July 8

The Permaculture Framework for Building a Sustainable Business

Ecological Business Theory

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Building a business is like growing a tree. 

You can’t just throw seeds into the dirt and hope for the best—each element, from climate to daily care, plays a crucial role in whether your efforts thrive or wither. 

This framework is my theory of business all in one place. (It builds on my original theory, which you can read >>here<<)

I’m drawing from agricultural principles, specifically permaculture, to help us all design and grow a business that is not only sustainable for you long-term, but gives you back 40x, 60x, and even 100x what you put into it!

There are 5 Core Elements of Permaculture: 

  • Climate & Microclimate
  • Planning
  • Site Design
  • Perennials & Annuals
  • Ongoing Maintenance.

There are 5 Core Elements of Business: 

  • Value Creation
  • Finance
  • Value Delivery
  • Sales & Marketing
  • Ongoing Maintenance 😉

In this framework, I will explain how the elements of each overlap, giving us insights into where and how to best apply our efforts for the highest (sustainable!) return. 😎


Foundation

Climate = Value Creation

No garden or business exists in a vacuum. The context of your project is paramount to understanding what is possible for your specific situation.

For agriculture, the climate dictates what sorts of plants you can grow, how you can grow them, and when. Even if you’re “defying nature” by growing tropical flowers in a temperate zone, the climate controls how you can grow by forcing you to use a greenhouse. 

Climate is the all-encompassing environment:

  • from what hemisphere you’re in to what continent you’re on
  • the longitude & latitude (which determines your growing zone)
  • large landscape features like deserts, mountains, and bodies of water
  • and annual weather patterns

The general climate is the “bones,” but your specific microclimate affects your garden on a more intimate level. 

Your particular piece of land may be in the lee of the mountain and get less rain, or on a peninsula between two lakes and get more rain, or be on top of the county’s only sand deposit where no matter how much rain you get it drains away asap. 

For urban gardeners, what and how you grow can greatly depend on how many skyscrapers are around blocking the sunlight.

When planning a garden or farm, agriculturists almost always start with their foundation, at least subconsciously. If you’ve lived in an area for a while, you already generally know what is possible to grow.

However, when people start a business, they generally don’t do a deep dive into the climate of their market. An idea usually comes based around a problem and a group of people, which is more of a microclimate consideration. When they get bigger, then it becomes more necessary to look at the broader scope.

Of course, if you're intending to grow a cottage level industry business (meaning you never want to get bigger than 1-10ish people on your team), you may never need to worry about the overarching climate.

Your microclimate, however, controls everything from your marketing to your delivery methods, so it's important to understand where you sit.

Your microclimate is the context in which you create value.

This includes:

  • the problem you solve (solution)
  • how you solve it (offer)
  • the people you help (audience)
  • the other businesses solving similar problems (niche)

Working with your microclimate is the key to a successful business.

In order to make the most of your microclimate, consider developing any or all of the following:

  • an elevator pitch of what you do
  • a mission statement
  • your backstory of how you stumbled on this project and why it matters so much to you
  • ideal avatar exercises to understand your person's demographics, psychological profiles, etc
  • a vision statement for how you want to work
  • a Heck No list of things you will never be interested in offering
  • a brief business plan 

👉This area should take >1% of your time. Review every 5-10 years.

Resources: 


Preparation

Planning = Finance
For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? (Luke 14:28)

What do you want to accomplish? Why build a permaculture solution? Why work to create a business that is self-sustaining and nurtures you as much as you nurture it?

Because we know, intuitively, that everything we do should have some benefit.

Most things we do don’t directly translate into monetary terms, but business is one area where it’s super easy to tell if you’re really getting anything out of doing it.

In business, water is a metaphor for money. 

Without water, you have no garden; so without money, you have no business.

If you’re not making any money, it’s a hobby or a charity. If you’re earning revenue but just breaking even, it’s an unsustainable, unprofitable venture. If you’re actually making a profit, it’s a business. (Remember, profit is not the same thing as owner’s comp.)

Most people ignore the money until it's a problem.

They wait until they feel stressed and pinched and in over their head, and then are too busy running the system to step back and take a look at why.

The most important thing to plan and design is your money system. Everything else is way sexier: I too love designing logos and working on my website and dreaming up life-changing products. But without a solid system for charging, collecting, and allocating money, it’s all a pipe dream.

👉 This should take >2% of your time. Set up your money system once and review annually. (Regular maintenance falls in the “Conservation” category.)

Resources: 


Ideation

Site Design = Value Delivery

Permaculture is, by definition, meant to be permanent. 

Instead of planting monocultures that change every season and require massive amounts of water and fertilizer to be added to the system, you work with your land to design a mini-ecosystem that creates and sustains its own elements with as little input as possible.

Rather than clearing and leveling your land, you’d take stock of the natural resources and features that are already there. 

These include things like big trees and rocks, hills or elevation changes, low points where water pools, any actual bodies of water (creeks, ponds, etc), the areas that get sun vs shade, typical wind directions, and points of access for wildlife.

