Regenerative Entrepreneur Consultation
Designing Your Business the Permaculture Way
Establishing Resilience From the Inside Out
begins with designing your project’s invisible infrastructure
I’m here to support you in the areas of business development, community relations, and cultural bridging.
Let’s have a chat
It’s exciting to embark on a regenerative enterprise. So many ideas, so much potential!
Ecological and social entrepreneurship are gaining headlines, and the economic playing field is leveling out in many sectors where these initiatives are gaining support.
More of these businesses are empowering heart-centered entrepreneurs who are improving people’s options for spending their time, money, and other resources in ways that are in harmony with the planet, living beings, and future generations.
It’s vitally important that these initiatives improve their chances for success by embracing sound business practices. Like with land management, you can either go for it or take the time to assess & design for maximum efficiency. This second approach minimizes the potential hurdles present in almost any business venture.
The permaculture design method has much to offer start-up endeavors and established businesses alike.
Holding all of your visions for what’s possible in a neutral and contemplative way, while taking action that you hope to be best, is a process of discovery. Having additional perspective can be valuable.
Being in the middle of everything happening all at once can make it difficult to evaluate risks, benefits, and opportunity costs objectively.Â
Having an ally to help you sort through your options, ask clarifying questions, and offer pragmatic perspective can be invaluable for your project’s success, not to mention your sense of confidence as you explore the process.
To say that your project is regenerative, it needs to meet that title environmentally, economically, and socially.
When the social part becomes a priority, a world of connection, inclusion, and cooperation opens that can’t be fully perceived otherwise. You know it’s there, but living it is just a few intentional steps away.
It’s like growing up in a city and then finally moving out to the countryside, or being poor and becoming financially secure. When you open your perspective on how you want to make an impact in the world to include the lives of your neighbors, life becomes richer and more fulfilling.
Use the Permaculture Design Principles to fortify your business & social infrastructure.
Your dreams won’t just look like they’re coming true.
They’ll have the heart to thrive.
Book a Clarity Call
I invite you to a free 45-minute session focused purely on your project, your ideas for it, and fresh perspective on how to align your approach for the best use of your time & other resources. Others have come before you. There’s no need to be winging it.
This call is designed to support you in gaining clarity around the viability of the options you’re imagining while opening perspective for what a refined approach might offer you.
Cultural Integration Package
To get a taste of what ongoing support can feel like, I offer a one-month package focused on the infrastructure of your business, as well as your community – internally and regionally. We’ll spend two weeks in observation & investigation and two more weeks in design & implementation. These are four 90-minute sessions focused on fortifying your project’s resilience.
Strategy Session
If your experience in the Clarity Call leaves you wanting more, book a 2.5 hours Strategy Call, where we’ll continue going deeper into your options and lay out a road map together, for your success.
The process brings in elements of a permaculture design but is focused on your business model. You’ll walk away with strategies, tools, tactics, and resources to get you moving forward with more confidence.
Private Consultations
If you’re ready to make confident steps forward with an ally at your side, I’m here to support you. If we both decide we’re a good fit to work together, I’ll invite you to spend 3 months with me, assessing, designing, planning, and implementing your next steps forward through weekly calls and homework. You’ll even have access to my team of remote assistants to help you check some of your technical tasks off your list!
So, what is Regenerative Entrepreneurship?
When something is said to be “regenerative,” it indicates a quality of renewal. It describes things that provide more than they take. It’s often used in reference to agriculture and other aspects of land management. Still, it’s a concept that can be (and should be) applied to our lifestyles, business practices, and relationships.
An “entrepreneur” is a creator, a way-seer, a risk-taker, a dreamer, a believer, and an action-taker.
Entrepreneurship is frequently associated with capitalism, with profit as its motivating agenda and extraction as its model, but it’s worth widening our definition. Just as permaculture isn’t exclusively for land management, entrepreneurship isn’t just about producing a profit.
While we’re adjusting perspectives, we can also keep in mind the difference between making a profit and “profiteering.” Profiteering is the practice of making, or seeking to make, an excessive or unfair profit. On the other hand, aiming to generate a profit from our investments of time, money, and heart energy that we can use to put back into our regenerative efforts, is regenerative!
