Permaculture Entrepreneurship: Navigating the Path from Student to Professional
By Jason Thomas
The voice behind the podcast Regeneration Nation Costa Rica
After completing a Permaculture Design Course (PDC), natural building workshop, or any other educational opportunities at a place like Rancho Mastatal, many students find themselves wondering how to turn their newfound knowledge and passion into a career. This transition from student to professional is a common challenge in the permaculture world.
It’s not surprising, considering that most standard education programs don’t teach entrepreneurship, and new students of the trade often feel like they lack sufficient experience to charge for their services.
Common Challenges Faced by Permaculture and Alternative Solutions Students
I’ve interviewed dozens of permaculture professionals and students wishing to make their mark, and I’ve found some common hurdles that seem to hold people back.
Some of those obstacles include:
Lack of business education and experience
Little understanding of how to monetize their skills
Imposter syndrome
Limited support network
Balancing ideals with practicality
Many potential clients don’t know what permaculture or these sustainable solutions are, and many regenerative entrepreneurs don’t understand how their ideal clients are thinking about their needs from their perspective.
Insight Tool: Identify Your Hurdles
Take a moment to reflect on your own journey. What are some challenges you're currently facing in turning your ideas into a profession? Write them down and consider how they align with or differ from the common challenges mentioned above.
The Gap Between Passion and Profession:
This gap isn't unique to permaculture. Many individuals who care about helping humanity turn its trajectory around face a similar divide between academic knowledge and professional application.
In permaculture, this gap is often widened by the holistic, systems-thinking approach that doesn't always align neatly with traditional business models but does exceedingly well when harnessing traditional tactics, repurposed in a holistic system approach.
Tim O’Hara from Rancho Mastatal shared with me in one of our conversations that he felt like they were chasing their tails for several years as they tried to figure out how to make it all work. It’s a similar story for many people who embark on a project like this.
… but that’s not the only way to go about it.
In today’s age, it’s easier than ever to learn from wisdom keepers like this and model from the solutions they’ve arrived to through their mistakes. It IS NOT a wheel worth recreating. We have work to do and the faster we can get our services out to the world, the better off we’re all going to be.
The trick is not to do it so fast that you skip the foundational steps of contemplative design.
So, from a design perspective, let’s look at some solutions we can embrace to bridge this gap between passion and professional application.
Key Business Skills Needed to Bridge the GaP
Business planning:
Overcome your unclear direction and orientation to business by looking at your business idea as if it were pasture land that you are about to implement into a multi-yielding homestead.
Taking the time to design your enterprise will earn you an intimate relationship with the path ahead and the confidence to walk it.
Marketing and communication:
Conveying the value of permaculture and other sustainable solutions to potential clients can be tricky because they lack the vocabulary and point of reference for what it means, let alone how or why it provides any unique benefits to them.
In marketing and communication, describe the benefits from the prospect’s point of view.
Financial management:
Understanding budgeting, pricing, and sustainable revenue streams may not sound sexy as you’re getting started, but careful documentation will come in handy when you revisit the feedback loop and want to understand what worked well, what didn’t, and how to do it better next time.
Finances are only one part of the puzzle, but trying to skip it will leave you hanging with gaps in your picture.
Legal and administrative skills:
Navigating regulations, contracts, and business structures is another aspect that many new entrepreneurs would prefer to skip.
However, if you want to practice your trade as anything more than a hobby, you might as well start with the end in mind and get some of those things squared away as soon as they are relevant.
Networking and collaboration:
Building a supportive community and finding complementary partners is the practice that will serve all others. We are a culture of people that want to help each other. We need each other! Reach out to other regenerative activators in your area and get to know them.
I even teach people to create a database of these projects and their owners. This could prove to be your business’s most valuable asset.
Insight Tool: Skill Assessment
On a scale of 1-5 (1 being novice, 5 being expert), rate yourself on each of the key business skills mentioned. Which areas do you feel strongest in? Which areas need the most improvement?
