Let’s start with a confession. This book is not written by a business genius, a serial entrepreneur with yachts and passive income streams, or someone who made all the right moves at just the right time. No. This book is written by someone who’s tried — hard — and learned, sometimes the hard way.

At best, Persephone Brewing Company, the business I co-founded, is what you might call marginally successful. We’re still standing, which in the landscape of Canadian craft brewing — and small business in general — is no small thing. But we are far from perfect, far from rich, and far from resting on any laurels. Most of our laurels, for the record, are metaphorical. The few real ones we’ve received — in the form of plaques, awards, and warm mentions in industry journals — tell only the most flattering 15% of the story. The other 85%? That’s where the juice is. Or maybe the yeast.

So, let’s be honest. I’m not particularly well-read. I’m not an academic. I didn’t write a thesis on regenerative capitalism, nor have I ever used the word “epistemology” unironically. What I am is someone who’s been in the dirt. Literally. I’ve shoveled compost, argued with building inspectors, navigated the cruel waters of seasonal cash flow, and fought — sometimes publicly — for a different kind of business. One that puts community first. One that might feed the land, not just extract from it. One that’s alive, like a tree, or a field, or a dream you can’t quite shake.

And I’ve screwed up. A lot.

I’ve made decisions that, in hindsight, compromised shareholder value — though I’d argue that “value” is a slippery word, and shareholder comfort isn’t always the same as long-term good. I’ve underpaid staff when the budget got tight. I’ve damaged parts of our farm trying to do something innovative. I’ve leaned too far forward, mistaking momentum for direction. I’ve been idealistic when I should’ve been prudent, and cautious when I should’ve gone all in.

These aren’t humblebrags. They’re just… facts.

We’ve learned from many of these missteps — not all, mind you, but many. Persephone, as a company, has matured. Some things have healed. Some scars are permanent. But if we’re going to tell a story about growing a regenerative business — a business that seeks to act more like a forest than a factory — then we have to begin in the shadows, among the rot and the worms and the breakdown of what didn’t work. Because that’s where fertility comes from.

It’s tempting, when you write a book like this, to polish the narrative. To present yourself as wise, stable, visionary — a kind of entrepreneurial Dalai Lama with a clipboard and a Shopify login. But that’s not real. I’ve spent too long walking the dirt roads of both business and actual agriculture to pretend otherwise. And the truth is, when you try something new — when you deviate from the norm — you get scraped up. Sometimes, badly.

There’s an adage I love, and unfortunately, relate to a bit too well: “The first through the wall are the bloodiest.” Early adopters, as it turns out, often become early examples — sometimes of what not to do. That’s the price of trying to innovate in a world that isn’t quite ready. When you’re trying to prove that a beer company can grow hops and community in the same soil, that a business can be a B Corp and a farm and a social movement — well, let’s just say there’s not a lot of instruction manuals out there. You figure it out by getting punched in the gut and then standing back up.

In hindsight, maybe we should’ve been more cautious. Maybe we should’ve waited for more capital, or a clearer market signal, or whatever it is that rational people wait for. But we didn’t. And while we’ve bled a little, we’ve also built something real. Something living. Something people seem to care about.

Still, I won’t lie: it’s hard. Really hard.

Imposter syndrome is a frequent visitor in my mind. Sometimes it wears a business suit and speaks with the voice of a bank manager. Other times it shows up as a whisper when I look at a spreadsheet and realize we’re out of runway again. It’s both real and — in some ways — completely unwarranted. Because the fact is, no one really knows what they’re doing. Especially not in business. Especially not in regenerative, values-based, community-rooted business. There’s no blueprint. Just instincts, feedback, and the occasional miracle.

Leadership, too, is often a lonely place. Everyone talks about “founder energy” like it’s some kind of superhero glow, but more often, it feels like camping alone in a thunderstorm with a paper tent and a broken flashlight. People look to you for clarity, for confidence, for answers. Sometimes you have them. Sometimes you don’t. But you still have to speak.

And you still have to care.

That’s probably what’s kept me going — the caring. I care about the land. I care about our team. I care about the craft of brewing something meaningful — not just beer, but culture. I care about our customers, who show up with dogs and kids and contradictions. I care about the kind of economy we’re trying to build, one that’s less extractive and more reciprocal. And I care about people like you — readers, thinkers, doers — who are looking for another way to do business. Not a perfect way. Just a better one.

This book is an attempt to offer that — not a map, but a field guide. Not a gospel, but a gardener’s journal. You’ll find a lot of metaphor here. Trees, mostly. Forests. Roots. Soil. That’s how I think. That’s how I see the world. And if you stick with it, you might just find that thinking like a tree is the most radical business strategy of all.

But before you dive in, I ask one thing: read this book the way you’d walk through a farm. Eyes open. Boots dirty. Expecting both manure and miracles. Because they often come together.

And while we’re confessing things, here’s another: we’re not professional farmers. Not really. What we’ve done at Persephone in the name of regenerative agriculture is more field trial than full-scale operation — a kind of agrarian jazz, improvised and intuitive. Our farming practices have been exploratory, small-scale, and often experimental, driven by curiosity and values rather than commercial yield. We’ve had successes. We’ve had slug infestations. But like everything in this book, the intent wasn’t perfection. It was participation. Learning. And doing the best we could with the land, tools, and knowledge we had.

It’s also important to name privilege, especially in the context of business and land. I am exceptionally privileged — white, Canadian, cis-gendered, and for the first 49 years of my life, able-bodied, among other things. While I haven’t been especially wealthy by conventional standards, I’ve had access to sufficient resources — including supportive networks, education, and modest capital — that allowed me to build some familial wealth. A cornerstone of that wealth is our ownership of real estate in Gibsons, which, like the Persephone farm, sits on unceded Squamish territory. To say this more plainly: our wealth is built upon stolen land. This is not a casual acknowledgment. It’s a deep and unresolved ethical dilemma — one I wrestle with regularly and without tidy resolution.

We don’t get to regenerate systems unless we’re honest about what broke them — and, in many cases, how we helped. I’m trying to be honest here. Vulnerable, even. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s necessary. Regeneration doesn’t start with bravado. It starts with humility. With compost. With things falling apart so they can become something richer.

So, if you’re feeling a bit unsure, a bit inadequate, a bit out on a limb — good. That means you’re paying attention. That means you’re alive. And that means you’re probably the right kind of person to read this book.

Welcome to the orchard.

Let’s grow something worth harvesting.

Chapter 1v2

Dirt First, Dreams Second

We didn’t start with a soil test.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We tested the soil before planting hops — but only for the basics. The surface stuff: can we get a tractor in here without it sinking into the abyss? Will hops grow? Will the ghosts of failed farm startups haunt our porta-potty? (Okay, maybe not that last one — but it was early days, and we were spooked by plenty.)

We didn’t test for microbial life. We didn’t assess soil structure or measure long-term nutrient cycling. We didn’t ask the land what it might want to become. We came in hot — full of conviction, caffeine, and not nearly enough humility. Classic startup energy. Just on farmland.

Persephone Brewing was born with purpose, but let’s not pretend we had it all figured out. We were mission-driven, sure, but we didn’t yet understand what that mission required — not from the land, not from the system, and definitely not from ourselves. We knew we wanted to grow something. We knew beer mattered to people — as beverage, as gathering point, as symbol. And we knew hops were a big part of that. So we planted them.

But we hadn’t reckoned with what it means to be stewards of land. Especially land in the ALR — B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve — with its particular rules, restrictions, and cultural expectations. We hadn’t thought through our capital structure either. (Like, who exactly should own a mission-driven farm-brewery hybrid? Tricky question.)

And we definitely hadn’t considered that soil — real soil — is one of the most complex, delicate, and foundational systems on Earth.

Here’s the truth: we started like most people start. Half-informed and fully committed. The dream led the data. And while we might do a few things differently if we had a time machine, I’m also not sure we’d have learned what we did without fumbling forward.

Mistakes were made. But compost, as it turns out, is just failure with a little time and the right conditions.

Soil Health Is System Health

We need to talk about dirt.

Not the sacred-seedling-cradled-by-clean-hands kind of dirt. Not the Instagram version, where some white-gloved saviour gently lowers a sprout into a composted fairy tale. I mean actual dirt. Dense, worm-stuffed, slightly rank, wonderfully alive dirt — the kind that stains your boots, makes your back ache, and, if you’re paying attention, humbles the hell out of you.

Because here’s the inconvenient truth: soil — real soil — is a goddamn miracle. And we’ve treated it like garbage.

We’ve scraped it, stripped it, sprayed it, and monocultured the life right out of it. Modern agriculture, in its pursuit of yield-at-all-costs efficiency, has hollowed out the ground we depend on — turning whole landscapes into sterile production zones with the nutritional complexity of a vending machine Pop-Tart. The UN says we’ve got fewer than sixty harvests left in some regions. That’s not a climate warning. That’s a slow-motion obituary.

So yeah. Soil health isn’t a niche concern for crunchy permaculturists and farm podcast junkies. It’s life or death. Literal and figurative.

I didn’t come into this work knowing that. We were excited — under-informed, over-confident — and thought our purpose would do the heavy lifting. We tested our soil, but we were checking boxes: Will the hops grow? Is the drainage okay? Can we get a tractor in without sinking like a medieval supply cart

We didn’t ask what the land had been through. We didn’t ask what it needed. We didn’t consider what the microbial communities might have to say — if we hadn’t already killed them off.

Eventually, we learned — mostly from falling on our ass. And then from people like Gabe Brown, whose book Dirt to Soil is basically a punch in the mouth followed by a hug from a guy in coveralls who’s already composted more wisdom than most of us will ever grow.

Gabe didn’t come out of the womb whispering to compost piles. He did it the conventional way first — the high-input, spray-happy, till-it-again approach. Watched it fail. Then started listening to the land. That’s when things got interesting.

At the heart of what he teaches — and the Regenified certification that grew out of his work — is this idea: healthy soil is healthy system. Period.

The principles? They sound simple. But they’re more like koans — deceptively plain, wildly complex.

Know your context. Don’t treat all land like interchangeable widgets on a spreadsheet. B.C. isn’t Nebraska, and your backyard isn’t Saskatchewan. Pay attention to what’s actually here — ecologically, culturally, historically.

Cover the soil. Bare dirt is basically an open bar for erosion. Keep it dressed — mulch, cover crops, plant residue, whatever it takes.

Minimize disturbance. Tilling rips the guts out of the soil’s structure. So does spraying everything with chemicals designed to kill life, then wondering why nothing grows back with any soul.

Embrace diversity. Nature doesn’t monoculture. We shouldn’t either — in crops, or in boardrooms, or in ideas.

Keep living roots in the ground. Dormant soil is dying soil. Something green should always be at work.

And yes, integrate animals — wisely. Grazing isn’t inherently destructive. It’s a missing piece of the puzzle if done right. (Also, chickens are hilarious and functional. Like little composting comedians.)

But more than principles, Regenified also challenges us with three deceptively sharp rules: Don’t harm. Honour your context. Ensure reciprocity. Not as slogans. As practice. And that practice? It’s never finished.

Because these aren’t just guidelines for farming. They’re guidelines for living. For running a business. For building policy. For engaging in relationships that don’t suck the nutrients out of everyone involved.

How often do we forget context — forcing cookie-cutter strategies onto communities like a franchise model for justice? How often do we kill soil — or spirit — in the name of efficiency? How often do we celebrate monoculture — of crops, of culture, of leadership — because it’s easier to manage?

So let’s be clear: soil isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a mirror.

When the ground’s depleted, our systems tend to be, too. Economically, emotionally, politically. We build on extraction, we burn out, and then we wonder why it’s so damn hard to grow anything that lasts. Maybe it’s because we salted the earth with our short-sightedness and called it innovation.

I’ve come to believe that tending soil — and I mean actual topsoil — is one of the most radical acts of hope we have left. It holds water. Stores carbon. Cools the planet. Grows food. Grounds us. Literally and philosophically. And none of it happens on your timeline.

Soil doesn’t heal fast. It needs patience. It needs restraint. And, above all, it needs us to stop treating it like a resource and start treating it like a relationship.

That shift doesn’t come easily — especially when you can’t physically work the land the way you used to. I miss that. The calluses. The motion. The dirty-fingernail intimacy of it all. But that loss? It’s made me more observant. More collaborative. More dependent on people who know more than I do — and more willing to listen when they speak.

That might be the whole lesson right there.

We didn’t include Gabe’s principles in this book to check some regenerative agriculture box. We included them because they’ve reshaped how we think — about land, yes, but also about hiring, capital, governance, even conflict. They are the compost beneath our business plan. You’ll see them again and again.

Because when the soil’s good, things grow. Not neatly. Not quickly. But with a vitality you can feel. In the hops. In the beer. In the way people gather without needing to be asked.

So go on. Get your hands in the dirt. Or if you can’t, watch it. Listen to it. Ask better questions. Because the signs are there. You just have to slow down long enough to notice them.

Context Isn’t Background Noise — It’s the Whole Damn Soundtrack

I used to think “context” was just a word consultants tossed around when they didn’t want to commit to an actual opinion.

“Well, it depends on the context…”

Awesome. Very helpful. Thanks for playing.

But I’ve come around. Not because I suddenly enjoy corporate buzzwords — I still think most of them should be composted — but because running a mission-driven business has taught me the hard way that context isn’t background. It’s the whole damn soundtrack. You can’t mute it. And if you ignore it, you’re dancing out of time and wondering why nobody else wants to join in.

When we launched Persephone, I thought I understood the local conditions — craft beer culture, tourism, a growing local food movement. But I didn’t fully grasp the deeper layers. The things people assume you know, because they’re so embedded they’ve stopped being said out loud.

There was Indigenous history I hadn’t done the work to learn. Agricultural zoning laws I assumed I could navigate with charm and optimism. Community politics that went back further than the pub trivia I was trying to host in the beer garden. I showed up (ugh, there’s that phrase again — I arrived, planted, stumbled in) with a pile of good intentions and not nearly enough humility.

Context isn’t just a consideration. It’s the difference between being a keystone species and being a goddamn invasive one.

A keystone species makes life better for everything around it — like a local food co-op that anchors its neighbourhood. It buys from nearby farms, employs people who live down the street, and hosts things like seed swaps or cooking classes without making a big song and dance about it. It’s useful, rooted, quietly vital.

An invasive species just eats. Think of the used car dealership that flattens an old orchard, throws up chain-link fencing and floodlights, and starts hawking zero-down financing with zero connection to place. It could be anywhere. And it leaves nothing behind but oil stains and bad credit.

Be the co-op. Not the car lot.

Rooting Is Not Branding

Place-based business doesn’t mean slapping your town’s name on the label and calling it authenticity. That’s marketing. I’m talking about the kind of rooting that actually shapes what you do — who you hire, how you price, when you grow and when you don’t.

And context isn’t fixed, either. Markets shift. Rain patterns get weird. Zoning rules change. The same piece of land might need something entirely different five years from now. You don’t just root once and move on. You stay in relationship with the place. You listen. You adjust.

If that sounds like marriage, it kind of is. Land — like a long-term partner — will humble the shit out of you if you stop paying attention.

The “Context” Principle in Real Life

Regenified’s first principle — Know your context — sounds easy. But in real life, it’s slippery as hell. It asks you to slow down. To ask first. To maybe not launch that new product line until you’ve figured out how it fits with the people and place you’re claiming to care about.

Here’s what that’s looked like for us:

• When the ALR challenged whether a brewery belonged on farmland, we had to face the uncomfortable truth that our identity — as both farmers and business owners — didn’t fit neatly into anyone’s rulebook. We had to advocate. Not just for ourselves, but for a different idea of what land stewardship could look like.

• When we hired folks with disabilities, we realized context wasn’t just legal or economic — it was spatial, emotional, human. Were we actually building a place people could use and feel welcome in? That question changed how we designed spaces, roles, and policies.

• When we brewed benefit beers for causes we cared about, we had to admit: sometimes we were outsiders. Sometimes we needed to partner instead of lead. Sometimes the best contribution was shutting up and handing over the mic.

Context doesn’t care about your good vibes or your business plan. It just is. You either acknowledge it, or you spend a lot of time and money wondering why things aren’t landing the way they should.

Context Is Your Soil Profile

Back to dirt for a second.

A soil profile tells you what kind of life is possible in a place. It tells you what might grow — and what never will, no matter how hard you try. Same goes for context.

You don’t plant hops in beach sand and expect a bumper crop. You don’t open a community-owned pub in a gated retirement village — unless you’ve got a killer bingo-and-IPA night dialed in.

Context is your business’s soil profile. It’s the cultural, ecological, regulatory, and emotional terrain you’re building on. If you don’t understand it, you’ll plant something that looks promising, only to watch it wither the minute things get hard.

Land-Based, Not Just Market-Based

We’re obsessed with “market signals.” Price points, analytics, social media reach. All fine. But the older signals — the ones from land, stories, seasons, people — we’ve tuned them out.

This framework, and this book, is about tuning back in. About listening to the ground beneath you instead of just the algorithm.

Because if the creek’s dry, the neighbours are mad, the kids can’t afford to live here anymore — those are market signals too. They just don’t come with a data dashboard.

Know your context. Actually know it. Learn the history. Ask better questions. And when you mess it up — because you will — admit it. Fix what you can. Compost the rest.

Good soil forgives. But it remembers.

We Didn’t Know What We Didn’t Know

Let’s be real: we were well-intentioned, mildly informed, and dangerously enthusiastic — a combination known in some regions as a liability.

We weren’t clueless. But we were definitely under-equipped. The kind of under-equipped that makes you bold enough to start something big, but not wise enough to realize what you’ve just committed to. We had conviction. We had community. We had a vague sense that business could be a force for good — and enough beer to convince ourselves we were right.

And honestly? I don’t regret it.

But I also wouldn’t do it the same way again.

We were driven by purpose. That part was real. We believed that community mattered, that local agriculture could be part of the solution, and that food and drink were powerful cultural tools. Still do. But belief doesn’t build a barn. And it sure as hell doesn’t get you through your first soggy winter when the drainage’s shot and the capital’s thin.

The Land Beneath Our Feet (and the Bureaucracy Above It)

We knew the land was in the Agricultural Land Reserve. But we didn’t know the ALR would turn out to be that roommate who labels all the condiments and leaves notes on the fridge every time you brew a batch of beer.

“Hey, just wondering… is this agricultural enough for you to be living here?”

We thought growing hops gave us a clear pass. Turns out, things get murky when you throw a tasting room into the mix. The ALR has rules. Thick, detailed, sometimes-contradictory rules. And while it wasn’t exactly hostile, it definitely wasn’t built with hybrid farm-breweries in mind.

