I wrote several months back about the wonderful vacation that my family had at Tranquilo Bay, an island "ecoresort" in Panama. The two couples who run the place (and live there with there kids), Jim and Renee and Jay and Stefanie, had such an amazing story to tell (which included five years of camping by Jim and Jay as they built the place) that I couldn’t stop talking about it. My ranting included making a pitch to Leigh Buchanan at INC magazine, where I argued that it was more interesting than any other entrepreneurship story I had ever heard (I know her from both HBR and INC, including from her INC story on The Bully Rulebook).
Well, after talking on the phone to Jim and Renee, Leigh got sufficiently excited that she went down to Tranquilo Bay do a story. And she took a photographer too. Leigh’s story just came out in the May issue of INC and it is fantastic — called Paradise The Hard Way. It is one of the most interesting and detailed stories I have ever seen in a business magazine, more like a New Yorker story in depth and smartness (but without their at times unbearable pretension). And it is the only story I’ve read in a business magazine that starts with an email exchange — and one is a love letter — between a husband and a wife. The first picture is of Jim and Jay, who literally had to hack their way through the jungle to build their dream. And the second is of Stefanie and Renee, who made considerable sacrifices to make it all happen, and now live at Tranquilo Bay with their kids.
The four of them now run the place. There is also a great slide show on the INC site that shows what it talk to build the place, which reminds me of a scaled down version of the story that David McCullough tells about the building of the Panama Canal in The Path Between the Seas — the rain, the mudslides, the setbacks, the improvisation, the persistence, the shear craziness of trying to attempt something like that, and ultimately, the success in the end, run though both of these stories about Panama.
P.S. My family has already made reservations to go back. They only have six cabanas, so things fill-up fast!
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