Welcome to The Business Academy.

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Last weekend I went to Cabo with a group of business owners.

The weekend event is designed to give us a place to meet, bond, and learn from each other .

tldr. The trips are amazing. They are transformative for my business.

I’m going to dedicate this email to sharing a lot of details with you about this event. Hopefully, some of you will use it as a template for your own peer gatherings.

If this isn't useful to you, you can skip to the section at the bottom of this email.

The Goal

These weekend trips are hosted by Matt Schnuck & Sahil Bloom. They call these events: "Inflection". Because they're designed to lead to career inflections.

In other circles, these are also called 'mastermind trips'. The goal is the following:

Surround yourself with ambitious, curious, smart, driven people who want to build relationships and learn from each other.

Very simply, I've found being around ambitious people makes me more ambitious.

Expected Outcome

By the end of the weekend, each person should have a clear understanding of the highest leverage decisions and activities they can take in the first six months that will meaningfully improve their business.

The Environment

Why are we in Cabo? Because Cabo is beautiful...

But, more importantly, you need to change your environment. When you change your environment, you introduce instability in your life, and through this, you can change your thought patterns.

Also, by removing ourselves from our normal life we create a lot of free time to think. There are no distractions from friends and family. There are no distractions from work. This is in some ways similar to Bill Gates' "think weeks", where he goes to a cabin in the woods to avoid distractions.

Accountability is Key

We do these trips once a year. This allows us to check-in on each other's progress.

We are all competitive people by nature so we want to be able to share an exciting update by the end of the year with our friends...

My Takeaways from the Weekend

Here are some reflections I observed...

• Everyone is too self-aware. Naturally, we all want to be loved, and we want to conform socially. But unfortunately, it's a weakness in business. This keeps us from taking decisive action because we wonder “what will people think me?”. Everybody has this internal voice, and I encourage you to quiet it.
• We’re all at war with ourselves. Our driving force is the desire to be better. Our biggest detractor is that we don’t think we are enough.
• There are levels to this game - you may be building something awesome. But there is always someone who's more ambitious, creative, or maniacal than you.

Overview of the Schedule

We started the official event promptly at 5 pm on Thursday.

MIT intros

At the start of the event, each person gives some background on their "Most Important Thing" (MIT). This is the main topic they came to discuss for the weekend. The group can go around and ask as many questions as they want. But these are only intros. We don't want to go too deep on any particular topic yet.

Surprise Recording

Matt surprised us by hiring a video crew to the venue for Saturday morning. Content creation and audience building is important to all of us so this was a nice forcing function. We spent a few hours interviewing each other and having group discussions on camera.

Unstructured Time

This nonstructured time is very important to the weekend it allows us to get to know each other and therefore be more vulnerable around each other.

Unsolicited Feedback.

Saturday night is the grand finale. We tried something new this trip that I loved...

It’s called unsolicited feedback. Here's how it works. Everyone sits together at a single table and the group all give YOU feedback as if you are not sitting there. They are sharing their wishes and desires for you. And you're just silently sitting there, like a fly on the wall.

You can take notes or you can record it on your phone. It’s a really powerful exercise. But it’s important to have the right group and have created the right connections before trying this exercise

How to pick the right people for these events

Not everyone is going to be a good fit for these types of trip. Avoid inviting somebody just because you’re friendly with them.

For this to work well you have to carefully curate the group. Matt and Sahil have done a wonderful job with this.

Here's what you need in your group:

You want a group of people that have similar levels of ambition to the others. If you’re a very ambitious person you’re not gonna get the type of energy that you want from somebody who is a lot less ambitious.

You also need people that are going to be OK getting vulnerable and being truly honest and talking about what’s not going well in their life. There are some entrepreneurs that are really not able to do that because they’re scared of vulnerability. If you get somebody like that it’s a detractor to the group.

Finally, likabililty is important. You’re gonna spend a lot of time together for three days and if you have someone who’s a jerk or is too recluse it could make the dynamic a little funky. If you haven’t met the person before the trip I suggest you do a pre-screening call or two.

Here is my Tweet about the weekend

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🔑 One great read

​The family restaurant that became the largest hotel business in the world...

Bill Marriot's first venture was inspired by a friend who owned an A&W store. The owners worked 4 months a year, and made enough money to take the rest of the year off. He secured the rights for the A&W franchise in Washington DC, Maryland, and Baltimore. But root beer sales fell off a cliff during winter months. So Bill turned his little root beer shack into the first of many "Hot Shoppes" restaurant locations. As Hot Shoppes grew, so did their airline industry. Hot Shoppes quickly became the leading airline food provider too.

With $19.7 million in yearly sales, Hot Shoppes Inc went public, selling 30% of the company for $2.5 million...and then Bill decided to build his first Marriot hotel. The rest is history (that I recommend you read).

BONUS read --> I recently read the biography of Bill Marriot. I read a lot of biographies. This one, in particular, is very well-researched and well-written.

🔑 Have you ever wanted to invest in a franchise? Check-out my interview with the kind of franchising...

Kenny Rose, Founder and CEO of FranShares, and I speak about the pros and cons of starting a franchise, what to consider before investing in the industry, and so much more. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and my new YouTube channel. -

Have a great week,

Sieva

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PS: I made a technical mistake when I shared this form last week (it was still locked). We have sold out of all rooms for the Enduring Ventures Shareholder Summit. If you'd like to sign up for a "bunk bed" room, please fill-out this form to apply.

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Disclaimer: nothing here is investment advice. Please do your own research. The information above is just for information and learning.

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