These “bones” won’t change unless something cataclysmic happens. 

So, too, the core of your business should be a constant landmark. 

These are things like the mission you identified in the Foundation phase, the type of problem you solve, your main audience demographic, and your theory of approach to solving it.

A business that provides glass shower doors to residential homes doesn’t typically add a line of perfumes to their offer. 

If you’re working with underprivileged youth in the inner city, you’d have to drastically change your messaging to attract upper-middle-aged billionaires; and the offers you’d present to each would be vastly different - almost like you’d need a different business to reach those two wildly different demographics.

(Side note: this is why large conglomerates operate smaller brands, like how PepsiCo has Fritos, Lay’s, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats. You’d never buy oatmeal from a soda company. So they need a different business to provide a different solution to a different demographic.)

When laying out the bones of your business, consider the permanent features of your landscape:

  • your metaniche
  • the overarching problem you solve & your solution
  • who you help (your evergreen client)
  • the general category of your solution (commodities, specialty services, education, experiences, edutainment, etc)
  • your skills, time, energy, and effort
  • your existing personal & professional networks
  • your competitors (list off the top of your head)
  • your companion planters (businesses serving the same people but solving an adjacent problem)

👉This should take >5% of your time. Review quarterly; audit your time, energy, and effort, competitors, and companion planters biannually.

Resources: 


Productization

Perennials & Annuals = Sales & Marketing

If value delivery is WHAT you do, your products and services are HOW you do it. 

You can sell the same product for 10 years, and introduce something new every season. You should have a mix of both long-term and short-term offers to keep the garden fresh and vibrant.

Perennials are plants that grow and mature over several years. Trees are part of this category, as well as woody shrubs like blackberries and blueberries, hardy herbs, vines, and bulbs.

Annuals are plants that grow and mature over one year. Most vegetables fit this category: root veggies like potatoes and carrots, all greens, legumes, and herbs, some fruits, and most flowers. 

A good permaculture design combines both perennials and annuals, considering the strengths and weaknesses of each. Masterful design combines them in ways that maximizes resource retention. The goal is to create a closed-loop system that requires very little input. 

👉 A good example of resource maximization is the 3 Sisters companion planting. 

In your business, you’ll want to offer different products at different times, combine them with services, and bundle them in multiple configurations.

For info-product businesses: your flagship program - a perennial - will probably change relatively little over the years, while your mini-courses, resources, and webinar trainings will probably be updated every year-ish.

For small-batch product businesses: your core product, i.e. hand-painted signs, will mostly stay the same, while the designs will change with the seasons. Introducing a new kind of product - like stuffed animals - adds another perennial to your ecosystem.

For service providers: if you’re an accountant, you’ll always do bookkeeping and reporting (perennials), but you may rearrange your contract lengths, offer different service packages, or do seasonal blitzes like at tax time (annuals). 

For those with a large permaculture installation, you should have the resources to experiment with combining products and services in ways you hadn’t before.

This element also includes your website, sales funnels, marketing strategy / channels, and your product delivery tech (membership platforms, etc).

👉 This element should take 25-40% of your time. Create new products and audit existing ones quarterly. 

Resources: 


Conservation

Ongoing Maintenance = Ongoing Maintenance 

The daily watering, weeding, harvesting, and fertilizing must be done or else your garden will stop producing.

Some things just have to be done on a regular basis. They can look different for each of us, but the core tasks are usually the same:

  • content/product creation
  • bookkeeping, tracking, and record keeping
  • marketing
  • posting
  • emailing
  • delivery of services

This element takes up the vast majority of your time - probably 75-80% right now.

The more time you spend here, the more you’ll feel stressed. It’s important to make sure your processes and systems for these tasks are streamlined AMAP (as much as possible) in order to make the most of your resources.

A good example is content creation: if you start your creation process with a video, you can easily break it apart into shorts, separate out the audio for a podcast, and use the text transcripts for blog posts, social posts, emails, etc. 

This element is the key to growing a business that sustains you.

If you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off, reacting to everything and scrambling to get things created right before they’re needed, you’ll always feel behind.

Getting these processes under control will give you breathing room. You’ll be able to work less time, and/or spend more time on the stuff that is more foundational.

It’s the key to doing what you want – but don’t NEED – to do.

Resources:


The health and longevity of your business depend not on hustle or luck, not on throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks, but on thoughtful design and consistent stewardship.

When you treat your business like a living ecosystem you set yourself up for sustainable success.
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Abigail Jackson Daniels

I'm a chronic entrepreneur, author, coach, and figurer-outer. You can think of me as a Loveable Nerdy Scientist and Professional Guinea Pig (kinda like Tim Ferriss… but less crazy).

I have a background in music, teaching, management, accounting, agriculture, homesteading, herbalism, textile arts, birthing, and about 1,000 other interests. ;) My goal is always to learn how to live the best, most fulfilled life possible and help others do the same.

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