Essential Skills and Mindsets to Adapt as a Regenerative Entrepreneur:
As you embark on your journey as an entrepreneur and business operator, you’ll want to cultivate a set of skills and mindsets that support your personal growth and business development.
The following attributes, to the degree they’re cultivated, will help you navigate challenges, recognize and embrace aligned opportunities, and cultivate the confidence to see them through. Let's explore some skills and mindsets worth developing:
Holistic Systems Thinking:
Apply the holistic approach of permaculture to your business. Understand how different aspects of your business interact and support each other. Find common problems people face in your area that have insufficient solutions and find the place where those meet your passions and skill set.
… or desired skill set.
Remember, you’re a student who likes to learn new things. Nothing can hold you back!
Insight Tool: Map Your Business Ecosystem
Sketch a simple mind map, outline, or diagram of your current or planned business idea. Include key elements such as your services, target audience, resources, and potential partners. Draw arrows to show how these elements interact and support each other.
Adaptability to Change:
Be prepared to adjust your strategies as you learn and grow. As Tim has mentioned to me, even they, after all these years, continue to develop and refine policies as they learn and grow. Their documents are regularly being edited and revised by new people with fresh perspectives.
It’s a regular, intentionally planned practice.
Patience and Persistence:
Building a successful business takes time. Rancho Mastatal, like most projects of this nature, didn’t have a huge budget to just set up shop and run massive retreats. Instead, they took a slow, iterative approach, using the resources they had on hand, which included the support of their neighbors, and slowly, persistently, grew as resources and wisdom allowed.
Creating a phase-planned design for your new enterprise to spread your ambitions out over the next 3-5 years is a great way to resist distracting impulses and stay on track.
Lifelong Learning:
Never stop learning. Stay open to new ideas and keep developing your skills. This is the habit that keeps on giving. However, don’t just study information focused on your trade.
Round out your education so that you can understand the macro patterns of the human condition, market patterns, and personal development, as well as the micro details of your business operations.
Community Integration:
Understand the importance of community integration. Of all the community projects and education centers I’ve researched around Costa Rica, Rancho Mastatal is one of the shining examples of community integration and worth modeling at any opportunity.
Community integration is an extremely important part of our work. It helps us to integrate in a way that allows us to be accepted by those we wish to influence and serve.
Insight Tool: Community Asset Mapping
List 5-10 local business owners, organizations, or other leaders in your community that could potentially support or collaborate with your efforts. How might you engage with each of them?
Innovative Problem-Solving:
Use holistic thinking to find innovative solutions to your business challenges. Permaculture teaches us that each problem holds a gem of solution just waiting to be discovered. By carefully researching and analyzing your options and approach, you can see these pitfalls before they ever become a problem and design ways to ensure they never will be.
By staying vigilant in your process to find ways you can stack functions in your solutions, your experience operating your business will improve.
Clear & Effective Communication:
Develop the ability to explain what you do and its benefits to a wide range of audiences. While it's always advised to start any product or service creation with a specific client avatar profile in mind to help target your messaging, we’re not just here to get customers. We want to affect change in the world, and that requires speaking other people’s languages.
The best way to do that is to talk to more people about the problems you provide solutions for, but not with an intention to pitch your services. Instead, talk to them with a sense of curiosity and care.
Get to know them and pay attention to the words they use in describing their challenges and perceived options. If you take the time to do this in a systematic way, you’ll develop the vocabulary and sensibility to make the impact you’re hoping for.
How the Permaculture Business Design Course Helps Bridge These Gaps:
The Permaculture Business Design Course is designed to bridge the gap between a passion for making regenerative practices what you do for a living and the business skills needed to make that happen.
It applies the permaculture methodology and principles to design your business like you would a multi-yielding food system or a physical structure made from carefully calculated materials and procedures.
Why would we celebrate those practices on the land and houses, but not our business?
It’s impressive how often we stumble into a business idea, throwing offers out there hoping it will land with someone as we describe OUR favorite features of the service, rather than the benefits THEY want to receive. Business development is too common a reactionary process of figuring out as you go, which is exhilarating in moments, but not an effective way to get off the ground flying.