We weren’t trying to pull a fast one. We were just naive. We thought being earnest and community-minded would smooth the regulatory path. That our beer — made with local hops, on working farmland, for a social mission — would speak for itself.

Spoiler: it didn’t. At least, not to the people holding the rulebook.

The Cap Table We Should’ve Written Down

Then there was the matter of ownership.

We started with friends. Smart, generous, principled friends. But we didn’t formalize roles. We didn’t build a model for how equity would evolve as the business grew. Who would bring money? Who would bring sweat? What happens when outside investment enters the picture?

We didn’t map any of that. We just assumed everyone would stay aligned — which, in hindsight, is how most bands break up.

To be clear: we were lucky in many ways. The people we started with were solid. But great people still need great agreements. We had a cap table built on trust and goodwill… until things got real, and we realized we’d built it on a handshake and a bar tab.

Because here’s the thing about trying to do good in business: when you screw up, it cuts deeper. Not just reputationally — emotionally. You’re not just disappointing stakeholders. You’re disappointing your values. And that stings.

The Hops Were the Easy Part

We planted hops because, well, beer. And because hops felt tangible. Local. Honest. A way to root the business in agriculture and actually grow what we were pouring.

We did test the soil — just not in the holistic, system-aware way we’ve since learned. We checked drainage, pH, and nitrogen levels. We didn’t ask about microbial activity or carbon sequestration. We didn’t understand cover crops or soil structure or the fact that planting a single crop over and over makes the soil about as resilient as a paper napkin in a thunderstorm.

We didn’t even know what crop rotation was. I thought it had something to do with turning in place.

We were farmers in theory. Entrepreneurs in boots. Purpose-drunk (and actually drunk) amateurs with dirt under our fingernails and spreadsheets in our backpacks.

And yet — the hops grew. The brewery opened. The community showed up. Volunteers helped plant those first rhizomes. Neighbours wandered in. Something took root, even if we didn’t fully understand the system we were tapping into.

The Wisdom We Found Late (But Not Too Late)

Looking back, we could’ve done things smarter. But I’m not sure we would’ve done them at all if we’d waited to be ready.

Sometimes “readiness” is just fear dressed up in a PowerPoint. And fear doesn’t build farms.

What we’ve done since — and are still doing — is dig in. Learn the place. Study the systems. Understand the damn zoning act. Ask better questions about ownership, governance, land use, and culture. Not because it’s trendy. Because it’s necessary.

Wendell Berry said, “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.” That line didn’t mean much to me when we started. Now it feels like scripture.

Because connection — messy, rooted, real — is what gives a business strength. It’s what lets it bend in the storm, lose a limb, and still hold on.

So Here’s My Advice

If you’re just starting — a farm, a business, a movement — start. Don’t wait until your ownership structure is flawless or you’ve memorized the entire ALR Act. But once you’re in it, dig deep. Know your place. Test your assumptions. Test the actual soil.

And when — not if — you mess something up, own it. Fix what you can. Learn. Then get back to work.

Because if we’d waited until everything was perfectly aligned, we’d still be in some bar sketching idealistic farm plans on the back of coasters.

Instead, we’re ten years in. Still learning. Still screwing some things up. But more rooted, more resilient, and a hell of a lot more awake than we were when we started.

Not bad for a bunch of beer nerds who planted hops without asking enough questions.

Soil is Living. So is Your Business.

Soil is living. Which means it can die. That’s not a metaphor. That’s science. And heartbreak. And a decent way to understand business too.

Soil is community. It is a mix of fungi and bacteria, of worms and insects, of root structures and carbon storage. And the best soils, the healthiest soils, are those with the highest level of diversity. The ones where the most life is thriving. The ones where the bugs are doing their weird flagella dance, the mycorrhizal fungi are chit-chatting away, and the roots are deep and generous, pulling up what’s needed and offering back what they can.

That’s what we should want in business too. Not a monoculture with one top predator devouring everything in sight, but a dynamic and diverse ecology of interdependent roles.

Here’s where the regenerative framework gets usefully simple: the formal Regenified model is grounded in three rules:

1. Reduce harm

2. Support life

3. Create reciprocal relationships

These aren’t just farming principles. They’re relationship principles. Business principles. Cultural principles.

Rule One: Reduce Harm.

We all know the obvious stuff — don’t spray Roundup, don’t run over your employees with forklifts, etc. But reducing harm also means slowing down extraction, easing off control, and questioning assumptions that profit is the only form of value.

In soil, harm reduction can mean no-till practices, keeping the ground covered, limiting chemical inputs, or not compacting the earth with giant-ass tractors every time you get the urge to “manage.”

In business? Maybe it means not paving over the back field just because parking overflow is annoying. Or not over-producing and over-hiring for a vanity expansion. Or not pretending your staff’s burnout is just a “seasonal push.” It might mean ditching exploitative suppliers, changing toxic workflow habits, or just recognizing that your slick social impact strategy is being held together by unpaid interns and good intentions.

Rule Two: Support Life.

This is where the fun begins. In farming, this might look like cover cropping, compost application, agroforestry, or integrating pollinator habitats. It means feeding the system without forcing it.

In business? It could mean providing fair wages, a healthy workplace culture, giving people time off when they need it, investing in their growth, saying yes to a community partnership even when you can’t trace the ROI. It means feeding creativity, curiosity, and even criticism. Because life isn’t tidy. It crawls and sprawls and buzzes and sings.

A local food co-op is a great example of this — not just stocking shelves, but feeding a sense of place. Supporting farmers. Hosting conversations. Reinforcing local food security and mutual trust. That’s what support looks like. Not just staying alive — making others more alive too.

Rule Three: Create Reciprocal Relationships.

This one is the deal-breaker. If it’s all one-way — if you’re just draining the system — then it’s not regenerative. It’s a Ponzi scheme.

In soil, reciprocity is carbon for nutrients, root exudates for microbial support, sunlight converted to sugar and offered up to fungi in exchange for phosphorus. Everyone gives something. Everyone gets something.

In business, reciprocity might mean sharing power. It might mean sourcing locally even if it costs more. It might mean building slow relationships instead of fast transactions. It might mean that if your business is growing, so is your responsibility to the land and people around it.

A regenerative business is rooted, but not rooted in place the way a weed can be. It’s rooted in relationship — with land, with people, with the flow of life. The opposite of this? The economic equivalent of an invasive species. Think: the used car dealership that pops up in a small town with inflatable gorillas and flapping tube men, siphons money out through zero-value credit scams, and vanishes before the lease is up. That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a parasite.

If soil is alive — and it is — then we have to stop managing land like a spreadsheet. And if business is alive — and it can be — then we have to stop managing companies like extraction pits.

This is where the metaphor becomes more than a metaphor.

Soil is not a passive substrate. It’s a feedback system. It’ll tell you if you’re screwing it up. So will your employees. Your customers. Your neighbours. Your gut.

Your business isn’t a product. It’s a system. A habitat. A damn ecosystem. If you’re not feeding life, you’re feeding the problem.

So treat it like soil: work it gently, listen more than you speak, and don’t assume it owes you anything.

Shit Growing in a Field — A Rant About Soil and Stock Imagery

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of the regenerative marketing aesthetic. You know the one: a pair of hands — usually white, always dirt-smudged just so — lovingly cradling a clump of moist soil with a tiny green seedling poking out the top. Sometimes, if the agency’s really cooking, there’s a dollar sign subtly photoshopped onto the sprout. Money growing from dirt. Cute.

And then there’s the font. Always rounded, earnest. A sans-serif lullaby for capitalists who want to feel like they’re composting something other than trust. Add a tagline — something like “Nurture Your Potential” or “Rooted in Growth” — and voilà: you’ve made an MBA wet dream look like a permaculture pamphlet.

This shit is everywhere. Conference decks. NGO brochures. ESG reports printed on recycled lies. It’s the visual equivalent of a greenwashing rubdown — sensual, soothing, and completely detached from the smell of actual compost.

But here’s the thing: if your soil isn’t healthy, nothing grows. Not your values. Not your culture. Not your business. That cupped handful of dirt isn’t a prop. It’s the whole damn foundation.

Real soil is chaotic. It doesn’t glow. It doesn’t pose. It doesn’t sit politely in your hands waiting for a macro lens. It moves. It shifts. It reeks. It bleeds and swells and sometimes collapses. It’s messy and wild and alive. And it does not care about your brand guidelines.

Same goes for the cultural and relational soil of your business. You don’t get to build a regenerative company by slapping a wellness program on a toxic workplace. You don’t get to put a B Corp badge on a pansexual budget spreadsheet and call it inclusion. You don’t get to outsource community-building to your marketing team and call it stakeholder engagement.

Regeneration isn’t a vibe. It’s a verb.

So yeah, you can commission more photos of hands and seedlings if it helps you sleep. But if your business is leaching talent, draining trust, and salting the earth of your relationships — then don’t expect much to grow, no matter how slick your Canva template is.

Want something real to sprout? Get into the goddamn dirt. Ask what’s feeding your system. Ask who’s doing the underground labour. Ask whether your root structure is even capable of holding up what you’re trying to grow.

This isn’t branding. It’s biology.

And soil doesn’t lie, and neither should you – the latter half of this sentence is read in the voice of Arnold Swatzenneger.

Soil Lessons, Real and Rooted

We didn’t start Persephone Brewing as farmers. We started with a few good ideas, a willingness to learn, and a lot of mistakes to make. And make them we did.

Our first attempt at growing was in the upper field — a plot of compacted earth and clay-heavy subsoil that had spent decades under gravel and machinery. We tried to plant without truly understanding what lived beneath the surface, or what didn’t. We planted rows of hops by hand — delicate vines that need strong support and rich soil to thrive. Our backs were sore, our optimism high., our backs sore, our optimism high. By mid-season, the plants were wilting under a brutal combination of heat, water stress, and nutrient-starved ground. We threw compost at it. Bought in amendments. Watered more. Hoped.

But the soil wasn’t ready. And we hadn’t listened.

In time, we learned to slow down. To test. To observe. To build from what was there — not from what we wished was there. We stopped trying to patch over deficiencies with quick fixes and started building from the bottom up: compost from our own brewery waste, rotational plantings, perennial hedgerows, better drainage strategies, and eventually, deeper partnerships with growers who actually knew what the hell they were doing.

And the soil responded. It got darker. Held more water. Worms showed up. So did the birds.

The business lesson in all this came later: don’t import a solution until you’ve fed the system you’ve already got. Regenerative practice — whether in farming or finance — isn’t about applying some pre-fab solution from a consulting firm with “growth” in the name. It’s about building capacity from within. Trusting that if the internal conditions are right, something good will grow. Something suited to place. Something that belongs.

Sometimes, people ask why we didn’t just lay down landscape fabric and truck in topsoil. Why not fake it until we make it? Because we weren’t just trying to grow food — we were trying to grow roots. In our community. In the land. In ourselves.

There’s nothing photogenic about clay soil cracking in a dry summer. There’s nothing sexy about a field half-full of cover crop instead of cash crop. But those moments taught us more about resilience than any Instagrammable harvest ever could.

And that — if you’ll allow one callback to the last section — is why you won’t find any cupped handfuls of black gold in our brochures. Just hands. Dirty ones. Trying.

Real soil doesn’t lie. And neither should we.

The First Three Inches

Regeneration doesn’t start with a carbon offset or a certified logo. It starts with the thin, fragile, messy top layer — the first three inches. In a field, that’s where the life is. It’s where fungal networks whisper, microbes party, and roots exchange favours with the underground economy. Strip that away, and you’ve got dust. Desert. Dead zone.

In business, same deal. Those first few inches are the cultural surface — the layer where people interact, where small decisions accumulate, and where stated values either take hold or evaporate on contact. It’s the texture of the everyday. The eye contact in meetings. The way someone welcomes a new hire. The offhand comment that tells you whether diversity actually matters or is just part of the footer on the website.

We learned the hard way that you can’t grow anything meaningful if this layer is depleted. At Persephone, we focused early on the big, structural stuff — governance, strategy, capital — but didn’t always pay enough attention to the relational topsoil. Sometimes we got it right. Sometimes we didn’t. A few partnerships failed. Some roles didn’t stick. And at least once, a good idea blew away before it could root.

Topsoil, literal or cultural, is shockingly easy to lose and maddeningly slow to rebuild. But it can be rebuilt — with composted failure, patient attention, and small, consistent care. What matters most isn’t what your brand says it stands for, but whether your ecosystem — your team, your partners, your customers — feels nourished by being part of it.

So instead of obsessing over your company’s impact report, ask this: is the surface alive? Are there signs of microbial joy? Can anything grow here without external fertilizer made from guilt and debt?

If not, no shame. Just start there. That’s where everything else depends.

Compost Happens — What We Learn When Things Break Down

Things fall apart. Not always spectacularly. Sometimes quietly — a resignation letter, a spreadsheet error, a string of unread emails. Other times it’s louder: a funder backs out, a fridge fails, someone finally says what everyone’s been thinking. In nature, this is normal. In business, we call it a crisis.

But breakdown isn’t always bad. You need to break some eggs if you want an omelette. And you sure as hell need to break down some systems if you want something regenerative to grow. In fact, it’s often where the real fertility hides. You don’t get compost without decomposition. You don’t get resilience without something first being tested. And in hindsight, most of our best ideas grew out of a pile of something that looked, at first, like failure.

We’ve lost staff. Sometimes to burnout, sometimes to better offers, sometimes because we just weren’t the right fit. Each time, it hurt. Each time, we learned. Not always gracefully. Not always quickly. But if you pay attention to what breaks, and how, you start to see patterns — in systems, in relationships, in yourself.

At Persephone, we once launched a promising new program with full hearts and a bad structure. It had good intentions, a confusing org chart, and a workload that burned through three capable people in under a year. That’s not a success story — it’s a compost heap. But we’ve since grown new things from that heap. Slower, sturdier things. Built with better drainage, more sunlight, and the humility to ask, “What would make this work for them — not just for us?”

Regenerative systems, whether ecosystems or businesses, aren’t built to prevent breakdown. They’re built to respond to it. To cycle nutrients. To learn. If your company can’t handle the exit of one key person, it’s not resilient — it’s fragile. And if your ego can’t handle feedback, neither are you.

So let things rot. Let them teach you. Just don’t bury the stink and pretend it didn’t happen. That’s not compost. That’s landfill.

And landfill never grows anything worth harvesting.

Cultivating the Underground

Some of the most important things in a living system are the things you can’t see.

The mycorrhizal networks. The bacterial colonies. The relationships built in basements, side lots, pub back rooms, and those painfully earnest late-night Zoom calls where someone inevitably says “the system is broken” and someone else stares into the void like, No shit, Carol. Pass the kombucha.

If Section 9 was about naming the rot, then this one is about what grows beneath it. Or through it. Or in spite of it. Whatever metaphor you prefer, the truth is this: if we want to build something that lasts — something worth the sweat and soil under our nails — then we need to understand and invest in the underground.

The visible stuff — the storefronts, the social posts, the shiny pitch decks — they’re just the fruiting body. The mushroom above the soil. But it’s the mycelium that holds the forest together.

For us, the underground has taken many forms. It’s been the informal networks of support that showed up when formal systems didn’t. It’s been the brewing community rallying around an equipment failure. It’s been the backchannel of funders and operators who are tired of performative impact metrics and just want to build something that actually fucking works.

It’s been Melissa planting without fanfare. Our staff throwing a harvest party without an agenda. Customers who’ve quietly told us, “Hey, this place helped me through something.” Not because of a social media campaign or an innovation grant — but because there was room to breathe. To belong.

You can’t systematize that. But you can cultivate it.

And here’s the kicker — that underground? It’s not just the moral core. It’s the source of our resilience. When things fall apart (and they do), it’s not your mission statement that saves you. It’s the relationships. It’s the whisper network. It’s the folks who say, “I got you,” and actually mean it.

We didn’t plan for that. But we damn well know to protect it now.

You can tell when a business is trying to fake an underground. You know the ones — all those “community” brands that talk about belonging but won’t answer your customer service email unless you threaten to post it on Reddit. Or those ESG initiatives that exist only in quarterly reports and LinkedIn humblebrags. That’s not the underground. That’s cosplay.

Real underground work is messy. It’s underfunded. It’s slow and relational and sometimes involves three people and a rusty wheelbarrow trying to move a literal shit pile. It doesn’t get venture capital, because it doesn’t scale cleanly. But it’s what makes a system durable.

So we’ve started protecting it like we would our topsoil.

That means saying no to things that would make us look shinier but eat away at the root system. It means prioritizing trust over speed. It means not franchising the soul out of our brand just because someone’s waving a cheque.

It also means investing in our own discomfort. Learning from folks we’ve overlooked. Listening harder. Letting others lead. Because the underground is plural. It’s Indigenous land stewards. It’s queer-led co-ops. It’s single moms running kitchens in community centres. It’s the weird, beautiful, often inconvenient complexity that monoculture wants to pave over.

And let’s be clear: monoculture is the enemy of resilience.

Whether it’s in a cornfield, a boardroom, or a staff retreat, monoculture reduces risk on paper and increases vulnerability in real life. We learned that the hard way. So now, we pay attention to the edges. We ask who’s not in the room. We watch what fungi are showing up in the soil, metaphorically and otherwise.

Because when the storm comes (and it will), the companies that survive won’t be the ones with the biggest Instagram followings. They’ll be the ones with the deepest roots and the most connected networks — seen and unseen.

And here’s the kicker that nature figured out long before we did: those mycorrhizal relationships? They don’t move in straight lines. They move in webs. Trees don’t hoard their nutrients. They share them. Especially with their young, their sick, and sometimes — and this is real — with entirely different species.

What kind of leadership model does that suggest?

If your team needs a permission slip to share water with the thirsty tree next to them, you’re not running a forest. You’re running a prison.

So we’ve stopped trying to build org charts and started tending to the fungal threads — the trusted connections, the informal coalitions, the phone calls that begin with, “I’m not sure where this is going, but I thought of you.”

You don’t manage a network like that. You nourish it. With time. With reciprocity. With fewer meetings and more wheelbarrows.

That’s the work. That’s what this section is about.

Not sexy. Not scalable. But damn near sacred.

So if you’re trying to build something — anything — that matters, start by tending your underground. Get to know the ones who feed your root system. The ones who whisper instead of shout. The ones who compost failure and grow kinship.

They won’t be on your org chart. But they’re the reason you’ll still be standing when the next wave hits.

And if you’re lucky? They might even hand you a shovel.