Entrepreneurship puts innovation in the hands of regular people. What we do with that is up to us.
“Social entrepreneurship” and “regenerative entrepreneurship” are terms describing the application of sound business sense and organizational methods applied to the agendas of earth care, people care, and fair share. These are the ethics of the clients I serve.
Why do so many start-up communities, healing arts centers, and permaculture projects close their doors within a few years of inception?
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Most of these projects are founded on the best of intentions. The build begins, and the stewards get excited about their vision & pursuit of the life they want to create and the experiences they want to offer. A lot of time and investment goes into the physical infrastructure and planning events, and the results are some beautiful bamboo yoga shalas and expertly designed food forests.
It’s not entirely uncommon, however, for less time to be put into developing their business model, writing clear agreements, and integrating with their conventionally-minded neighbors who’ve been living in the area for generations.
These physical infrastructures and regenerative landscapes are essential, but they can start to feel empty if they aren’t built around rich relationships, commitment, and trust.
By taking the time to design with a permaculture mindset within a holistic context, you can reduce the burden or overwhelm that can come when hosting educational or transformational experiences in a linear fashion. You can build it, market it, and get some people to come. Still, the reality can be more energetically supported, enjoyable, and even financially regenerative with more aspects of the process considered.
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Taking the time to invest in your invisible infrastructure is a step worth taking.
I should know. The permaculture education center I ran for 7 years went from struggling financially and energetically to sustaining itself in a flow of harmony after we applied this practice. It’s a similar process that most successful education centers and communities adopt at some point along their way. After a while, you tend not to hear much from those that don’t.
I’ve made it my mission to help more of these well-intending initiatives establish their foundation, stay open, and make the impact they intend.
More people are coming to understand that permaculture isn’t just for land management.
Permaculture is a collection of principles that invites us to slow down and design resilience into our business design, relationships, and connections with our outer communities in a holistic and synergistic way.Â
Permaculture trains us to think about how our decisions and actions affect everything around us. It teaches us to use the edges and value the marginal, design from patterns to details, and use small and slow solutions.Â
How many progressively-minded eco-projects integrate with their conventional neighbors more than segregate?
Perhaps, not enough.
Permaculture leads us to take time and consider the many ways our plans, actions, and inactions influence the zones around us and how that influence feeds back into the cycle.Â
Are you motivated?
Are you ready to take action, create a comprehensive design, and hold yourself accountable for actualizing it?
If so, I commend you!Â
Many people thrive when held accountable by someone who cares enough to have their back. To keep them motivated and reflect their thoughts back to them with a broader perspective.
Most people who successfully take their dreams to impactful levels are those who’ve reached out for and received support.
I think that’s why you’re here.
You want someone with integrity and years of experience to complement your own and keep you on track.Â
You want someone who’s spent years studying business, trained with multiple mentors, and knows what pushing beyond limiting beliefs is like.
You want someone to reflect your ideas back to you and help you craft them in a way that speaks to the people you’re trying to get them out to.Â
You want a greater degree of resilience in your life and your program, and if you’re ready for help, I’m prepared to be there for you in the way you need most.Â
If you’re ready to:
- Re-evaluate your business model through the permaculture lens.
- Take the time to write agreements that’ll grant clarity and trust within your co-creative team,
- And develop relationships with your neighboring community that will have them grateful for your presence beyond the work you can provide,
Then I invite you to take this opportunity to have me by your side.
The journey toward a more resilient life, business, and community awaits you.
Examine your business through the permaculture lens.
We’ll lay out your goals and a perceived path toward achieving them while exploring where you might be able to simplify, stack functions, and prevent energy from being lost in your efforts.
Design agreements to grant confidence to those you’re creating with, and minimize drama.
We’ll consider how complex or simple you want to make these agreements, but we’re going to make them. Operating any project that involves multiple humans is a better experience when fewer things are left to assumption.
Start integrating with the people you share your bio-region with.
We’ll look at ways you can become a gift to those around you. Living amidst people who don’t understand you and with whom you only superficially understand is a stress you won’t fully realize until it’s dissipated. It takes courage to put yourself out there and interact with others different from yourself, but the well-being of your efforts depends on it.Â
Develop confidence through regular contact with someone who has your interests at heart.
