CO-designing (Y)OUR retreat center
Starting a business in 2020 requires more than just out-of-the-box thinking. Not only are we in the midst of a pandemic that has radically changed how we think and act on a global level, but we’re also facing a mass extinction event, where we are witnessing environmental devastation on a scale that’s hard to grasp.
Any founder with a moral compass needs to consider how their business serves to not just be a “good” operator, meeting baseline green metrics, but they need to think how to create a business that deeply recognizes that our current capitalist approaches are not serving our long term well-being on the planet.
When I started working on Kasaba it was important to me that people have the ability to own something that gives them a place in nature to escape to, but also earns them money so it’s not a sinkhole of expenses. Creating the village with tiny homes offered the chance to provide an affordable way to buy part of a retreat center and have it fully managed so there’s no headaches or worry. It also gives owners the security that if Kasaba doesn’t make it as a business, they still have their investment that can be moved elsewhere or sold.
When working on the branding and messaging with Rich Binell and John Bielenberg, we riffed on the idea of a new category design (inspired by the thinking behind the book Play Bigger) and from that, I came up with “co-retreat”. It felt like Kasaba was going to be more (co)llaborative and (co)operative than traditional retreats and glamping destinations where people just pay, stay then go away.
I wanted Kasaba to be more persistent. A place where you not only paid and stayed, but you planted a garden and each time when you visited you could harvest from the garden. As someone who has moved from rented house to rented house, I sometimes mourned the loss of seeing the apple tree I planted grow to its full expression and yield enough produce to dehydrate and preserve the fruits to enjoy throughout the year.
So the “co” really represented a shared interest, but the details were still foggy about how this might extend beyond a simple profit share model from their cabin rental income.
While considering my options for fundraising to get the venture off the ground, I chose a more durable business financing model of preferred equity with annual dividend returns to investors. This is different to the pathway of angels and VCs looking for exits and 10x returns within a few years. I’m under the expert guidance of Jenny Kassan, who wrote the book Raising Capital on Your Own Terms. She explains these two alternatives are like planets, you either choose the green living planet or the Death Star (the VC model). I’d already been following the Zebras Unite movement and seeing the growing discontent with the winner takes all approach of the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem players, so her method resonated with me and I became her client.
Part of this strategy is finding values-aligned investors as well as presenting a crowd-funding option that invites more than just accredited investors (who have to meet high personal wealth metrics in order to participate).
To date, things are falling into place with the fundraising, but that still leaves the community and team-building design.
I knew it was important to create a framework for decision-making and tension-resolution so that the community of cabin buyers have ways to work through disagreements and participate in decisions that impact them. To that end, I’ve been consulting with Jamaica Stevens, who wrote Reinhabiting the Village. We’ve developed a Village Code that documents how people can address tensions as they arise and collaborate on changing our agreements moving forward when needed. This has been a great process and Jamaica is well known as an expert in the field.
Although this was achieving a strong foundation for cooperation, it was still missing the framework for how to bring the investor/buyers more deeply into actively participating in the success of the business and having clarity on their stakeholdership of Kasaba.
I’ve recently had the good fortune of meeting Marc Tognotti, who has a wealth of experience in designing multi-stakeholder action-planning processes, not to mention a team of associates, including top legal and financial experts, who are skilled in architecting worker and community-owned enterprises where everyone has a share of the equity and a real stake in each other’s success. Marc says that when you get the financial piece right, it opens the way for everyone to profit themselves and each other by sharing their yearnings and their gifts.
Marc is working tirelessly with me, as we thresh out a truly collaborative and inclusive model that will bring the cabin owners more deeply into the flow of all the benefits — spiritual, healthful, financial and more — that will come from being in a well-architected, mutually supportive community of people with many different skills and shared dreams. Marc’s work has been achieving great success in structuring and energizing indigenous-owned and operated community conservancies in Africa, that are developing the self-sufficient capacity to protect and regenerate threatened forests and wildlife. In addition, he and his team are now working with the leaders of a developing country on a plan to convert the nation’s many state-owned enterprises into what they are calling “direct citizen-owned enterprises.” The vision is that all citizens will enjoy an ownership share — become actual holders of non-transferable stock — in the national economy, aligning their interests as workers, customers, shareholders, and citizens in the nation’s economic success, so that the commonwealth is shared and distributed and increased by each and all for each and all.
Marc’s thinking is orders of magnitude more evolved than mine on how a truly collaborative model for our retreat center can work. He’s a master at multi-stakeholder negotiations and cooperation, and how the right kind of shared equity structures can drive ever deeper levels of collaboration where everyone supports everyone else in following the path of their desires and dreams in learning, growth and action. This includes the participative collaboration structures for how we can all share fully in developing the vision and the village, and also how we can use financial tools like open book management to enable everyone to steer the ship towards entrepreneurial and financial success. Marc is emphatic on developing ways we can help people bring forward their gifts to ensure Kasaba flourishes and is resilient enough to weather the inevitable bumps and grinds that will happen as we grow.
This also requires creating a team culture for the employees and making a “teal” company (see Reinventing Organizations for more on this) using empowerment systems like Holocracy. We are working on thoughtfully designing the company to have distributed power and make it safe for people to bring their whole selves to the workplace.
As the person at the heart of this vision I know it’s on me to level up my ability to meet this challenge to achieve a truly future-thinking organization that leads with the heart and fulfills the needs of everyone involved.
To that end, today I spoke with Jeff Barnum from School for the Social Future. Together with his partner, Louisa Barnum, they are equipping people to find creative solutions by working on their higher selves, transforming their shadow, and being present with all situations as they arise in order to create a social wholeness.
I’m pledging to continue to share our journey so that others might learn from our challenges and celebrations along the way. I also hope to provide a window into our organization for all stakeholders, guests and supporters to understand a little more about what we’re trying to achieve at Kasaba.
Please follow me here to keep updated, or head over to kasaba.co to subscribe to our monthly email newsletter. You’re also welcome to reach out and ask me questions about the process. keren (at) kasaba.co. I’ll be happy to hear from you.