Resilience Is Relational

You want to test your resilience? Try asking for help.

Not the performative, “I could use a hand but I’ve totally got this under control” kind of ask. I mean the ugly, humbling kind. The kind where your pants are halfway down from a transfer gone sideways, your ego’s on life support, and the only option is to yell down the hallway for your teenager to come lift your legs back into place.

That kind of ask.

It’s not the kind of resilience they teach in MBA programs or TED Talks. There’s no tidy acronym. No 5-step framework for “radical interdependence.” Just the steady erosion of your illusion that you’re the one holding everything together.

Turns out, you’re not. Never were.

And for me, that’s where real resilience begins.

We like to pretend resilience is something you build solo. Like a bunker. Or a brand. Or a LinkedIn hustle post about grit that somehow still finds a way to mention your podcast. But let’s be honest — the image of the rugged individual, grinding it out, overcoming all odds through sheer personal fortitude? That’s bullshit. It’s also a lie capitalism keeps whispering in our ears because it sells better than the truth: that nothing meaningful is built alone.

The “Hero Founder” narrative — you know, the lone genius with a garage and a vision — is just Silicon Valley’s version of the Marlboro Man. Romantic. Marketable. And eventually dead from internal hemorrhaging.

Real resilience? It’s messier. Slower. Shared.

It looks like a team member noticing you’re spiralling before you do and nudging you toward a walk or a quiet beer. It looks like a supplier extending terms not because your spreadsheet says you’re solvent, but because they know your character. It looks like neighbours showing up with soup, unsolicited, because they heard you were dealing with both a flooded basement and a staff resignation in the same week.

And yes, I said “showing up.” Damn it. I hate that phrase too. But I’ll allow it, just this once, because there really isn’t a better way to describe the unspectacular act of simply being there for one another — not because it’s profitable, but because it’s human.

The truth is, the only reason Persephone weathered the storms — both metaphorical and literal — is because we weren’t trying to hold it together on our own. We had people. Not perfect people. Not always even the right people. But people who gave a damn. Who leaned in when things went sideways. Who stuck around when the vision got muddy and the margins got thinner than a basil leaf in August.

Let me be clear: we didn’t design some fancy “resilience strategy.” We didn’t hire a consultant or build a dashboard. We just tried to be decent. And we tried to make space for others to be decent too. Over time, that built trust. And trust is compost for resilience. Rich, slow, full of stuff that used to be broken but now feeds the future.

You can’t spreadsheet that.

I remember once — in the chaos of a mid-summer event — the power went out during a wedding reception in the beer garden. No lights. No music. The catering fridge started sweating like it was about to confess. And I’m sitting there thinking, “Well, this is it. This is how the dream dies. To the soundtrack of lukewarm chicken skewers.”

But then something happened. One of the kitchen staff — a line cook with maybe two months on the job — grabbed a Bluetooth speaker from his truck and rigged it up to the back of a serving tray. Someone else started lighting candles. Guests offered battery packs. A musician who happened to be in attendance asked if they wanted some live acoustic instead. Within twenty minutes, it was better than the original plan.

That wasn’t resilience engineered from the top. That was community intelligence. Adaptive capacity. Human-scale systems doing what they’re meant to do — respond, not react.

We’ve seen this over and over. In tiny ways and big ones. Like the time we decided to take a risk and co-invest in the Rio Theatre to help save it from redevelopment. That wasn’t a pure financial decision. It was relational. We knew the team. Knew the community. Knew the value wasn’t just in the bricks and licensing — it was in the stories, the memories, the shared effort to keep something soulful alive.

That’s what resilience actually looks like. It’s not bulletproof. It’s not infinite scalability. It’s held together with duct tape, kindness, shared memory, and a willingness to let go of perfection.

It’s also what makes working with people both maddening and magic.

Because here’s the thing: resilience is only relational if you give people enough space to show up imperfectly. If you insist on perfection — from yourself or others — you’ll burn out or burn bridges. Likely both.

We’ve hired people who didn’t check all the conventional boxes but had the heart and curiosity to figure it out. We’ve trained each other. Made space for second chances. Gotten it wrong and apologized like adults. And sometimes, we’ve had to let people go — not because they weren’t good, but because the fit wasn’t right. That too is part of resilience. Knowing when to prune.

Nature doesn’t do heroism. It does symbiosis. Redundancy. Polycentric adaptation. A forest doesn’t bet everything on one kind of tree. And when fire comes through — which it always does — the recovery is never led by the tallest trunks. It’s led by the mycelium, the root systems, the stuff underground that no one applauds but without which nothing grows back.

Business, if we let it, can be that kind of system.

Not a machine. Not a brand. Not a cult of personality.

A living, breathing, relational system where resilience is composted from crisis, held in community, and quietly passed along like sourdough starter. Not sexy. Not scalable. Definitely not eligible for an innovation grant. But it works.

The old world still wants us to go it alone. The new world — if it’s going to work at all — needs us to go together. Imperfectly, yes. But together.

And that starts with acknowledging what we can’t carry on our own.

Even the parts we’d rather hide.

Chapter 2v2

Section 1: Roots of Purpose — Defining Mission, Vision, and Core Values

Let’s begin with a confession.

We never wrote a Vision Statement.

There. We said it. The sacred cow of corporate strategy — the Almighty Vision Statement — was never slaughtered at Persephone Brewing Company because, frankly, we never bought the cow.

You know the type. “To be the leading provider of globally integrated synergistic solutions to humanity’s beer needs, one innovation at a time.” Or worse: “To make the world a better place through disruptive beverage experiences.” Spare us. A vision should be what you see when you close your eyes and imagine the future, not a linguistic crutch built by consultants over artisanal charcuterie boards.

Persephone never had one of those statements because the world never gave us the luxury of that kind of certainty. We had something much better: values.

And if there’s one thing we’ve learned growing a business like a tree, it’s that you don’t start with a flag to plant on top of a mountain — you start with roots. Deep ones. Anchored in values that actually mean something, not just sound good on recycled cardstock.

But if you’re curious, here’s what our Vision Statement might have been, had we surrendered to the gods of brand architecture:

“To craft purpose-driven, community-activated, carbon-considerate, post-colonial fermented experiences that inspire cross-sectoral co-creation and yield synergies between social good and seasonal crushability.”

You’re welcome.

There’s a whole cottage industry of people who can help you wordsmith this sort of inspirational vapour. If you’re lost, just call up the Strategic Messaging and Purpose Alignment team at SynergoCore Consulting™ and ask for their proprietary Vision Discovery Framework™ — the one that involves Post-It notes, vision boards, and a weird amount of gazing into middle distance.

Or you could just commit to something real. Like the people you serve. The place you’re rooted. The beer you actually put in the glass.

Still, because we know there’s a part of every MBA brain that clings to the comfort of strategic frameworks — even while sipping kombucha from a mason jar — here’s a SWOT Analysis of a Tree for your internal deck:

Strengths

• Carbon sequestering powerhouse

• Resilient to most market trends

• Generates literal oxygen

• Popular with birds and small children

Weaknesses

• Can’t pivot quickly

• Terrible at quarterly reporting

• Susceptible to chainsaws and government infrastructure projects

• Limited engagement on LinkedIn

Opportunities

• Tap into wellness market (see: forest bathing)

• Monetize seasonal leaf drop as artisanal confetti

• Potential to disrupt monoculture landscapes

• NFTs of bark textures?

Threats

• Wildfires, clearcuts, bulldozers

• Developers with “a vision”

• Climate change, obviously

• Guys named Chad with axe-throwing startups

Which is all to say: trees are already doing just fine without PowerPoint. And so are the best businesses we know.

So no, we didn’t start with a Vision Statement. We didn’t gather our team around a flipchart and brainstorm inspirational verbs. We started by doing something. Brewing beer. Growing food. Hiring people we liked. We let the work point to the purpose — not the other way around.

And when the work got hard (which it did, almost immediately), what held us wasn’t a plaque on the wall. It was a shared set of values, reinforced through crisis, disagreement, bad weather, and the occasional equipment fire.

That’s where the roots come in. And once you’ve got roots, you don’t need a telescope to guess where you’re going.

Section 2

Why Vision Statements Are Overrated — and Nature Knows Better

Let’s be clear. We’re not anarchists (at least not full-time). We understand the need for direction. But anchoring your business on a static vision is like planting an oak tree with a blueprint and then being surprised when it leans toward the sun. Living systems — and businesses that try to do good in a messy world — have to bend, stretch, adapt, even contort themselves sometimes, just to survive.

A vision statement doesn’t leave room for that kind of nimble evolution. It’s aspirational, sure, but it’s also brittle. What happens when the market shifts? When tariffs hit your aluminum cans? When climate change literally fries your farm’s crop plan? Do you go back to the Vision Statement and revise the font?

Nature doesn’t write manifestos. Trees don’t sit around in boardrooms and draft a five-year vision to capture more sun than the birch next door. They sense, respond, adapt, and — if they’re lucky — thrive. They survive because they are attuned to their context. And so must we be.

That part, we learned the hard way.

Because the thing no one tells you when you start a values-driven company is that “values” are not insurance. They won’t stop the flood, calm the markets, or prevent your hop harvest from failing three years in a row. But they do give you a compass when your roadmap catches fire.

We’ve had our fair share of derailments. A global pandemic. A regulatory misstep. A construction timeline that looked more like an archeological dig. One year we lost a third of our expected volume to supply chain chaos and nearly all of our optimism to a February without sun. In moments like that, a beautifully crafted vision statement doesn’t do much. It just stares at you, polished and useless, while you’re trying to decide whether to lay someone off or eat the cost yourself.

That’s when we started noticing something — quietly, without fanfare. The companies and communities that adapted well didn’t necessarily have the best plans. They had the best instincts. Or rather, they had a culture that had trained them to respond rather than react. They were grounded — not in mission statements or quarterly KPIs, but in relationships, values, and a lived understanding of their place.

If you want a business that can surf the volatility of real life — that can flex when the wind picks up, that can pivot without cracking — you have to give up on perfection. You have to listen more than you declare. And you have to allow for ambiguity. That’s not a character flaw. That’s strategy, in disguise.

We’re not saying “don’t have a vision.” (Okay, maybe we are, a little.) But we are saying: don’t let it calcify. Don’t let it become so precious that it outlives its usefulness. Vision should evolve like language: practical, responsive, alive in the mouths of those who use it. If no one on your team can remember your vision without pulling up the PDF, it’s probably not guiding much of anything.

And while we’re here, it’s worth noting: trees may not have mission statements, but they do know where the light is. That’s not hippie poetry — it’s biology. They grow toward the good stuff. They respond to feedback. They create conditions for other life forms. They leave the soil better than they found it.

If your business can do that — even on a Tuesday, even after a storm — you’re probably on the right path. Whether you wrote it down or not.

Section 3

Enter Values: The Real Compass

Mark Carney, the former central banker who pivoted from guarding the vault to guarding the planet, has a few things to say about this. In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Carney argues that we’ve allowed the market to conflate value (as in price) with values (as in principles). He’s not wrong. When the only thing that matters is shareholder return, you end up with a whole forest of withered ideals.

Like roughly 12 million other people in Canada, we read Carney’s book after we unconsciously nominated him to lead the country. We didn’t say it out loud, but come on — we all kind of wanted him to take over. He’s got the eyebrows, the suits, the cross-border credibility. Honestly, if the man ever opens a brewery, we’re toast.

Carney’s framework suggests that values should drive economic decisions, and that purpose — not profit — ought to sit at the heart of business strategy. Businesses, he says, must be governed not just by fiduciary duty, but by moral duty.

Now, we didn’t read Carney’s book before we launched Persephone — we were too busy trying to keep a tractor from rolling down a hill or negotiating with the Agricultural Land Commission to keep our farm from being turned into condos. But when we finally cracked open Value(s), it was as if the former governor of the Bank of England had been eavesdropping on our team meetings the whole time. Minus the beer.

The takeaway? Values are not a garnish. They’re the nutrient-rich soil in which everything else grows.

It’s easy to say that now. But in the early years, we weren’t exactly operating from a polished values deck. There were no retreat sessions with sticky notes and talking sticks. There were just decisions. Hundreds of them, every week — about suppliers, hiring, partnerships, pricing, repairs, events, and what to do when it all broke down. And in the absence of a master plan, we defaulted to what felt right. What aligned. What felt fair. We didn’t always get it right. But we rarely got it wrong in the same way twice.

And sometimes, values collide.

One of the harder ones — and one I still wrestle with — is honesty. Not the performative kind, where someone posts a “vulnerable” LinkedIn update after firing half their staff. I mean the hard kind. Being frank with people you care about. Naming what’s difficult. Speaking a truth even when you hold more power in the room.

Dion Whyte was our first General Manager, and frankly, Persephone wouldn’t exist without him. He helped design our first hop yards. He brought deep farming experience, operational insight, and a work ethic you could set your watch to. He was, in many ways, the engine under the hood.

And more than once, we disagreed.

Not in a dramatic, door-slamming way. But in that slow-burn, tension-under-the-surface way that arises when two people both care deeply and see things from different angles. His perspective was often more seasoned, more field-informed. Mine was often more financial — partly because I had more capital on the line, and partly because I carried the existential anxiety of a founder who couldn’t afford to get it wrong.

In the end, there were decisions where my view won out. Not necessarily because it was better — though I thought it was, at the time — but because that’s what power does when it’s not actively tempered. It asserts itself.

Looking back, I don’t think it matters much who was “right.” (Marcus Aurelius has a whole library of thoughts on the futility of that pursuit.) What does matter is how we related to each other in the meantime. Whether we could stay in dialogue. Whether the work remained collaborative. Whether we kept showing up for the same shared purpose.

Because honesty — the real kind — risks relationship. It says: I respect you enough to tell you what I see, even if it disrupts the peace. And for those of us in positions of leadership or ownership, that kind of honesty comes with a responsibility to make space, not just decisions.

So yes, values are the compass. But don’t mistake them for easy answers. They’ll cost you. Especially if you mean them.

And here’s something else we’ve learned: values don’t just show up when you need them. Like any muscle, they only strengthen through use. If you don’t practice honesty in the small stuff, you won’t suddenly find it when the stakes are high. If fairness isn’t baked into your pricing, hiring, or purchasing decisions, it won’t magically appear during a crisis. Values are not innate virtues. They’re disciplines. They either grow through repetition or atrophy from neglect.

(We’ve definitely skipped leg day a few times.)

Which is why we started writing ours down. Not to check a box. Not for branding. But because when the septic backs up, the supplier flakes, the bank account is looking anemic, and someone suggests karaoke night again, you need more than instinct to steer you. You need roots. You need a compass. You need to remember what the hell you’re actually doing this for.

And maybe most importantly, you need something that reminds you who you want to be in the process.

Section 4

Our Roots: Persephone’s Values and Operating Principles

We wrote these down early in the company’s life. Not because a consultant told us to, or because we needed filler for the website, but because it got real — fast. When decisions pile up, when emotions run high, when you’re patching irrigation lines in the dark, you want something better than guesswork to fall back on. Something shared. Something you can stand behind.

These weren’t crafted during a “visioning session.” There were no sticky notes, no facilitators in socks. Just a few of us trying to run a working farm, a functioning brewery, and a business that didn’t leave us feeling like sellouts. What emerged were a handful of principles — not perfect, but durable. And over time, they’ve become our internal scaffolding. Below are those original values, grouped roughly the way we organized them then, with updated commentary. Think of them as field notes from the early days, slightly muddy and written in pen.

1. Our Products and Service to Community — Quality, Local and Tenacious

“We are serious about the quality of our beer, the craft of brewing it, and the ingredients that comprise it. We grow locally what we can and support neighboring communities and other B Corps to supply the rest.”

This wasn’t just lip service. We actually grew things. We knew the farmers, and they knew us — sometimes more than we’d like. We didn’t outsource quality. We dragged it out of the ground, brewed it in batches, and hoped the tanks would hold.

“We continually innovate for quality, efficiency, product and service improvements. We are a learning company, which means we have comfort with both ambiguity and stability in our operations.”

I don’t remember anyone saying “we are a learning company” out loud, but we did spend a lot of time figuring things out while they were already on fire. We chased improvements because we had to. Equipment broke. Staff changed. The market did its thing. You can either treat that as chaos or as feedback.

“We aim to surpass our communities’ expectations by serving the highest quality products, providing an extraordinary experience and including them as if they are owners of our company — many of them are!”

This one’s literally true. We sold shares to customers, and a surprising number said yes. That move — letting people in — shaped everything that followed. It changed how we designed events, how we communicated, even how we brewed. It was never just about impressing people. It was about reminding them they belonged.

“We achieve profits that, in turn, further the goals of the company, employees and shareholders.”

We believed in profit, but only if it served something beyond itself. There were years when the business did fine and we personally did not. That’s not a complaint — just a reality. Profit wasn’t the signal that guided us. It was one of several. And sometimes it showed up late.

2. Healthy Communities, People and Culture — Diverse, Creative and Inspired

“We seek to balance the myriad of needs, especially health and well-being, of the company, staff and their families.”

Balance is a strange word here. It makes it sound like we were weighing things calmly on a scale. It was messier than that. Some seasons were survival mode. Others felt like we were building something good. Looking back, this value was aspirational — a north star we moved toward, not something we always reached.

“Jobsite safety, adequate income, sufficient time off and access to nutrition are critical elements of our culture.”

These are not perks. They’re the floor. And yet, building a small business that can actually support this is harder than it should be. We made mistakes here. We underpaid people we liked. We cut back on time off when margins were thin. And we learned. Eventually, our culture started to reflect our intentions — not just our pressures.

“We promote healthy beer culture and the responsible enjoyment of beer.”

This one is trickier than it looks. Selling alcohol means knowing where the lines are, and caring about what happens after the last drink is poured. We’ve had to make tough calls at events. We’ve seen when things get out of hand. We want people to celebrate — and also to make it home safely.

“We acknowledge the inherent value in diversity and the inclusion of voices different from our own, even when it is uncomfortable.”

We wrote this before diversity statements were everywhere. And we didn’t fully understand it at the time. We do more now — not because we’ve arrived, but because we’ve had enough conversations that changed us. Inclusion isn’t something you claim. It’s something you practice, quietly and repeatedly.

“Have fun or don’t come to work … is not a joke.”

It’s a real part of our ethos. Fun keeps people engaged, ideas moving, and egos in check. If the place gets too tense, something’s off. When people are laughing, it usually means something’s working. And yes, there’s been a lot of awkward dancing at staff parties. You’re welcome.