You’ll receive the insightful perspective you need when making difficult decisions. You’ll be encouraged to do deeper research when we uncover assumptions. You’ll get support reflecting on ways you might be extending yourself beyond your well-being and the needs of those closest to you.Â
Grow wiser without having to experience all the mistakes yourself.
One of our greatest gifts as humans is the ability to learn from each other’s experiences. I’ve interviewed, counseled with, and consulted an uncountable number of people who’ve been in a similar place you are now. You’ll have access to the experiences of those people, myself, and the team of professionals that support our work.
Build a program that future dreamers will use as their model.
We need more successful models in this regenerative movement. Enough mavericks have gone it alone, figured it out along the way, and come up short in their intended impact. Don’t be one of them. We live in a world where the resources are all available to you. You just need someone to guide you to the right ones.
Meet your guide
Hi,
My name is Jason Thomas. I’ve spent over 20 years in the permaculture/back-to-the-land movement.
In 2009, I co-founded Finca Fruición, a hosting and education center in Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. In the 7 years the program was active, we hosted several hundred guests and volunteers from 20+ countries. We hosted PDCs, workshops, and even a couple of mini-festivals. I raised my kids in that environment and went through many stages of growth.
Due to family needs, I returned to Minnesota for a few years, where I began learning and practicing the 21st-century business practices I’d pushed away during my homesteading years. In just a few years, I developed my balloon art business into a booking agency and moved back to the farm to apply what I’d learned to something more regenerative.
Facing the state of atrophy the farm was in, and the time it would take to fix it up, I began to produce a podcast, mainly relying on affiliate sales as my monetization model.
After a year of experimenting with the show, I pulled back, reassessed, rebranded, and relaunched with an expanded mission. With it, I’ve begun a series of Business Incubator events, a membership site for Land Stewards, an online Community Living Agreements training, and Regenerative Entrepreneur Roundtable meetups in my region of Rivas, Pérez Zeledón, both in English and Spanish.
At the beginning of 2023, I began offering private consultation services for entrepreneurs committed to setting up their strategic and digital infrastructures for success.
After several months of walking that road with my clients, I’ve realized that I don’t just want to help people with their businesses. I want to help them create resilient lives for themselves and to become cultural bridges and bold ambassadors for a more connected humanity.
I know what it means to have to pivot. I know what it feels like to persevere.
And I know that operating a big project without a strategic design, guidance, and accountability can leave one feeling like they’re spinning their wheels until they’re burnt out. Don’t let that happen to you.Â
I’m here to help!
Regenerative Entrepreneur Consultation is ideal for you if:
- You’re in the beginning phases of planning, establishing, or building a regeneratively-minded project
- You have a business model attached to that project
- You want that business model to be grounded in integrity, connection, and values
- You have a commitment to building bridges with the conventional culture you’ve chosen to live amidst
- You want to succeed in making this all work – enough to alter reactionary patterns that have kept you distracted from that goal so far.
Which Path is right for you?
- Clarity Call
- 2.5 hr Strategy Session
- 30-Day Holistic Integration Incubator
- 90-Day Regenerative Entrepreneur Consultation
The beginning of our journey starts with a clarity call. It’s a free 45-minute call. You’ll answer some questions before arriving at the call, and we’ll go through them together. Besides my ability to learn more about who’s doing what and how I can support them, the process is also enlightening for most of those who choose to have a chat. I have a way of asking thought-provoking questions.
It’s a way for us to get to know each other and for me to understand the parameter of your project & personal goals before deciding to work together. If either of us decides that that call is enough, we’re under no obligation to go any further. Conversely, if we choose to enroll you in one of our programs, we’ll already have a grounded base to work from.
After a clarity call, you may feel like you’ve identified a path forward, but you’d like to spend some more time identifying the different steps, how to arrange them, or even more specific questions about a few of them. This is your chance to go deeper and develop the idea that you’ve gotten clarity around.Â
I’ll guide the call with a series of questions to help uncover gems of insight from you. It’ll be recorded, and you’ll have access to review your revelations. You can bounce ideas off of me to see their reflection. You’ll walk away with greater confidence to take the next steps. I’ll also send you a report within 72 hours with a revision of my notes, additional thoughts, and a list of links and other resources to help you on your way.
