardt, the answer is no. And they wrote a book to prove it.
“Do I have to become a goat herder?”
That is how Henderson opens this chapter. His old college buddy Bryan asks this question while driving him from the Cape Town airport. Bryan has been watching Henderson post Facebook updates from El Salvador, Albania, Singapore. And he wants in. But he also has three kids, a wife, and an IT business with sixteen employees in South Africa.