In this course, you’ll:
Expand your perspective on how to solve common challenges people are actually experiencing so you can find the unique niche that’s perfect for you.
Gain clarity around your unique vision and how it meets the needs of your region to purposefully design a financially regenerative enterprise that people can relate to.
Enhance your professional skill set through training videos, insight tools, worksheets, and other guided exercises.
Proceed through the lessons at your own pace to develop your offer, invisible infrastructure, marketing strategies, and operational procedures through slow and small solutions.
It’s a start-to-finish roadmap for the motivated permaculture entrepreneur, from ideation to implementation.
Insight Tool: Your Next Steps
Based on what you've learned in this post, what are three specific actions you can take in the next month to move closer to your goal of becoming a permaculture professional?
A Little More About Rancho Mastatal's Journey from Vision to Successful Enterprise:
I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Rancho Mastatal's story through my various interviews with Tim and the fortunate opportunity I’ve had to visit on the Ecovillage Tours that we now operate annually.
Each interaction with Tim, Robin, and their team has demonstrated:
Consistency in their intention to integrate and serve with the local community
Persistence in finding solutions when change happens
Adaptability through intentional experimentation
And ongoing education and refinement of their practices.
In an interview we did for the Permaculture Professionals Interview series, Tim shared that, early on, they didn't focus enough on compensating and taking care of the people that were making it possible. And that is unfortunately common amidst foreigners who buy land are happy to take advantage of the poverty wages many rural farm-hands are willing to work for.
Many of us have that wake-up call at some point, and for them it led to significant changes in their approach.
They implemented changes like:
Formalizing their business structure
Creating clear agreements and expectations
Developing a core team with defined roles
Implementing financial tools for better decision-making
Tim shared that developing more of a structure has helped them feel much more stable and resilient.
Rancho Mastatal's evolution is one of my favorite examples of combining permaculture principles with sound business practices. They've grown from a couple running a farm to an education center offering diverse courses, an apprenticeship program, and strong community integration directly affecting who knows how many hundreds of people each year, and thousands through the lives touched by those who’ve passed through their doors.
In the guest presentation Tim provided for the Community Living Agreements Training, he emphasized the value that clear documentation has brought to their project.
He explained that creating documents outlining standards for:
Sharing communal space
Participation expectations for members and guests
And common operating procedures
They have a library of best practices they can use to inform guests, train staff, and keep their intentions on track over time.
(Image) PBDC Landscape 1.jpg
Are you ready to start to design?
The Permaculture Business Design Course offers the knowledge, tools, and support needed to navigate the journey from permaculture student to professional. It provides practical skills to design a business that's as regenerative and abundant as the ecosystems we aim to protect and regenerate through our work.
Enroll in the course to start designing a business in a way that will earn you experience, confidence, and clear enough vision to motivate people to your cause.
If you like the idea of designing and developing your regenerative enterprise in the company of other dedicated entrepreneurs, I offer a seasonal group program for permaculture-minded professionals looking for support and accountability as they navigate the path ahead. It’s application only and an interview is required to ensure we have a committed group of aligned individuals in the cohort.
Let’s do it together!
To learn more, visit the Permaculture Professionals Program and fill out the application. I’d love to meet you and hear about your ambitions to cultivate a regenerative livelihood.
Remember, as in permaculture design, the key to a successful business is thoughtful planning, diverse strategies, and regular visits to the feedback loop.
However, accountability, coaching, and peer support are powerful amendments worth investing in.
May your dreams to serve through right action flourish!
Jason Thomas is the voice behind the podcast Regeneration Nation Costa Rica, designer and guide for Ecovillage Tours CR, mastermind facilitator for the Community Founders Circle and the Permaculture Professionals Program, and creator of the Permaculture Business Design Course.
With over 20 years practicing both permaculture and entrepreneurship, he bridges these two worlds to empower our next agents of change.