This is an opportunity to work on your business infrastructure together and explore ways to improve your relationships with your local community. We’ll spend a couple of weeks diving deep into the holistic context of your project, its surroundings, and its future. You’ll have homework to do to begin building tools and bridges that’ll empower your forward movements.
In the second two weeks, we’ll use the permaculture design process to create a roadmap to guide you on your way to a more empowered and connected future. I’ll also be available to help you with any immediate needs during our time together.Â
The Holistic Integration Incubator includes:
- (4) 90-minute calls
- Email and text support in between calls
- A website audit
- Content editing where desired
- An exploration of relevant ways to build relationships locally
- Accountability support
- Access to the Community Living Agreements Training replays
- Access to my client membership site and the members-only blogs I’ve written there on related topics
This package is for committed individuals or teams that are ready to improve the future of their business and community relations forever.
Month 1: Observe
In our first month together, we’ll lay out all your ideas for what you want to accomplish with your project. We’ll hold each one in perspective with the rest, look for places where efforts can be co-supportive, and identify others that are likely to be distracting.
You’ll get homework. We’ll do targeted research into different aspects of your intended goals to identify patterns that others in your field have used successfully that we can model from to improve our design process.Â
We’ll evaluate your findings and measure them against your expectations to make early course corrections before designing ourselves too far in a less ideal direction.
Introspect
In our first calls, we’ll examine your intentions, expectations, and perceived limitations and find ways to break free of them so they don’t hold you back as we progress.
You’ll be held in a safe space to be honest with yourself about the state of your connection with your co-creators and those you’re living among. We’ll explore ways to transcend them by visualizing a path of right action and accountability.
Mapping
By the end of our first month together, we’ll have clarified where we’re going and begin to map the terrain giving context to the steps we’ll take to get there.
Month 2: Design
Once we’re clear regarding the path ahead, we’ll begin to design the foundational elements needed to keep things moving forward in an intelligent and efficient manner.
Business Plan
If you already have one, great. We may choose to modify it. If you’ve never made a business plan, no worries. I can help with that. You’ll have many of these decisions worked out from our first month’s explorations, so you’ll be ready for it!
Community Infrastructure
Whether operating your program solo with a hired staff, as a couple, or with a team, you’ll want certain documents in place. These documents will keep you on track and minimize the energy lost due to assumptions, things being taken personally, and lack of clarity around accountability. We’ll examine various options and decide what’s best for your program.
Cultural Bridging
By now, you’ll have taken your first steps to connect, listen, and inter-relate with the more conventional people you’re living amidst. Now we’ll design an approach of influence born from an attitude of curiosity and generosity. This will extend to your relationships with the world around you, both in your physical town as well as online. Your life is about to get better!
Month 3: Interact
The research and design process is crucial for uncovering areas where your previous plans might have cost you unnecessary time, money, resources, and enthusiasm. Now that we have a more holistic design, we’ll begin implementing those steps toward improving your project’s state of resilience.
Refine and Market your Product
Whether you’re selling a physical item, a service, an experience, or shares of your project to investors, how you package it and put it in front of them will make all the difference. We’ll have done much of this work in the Design phase, so now we’ll be putting the first steps into motion. We’ll also build out a pitch deck to make your design easier to communicate to others.
Community Assets
It’s time to start writing. The invisible infrastructure of your project will take many months to flesh out and refine, but the time has arrived to begin the process. We’ll schedule the time into your calendar needed to accomplish that mission in a sustainable way.Â
Cultural Integration
Now that you’ve taken the time to get to know your surrounding culture, learn their preferences and needs, and design your desired place among that culture, we’ll lay out the steps to make that marvelous dream your reality.Â
What’s included in the consultation package?
- (13) 60-minute calls
- Email and text support in between calls
- An audit of your website with recommendations for what you can improve to get your message out more clearly
- Content editing
- Technical assistance from my team in setting up your digital infrastructure
- Guidance writing & revising your business plan
- Assistance in creating your pitch deck
- Access to our private membership site, where I’ve been compiling special members’ only articles regarding businesses administration, organizational hacks, and marketing
- The satisfaction that you’re approaching your dreams in a way that’ll sustain their coming true!
