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Guerrilla Podcast – My Presentation from Permaculture Voices

The Survival Podcast Posted on by

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So this is kinda sorta a guerrilla podcast.  The majority of the audio in today’s show is from my “run through” of the presentation I gave last week at Permaculture Voices.

It covers many ways to build a business in permaculture, some really sound and basic business concepts that many new entrepreneurs often overlook.

As for myself and Josiah we along with two yet to be named other folks are getting on airplanes today to go see to something that should have us officially launching the first PermaEthos farm and a very cool educational opportunity in about one month’s time.  More on that on Monday!

Comments

Guerrilla Podcast – My Presentation from Permaculture Voices — 25 Comments

  1. Prediction: Jack is teaming with Ben Falk on Ben’s new property. I’m probably way off but that’d be awesome!

  3. Thanks for this! I’m glad we don’t have to wait till the Voices video/audio is available to hear your presentation, though I’m still going to be buying it.

    Really looking forward to building a permaculture nursery business this year in OK. Something I can do while waiting for the pigs to grow out and bees to produce honey. Have already ordered seed stock and working with a friend who works at Dave Wilson.

    Thank you for the inspiration.

    • If you have a green house I had the thought of selling annuals. Start tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage and such from seed and sell them. They sell for $4 a piece at Home Depot. Until I could get the trees up and going.

  4. Passion as well as abrasive and caressing moments. Jack, you are awesome when your are beying you, of that there is no doubt in my mind. Store this talk, revisit yearly. To me, this talk is your pinnacle mind moment, from here, it is just implementation. You and destiny have become friends, I think.

  7. Thanks Jack! Btw, would you be willing to make the Powerpoint deck available?
    Al

    • +1
      And if you had your sales pitch and sample mission statement/financial plan typed up…

      I’m the type of person who has a hard time getting started writing these types of ‘business’ statements from thin air. If I have a sample I can go to town and often end up with something completely different, with no shred of the original to be found. I just need the example to get my juices flowing.

  8. Not sure what is going on but the last 2 podcasts do not have a player and no way to hear the show. Any idea what is happening?

  9. I would like to know how Jack recommends one becomes a better public speaker.

    I am also curious what the importance of a mission statement and revenue models is ? It’s not for marketing ? I still have to listen to the rest of the podcast; but might like to hear some elaboration on that.

    • Unless you are well funded you are going to need to deal with a bank to get your enterprise off the ground. All banks are going to want to know what your business plan and revenue model are before they’ll even talk to you. Even if you are not dealing with a bank, if you need investors they’ll need this also.

      That’s just the external need. Internally, most businesses that fail did not have a business plan or financial model. If you want to be successful the first step is to have a good plan. A business plan isn’t a guarantee of success and not having one isn’t guarantee of failure, but the statistics show you’ll have a much higher chance of success with one than without.

      In short, if you don’t know what your mission statement and financial models are and if you can’t communicate it to others your business is going to struggle for a long time and may fail.

    • One of the most important things about these is organizing your thoughts and understanding of what you want to achieve. How can you know where you’re going if you don’t even know the goal?

      When you establish these things you can start to create specifics and details that will allow you to walk along to achieve this goal. This is classic steps using analysis to solve a problem. Time and time again people fail to realize you can’t look at details before you get the big picture. Big picture provides the boundaries for which you can construct a framework for achieving the goal.

      This is even used in military tactics. The mission is to “win”. The top generals are given their sectors and areas for which they’re supposed to take control over. These generals turn to their senior officers and split up that job. These jobs are then split up amongst various lower ranking officers and so on and so on until you hit the the lowest levels of enlisted as a fire team.

      You cannot win (overal goal) by first choosing the layout of a fire team (specifics and hyper details, like, which specific cultivars of gooseberries) without even understanding what “win” means.

    • I realize there is probably a tad more explaining I should have done before finishing the post.

      While it is also for “marketing” you should see by now its really less about marketing and more about yourself. Bill Mollison / Geoff Lawton stress time and time again about looking big then zooming into details. You are not going to get much specifics about plants/varieties/cultivars etc in a Geoff Lawton PDC. He gives them as an example for answering a type of problem, only to show what a possible answer could look like for a specific situation.

      In the gooseberry example I gave, let me go a bit further. If you’re super excited about gooseberries and that’s all you want to do, you logically cannot come up with a business gooseberry cultivars until you solidify “what exactly am I going to do with gooseberries”. Here are some thoughts that I might have. “I am going to create a business around gooseberries. I will conduct experiments and trial the best varieties possible. I will conduct workshops on propagation techniques and sell specific varieties for specific situations. I will provide consulting services for commercial growers regarding gooseberries”. As you can see, at no point in time can I dial into specifics till I have at least said these type of things. Condensing this down into a concise solid statement (or a few) will make it crystal clear to yourself, and others, what exactly it is that you want to do. “My business provides services around the gooseberry plant by providing education, consulting services, and the selling of plants. The business will also conduct research and development to provide superior new varieties for specific customers needs.”.

      Done.

  10. Wow, Jack spot on with this off the hook podcast. I’m currently working on developing my property. I want to get my nursery biz going here in OK, and install my food forest. They will both work hand in hand.

  11. Great information Jack. This is one I’d definitely like a transcript from.

    Regarding your PermaEthos project, I can’t wait to hear more. I also can’t wait for the playbook. This is something I’d really love to do in Oregon if I can just find the right farm. I’m hoping I can find a way to do it with my whole family.
    While you work out the details I’ll be doing my PDC this spring with Geoff and looking for a rural rental to move my family to so we can start putting some of these things in practice. The trick will be finding a rental where either the landlord is open minded to changing his land or where there is rentable land nearby.

  12. This was an amazing podcast. Just listened to it twice. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

  13. Jack, I have listened to pretty much all of your shows. I have to say that this show is absolutely one of my favorites.

  14. Wow. Just wow.

    I listened to this podcast twice it was so awesome, and I feel like I need to listen to it another 2-3 times, ideally sitting at a table with pen and paper in hand to write down the main points.

    It’s kind of funny how sometimes the universe tends to bring several things together in confluence that you just cannot ignore. I’m a civil engineer and licensed P.E., and have been trying to figure out how I can realistically combine the two into a viable business model while helping to bring my profession out of the mid-20th century. Well, over the past month I found out that a group is looking to purchase a property about 5 miles away from me to form an ecovillage, and I jumped at the opportunity to do whatever I can from a site planning standpoint to help them. Then, I found out that a couple in my town is relocating to just over the border in NE PA to form a small community on a farm, and I jumped at the opportunity to help them design their site along permaculture principles. What I always feel like I lacked was the intuition/skill to successfully market what I want to do.

    This podcast came at exactly the right time, and filled in that empty niche. Thank you so much for putting this out there, Jack! This post was a HOME RUN! I could probably go on for about two dozen more paragraphs right now with the details, but I’ll just leave it at THANK YOU for now.

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