3. Leading by Example — Courageous, Humble and Just

“Our land ethics include farming in an ecologically responsible, if not regenerative, way that adds value to our local food system and economy, for generations to come.”

We weren’t trying to be noble. We just didn’t want to replicate the extractive models we’d seen elsewhere. So we learned how to grow things without wrecking the place. Sometimes we succeeded. Sometimes we tilled too soon or planted too late. We tried to pay attention, which turns out to be half the job.

“We aspire to provide a model of how business can be used as a force for good.”

This sounded bold at the time. It still does. But it’s grounded in a simple belief: that your business reflects your values whether you intend it to or not. We weren’t trying to be a lighthouse. We were just trying not to be part of the problem.

“We are committed to the B Corp certification to both track our improvements and articulate our impact.”

The certification wasn’t a trophy. It was a tool. We used it to see ourselves more clearly, to find the weak spots. Sometimes it affirmed our direction. Other times it flagged things we’d overlooked. The process mattered more than the badge.

“We partner with other social ventures to advance our collective goal of responsible business, healthy community and a sustainable world.”

This wasn’t just about being nice. It was about being real. No single business — especially not a small brewery on a farm — can fix much alone. We learned more by collaborating than we ever could’ve by competing. Some of our best ideas came from people working on entirely different problems.

The Test Is Always the Day-to-Day

Writing values is the easy part. Living them when it’s inconvenient — that’s where they either get stronger or disappear. You don’t get credit for posting them on the wall. You get credit for letting them shape how you deal with conflict, change, and uncertainty.

And like anything that matters, values don’t stay healthy on their own. They need to be used. Talked about. Stressed and repaired. You have to carry them into the parts of the business that aren’t romantic. Not just the launch party — the team meeting where someone’s burned out and no one’s said it yet.

Values don’t make you special. They make you responsible. That’s the tradeoff.

(And yes, we’ve skipped leg day a few times.)

Section 5

Rooted in Change, Not Locked In

We never had a five-year plan. We had a five-minute warning.

The world didn’t ask us for a grand strategy. It asked us for responsiveness. Over and over again. Wildfires, pandemics, supply chain collapses, late-season hail, absentee welders, zoning conversations that made no sense and went nowhere — you name it.

We weren’t charting a straight line to market dominance. We were doing our best to keep the lights on and the culture intact while the ground kept shifting under us. And through all of it, what held us wasn’t some laminated strategic framework. It was values. Unsexy, hard-won, slightly wobbly values — but values nonetheless.

We once watched a well-funded business roll out a three-year plan in a glossy deck, only to abandon it six months later when one of their two suppliers folded. It’s not that planning is useless. It’s that plans don’t negotiate well with entropy. And entropy always wins the long game.

Take COVID, for example. When the world shut down, we didn’t reach for a mission statement. We called our team, then our investors, then our partners, and started asking real questions: Who needs what? What can we stop doing? What can we keep doing safely? What feels fair?

We weren’t guided by “growth targets.” We were guided by instincts shaped by years of working in close proximity with people we cared about. We cut our own salaries first. We slowed production. We called customers, asked how they were holding up, and told the truth when they asked us the same. That wasn’t heroism. That was values in motion.

And the truth is, it was exhausting.

There’s no roadmap for how to lead through uncertainty without defaulting to control or collapse. We flinched, got frustrated, regrouped. But what gave us traction wasn’t the hope that things would return to normal — it was the knowledge that our people trusted us, because we’d earned it one decision at a time.

People often talk about “resilience” like it’s something you download or install. It’s not. It’s what’s left when the polished tools don’t work and the question becomes: who are we to each other when the plan breaks?

Through all of this, our values never wavered. They bent, sometimes. They got tested. But they held. Like deep taproots, they gave us something to grip when the forecast was vague and the invoices kept coming.

We didn’t always know where we were going. But we knew how we wanted to move.

Customers didn’t support us because we had a bronze plaque in the lobby with a soaring mission. Most of them never read our values statement. They saw it — in how we treated our staff, in how we handled a mislabelled batch, in how we kept coming back to the table after a disagreement.

This wasn’t about branding. It was about behaviour.

Mark Carney might call it a “moral marketplace.” That’s generous. We just tried to act like decent people who’d been given the responsibility of running a business — one that had become, by accident and design, a kind of commons.

Trust doesn’t scale easily. But it grows. Slowly. Organically. Sometimes only after it’s been broken and rebuilt.

So no, we never had the master plan. But we had something better: a team of people who knew why we were here, even when the world didn’t make much sense. And when that’s true, the plan is allowed to change.

Section 6

Values as Living Systems

To bring it back to trees (and why not, since that’s kind of the point of this book), values are not static. They evolve as the tree grows. They deepen. They become layered. And in regenerative systems, they are reinforced by feedback loops — from customers, staff, suppliers, even regulators.

That part isn’t just poetic. It’s biological. Forests survive because they’re wired for mutual awareness. Underground, fungal networks connect tree roots, passing signals, nutrients, stress responses, even chemical warnings between species. Some call it the “wood wide web.” Others just call it smart. Either way, it works.

The point is: living systems are smart not because they’re efficient, but because they’re relational. So are values. They don’t sit in a document and radiate virtue. They live in how we make decisions. In how people feel after a tough meeting. In what happens when nobody’s watching. In what’s passed from one team member to another, without being taught.

Our values were stress-tested every time we couldn’t make payroll or had to fire a friend or change a supplier. And they held. Not because we were so principled, but because they were practical. They worked. They helped us navigate disagreement. They helped us decide what to prioritize when everything felt urgent. They helped us tell the truth, even when it made things messier in the short term.

They were also messy. We didn’t always live up to them. There were moments — and months — when we acted out of fear, or exhaustion, or pressure. We made calls that were too fast, too rigid, or too self-protective. Sometimes we caught it quickly. Sometimes someone else had to point it out.

And that’s where the network matters.

Feedback isn’t just something you collect during surveys. It’s how you keep values from calcifying. The team tells you when your actions don’t match your intentions. The community tells you when your beer or your business has lost the plot. And if you’ve built enough trust, that feedback becomes less threatening — more like compost. A little uncomfortable, but useful.

We had staff challenge us — respectfully, directly — on decisions that didn’t feel consistent with our principles. They weren’t always right. But they weren’t dismissed either. That’s part of the deal. You invite the network in, you don’t get to control how it speaks.

Values, like soil organisms, need disturbance now and then. Not destruction — just the kind of friction that keeps things honest. We learned more from the times we got it wrong than from the times we nailed it. And often, the correction didn’t come from the top. It came from someone who’d internalized the values better than we had — and held up a mirror.

That’s when you know your values have become more than a statement. When they start talking back.

If there’s one thing I’d say to another founder or leader here, it’s this: don’t confuse coherence with control. Living your values doesn’t mean things always go according to plan. It means your decisions — even the hard ones — feel aligned. The people around you can sense when you’re acting from principle versus panic.

And if they can’t sense it, it might not be there.

We didn’t enshrine our values in granite. We wrote them in pen, crossed things out, added new ones. We learned that generosity wasn’t just a virtue — it was an operational strategy. That boundaries were part of care. That silence wasn’t always neutrality. That power needs to be named, not tiptoed around. None of that was in the original draft. It came through tension, reflection, and a whole lot of trying again.

So yes, values are like mycorrhizal fungi — invisible most of the time, but absolutely essential to life. And when they’re alive in your organization, they create something far more valuable than alignment. They create resilience. Not the bunker kind — the forest kind. The kind that holds fast, stretches, and signals when something’s off.

That’s not brand strategy. That’s biology. And it’s working all the time, whether we write it down or not.

Section 7

What You Can Take From This (Even If You’re Not a Brewery With a Farm)

Not everyone reading this is navigating hop harvests, septic malfunctions, and ALR land use policies. And thank goodness for that. But values aren’t industry-specific. Neither is the experience of being completely overwhelmed and needing something solid to guide you.

We didn’t write this list as best practices. We’re kind of allergic to that notion. These are just things that kept us from losing the thread when everything got weird — which, in business and in life, is often. You don’t need a farm or a brewery or a bowling alley to name and try to live by a set of values. You just need people, place, pressure, and the willingness to pay attention when something feels off.

So, in the spirit of practical wisdom and light self-deprecation, here’s what we’d pass along:

Don’t write a vision statement unless you have to.

Many people — including people on your team — will want one. But if you already know what matters and your team generally knows how to act on it, you’re probably fine. Vision is only useful if it changes behaviour — not if it sits untouched in a cloud folder you forgot the password for. Because our team called for one, I tried to write one once. It sounded like a cereal box crossed with a UN press release. We quietly let it die. It just didn’t do justice to what we were trying to do.

Start with your context.

Before you chase best practices or five-year plans, ask: Where are you? What’s growing here already — in the soil, in the culture, in the relationships? Who are your neighbours? Who’s tired? Who’s quietly holding the whole thing together? Start there. If you skip the ground you’re standing on, everything else can feel like it floats.

Don’t expect perfection. Values aren’t commandments. They’re more like hand tools — meant to be used, sharpened, and occasionally repaired.

You will screw up — I certainly did. I remember one moment when Dion and I were trying to get a tiller aligned and I pulled too hard. It slipped and pinched his finger — looked like it hurt like a motherfucker. He handled it well. We all forget what matters and do the easy thing sometimes. You’ll say yes to something that’s out of alignment and then have to walk it back. That’s not failure. That’s Tuesday. What matters is noticing when you’re off track — and having people around you who’ll tell you. Dion didn’t say anything that time. He wrapped his finger in gauze, got on the tractor, and went back to laughing in the field. Still kind of heroic, honestly.

Measure what matters. Even if you’re doing good, someone should be able to tell.

We got a B Corp score in the low 80s and I felt a little embarrassed, like maybe our standards had slipped — until I remembered how much the B Corp assessment had changed, and how much room we still had to grow. Metrics aren’t moral judgments. They’re tools for learning. Use them to check your blind spots, not to justify your pitch deck or show off. Chase improvements in the metrics because it aligns with your values, not because it looks good in a slideshow.

Have fun, or don’t come to work. Seriously.

We meant this. Not as a threat, but as a temperature check. If the joy has gone out of the work — all of it, not just the Instagram parts — something’s wrong. Maybe it’s fixable. Maybe it’s not. But you can’t build something enduring on dread, doom, or darkness. And yes, we have actually invoked this value in encouraging someone to move on. I hope we did so with kindness — for her sake and for the team’s. A workplace without joy is a place that drains people. No spreadsheet can fix that.

Bonus: Pay attention to how it feels.

Not everything has to scale. Not every opportunity is strategic. Not every investor is a fit. If you’re ignoring your gut regularly, it won’t keep whispering — it’ll pack up and leave. Most of our worst decisions came from overriding something we knew but didn’t say out loud. Listening to my instincts has been maybe the hardest and most profound lesson I’ve (almost) learned. I’ll say more on this later.

You don’t have to do it our way. You just have to do it in a way you can stand behind when the work is done and the room is quiet. That’s the test. And if you’re lucky — and a little stubborn — and surrounded by people who’ll call you on your bullshit gently and often, you’ll get somewhere that feels, if not visionary, then at least worth sticking with.

Chapter 3: Nutrients of Culture — Building Organizational Culture and Ethics

Section 1: What Feeds a Thriving Tree (or Business)?

You can plant the perfect seed in the perfect soil, but if it’s starved of nutrients, it’ll still wither. The same goes for businesses. You’ve got your environment (market conditions, land, economy — we covered that dirt already). You’ve got your roots (purpose, values — been there, composted that). But what makes the thing actually grow? What moves through the entire system, connecting roots to branches, branches to leaves, and leaves to that fruit you’re hoping won’t turn out bitter?

It’s culture.

But not the kind of culture that fits neatly into a mission statement or a Slack channel named #vibes. I’m talking about the living, breathing, often infuriating network of relationships, behaviors, rituals, and tensions that either nourishes your organization… or quietly chokes it out.

Culture is the mycelium of your business ecosystem. Invisible most of the time, yet it’s what transfers the nutrients, relays the messages, and, if you’re not careful, sabotages you with a surprise fungus bloom in aisle five. Ignore it, and you’ll wake up one day wondering why the place feels wrong — even if nothing on paper has changed.

Here’s the first uncomfortable truth: culture is never neutral. It’s either feeding your business, or it’s slowly poisoning it. There is no middle ground, no cultural Switzerland where vibes stay peacefully indifferent.

Second uncomfortable truth: culture isn’t something you “build”. You don’t write it down, announce it at an all-hands meeting, and watch it blossom. You grow it. Through practice, through tension, through those weird in-between moments that don’t make it into quarterly reports.

We learned this the hard way in Persephone’s early years.

Culture at 30 Nautical Miles: The Early Strain

Picture this: most of our operational team — Dion hauling kegs, Anders fine-tuning recipes, Sara running events, a crew of farmers wrangling weeds, and myself — were all physically present on the farm, breathing the same air, trudging through the same mud. Our “culture” was being forged daily in hop yard scrambles, septic malfunctions, and emergency brew days that ended with beers around the firepit.

Meanwhile, our branding and marketing team, led by the brilliant and creatively disruptive Mark Brand, were located a ferry ride (and a cultural galaxy) away in the city. They were immersed in the urban buzz of Vancouver’s social enterprise scene, crafting bold narratives and edgy campaigns from stylish coworking spaces while we were — quite literally — shoveling shit.

This geographic and cultural divide wasn’t just a scheduling headache. It created real tension. Conversations that should’ve happened over coffee happened over strained Zoom calls. Mutual assumptions festered. The farm team felt the city folks didn’t grasp the grit of daily operations. The city folks, in turn, sometimes felt like their ideas were being dismissed by a bunch of muddy-booted Luddites.

It was like trying to grow a single tree across two radically different ecosystems — one foot in a dense forest, the other in an urban rooftop garden. Same roots, same purpose, but the nutrients weren’t flowing smoothly.

And that’s the thing about culture: it doesn’t care about org charts or ferry schedules. If the connection is weak, the system suffers.

We learned (eventually) that culture isn’t about getting everyone to agree. It’s about creating conditions where the different parts of the system can nourish each other, even — especially — when they come from different soils.

But before we get to how we fixed that (or at least learned to live with the beautiful mess of it), let’s get practical.

Section 2: The Culture Nutrients Field Guide (with Warnings & Side Effects)

If you’re thinking, “Great, culture’s important, but where the hell do I start?” — welcome to the nutrient aisle. Below is your Culture Nutrients Field Guide. These aren’t corporate buzzwords masquerading as values. They’re the essential compounds that actually feed a living business ecosystem. Some are obvious. Others are sneaky. All of them come with side effects.

[Table]

Nutrient

Description

Warning Label

Field Example

Respect

The foundational compost of human dignity. Not the polite, nod-and-smile version — the kind where people, land, and community are treated as living entities, not assets.

Artificial respect additives (like meaningless awards) may cause allergic reactions.

Paying living wages when it hurt. Designing spaces that worked for wheelchairs before it was a hashtag.

Transparency

Sunlight for the soul. The more light you let in, the less rot you’ll find later. Transparency isn’t a quarterly newsletter; it’s a daily practice.

Warning: May cause discomfort in boardrooms. Use anyway.

Sharing financial statements with staff when explaining why bonuses weren’t happening. Painful, but honest.

Reciprocity

The nutrient loop. Give, take, replenish. Builds resilience in the system when practiced across all relationships — customers, staff, bees.

Beware: One-way reciprocity (a.k.a. charity for optics) leaches soil health.

Supporting other breweries, even direct competitors, because the pie grows when everyone brings ingredients.

Authenticity

The beneficial bacteria of culture. Messy, unpredictable, but essential for fermentation (in both beer and business).

Over-sterilization (a.k.a. corporate branding committees) kills authenticity on contact.

Hiring people because they felt right, not because their résumé was a LinkedIn masterpiece.

Community

The pollinator attractant. When community thrives, everything else gets a little sweeter.

Fake blooms (community-washing events) will not attract actual bees.

Inviting customers and shareholders to weed hop rows — with real gloves, not photo-ops.

Adaptation (Resilience)

The fungal network’s superpower: re-routing, re-growing, regenerating after storms.

Side Effect: Requires leaders to admit they don’t have all the answers. May cause humility.

Rallying a land-use campaign instead of panicking when our lease got shaky.

Joy

The microbe that breaks down stress and releases creative energy. Joy isn’t a luxury; it’s the cultural enzyme that keeps the whole system from seizing up.

Caution: May be misdiagnosed as frivolity by those who hate fun.

Solstice festivals, bad puns on labels, brewing with bees. You get the idea.

These aren’t values you frame and hang in the lobby. They’re nutrients you spread, water, and sometimes, frankly, scramble to salvage after a flood. But when they flow, the system works. Ideas move. Trust grows. People — and businesses — thrive.

Next up, we’ll get into what happens when weeds and pests invade this carefully tended nutrient network. Spoiler: it’s not always pretty. But it is necessary.

Section 3: Cultural Weeds & Pests — The Uninvited Guests

Ecosystems are messy. Even the healthiest forest has its share of opportunistic weeds and cheeky pests nibbling at the edges. Same goes for business culture. You can have the best intentions, the clearest values, the most heartfelt mission—and still find yourself overrun with dynamics that choke out the good stuff.

These aren’t always bad people or malicious acts. More often, they’re subtle behaviors, unchecked assumptions, or structural blind spots that quietly tangle up your team’s roots. Some pests come with the territory. Others drift in from afar. Either way, if you ignore them, they’ll grow. But if you pay attention, these uninvited guests can actually teach you a thing or two about where your culture is strong… and where it’s vulnerable.

We’ve seen them all at Persephone. Hell, I’ve been some of them. The key isn’t to aim for a sterile, pest-free utopia. That’s not how living systems work. The key is to know who’s in your garden, what they’re telling you, and how to keep the whole ecosystem thriving despite — and sometimes because of — their presence.

Let’s break it down.

Common Cultural Weeds & Pests: A Field Identification Guide

Weed/Pest

Symptoms

Treatment

Martyr Complex Leader

“I’ll just do it myself” syndrome. Late-night emails, quiet resentment, and an unspoken belief that no one else gets it.

Delegation, humility, and remembering that trees don’t hold up their own branches.

Energy Vampires

Constant problem-spotters who rarely propose solutions. Meetings leave everyone tired.

Invite into ownership. Clarify roles. Or kindly escort them to a place they can thrive elsewhere.

Silent Resisters

Nod in meetings, ignore in practice. Passive-aggressive compliance that slows everything down.

Honest conversations. Structural clarity. And sometimes, recognizing a misalignment that won’t resolve.