Let’s get you, in a few months, to a place it might take you years to get to on your own.
Welcome me as your ally in designing and actualizing the regenerative project you know your dream is destined to be.Â
The Regenerative Entrepreneur Consultation Program is designed to keep your financial, social, and cultural reality moving forward in a balanced and regenerative way. You’ll move forward from our time together with fresh perspective, useful tools, an intelligent design, and your path forward laid out in a clear and approachable way.
Things you may still be wondering
Is there a guarantee to your offer?
The Regenerative Entrepreneur Program is designed to guide you along your path in a way that clarifies your obstacles, guides you through them, and gives you the tools to keep moving forward more confidently, effectively, and efficiently.
If you accomplish your tasks each week, do your research, put in the effort, and follow through with your commitments, you are guaranteed to be much further along your path than the last 3 months have brought you.
If I, or my team, fail to meet our commitments, I’ll do what I can to make it right.
What do your packages include?
The Strategy Session is 2.5 hours and can be split between 2 calls if you prefer.
The Holistic Integration Incubator is 4 weekly 90-minute calls. You’ll also receive an audit of your website with recommendations for what you can improve to get your message out more clearly. While working together, you’ll have access to our private membership site, where I’ve been compiling special members’ only articles regarding business administration, organizational hacks, and marketing.
During the 3 months of Regenerative Entrepreneur Consultation, you’ll book weekly calls with me where we’ll get systematically focused on your project and what’s important. Beyond that, I’ll be available by email, Whatsapp, and Telegram to answer any questions that come up along the way. This package includes the website audit, assistance with content editing & access to my virtual team for assistance getting your tech needs checked off your list. I’ll also guide you through writing or revising your business plan & a pitch deck to easily communicate what you offer to others.
What if I can’t keep up with the calls and assignments?
 This is your commitment to yourself, your project, and your well-being. I’m here to support you in that. Helping people like you create regenerative projects that survive and thrive is what I’m here to do. We both have to commit if you’re going to get results different than what brought you to this page.
You’ll have access to my calendar to book your calls far in advance at your convenience. It’s your job to keep your calendar clear and to commit to them. You’re the only one who can decide if you’re ready to make your project a shining example of what’s possible or another statistic ruled by distractions. It’s up to you.
If we choose to work together, it’s because we both decide that we won’t let anything get in the way of your project’s growth, harmony, and respectable reputation.
During our Clarity Call, you’ll be able to choose whether you want to commit to one month together or if you’re all in for the three-month program.Â
Can I really make meaningful progress in just a few months?
What do you want to believe?
It’s all going to rest on that. If you value surfboards, dance parties, and Netflix, or even your endless reactionary task list more than establishing a resilient future for your project’s future, then maybe not.
If you’re willing, however, to dedicate yourself to this work, then the answer is ABSOLUTELY!Â
If you play full-in, you’ll have useful tools for meaningful progress at your hands in the first month!
Think back to the last three months of your progress. Now imagine that you had someone at your side guiding you, sharing resources, giving you direct assistance, and keeping you accountable to your commitments. Where do you think you’d be now?
… much further along.
That’s right. We aren’t meant to be doing projects this big alone. We aren’t in an age where we need to reinvent the wheel. There are too many resources available to be winging it.
If you believe in yourself, I’m going to believe in you and help you remember what you’re capable of.
Okay, I’m in. How do I get started?
Click the button below, book a free, no-obligation call with me to help us discover whether my offer is right for you, and we’ll go from there. I can only work with so many clients at a time, and I want to make sure that you’re willing and able to follow through with the work, as much as you’ll want to know me and how I approach it.Â
The Regenerative Entrepreneur Program will walk you along the path of getting to know yourself and your project’s most practical potential in a way that’ll get you there!
Book a call to see if co-creating the future you’ve been dreaming for yourself is as close to reality as you want it to be.
You want an ally, and I want to see your project thrive.
The 45-minute Clarity Call is obligation-free. I enjoy learning about who’s doing what, and love the chance to sprinkle a little influence to aid others on their way.