Hero Syndrome

One person saves the day repeatedly, while team collaboration withers.

Redefine success as a team effort. Celebrate systems, not solo performances.

Cultural Monoculture

A sea of sameness — same backgrounds, same opinions, same playlists. Innovation flatlines.

Hire for friction, not just “fit.” Encourage dissent as a creative act.

Founder’s Nostalgia

Romanticizing “how we used to do things” to the point of cultural stagnation.

Honor the past, but compost it. Let new identities sprout.

Toxic Positivity

Everything’s always “great!” even when it’s not. Discomfort is taboo.

Model real talk. Normalize struggle alongside celebration.

Martyr Complex Leader: Carrying Too Much Kills the Roots

Early Persephone days? I was the classic martyr. If something needed fixing, I was on it. If a conflict arose, I internalized it. The narrative in my head was noble: “If I just work harder, we’ll get through this.” But martyrdom doesn’t feed a culture — it strangles it. People stop offering help because they assume you’ll muscle through. Collaboration turns into spectatorship.

It took me a while (and some not-so-gentle nudges from Dion and Anders) to realize that resilience isn’t about personal sacrifice. It’s about creating structures where everyone can carry a piece of the load. Martyrdom feels heroic until you realize you’re the bottleneck.

Energy Vampires: The Meeting Drainers

Energy vampires don’t wear capes. They wear concern. They come to meetings with a finely curated list of problems and a conspicuous absence of solutions. We’ve all been that person at some point. But when it becomes a pattern, it drains the collective will to move forward.

At Persephone, we learned that these folks often had important insights — they just didn’t feel ownership of outcomes. When we invited them into problem-solving, some stepped up beautifully. Others… well, they found opportunities elsewhere where their talents (and complaints) were a better fit. That’s okay. Not every organism thrives in every ecosystem.

Silent Resisters: The Polite Saboteurs

Silent resisters don’t yell. They don’t argue. They nod, smile, and then proceed to do things their own way — or not at all. In the early years, this dynamic became glaringly obvious between our farm team and the city-based branding team.

It wasn’t malice. It was misalignment. The folks on the farm — Dion, Anders, Sara, myself — were living the grind daily. Hop yard. Tasting room. Septic mishaps. The city team, under Mark Brand’s leadership, was operating in a different reality. Their context, their pace, their culture was simply not rooted in the same soil.

We tried bridging that gap. We wanted unity. But over time, it became clear: this wasn’t a rift to be healed with more Zoom calls. The farm team needed to enshrine a culture that was of the place, grown through shared physical experience. A culture you couldn’t fabricate or fully understand unless you were literally on the land.

Creating that distance was awkward. Painful, even. But it was necessary. And looking back, it marked a maturation. We stopped forcing cohesion and started honoring the specificity of place-based culture.

And guess what? We’re facing that challenge all over again with The Alley in Powell River. Another ferry ride. Another team rooted in physical space while senior management operates remotely. The dynamics feel eerily familiar. The lesson? Culture can’t be phoned in. It must be grounded — quite literally — in shared experience.

Hero Syndrome: When Individual Excellence Undermines Collective Strength

In small, scrappy teams, it’s easy to glorify the person who saves the day. The problem is, the more you spotlight the hero, the less others feel needed. At Persephone, we had to actively shift the narrative from solo saviors to team systems. Success stories became about processes, not personalities. Over time, that reframed how we viewed leadership — not as a performance, but as an ecosystem function.

Cultural Monoculture: The Comfort of Sameness

We’ve been guilty of this, too. Hiring folks who “fit” — who looked like us, thought like us, shared our playlists. It’s cozy. It’s efficient. And it’s creatively deadly.

Monocultures in nature are fragile, vulnerable to disease. Same with businesses. Innovation withers in echo chambers. We had to get intentional about seeking out diverse perspectives, even when — especially when — it created discomfort. Friction, after all, is what sharpens tools.

Founder’s Nostalgia: The Sweet Poison of “Back in My Day”

I’ve carried my fair share of nostalgia for the scrappy, underdog Persephone. The farm-first identity, the under-resourced hustle, the “we’ll figure it out” charm. But nostalgia, when left unchecked, becomes a sweet poison. It blinds you to the needs of a growing system.

I’ve learned to compost those memories. They nourish our story, but they can’t dictate our future. Place-based culture isn’t about romanticizing the past. It’s about being rooted in the present.

Toxic Positivity: When Good Vibes Muzzle Honest Struggle

We all want positive workplaces. But when “good vibes” become a shield against acknowledging hard truths, culture suffers. At Persephone, we had to learn that joy and struggle aren’t opposites. They’re companions. A culture that allows people to say, “This is hard,” without fear of being labeled negative is a culture that can adapt, grow, and — crucially — still laugh at itself.

Weeds as Teachers, Not Enemies

The goal isn’t to eradicate every pest or pluck every weed. The goal is to notice them early, understand what they’re telling you, and respond with care. Weeds show you where soil is exposed. Pests reveal where nutrients aren’t flowing evenly. They’re feedback loops, not failures.

Culture, like a forest, isn’t perfect. It’s dynamic, messy, and occasionally overrun with blackberry brambles. But with attention, humility, and a willingness to get your hands dirty, you can cultivate an ecosystem that nourishes itself — and everyone in it.

Weeds as Teachers, Not Enemies (Revisited with Regenerative Eyes)

In conventional farming, weeds are public enemy number one. The solution? Eradication. Spray them dead. Till them under. Pretend you’re “in control.” But regenerative farmers know better. Weeds aren’t invaders. They’re messengers. They show up where the soil is bare, the nutrients are out of whack, or the ecosystem is stressed.

In no-till regenerative systems, you don’t fight weeds with force. You crowd them out with diversity. You build cover crop blends so rich, so varied, that weeds become just another player in the ecosystem — not a threat, but a contributor. Diversity doesn’t eliminate weeds. It makes them irrelevant.

Business culture works the same way.

If your culture is a sterile monocrop — a tight row of “culture-fit” hires, top-down management, and slogan-driven values — the minute stress hits, weeds will thrive. But if your culture is a messy, vibrant cover crop — a blend of perspectives, quirks, and place-based experiences — those same weeds lose their grip. They get crowded out by the sheer resilience of a diverse system.

At Persephone, we had to learn that lesson by living it. Trying to force a unified culture between the farm and city teams was like trying to grow a vineyard and a rooftop garden with the same irrigation plan. It doesn’t work. Culture isn’t a template. It’s a local ecosystem.

That’s why, as we build out The Alley in Powell River, we’re leaning into this regenerative approach. We know we can’t “control” culture from afar. Ferry rides and remote management create gaps. Instead of fearing those gaps, we’re asking: how do we seed enough diversity, enough local ownership, that the culture grows strong in place — not in spite of us, but because of its own unique ecosystem?

Weeds will still pop up. But in a diverse, resilient culture, they won’t dominate. They’ll simply be part of the mix — an occasional reminder to check the health of the system, not a sign of failure.

Section 4: Cultivating Relationships — The Most Potent Nutrient

If culture is the nutrient flow of an organization, then relationships are the mycelial filaments that make that flow possible. You can have the richest soil, the clearest purpose, and a killer product lineup, but if your relationships are transactional, brittle, or — worse — performative, your culture will stagnate faster than an uncovered compost pile in July.

I’ve learned (the hard way) that relationships are the single most potent nutrient in any living system. But not the LinkedIn-endorsed “networking” kind. I’m talking about real relationships — built through shared experience, mutual care, and, most importantly, the recognition of gifts.

That lesson came home through the mentorship of Al Etmanski and Vickie Cammack, co-founders of PLAN and two of the wisest relationship cultivators I’ve ever met. Al’s philosophy — simple, radical, and surprisingly hard for most of us to practice — is that every person has gifts. Not skills. Not marketable assets. Gifts. Deep, often invisible contributions that only surface when we take the time to see them.

These aren’t the gifts that show up on résumés or performance reviews. They’re the gifts that reveal themselves when the conditions are right — when the soil is healthy enough to let them grow.

Vickie often told a story that stays with me. She spoke of a friend who, after being asked about their gifts, offered the following: “I bring the gift of slowness.” At first, it seemed almost apologetic. Like a confession of a flaw. But with a little reflection, it became clear — slowness is a profound gift in a world obsessed with speed. Slowness allows for listening. For noticing. For depth.

In a business context, how often do we overlook gifts like these? We hire for efficiency, charisma, technical prowess — but slowness? Presence? The ability to steady a room simply by not rushing to speak? These are gifts that can transform a culture, if we’re paying attention.

At Persephone, Al challenged us to shift from asking, “What can this person do for the company?” to “What gifts does this person bring to the world that we might not yet see?” That wasn’t a poetic exercise. It was a fundamental shift in how we hired, collaborated, and built culture.

We stopped hunting for “culture fit” and started searching for resonance. That meant hiring people whose gifts didn’t show up on paper but made themselves felt in the rhythm of the work. The guy with the three-legged dog and a quiet, grounding presence. The young woman who could read a crowd’s mood before anyone else noticed. Folks whose contributions weren’t flashy but were essential.

Over time, this approach created something that no values workshop could manufacture: a culture of belonging. People felt seen — not for what they produced, but for who they were. That belonging created loyalty. Not the kind you measure with retention stats, but the kind you feel in your bones when a team member shows up on a Sunday because they heard the hop trellis took a beating in the wind.

The Gift Economy of Culture

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her essay The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, offers a powerful reflection on the difference between economies of transaction and economies of relationship. In a transactional economy, value is quantified, exchanged, and protected. In a gift economy, value circulates. Gifts increase in worth when they’re shared, not hoarded.

Culture behaves the same way.

When relationships are transactional — “I’ll help you if it benefits me” — culture becomes brittle. Trust erodes. Collaboration turns into a ledger of favors owed. But when relationships are rooted in gift-giving — in the simple, sometimes uncomfortable act of offering without guarantee of return — culture becomes resilient.

At Persephone, we saw this gift economy in action in countless small ways. A staff member staying late to help a co-worker clean up after an event, not because it was assigned, but because it was needed. A shareholder showing up to a work bee with homemade soup because, well, someone’s gotta feed the crew. Customers bringing in their own harvest baskets to pick up CSA shares because they wanted to participate, not just transact.

These gestures weren’t part of anyone’s job description. They were gifts. And they nourished a culture that couldn’t be replicated through policy.

But a gift economy doesn’t just happen. It requires conditions. You have to cultivate the soil — with trust, with time, and with an intentional slowing down to notice gifts that aren’t immediately obvious.

Gifts You Can’t Hire For (But Can’t Survive Without)

There’s a tendency in business to focus on “skills gaps.” The checklist of competencies you need to fill. But what if the most critical gaps are in gifts you don’t even know you’re missing?

We once hired someone whose primary gift was noticing when people were having a bad day. They weren’t in HR. They weren’t in management. But they had an uncanny ability to sense tension, to ask the right question at the right moment, to humanize the workplace in ways that defused stress before it escalated.

You can’t put that on a job description. But you sure as hell notice when it’s gone.

Another team member brought the gift of ritual. They initiated small practices — a morning stretch, a quirky team check-in question — that, over time, became cultural glue. These weren’t “initiatives” or “programs.” They were gifts, offered freely, that shaped how we showed up for each other.

The point is: gifts don’t follow KPIs. They emerge. If you let them.

Relationships as Nutrient Pathways

Think of relationships as the nutrient pathways in your business ecosystem. You can have the richest cultural compost, but if the pathways are blocked — if relationships are shallow, transactional, or fear-based — the nutrients won’t flow.

Gifts are what open up these pathways.

The person who notices when the team’s energy is low and quietly arranges a reset. The one who offers slowness in a meeting that’s veering into chaos. The co-worker who remembers someone’s kid was sick and asks how they’re doing — not as a social nicety, but because they care.

These small acts don’t just build goodwill. They create the conditions for ideas to move, for trust to deepen, for culture to regenerate itself after stress.

From Relationships of Efficiency to Relationships of Care

If we’re honest, most business relationships are designed for efficiency. Get the project done. Hit the target. But cultures built on efficiency alone are fragile. They can’t absorb shock. They can’t adapt to change. They snap.

Cultures built on care, however, are resilient. Care isn’t soft. It’s structural. It’s what allows a system to flex without breaking.

At Persephone, we didn’t always get this right. There were seasons where efficiency dominated — when the urgency of operations outpaced the patience for relationship-building. And every time, culture suffered. Stress went up. Creativity went down. The work still got done, but the nutrient flow was constricted.

The seasons where we slowed down, paid attention, and honored the gifts within our team — those were the seasons when culture felt alive.

Cultivating a Gift-Conscious Culture

So how do you cultivate a culture that sees gifts, nurtures relationships, and keeps the nutrient pathways open?

You don’t need a new policy manual. You need to create space. Space for slowness. Space for noticing. Space for reciprocity to emerge naturally.

It’s in small rituals. In unstructured conversations. In resisting the urge to fill every silence with productivity. It’s in the humility to accept that the most valuable contributions might come from the quietest person in the room.

As Vickie’s story reminds us: the gifts we overlook are often the ones we need most.

And as Kimmerer teaches us, when we honor gifts as circulating, regenerative forces — not commodities to be exchanged — we create cultures that are alive, adaptable, and deeply human.

Section 5: Culture in Action — Composting Mistakes into Fertilizer

Composting isn’t a metaphor you throw around lightly. At least not if you understand how it actually works.

In nature, composting is a process of controlled decomposition. It’s the act of transforming what’s no longer useful in its current form — fallen leaves, spent hops, kitchen scraps, manure — into nutrient-dense, life-giving soil amendment. But here’s the catch: composting isn’t passive. It requires heat, moisture, microbial activity, and, crucially, turning. Left unmanaged, a compost pile doesn’t transform; it rots. It goes anaerobic, breeds pathogens, and starts to stink in ways that’ll have your neighbours calling bylaw enforcement.

But when tended properly — when you monitor carbon-to-nitrogen ratios, maintain aeration, and cultivate the right microbial diversity — composting becomes one of nature’s most elegant regenerative processes. Decay isn’t an end. It’s a beginning.

Organizational culture works the same way.

Every business produces its share of waste. Mistakes. Missteps. Ideas that didn’t land. Relationships that got strained. Decisions that, in hindsight, deserve a long sigh and a strong drink. The question isn’t whether you’ll produce cultural “waste” — you will. The question is: do you have a system that can process that waste into something life-giving?

At Persephone, we didn’t set out to build a culture that composted well. Frankly, in the early days, we were too busy reacting to put much thought into our cultural decomposition practices. But over time, through necessity more than design, we learned how to take our failures, frictions, and fumbles and metabolize them into lessons that fed our future.

Not by moving on. But by turning the pile.

The Heat of Failure: Why Discomfort is Necessary

Compost doesn’t happen in the cold. Microbial activity ramps up as temperatures rise, breaking down complex materials into simpler, more accessible nutrients. The heat isn’t a byproduct — it’s an essential catalyst.

Cultural heat — the discomfort of conflict, the awkwardness of admitting mistakes, the friction of misaligned expectations — serves the same function. Without it, lessons stay inert. They don’t decompose. They fester.

One of our early heat cycles came when we botched a collaboration with Pacific Wild — an environmental organization working to protect BC’s coastal ecosystems. The project was a benefit beer designed to raise awareness about the deeply threatened state of the herring fishery. We believed in the cause. We believed in the urgency. So we jumped in, brewed the beer, and launched a campaign.

And then the blowback hit.

It turned out the herring industry is a complex web of livelihoods, intergenerational fishing families, and cultural identities. By not doing enough due diligence — by not engaging with the full diversity of voices connected to the herring fishery — we’d inadvertently alienated a significant portion of the community. What we intended as a gesture of solidarity was seen by many as an oversimplified, even patronizing narrative.

That one stung. Not just because of the public criticism (which was warranted), but because we realized how quickly good intentions can curdle when they’re not grounded in thorough, relational due diligence. I wrote a public apology, taking responsibility for the oversight. It wasn’t a PR exercise. It was an act of cultural composting — of turning the pile, letting the heat do its work, and extracting the nutrients of a hard lesson.

The mistake taught us that no matter how noble the intention, if you don’t engage with complexity, if you don’t slow down to listen deeply, you’re not building culture. You’re building a brand veneer that peels off at the first sign of friction.

Turning the Pile: Making Space for Organic Reflection

Compost piles don’t turn themselves. They need human intervention. A pitchfork. A shovel. A deliberate act of agitation to ensure oxygen gets in, preventing stagnation.

At Persephone, our cultural pile-turning isn’t formulaic. We don’t have scheduled “debrief sessions” or post-project checklists. Reflection tends to happen more organically — in impromptu conversations after a shift, around the picnic table, or during a quiet moment when someone’s hauling kegs and a colleague says, “Hey, that thing last week… how do you think it went?”

It’s not systematic. It’s relational. But it matters.

The Pacific Wild experience underscored for us that you don’t need formal debriefs to metabolize failure. What you need is a culture where people feel safe enough to bring it up, to turn the pile together in small, daily acts of reflection.

Microbial Diversity: Why Multiple Perspectives Matter

In compost, diversity is king. A pile of nothing but grass clippings becomes a slimy mess. A pile of just wood chips stays inert. You need a balance of greens (nitrogen-rich materials) and browns (carbon-rich materials). You need microbial diversity — bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes — each playing a role in the breakdown and synthesis of nutrients.

Cultural composting thrives on the same principle. Homogenous teams process failure poorly. They recycle the same perspectives, leading to blame loops or echo chambers. Diversity — of background, thought, experience — acts like the beneficial microbes, breaking down complex problems into digestible insights.

The Pacific Wild misstep was, in part, a failure of microbial diversity. We didn’t have enough internal perspectives questioning whether we’d engaged all the right stakeholders. We didn’t invite dissent early enough. That realization reshaped how we approached collaborations moving forward. We started seeking out the quiet voices, the unexpected stakeholders, the “harder to hear” perspectives. Because compost without microbial diversity just rots.

Moisture & Patience: The Time Factor

Compost needs moisture. Too little, and decomposition stalls. Too much, and you drown the aerobic microbes. But perhaps more importantly, compost needs time. You can’t rush it. Try to shortcut the process and you end up with half-composted muck that harms more than it helps.

Cultural decomposition requires a similar patience. Some lessons take time to surface. Not every failure will produce immediate insight. Sometimes, it’s months later, in a seemingly unrelated context, that the nutrients from a past mistake become available.

The Pacific Wild episode wasn’t “resolved” overnight. It sat in the pile for a while, quietly breaking down into a deeper understanding of how we engage with community complexity. The apology was necessary, but it wasn’t the endpoint. The real nutrient release came much later, in the form of more thoughtful collaborations, more cautious narrative framing, and a healthier skepticism of our own assumptions.

Compost as a System, Not a One-Time Fix

The beauty of a well-maintained compost system is that it’s self-sustaining. Once the microbial ecosystem is established, it doesn’t need constant intervention — just regular, mindful tending. It becomes a regenerative loop, turning waste into nourishment on an ongoing basis.

Culture works the same way. You can’t “fix” culture through a one-off retreat or a clever rebranding exercise. You need systems that metabolize experience continuously — that turn conflict, failure, and even success into compostable material. The goal isn’t to avoid mistakes. It’s to have a system that ensures every mistake feeds the next cycle of growth.

The Complexity Commitment

Composting, at its core, is a commitment to complexity. It’s an acknowledgment that nothing truly disappears — it just changes form. For organizations, this is a vital shift in mindset. Complexity isn’t something to be “solved.” It’s something to be stewarded.

At Persephone, the seasons where we embraced this complexity — where we allowed ourselves to sit in the ambiguity of half-composted lessons — were the seasons where our culture felt most alive. Not tidy. Not always comfortable. But rich, dynamic, and fertile.

Culture as a Living, Decomposing, Regenerating System

When you treat culture like compost, you stop fearing failure. You stop dreading the weeds. You start seeing every misstep, every awkward conversation, every tension point as raw material for future growth.

But only if you’re willing to do the work. To turn the pile. To endure the heat. To welcome the microbial diversity that makes real transformation possible.

Because here’s the quiet, regenerative truth: healthy cultures smell like good compost — earthy, alive, and just a little bit wild.

Section 6: The Living System — Culture as a Dynamic, Evolving Ecosystem

You can’t “arrive” at culture. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling software or hasn’t been in business long enough to know better.

Culture is not a destination. It’s not a program. It’s not even a thing. It’s a living system — dynamic, responsive, often unpredictable, and always evolving. Just like a forest. Just like a coral reef. Just like any ecosystem that knows how to survive.

The myth of a “finished” culture — where you tick the values box, do a few team-building workshops, and sit back as the good vibes carry you into perpetuity — is dangerous. It’s like planting a forest, getting the first flush of greenery, and assuming you’ve created a self-sustaining wilderness. Ecosystems don’t work like that. They go through succession, through cycles, through constant disturbance and regrowth.

So do businesses.

At Persephone, we’ve learned (sometimes painfully) that culture is not about control. It’s about stewardship. It’s about creating conditions where life can thrive — knowing full well that life is messy, unpredictable, and prone to wander.

Complexity is Not a Problem to Solve — It’s the Environment You Operate In

Economist Mancur Olson, in his seminal work The Rise and Decline of Nations, pointed out a critical flaw in how organizations — and even governments — manage their internal systems. Olson argued that over time, groups tend to accumulate structures, rules, and vested interests that are designed to protect their status quo. These structures, while intended to provide stability, often become so rigid and self-reinforcing that they inhibit adaptability. They simplify complexity down to a brittle framework.

And brittle things break.

Olson’s theory was that organizations (and nations) that lose their ability to navigate complexity — that try to overly streamline and “optimize” themselves — eventually stagnate and decline. On the other hand, those that embrace complexity — even at the expense of short-term efficiency — build the adaptive capacity necessary to thrive in a dynamic world.

At Persephone, complexity isn’t a side-effect. It’s the point. We chose to be a brewery, a farm, a gathering place, a B Corp, a social enterprise, a community investment vehicle, and, if that wasn’t enough, a bloody composting site for civic discourse. It’s messy. It’s often inefficient. But it’s alive. And it keeps us attuned to the ever-changing ecosystem we’re part of.

Ecological Succession: Culture Evolves in Waves

In nature, ecosystems develop through succession. You start with bare soil. Pioneer species — the scrappy, fast-growing types — move in. Over time, they prepare the ground for more complex organisms. Shrubs give way to young trees. Young trees give way to old-growth forests. But it’s never linear. Disturbances — fires, storms, floods — are part of the cycle. They clear space, return nutrients, and allow the next wave of growth to adapt to new conditions.

Organizational culture evolves in the same way.

Persephone’s early days were pure pioneer species. Scrappy, opportunistic, barely holding onto the margins, but full of life. We needed that energy. We wouldn’t have survived without it. But as the business grew, so did the complexity. We couldn’t operate on pioneer energy forever. We needed deeper root systems. More diverse species in the mix. The culture had to evolve.

But here’s the kicker: what served us in one season often became invasive in the next. Practices that felt essential during our startup phase became obstacles as we matured. The only way through was to embrace the idea that cultural succession isn’t a one-time shift. It’s a continuous process of adaptation.

The Danger of Cultural Ossification

Olson’s warning looms large here. The minute you start protecting the status quo for comfort’s sake — the minute you decide “this is how we do things” is more important than “this is what we need now” — you’re already in decline.

We’ve flirted with ossification at Persephone. There were moments when we wanted to freeze the culture we loved — the quirky, farm-first, ragtag energy of the early days — and just keep it that way. But nostalgia is a sweet poison. It makes you long for a version of yourself that may no longer fit the ecosystem you’re now operating in.

Cultural ossification feels safe, but it’s like a forest with no underbrush — pretty, but dead underneath. The antidote isn’t to fight change, but to embrace disturbance. Controlled burns. Letting go of practices, rituals, and even relationships that no longer serve the ecosystem’s health.

Complexity as Competitive Advantage (But It Hurts)

Complexity is often framed as a problem. Something to be minimized. Streamlined. Managed down to a series of simple dashboards.

But here’s the reality: complexity is the environment. It’s not going away. The businesses that survive aren’t the ones that simplify themselves into oblivion; they’re the ones that build enough resilience to dance with complexity without getting overwhelmed.

At Persephone, complexity isn’t a branding strategy. It’s a survival strategy. Our farm-brewery-community-partnership-mutant hybrid model may never win efficiency awards, but it allows us to flex in ways that a single-purpose brewery can’t. When one revenue stream falters, another props it up. When a regulatory change hits one part of the business, another part can absorb the shock.

That said — complexity hurts. It demands more relational bandwidth. It forces you to hold contradictions in tension. It slows things down when the market wants you to speed up. But the payoff is resilience. And in a world where brittle efficiency snaps at the first market wobble, resilience is priceless.

Adaptive Capacity: Culture’s Self-Healing Mechanism

Healthy ecosystems have redundancy. They don’t rely on single points of failure. If a tree falls, the understory is already primed to regenerate. Culture works the same way.

Organizations that build adaptive capacity — through distributed leadership, deep relationship networks, and an openness to emergent practices — are better equipped to recover from setbacks. They don’t crumble under the weight of a leadership departure or a PR mishap because the system is alive enough to regenerate from within.

Persephone’s adaptive capacity has been tested more than once. Whether it was navigating leadership transitions, public controversies, or pandemic-induced pivots, the reason we’re still here isn’t because we had a brilliant strategy document. It’s because we had a living culture that could adapt in real-time — messy, chaotic, but ultimately regenerative.

Stewardship Over Control: The Living System Mindset

You don’t manage a forest. You steward it.

You don’t “run” a coral reef. You protect its conditions for life.

Culture is no different. The more you try to control it, the more you suffocate it. The role of leadership isn’t to dictate culture — it’s to tend it. To notice where the nutrient flows are blocked. To clear deadwood when necessary. To make space for the new growth that inevitably looks different than what came before.

Olson’s insight was clear: simplify yourself to death, or embrace complexity and stay alive. At Persephone, we’re trying — imperfectly, but earnestly — to live in that complexity. To stay rooted in place, open to change, and humble enough to know that culture will never be “finished.”

A living system is never finished. It’s always in season.

Section 7: Closing the Loop — You Don’t “Build” Culture. You Grow It

Let’s get one thing straight: culture is not IKEA furniture. You don’t “build” it with an Allen key and a PDF manual. There’s no box you can check that says Culture: Assembled.

If anything, culture is like a sourdough starter. You feed it, you tend it, and occasionally, you wonder if it’s still alive or just passive-aggressively fermenting on your counter. Either way, it refuses to be rushed.

Dad Joke #1 (Intermission):

Why did the culture document get kicked out of the farm?

Because it was all talk and no fungi.

Culture is a Practice, Not a Product

Culture is what happens in the in-between. It’s how people treat each other when no one’s watching. It’s how tension gets metabolized when the delivery is late, or when someone’s dog decides the tasting room is the new bathroom. It’s the collective vibe at 3:47 pm on a Thursday when the keg washer is jammed and everyone’s patience is wearing thin.

It’s built — or broken — in these unglamorous, uncurated moments.

You can’t purchase culture. You can’t template it. You practice it. Every. Damn. Day.

At Persephone, our culture didn’t come from a “visioning retreat.” It came from the cumulative effect of awkward conversations, shared blunders, beers after bad days, and the slow accumulation of trust built in soil, not slideshows.

Dad Joke #2 (Intermission):

Why did the team stop going to culture workshops?

Because they realized compost piles smell better and do more good.

The Illusion of Control vs. The Discipline of Stewardship

There’s a seductive fantasy in business leadership that culture can be controlled. That if you just declare the right values and hold the right meetings, culture will obediently fall in line.

Spoiler: it won’t.

Culture resists control the way a toddler resists bedtime — loudly and creatively.

What does work? Stewardship.

Stewardship means paying attention. It means noticing when the vibe shifts in a meeting. It means clearing blockages when communication gets tangled. It means letting go of what used to work and creating space for what needs to emerge now.

At Persephone, our best cultural moments didn’t come from mandates. They came from relational attentiveness. Someone noticing that a teammate looked off, and pausing to ask why. Someone catching a brewing misalignment before it became a blow-up. Culture is in the micro-acts of stewardship, not the macro-announcements of intent.

Dad Joke #3 (Intermission):

Why don’t ecosystems send out press releases?

Because they know actions speak louder than mission statements.

Building Feedback Loops That Actually Nourish

Here’s a secret: culture doesn’t need a suggestion box. It needs a feedback loop that breathes.

Quarterly surveys are like checking the soil’s moisture by licking a rock. The real data is in daily, informal exchanges — the glance shared after a customer interaction, the half-smile when a new idea is floated, the quiet “hey, that felt weird, didn’t it?” in a hallway.

At Persephone, our feedback culture isn’t a system. It’s a series of relational reflexes. We didn’t set up formal debrief sessions, but we’ve had hundreds of impromptu debriefs — on loading docks, over coffee, while untangling irrigation lines. These micro-conversations are the cultural equivalent of turning the compost. They aerate the pile. They keep things from festering.

If culture feels stagnant, don’t look for a new survey platform. Look for the conversations that aren’t happening — and ask why.

Rootedness and Regeneration: Culture That Belongs to Place

One of the biggest cultural fallacies is the idea of scaling culture like a franchise model. You can’t pick up a culture from one context and plant it in another and expect it to bloom identically.

Culture is place-based. It’s a product of soil, air, water, and the people who work that land — metaphorically and literally.

Persephone’s culture is not an abstract concept. It’s rooted in Gibsons — in the quirks of our farm, in the community that’s grown with us, in the particularities of this place.

As we venture into The Alley in Powell River, the lesson is clear: we’re not exporting Persephone culture. We’re creating space for a new culture to emerge, one that’s in dialogue with its own ecosystem. The values may be consistent, but the expression will — and should — be different. That’s not dilution. That’s regeneration.

Dad Joke #4 (Intermission):

What did the brewery say to the farm?

“I’m hoppy to be rooted here.”

Complexity as a Daily, Painful, Glorious Choice

Culture work doesn’t “settle down.” Complexity is not a season. It’s the environment. Olson warned us that organizations simplify themselves to death. They standardize, streamline, and, in doing so, lose the very adaptive capacity that made them resilient.

Choosing complexity means choosing discomfort. It means allowing for multiple truths, for tension, for ambiguity. It means accepting that culture will never fit into a neat dashboard KPI.

At Persephone, we choose complexity every day. It’s not because we’re masochists (though jury’s out some days), but because complexity has kept us alive. It’s allowed us to pivot, to absorb shocks, to stay interesting — even when it would’ve been easier to narrow our scope.

Culture is Everyone’s Job — But Leaders Have Bigger Shovels

Yes, culture is co-created. Yes, everyone plays a role. But let’s not kid ourselves — leadership has outsized influence.

Not because of title. But because of proximity to the levers that shape relational conditions.

At Persephone, leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice. It’s about noticing where nutrients aren’t flowing, where relationships need tending, where blockages need clearing. Leaders carry bigger shovels — not to dig trenches of policy, but to turn the cultural pile when no one else wants to get their hands dirty.

Dad Joke #5 (Intermission):

Why did the compost pile apply for a leadership role?

Because it knew how to handle a load of crap and turn it into growth.

You Don’t “Fix” Culture — You Tend It

Culture isn’t a problem you fix. It’s a system you tend.

Mistakes are inevitable. Friction is part of the deal. But with the right tending — with relational attentiveness, with humility, with the patience to let things decompose and regenerate — those mistakes become compost. They feed the next cycle.

The goal isn’t to create a perfect culture. The goal is to create a living, breathing, compostable culture. One that can metabolize its own waste. One that doesn’t fear tension. One that treats every misstep as raw material for future richness.

The Legacy of a Living Culture

When Persephone is long gone — or, more hopefully, evolved into its 15th iteration as a spaceport for community agriculture — the lasting legacy won’t be the beers. It won’t be the farm. It won’t even be the awards (though, sure, they look nice on a shelf).

The real legacy will be the culture we cultivated. The relationships. The micro-stories of shared effort. The soil of belonging that outlasts brands and balance sheets.

Culture, like soil, is what you leave behind.

You don’t build it. You grow it.

Chapter 4 v2

Section 1: The Myth of the Perfect Seed

Let’s talk about seed selection — or as business schools like to call it, “defining your core competency,” preferably with a whiteboard, a laser pointer, and the unwavering confidence of someone who’s never actually run a business.

If you believe the startup mythology (and bless your pitch deck if you do), you’re supposed to begin your journey with perfect clarity. You find your niche. You carve your value proposition into a granite tablet. You know exactly what you’re planting and what it’ll grow into, right down to the font on your labels and the TED Talk you’ll give once you scale.

It’s cute.

Meanwhile, back in reality, most of us are wandering through the metaphorical seed aisle of business ideas with a shopping cart full of conflicting advice, budget constraints, and a vague hope that something — anything — will sprout before the bank account does the opposite.

We thought we were planting a production brewery.

You know, cans, bottles, kegs, scaled-up wholesale, clean margins, predictable growth — the kind of thing that looks good on spreadsheets and makes investors nod slowly.

But spoiler alert: that’s not what sprouted.

What sprouted was… a community gathering space. A farm with a beer problem. A third place disguised as a brewery disguised as a farm disguised as a business plan. Honestly, it’s hard to say who’s in charge anymore — us, or the chickens.

But let’s rewind.

In the beginning, we — like many eager founders — wrote a business plan with the sincere belief that writing things down made them true. It was focused, optimistic, and based on a charming misunderstanding of how life works.

We thought our seed was production brewing.

Turns out, it was something else entirely. Something messy and plural and slightly allergic to clean category labels.

Here’s the thing about seeds: they don’t care what you meant to plant.

You don’t get to bury a maple and wish for mangoes.

You don’t plant barley and get a yoga retreat. (Unless you’re in California, in which case… maybe.)

Seeds come with instructions built in. Your job isn’t to rewrite them; your job is to notice which ones are viable, and which ones are just decorative nonsense printed on the side of the packet. (Looking at you, “100x ROI by Q2.”)

What’s more — and here’s where it gets annoying — some seeds don’t sprout until conditions are right. And sometimes those conditions include pain, or patience, or a total identity crisis at year three followed by a regulatory review and a spontaneous community barn dance that teaches you something about joy.

So yes, seed selection matters. But not because it guarantees the outcome.

Because it anchors the inquiry. It gives you something to pay attention to, until something real begins to grow — or dies trying.

And if you’re lucky, one day you’ll stand back, look at what’s taken root, and say something truly profound like:

“Huh. That’s… not what I planted.”

Welcome to the garden. Please wipe your boots.

Section 2: Choosing What to Grow (vs. Copying What’s Trending)

If Section 1 was about realizing that seeds don’t always behave the way you want them to, then this section is about how to choose what to plant in the first place — and how to avoid the subtle but highly marketable art of planting someone else’s dream and calling it strategy.

Let’s say you’re standing in the metaphorical garden centre of capitalism, wearing your best entrepreneurial flannel and holding a freshly minted mission statement. You’ve got the freedom to grow anything — kombucha empire? Tiny home startup? Fermented alpaca milk? (Niche, but we’ve seen worse on Dragon’s Den.)

So how do you choose?

Well, if you’re like us in the early days, you pick the seed that looks good in the catalogue. The one everyone’s talking about. The one that’s “crushing it” on social media, being featured in Monocle, and comes with a helpful TEDx Talk by someone who meditates and microdoses before breakfast. You know the one.

That’s how we picked “production brewery” — not because it was a bad idea, but because it looked like the right kind of idea. You make something, you sell it at scale, you optimize for margins, you franchise the tasting room, and then you build a taproom in an airport and call it a day. It was a model. It worked for others. It even made economic sense. On paper.

And yet, within the first growing season, we were already feeling off. The soil didn’t feel right. The weather was unpredictable. And the seed — that shiny, scalable, slightly smug seed — just wasn’t thriving.

Now, this is where most founders get stubborn. You’ve already told your friends and your accountant and your local newspaper that you’re building a production brewery. You’ve got spreadsheets with tabs. You’ve got cans with labels. You’ve got debt.

So instead of changing the seed, you double down. You fertilize harder. You water more. You increase your ad spend. You make strategic pivots that aren’t really strategic, and definitely aren’t pivots — they’re just increasingly sweaty attempts to resuscitate something that doesn’t want to live.

We did a bit of that. Okay, a lot of that. Including trying to chase down trends that had nothing to do with our place, our people, or our actual strengths. We brewed the beers people were supposed to want. We flirted with distribution deals that would’ve buried our margins but looked like growth. We flirted with being a brand instead of being a business. (And that’s not just poetic language — we actually hired a brand agency. They were lovely people. Very clever. Mostly worked in LA.)

The problem wasn’t them. The problem was us — trying to grow a tropical orchid in a coastal rainforest. Just because the orchid was beautiful in someone else’s Instagram story didn’t mean it belonged in our soil.

Copycat Seeds and the Curse of Pinterest Farming

Now, let’s talk about what I call Pinterest farming — the aestheticized, idealized version of agriculture (and business) that looks amazing in theory and completely falls apart in real life. You know the vibe: pristine rows of lavender, rustic signage made from reclaimed barn wood, heirloom tomatoes nestled gently in hand-woven baskets. No weeds. No pests. No actual farmers, either — just attractive people in wide-brimmed hats gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance.

Pinterest farming also happens in business.

It’s when you build a model that looks like success but doesn’t actually grow anything real. You adopt a tone, a brand, a slogan, a revenue stream that isn’t actually rooted in who you are or where you are — it’s borrowed. Imported. Curated for optics.

And look, I get it. The pressure to look like you have your shit together is enormous. Everyone’s comparing grow lights on LinkedIn. Investors want to hear about scale, not soil conditions. And if you’re in a small town like us, you also don’t want to seem like you’re failing — because the town will absolutely notice. Your local barista will hear about your declining keg orders before you do.

But copying what works elsewhere is rarely the path to integrity. Or to viability. It’s a form of mimicry, and while mimicry can buy you time, it won’t make you thrive.

Seed Sovereignty: A Metaphor Worth Stealing

Let’s borrow a concept from agroecology: seed sovereignty.

Seed sovereignty is the idea that communities have the right to save, share, and select the seeds that grow well in their own climate — not just the ones sold to them by multinational seed corporations. It’s about autonomy, context, and resilience.

And it makes for one hell of a business metaphor.

When you choose a seed — a core competency, a value proposition, a business model — you’re not just picking a trend. You’re picking something that has to grow where you are. In your ecosystem. With your people. In your actual weather, with your real constraints and your actual weirdnesses.

You don’t get to just airlift in some high-yield, VC-optimized seed from Silicon Valley and expect it to fruit in Gibsons. (Or you can try — but you’ll be yelling at spreadsheets while raccoons dig up your compost bins.)

Instead, you need to ask better questions:

• What grows well here — even without me forcing it?

• What do people already love about this place?

• What would still be meaningful if it made no money for three years?

• What can I offer that no one else can, not because I’m better, but because I’m of this place?

Those are seed questions. And most people avoid them because they’re not as sexy as “scalable” or “disruptive.” They sound slow. They sound vulnerable. They sound… expensive.

But they’re the ones that work.

When We Realized What Was Actually Growing

It didn’t happen all at once. There was no angel choir or perfectly backlit moment of realization. Just a slow, sometimes awkward, unfolding.

People weren’t just coming for the beer. They were coming for the experience — the farm, the conversations, the sense that they belonged to something slightly bigger than themselves and a lot weirder than a typical tasting room.

They came back not because we launched a new product line or nailed our branding. They came back because it felt like a place. Their place.

We realized we weren’t in the beer business. We were in the gathering business.

We weren’t selling hops — we were selling permission. To show up. To linger. To bump into someone you didn’t expect and leave with a little more trust in humanity.

Our seed wasn’t production brewing. Our seed was place-based community building with an agricultural accent and a fairly consistent alcohol content.

We didn’t choose that seed at first. It chose us. And luckily, we eventually stopped resisting.

Closing Thought (Before the Next Section)

So here’s the real takeaway from all this:

If you find yourself straining to grow something — forcing, tweaking, rebranding, overwatering — maybe it’s not the wrong climate. Maybe it’s the wrong seed.

And if you find something growing that you didn’t plan, but people seem to love it, and it brings you to life even when you’re exhausted… well, maybe that’s your actual business.

You can be successful in someone else’s business model. But you’ll only feel alive in your own.

Section 3: The Slow Realization — Our Seed Wasn’t What We Thought

If you’ve ever started a business, you know the intoxicating clarity of the early days. You have a plan. It’s laminated. People nod when you explain it. They even say things like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

We thought ours made sense too: production brewery. Wholesale to pubs and liquor stores. Clean margins, controlled overhead, stable growth. The tasting room would be a nice little side hustle — like an afterthought with a cash register.

It all seemed very professional. We were going to be that brewery. The one with consistent SKU movement, a growing distribution footprint, and a sales rep who could hit their volume targets without using a therapy app.

Of course, reality is a patient prankster.

The Signs We Ignored

In hindsight, the clues were everywhere.

The tasting room was packed on sunny afternoons, while the keg orders dribbled in like reluctant teenagers doing chores. Locals didn’t just come for a pint; they came to linger. Some brought their own lawn chairs. A few brought their own dogs’ lawn chairs.

Regulars started claiming “their table,” even though the tables weren’t numbered. More than once, someone asked us to host their wedding reception in the middle of hop harvest season. Once, someone floated the idea of holding a memorial service in the hop yard.

We didn’t just sell beer — we accidentally started curating the town square.

Staff noticed it too. More and more of their time was spent not on “upselling the seasonal IPA” but on chatting about someone’s tomato harvest, dog’s surgery, or retirement plans.

We could have paid attention then. We could have looked at the numbers, the energy, the gravitational pull toward the farm. But no — we were still convinced the real business happened in stainless steel tanks and pallet shipments.

Realization in Slow Motion

Recognition didn’t hit like a thunderbolt. It seeped in like coastal fog — soft, slow, inescapable.

Winter should have been dead season. No patios, fewer tourists. But even in February, people kept showing up — huddled inside, swapping stories, and bringing friends from out of town like they were showing off the local museum.

Our events kept growing in scale and absurdity. Collaborations, pop-up markets, music nights. Each time, people came for the place as much as the product. Sometimes more.

Two events, in particular, forced us to admit that what we were building wasn’t just a brewery.

Eye-Opener #1: Hop Harvests

Hop harvests should be pure manual labour — itchy vines, sticky hands, hauling bines into the barn, picking until your fingers smell like the world’s most pungent air freshener. But for us, hop harvest days turned into something else entirely.

We opened them up to the community, inviting anyone who wanted to help. And people came — not just beer nerds or local farmers, but everybody.

We made a point of welcoming folks from the Sunshine Coast Association for Community Living (SCACL), alongside retirees, old-timers who remembered when hops grew in the region decades ago, kids darting around between tractors, and people who’d never seen a hop cone in their life.

There was food, laughter, tractor rides. Someone inevitably tried to weave hop vines into a crown. Nobody wanted to leave.

It was work, yes — but also something deeper. Picking side by side broke down barriers. Titles, roles, and labels didn’t matter. People were just… people. And the hops seemed to get picked faster when nobody was counting the minutes.

Somewhere between the smell of fresh hops and the sound of an old Massey Ferguson engine coughing to life, it became obvious: we were in the business of creating spaces where people could belong. The beer was just the ticket in.

Eye-Opener #2: Tough Kegger

For the uninitiated, the Tough Kegger was our annual “adventure race for beer.” Teams of four would lug a full 60-pound keg through seven kilometres of trails and obstacles on Mount Elphinstone. There were checkpoints with names like “Selfie Summit” and “Can Crush” (yes, you chugged a can of water — hydration counts).

It was the sort of event that sounded like it had been invented after several pints — which is entirely possible. But it worked.

Race day had the energy of a festival and the camaraderie of a kitchen party. Teams showed up in costumes. Spectators lined the trails with camp chairs and snacks. People who had never set foot on our farm before came to cheer, laugh, and maybe judge the carrying technique of strangers.

That year, as the race director, Dion Whyte, put it:

“It was a great success, and a truly unique Coast and brewing industry experience. Everyone who participated had an amazing time and are excited to come back next year!”

It wasn’t just the event’s popularity that struck me — it was the feeling. Watching people help each other up hills, share the weight of the keg, and celebrate together at the finish line felt… familiar.

It was the same thing that was happening at hop harvests, in our tasting room, at our markets and concerts.

The Tough Kegger was the perfect metaphor for what we were really doing: giving people a reason to gather, to share effort, to laugh through the absurdity of carrying something heavy together. Beer was part of it, sure, but the keg might as well have been a campfire or a casserole dish. It was a prop for connection.

That day made it embarrassingly obvious: this was our business. Not brewing beer — although we still took pride in doing that well — but building a place where community could happen.

Resistance and Denial

Admitting that was harder than it sounds.

We had an actual business plan — you know, the kind banks want to see — and it didn’t have a line item for “cultivate vibes.” Investors like projections, not “people seem to like hanging out here.”

So, naturally, we resisted.

We tried to scale production anyway, chasing distribution deals that would prove (to ourselves, mostly) that we were still “a serious brewery.” We brewed for trends, thinking maybe a few hot releases could pull us back toward that original wholesale dream.

But it didn’t work. The pull toward community wasn’t just strong — it was magnetic. The more we leaned into it, the more everything else made sense. The more we fought it, the more exhausting the work became.

Lessons from Letting Go

In stoic terms, letting go of the production brewery dream wasn’t failure — it was alignment.

Like Marcus Aurelius said: “The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around.”

Our cucumber wasn’t bitter, exactly — but it wasn’t the crop that wanted to grow here. The brambles were real, though: logistics, distribution costs, competition.

What wanted to grow was something else entirely — a place, a hub, a field where people could gather (sometimes literally).

When we finally stopped resisting, we found the joy again. Not because the work got easier — if anything, the work of cultivating community is harder than just making beer — but because it finally felt like the work matched the soil we were in.

Foreshadowing the Next Section

Of course, just because we’d accepted our true seed didn’t mean we stopped making questionable choices. We still grafted on some dubious branches, tried some awkward hybrids, and made more than one trip back to the Pinterest seed catalogue.

But by then, we’d learned a crucial thing: you can’t out-market your actual identity. You can only tend it. And when the community is the crop, you’d better learn how to water it.\

Section 4: The False Starts and the Fertilizer of Failure

Every garden needs compost.

You can fuss over your rows, buy artisanal mulch, and quote regenerative farming principles until the cows come home (and on our farm, they often do), but without something rotting in the mix, the soil never gets rich enough to grow the good stuff.

Business is the same. You can have the neatest plan in the world, laminated and colour-coded, but the truth is: the things that go a bit sideways — or just don’t stick — are often the best long-term investments. They’re the stuff that breaks down, releases the nutrients, and feeds the roots of what actually works.

In our early years, we were lucky: our wholesale beer sales were growing and the community hub was taking on a life of its own. That’s a rare combination. Usually, when you grow in one area, the other starts sulking in the corner like an under-watered houseplant. We had both on the rise.

But that didn’t mean every decision was pure gold. Some were more… manure. Fortunately, manure makes great fertilizer.

False Starts, Defined

When I say “false starts,” I’m not talking about catastrophic, “shut-the-lights-off” failures. I mean projects, products, or strategies that seemed promising, worked in certain ways, but ultimately didn’t become part of the long-term ecosystem.

They weren’t mistakes so much as… seasonal crops. They came, they served a purpose, and they eventually went to seed — sometimes literally.

If you’re the sort of leader who can’t stomach the idea that something you try might not last forever, you’re probably also the sort of leader who over-waters their plants and then wonders why everything’s root-bound.

Wholesale Pushes and Pivots

In the early days, wholesale felt like the “serious” side of the business. If you could ship pallets of beer to multiple markets, get your SKUs on liquor store shelves across BC, and rattle off your sales growth percentages at networking events, you were clearly legit.

And to be fair, wholesale was good for us. It gave us reach, reputation, and revenue. But it also taught us some very specific lessons about scale:

• Not all accounts are worth the chase. Some order like clockwork, pay on time, and make you want to send them a thank-you card. Others act like they’re doing you a favour by placing a case order every other month, usually after you’ve called them twice.

• Geography matters. Selling into Vancouver is one thing. Selling into a remote town where delivery costs rival your gross margin is… a different sport entirely.

Some markets were worth pushing into; others weren’t. But here’s the real kicker: we learned that how we sold mattered as much as where we sold. Our best wholesale relationships came from accounts who loved what we stood for — the farm, the values, the community work — not just the beer. And no amount of cold-calling could fake that connection.

Product Experiments: The “Why Not?” Years

If you’re a brewery and you don’t occasionally experiment, you risk becoming predictable. And predictable is fine for accountants and IKEA assembly manuals, but not so much for a craft brewery.

So, yes — we played around. We brewed styles because they were trending. We brewed styles because we wanted to see if we could. We brewed styles because someone on staff said, “It might be fun.”

Some of these stuck around and became part of our core lineup. Others were… let’s just say “limited release” in both quantity and enthusiasm.

The thing is, even the one-off beers that didn’t land perfectly still taught us something. They stretched our team’s creativity. They gave our customers a reason to try something new. And, occasionally, they taught us exactly where the line is between “innovative” and “weird for the sake of weird.”

(For the record: cucumber saison. I’m not saying it was bad, but I’m also not saying we made it twice.)

Events and Partnerships

If wholesale was the “serious” side of the business and brewing was the “creative” side, events were the wild card. We said yes to a lot of ideas.

Some events were obvious hits — Tough Kegger, hop harvests, live music nights that felt like mini-festivals. Others… well, let’s just say they were educational.

We once partnered on a community initiative that, on paper, sounded perfect: great cause, aligned values, eager collaborators. In practice, it involved months of planning for an event that drew fewer people than a rainy Tuesday in the tasting room. The cause was still worthy. The collaboration still mattered. But the format? Not one we’d repeat without heavy modification and a weather guarantee from the universe.

That’s the thing about partnerships: even the awkward ones teach you something. Sometimes they teach you what to double down on. Sometimes they teach you who to avoid getting into a three-month planning cycle with ever again.

The Composting Effect

The beauty of false starts is that they don’t have to be wasted energy. In nature, disturbance is part of a healthy system. A tree falls, light reaches the forest floor, and new species emerge. A failed crop gets ploughed under and enriches the soil for the next season.

Our false starts worked the same way. Every product experiment, wholesale detour, and event that didn’t go as planned still added to the richness of our understanding. They clarified who we were, what we did best, and where our energy was most valued.

Some of the things we tried in those years planted seeds that didn’t sprout until much later. An early wholesale relationship might turn into a high-impact collaboration down the road. A small event might lead to a new community partner years later.

And sometimes, you only recognize the value of a false start when you’re deep into something else entirely and think, Oh, this works better because we learned that lesson back then.

Fertilizer for the Core

Looking back, I wouldn’t strip those experiments out of our history. Even the messy ones. Especially the messy ones.

They gave us the confidence to be a little weirder, the humility to know when to let go, and the flexibility to adapt without losing ourselves. They were the manure in the mix — unglamorous, occasionally unpleasant, but absolutely essential.

And yes, I’m aware I just compared some of our early ideas to actual crap. That’s the thing about humility: if you can’t admit some of your ideas were basically cow patties, you’re probably not ready to grow anything worth harvesting.

Bridging to What Comes Next

By the time we’d composted a few seasons’ worth of experiments, we were more grounded in our core identity. We knew we could grow wholesale without losing the heart of the place. We knew the community hub was non-negotiable. And we knew that the best growth happened when those two parts of the business fed each other instead of competing for sunlight.

Which brings us to the next truth: your core competency isn’t always the thing you make. It’s the thing you are. And if you’re lucky, you get to make both work together without one choking the other out.

But that’s a story for the next section.

Section 5: Core Competency ≠ What You Make

One of the most persistent and limiting assumptions in business is that your “core” is the thing you produce. You make beer, you’re a brewery. You roast coffee, you’re a café. You sell pants, you’re in the pants business.

It’s neat, it’s simple, and it’s almost always wrong.

It’s wrong not because the product is irrelevant — obviously, you need to produce something people are willing to pay for unless your business model involves winning lotteries or marrying well — but because the product is a surface expression, a seasonal yield, a single year’s fruit. It is the apple on the branch, not the tree.

And like in nature, focusing only on the fruit is a great way to end up with a very pretty Instagram post of an orchard you no longer own because the soil collapsed underneath it.

The Mismatch Between Output and Identity

Entire industries have built their branding and operational strategies on this fruit-first thinking. Some even manage to keep it going for decades before the rot sets in.

Consider the coffee shop that thinks it sells coffee. The owner obsesses over sourcing, roast profiles, and latte art so perfect it could hang in a museum. Meanwhile, half the people who come in couldn’t care less about the origin of the beans. They come because it’s the unofficial dating marketplace for the neighbourhood. The coffee is incidental. The espresso machine is basically a chaperone.

Or take the clothing brand that thinks it sells pants. Technically, yes, there are pants involved. But what customers are actually buying is identity — a sense of belonging to the “kind of people” who wear those pants. Which means if a competing brand can replicate that sense of belonging, they can swap the pants out for kilts or biodegradable jumpsuits and the customers will happily follow.

The mismatch isn’t that the product and the identity are different. It’s that most businesses don’t realize it, and so they spend all their energy polishing the fruit while the roots quietly wither.

The Tree as a Complex Adaptive System

This is where the tree metaphor starts doing some heavy lifting.

A tree exists in an ecosystem — not in isolation. Its survival depends on an elaborate web of interactions: mycorrhizal fungi, soil composition, pollinators, sunlight, rainfall, temperature, wind, competing plants, browsing animals, microbial activity, and yes, even the occasional squirrel with questionable judgment.

A business is no different. It sits inside interdependent systems that are ecological, social, and economic, whether it likes to admit it or not.

• Ecological: The literal resources it depends on — raw materials, water, energy, waste systems.

• Social: The network of people and institutions it touches — customers, suppliers, regulators, communities, competitors, allies.

• Economic: The flows of capital, pricing pressures, labour markets, trade rules, and financing conditions that shape its operating environment.

Systems thinking teaches that health and resilience don’t come from maximizing a single variable — like quarterly profits, or fruit yield — but from optimizing the relationships between elements in the system. In other words: a healthy tree isn’t just one with lots of apples; it’s one with deep roots, healthy soil, a functioning canopy, and enough squirrels to plant new trees without eating every last one of them.

Why the Fruit Isn’t the Tree

Fruit is seasonal. Some years it’s abundant, others lean. And a healthy tree can survive multiple bad fruiting years if the root system is robust, the trunk solid, and the surrounding system supportive.

In business terms, this means that your survival depends less on a single product’s performance and more on the resilience of the system that produces it.

This is why monocultures — in agriculture or in business — are so vulnerable. A single pest, a single market shift, a single weather event, and the whole system collapses. Ask any farmer who’s ever watched a late frost wipe out an orchard, or any company that tied its fate entirely to a single blockbuster product only to see a competitor release something marginally better and 20% cheaper.

In systems terms, the product is an output, but the business’s core competency is its role in the system — how it creates, manages, and sustains the relationships and flows that make that output possible.

Examples Beyond Persephone

Let’s widen the frame.

A regenerative farm in the prairies sells CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares. One summer, a freak hailstorm wipes out half their crops. In a conventional model, they’d be done — the fruit failed, therefore the business fails. But because their true core competency is cultivating community trust and involvement, their CSA members accept smaller shares that year, volunteer on the farm, and renew their memberships for the next season. The farm survives because its role in the social system is stronger than its dependence on a single season’s output.

A small software company makes its money from a single productivity app. Then a giant tech platform releases a free version that’s “good enough” for most users. Sales crater. If the company’s identity is “we make an app,” they’re toast. But if their real core competency is the community of users they’ve built — a loyal group that trusts their ethos and wants more from them — they can pivot to new products or services and keep that community intact.

An arts venue loses its primary government grant. If the venue is just a place with four walls, it closes. But if its role in the community ecosystem is as a convener of talent, a trusted platform for emerging artists, and a hub for creative exchange, then the community itself will rally to fund it, or find new ways to keep it alive.

Persephone Brewing? Same deal. We made beer — and we still do — but beer was never the whole tree. Our roots were in the land, our relationships, and our role as a gathering place. If the beer disappeared tomorrow (perish the thought), the community hub could still exist in some form, because its life comes from the relationships, not just the taps.

Systems Thinking in Action: Resilience Through Diversity

One of the first things ecologists will tell you is that diversity equals resilience. The more species, the more niches, the more redundancies in the system, the better it can absorb shocks and adapt.

Business works the same way. Diversity in revenue streams, customer segments, partnerships, and skills increases your capacity to survive the unexpected. It’s why a brewery that sells wholesale and runs a bustling tasting room and hosts events and runs a farm can weather storms better than one that relies entirely on shipping kegs to urban bars.

Monocultures — whether of crops or customers — look efficient in the short term but fragile in the long term. They’re optimized for yield, not for resilience. And yield without resilience is like fruit without roots: impressive right up until the moment it collapses.

Adaptive capacity — the ability to reorganize after disruption without losing your core identity — is the difference between a business that survives and one that becomes a cautionary tale.

How to Identify Your True Core Competency in a Complex System

So, how do you figure out what your core really is? Spoiler: you can’t do it by staring at your product long enough or running another round of A/B testing on your website banner.

Start by asking questions that force you to look at your role in the system:

1. What role do we play in the ecosystem around us? Are we a keystone species whose presence supports many others? A pioneer species that prepares the ground for future growth? Or are we a vine that risks choking out our host if we’re not careful?

2. If our main product disappeared tomorrow, what would still make us valuable? If the answer is “nothing,” that’s a red flag.

3. Where do we create relationships and flows that can’t be easily replaced? That could be trust, shared knowledge, cultural capital, infrastructure, or even humour.

4. How do we contribute to the resilience of the system as a whole? Are we making the ecosystem stronger, or are we extracting from it until it collapses?

Once you’ve mapped these, you can start to see the “root system” of your business — the hidden structure that feeds and supports the visible outputs.

The Stoic Overlay

This is where stoicism pairs beautifully with systems thinking. In both, the focus is on tending what’s within your control and accepting the things that aren’t.

You can’t control the weather. You can’t control market shocks, sudden competition, or a shift in consumer behaviour. You can control how healthy your soil is, how diverse your system is, and how adaptable your relationships are.

The stoics would tell you that your job is not to produce a perfect crop every year, but to tend the conditions so that when the rain comes, you’re ready to grow — and when the drought hits, you can survive.

Also, you should probably avoid telling the sun to “shine harder” or yelling at clouds, unless you’re doing it for comedic effect at a company picnic.

Core Competency as a Role, Not an Output

When you think of your core competency as your role in the system, a few things happen:

• You stop obsessing over the competition’s fruit yield and start paying attention to the health of your roots.

• You get less attached to any single product or service and more focused on the flows that make you relevant.

• You start to see disruptions not just as threats but as opportunities to reorganize in ways that strengthen the system.

And perhaps most importantly, you start making decisions that sustain both your business and the system you’re part of — which, if you’re paying attention, is the same thing.

⸻

Bridging to the Next Section

This brings us to a fundamental truth: what you make is just one chapter in the story. What you are — your role in the web of relationships and flows around you — is the whole book.

In the next section, we’ll turn our attention to the brand and ecosystem layer: how your identity is perceived, how it interacts with the rest of the system, and how to ensure it remains both grounded and adaptive over time.

Because even the healthiest roots can’t do much if the canopy above them can’t capture the light.

Section 6

Section 6: When the System Pushes Back — Navigating Constraints Without Losing the Plot

If you’ve ever planted something in your backyard — a tree, a vine, a garden full of enthusiastic zucchini — you know the optimism of the first day. The sun is shining, you’ve read the instructions (or at least the part printed in bold), and you’ve imagined the glorious harvest that will follow. Then the neighbour’s goat eats it, the frost kills it, or the soil turns out to be 80% gravel and 20% the broken dreams of past gardeners. Welcome to business.

If running a business were just about following the original plan, every MBA with a flip chart would be a titan of industry. But nature and bureaucracy are equally unimpressed with your intentions. You can design the most elegant business model, backed by bulletproof market research and a 40‑page impact thesis, and the system will find new and inventive ways to smack it out of your hands. Sometimes it’s a freak storm. Sometimes it’s a regulation written in 1973 that no one remembers the logic for but everyone insists still applies. Sometimes it’s a global pandemic — nature’s way of flipping the table and asking what you’re made of. And sometimes it’s softer: a community expectation that metastasizes into entitlement, or a supply chain that behaves like a cat — affectionate, fickle, and determined to sit on the keyboard the moment you need to type.

The point isn’t that plans are useless. It’s that the ecosystem always gets a vote. And often several.

The Role of Constraints in Healthy Systems

In ecology, constraints aren’t just inevitable; they’re essential. Trees that grow in wind‑swept environments develop what foresters call “wind‑firmness” — shorter, thicker trunks, deeper roots, more flexible branches. Trees raised in sheltered comfort grow tall and elegant, right up until the first real storm files a performance review and the canopy underperforms catastrophically.

There’s even a term (and yes, we’re allowed one nerdy word per section): thigmomorphogenesis — growth responses induced by mechanical stress. Touch a plant, bend it, expose it to wind, and it strengthens. Insulate it from stress entirely, and it becomes a decorative metaphor for fragility.

Businesses experience their own thigmomorphogenesis. The “wind” comes as regulatory hurdles, budget ceilings, limited market access, seasonal demand, fickle customers, aluminum price shocks, interest‑rate whiplash, and the fact that, no matter how poetic your mission statement, payroll is due on Thursday. Constraints force creativity. They force prioritization. They remind you that growth and strength are not synonyms. Growth is bigness; strength is fitness — to place, to purpose, to the pressures that actually exist.

Complexity folks would call this adaptive capacity: the ability to reorganize under stress without losing your identity. In a forest, that looks like multiple species sharing light, nutrients, and mycorrhizal networks; when the fire comes, the system reshuffles but persists. In a business, it looks like modular processes, redundant skills, multiple revenue branches, and the cultural humility to change tactics while holding purpose constant. If that sounds less sexy than “scale at all costs,” that’s because it is — right up until costs happen

Persephone Case Study: Zoning, Licensing, and ALR Quirks

When we started Persephone, we assumed our knottiest problem would be, you know, making great beer. We were wrong. Brewing was the part that responded predictably to good inputs and steady attention. The real chaos engine lived in the interface between agriculture and policy: trying to operate on Agricultural Land Reserve land with a model that blended farming, manufacturing, hospitality, and community life — basically the bureaucratic equivalent of juggling chainsaws while the audience files safety complaints.

In the Venn diagram of what we wanted to do and what the rules allowed, the overlap was roughly the size of a hop pellet. ALR frameworks exist for excellent reasons — protecting farmland from industrial creep — but a farm‑based brewery is, by design, a liminal creature. It is neither a field nor a factory; it’s a hedgerow, an edge habitat. And edges are noisy. We learned quickly that the letter of the law and the spirit of the land sometimes look at each other like two drivers at a four‑way stop: you go. No, you go. No, you.

Add municipal licensing to the mix — hours of hearings, stacks of forms large enough to mulch a vineyard — and you get a master class in humility. And yet those fences and hedgerows did something valuable: they shaped the canopy. If we couldn’t spread the branches exactly where we wanted, we found where the light actually was. We leaned into agritourism, place‑based education, and events that braided land, labour, and laughter. We planted along the fence line and discovered the hedgerow is often the most alive part of the field.

Was that easy? No. Was it clarifying? Absolutely. Constraints handed us a non‑negotiable: if we insisted on being a conventional production plant, we’d be perpetually at war with the site. If we embraced being a farm‑anchored gathering ecosystem that also brewed excellent beer, we could work with the land and the rules, not against them. Sometimes the system doesn’t need you to be louder; it needs you to change species.

Social Constraints: Community Expectations

Being called a “community hub” is flattering until you realize it’s also a job you never applied for. Once you become the place for weddings, fundraisers, hop harvests, and a competitive sport wherein humans voluntarily carry a full keg through the woods, it becomes hard to say no without feeling like you’ve kicked a puppy, insulted a neighbour, and personally doomed the concept of community — all before lunch.

Every yes, however, is a hidden no. Yes to one noble cause can be no to staff bandwidth, no to margin, no to recovery time, no to the quieter forms of stewardship that never trend on Instagram, like repairing the tractor or cleaning the ditch so the parking lot doesn’t become a seasonal wetland. We’ve hosted events that were absolute magic and others that taught us the important lesson that mission without capacity is just martyrdom with better branding.

Community expectations behave like an exuberant vine: spectacular when trellised and tended; suffocating when left to its own devices. The work, then, is not to say yes or no on principle, but to prune — to keep vitality without letting it strangle the trunk. That means setting thresholds (causes we align with, days we can staff, budgets we won’t exceed), clarifying rituals (how we welcome, how we close, how we recover), and being explicit that “community” does not mean “infinite availability.” Love the vine. Train the vine. Do not become the vine.

One more constraint simmering underneath: inclusion is not free. If you commit to being a place where elders, kids, people with disabilities, and overcaffeinated dogs can coexist happily, you must design for that — seating, shade, ramps, bathrooms, acoustics, staffing — which is to say you must pay for it. It is both the right thing and a real thing. Values scale through line items, not adjectives.

Economic Constraints: Market Realities vs. Ideals

Craft beer is a crowded canopy. You can make a product that wins medals and still lose shelf space to a brand whose can features a cartoon llama in sunglasses. Ingredient costs climb, aluminum prices moonwalk, energy prices audition for villain roles, and somewhere a big player decides to discount just as your barley farmer calls to explain what “drought stress” did this year. Meanwhile the internet graciously informs you that your IPA is two dollars more than a competitor’s and your ethics are lovely but also, their cousin is having a wedding so, could you do a discount?

The market does not care how regenerative your hops are if someone else’s six‑pack is cheaper and within arm’s reach. That’s not cynicism; it’s gravity. In a values‑driven business, the tension is continuous: how do you keep fair wages, decent benefits, responsible sourcing, and environmental realities in the same conversation as “we need cash flow by Tuesday”? Sometimes you hold the line. Sometimes you adapt packaging or a recipe. Sometimes you discontinue a darling. And sometimes you decide you’re okay forfeiting a thin sliver of market to retain the integrity of the trunk.

Complexity helps because it reframes the question from “win or lose this SKU” to “maintain system viability.” Maybe you introduce a rotating tap that uses what’s abundant. Maybe you share logistics with a neighbour. Maybe you switch from a growth target to a resilience target — less romance, more sleep.

Stoic Response to Constraints (and Who Ryan Holiday Is, Really)

Enter the Stoics. Not the toga influencers of your social feed, but the ancient practitioners who accepted that reality is stubborn, control is limited, and character is a strategy as much as a virtue. Their modern hype man — and I mean that fondly — is Ryan Holiday: American author and media strategist turned popularizer of Stoicism. He wrote The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, Stillness Is the Key, and Discipline Is Destiny; he runs The Daily Stoic; he tells stories about Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Ulysses S. Grant, and a rotating cast of athletes and CEOs; and he has, with admirable consistency, convinced a generation that journaling is not just for teenagers and tyrants. He is a skilled synthesizer and a savvy marketer of old ideas to modern attention spans — which, to be clear, is not an insult. Someone has to translate Latin into “read this on your phone between emails.”

What’s useful about Holiday, beyond the pull‑quotes, is how his version of Stoicism intersects with complexity in practice. The Stoic “dichotomy of control” — focus on what you can control, accept what you cannot, discern the difference — turns out to be a power tool in complex systems where causal chains are long, feedback loops are delayed, and certainty is mostly cosplay. Complexity says: feedback, emergence, nonlinearity. Stoicism says: okay, then organize your agency around posture, preparation, and process, not outcomes you were never promised.

Some practical crossovers:

• Negative visualization ≈ pre‑mortem. The Stoic exercise of imagining loss or disruption (not to wallow, but to rehearse acceptance and readiness) mirrors the strategist’s pre‑mortem: “It’s one year from now; this project failed. Why?” You surface fragilities in the system before the wind arrives.

• Journaling ≈ sensemaking. In complex environments, data is noisy and meaning is provisional. Writing is a way to metabolize ambiguity, track decisions, and notice patterns. Stoics called it philosophy; operators call it Tuesday.

• Voluntary discomfort ≈ slack capacity. Training yourself to tolerate discomfort (cold showers, hard workouts, silence) is the human analogue of building slack into a business system: buffers in inventory, cash reserves, cross‑trained teams. Slack is not waste; it’s anti‑fragility lite (Taleb has the trademark on the spicy version).

• Amor fati ≈ embrace of emergence. Love your fate, says the Stoic; love what happens not because it’s pleasant, but because it is real and therefore actionable. In complexity, that reads as honoring emergence: treat surprises as data, not insults.

• Virtue as algorithm. The Stoics keep emphasizing character not to win moral points but because consistent principles (courage, justice, temperance, wisdom) become decision heuristics when the map is fuzzy. In a complex system, you won’t always know the optimal move; you can know the honorable one. Paradoxically, honor reduces decision fatigue.

Holiday’s other practical gift — besides being quotable in meeting slides — is reminding leaders to own the controllables: effort, standards, communication, cadence. When the ALR says no, you look for the adjacent yes. When aluminum spikes, you rework a product line. When a competitor undercuts you, you make the experience unmistakably yours. The obstacle is not necessarily the way (sometimes the obstacle is just a wall), but it often shows you the way — which parts of your system are rigid, brittle, bloated, or delusional.

Stoicism also asks for a specific kind of bravery: to accept that your control is partial and your influence is situational — and to act anyway. Complexity smiles and says: welcome to the forest.

The Gift of Boundaries

It’s easy to hate restraints until you realize they’re what gives the work its shape. The twelve‑bar blues is not a prison; it’s a playground. Haiku is not silence; it’s a scalpel. Film ratings, building codes, safety rails — limits everywhere, and somehow creativity still sneaks in, usually improved, always specific.

In ecology, the lively places are often ecotones — edges where forest meets meadow, river meets bank, tide meets shore. These boundaries concentrate diversity and interaction. In our world, the edges between agritourism and manufacturing, hospitality and agriculture, community delight and business discipline — those were the places where interesting things happened. We learned that a “no” often redirected attention to a neglected yes. If the tasting room couldn’t be bigger, the programming could be smarter. If the production capacity couldn’t jump a tier without wrecking the economics, the experience could deepen. If we couldn’t do everything, we could do the right things beautifully.

Boundaries also force language. When you can’t do “any event for any cause at any time,” you decide what you actually stand for. This is not austerity; it’s identity. And identity is what an ecosystem recognizes. Bees don’t visit every flower; they visit the ones that fit.

Economic Pragmatism Without Moral Collapse

Let’s speak plainly. There is a version of values talk that dissolves on contact with a balance sheet. There’s also a version of hard‑nosed finance that mistakes cynicism for wisdom. The work is to occupy the middle ground where math and meaning negotiate in good faith.

That looks like: unit economics you can explain without blushing; seasonal lineups that flex with supply; pricing that respects both the customer and the soil; wages that aren’t a punchline; vendor terms that don’t require telepathy to honour; and a policy that if the numbers work only when the people don’t, then the numbers don’t work.

Will you hit every mark every time? No. Complexity says the system moves; Stoicism says hold your posture.

The Bend‑Don’t‑Break Principle

A tree that refuses to bend in the wind will eventually snap. A business that refuses to adapt to constraints will eventually fail. The goal is not to stand rigid against every gust but to flex where you can and stand firm where it matters.

“Where it matters” deserves specificity. We found it helpful to codify guardrails:

• Non‑negotiables (the trunk): dignity of people, honesty in the numbers, care for land, no gimmicks that betray who we are even if they trend.

• Negotiables (the branches): product mix, distribution tactics, hours, event cadence, packaging format.

• Exploratories (new shoots): odd collaborations, pilot batches, temporary layouts, and seasonal experiments with a pre‑agreed kill switch.

Having thresholds and timers on experiments turns courage into process instead of theater. It also lets you admit an idea was a cow patty without turning the person who proposed it into one, which is excellent for culture and reduces the need for meetings where everyone says “great idea” while making the face that means “never again.”

The bend‑don’t‑break principle also argues for buffers: cash cushions, relationship equity, goodwill in the community, time in the calendar that isn’t already claimed by franticness. Buffers aren’t laziness; they are what systems theorists call requisite variety — enough flexibility to absorb a variety of shocks. The forest keeps seed banks. So should you.

Finally, resilience isn’t purity. You will compromise — the art is knowing which compromises are price paid for adaptability and which are termites in the foundation. One heuristic we like: if a compromise permanently reduces your capacity to do future good (erodes trust, hollows culture, damages place), it’s too expensive, even if the spreadsheet claps.

A Short Stoic Coda (with a Wink)

Marcus Aurelius would not have loved our tasting room playlist, but he would have recognized the work: attend to what’s yours, relinquish what isn’t, practice the virtues until they become muscle memory, and remember that the weather is not personal — even when it ruins your Saturday.

Ryan Holiday, bless him, would tell you to write it down, show up daily, and turn the obstacle into a teacher — then sell a handsome hardcover that reminds you again next quarter. We’re not above that reminder. We’re certainly not above the hardcover.

Constraints will keep arriving — from climate, from policy, from economics, from the glorious chaos of community life. Good. They thicken the trunk. They deepen the roots. They keep the canopy honest about where the light actually is.

Bend. Don’t break. And when the wind calms, plant again — a little wiser, a little funnier, and a lot less certain that your first draft was the final form of anything.

And here’s the other thing about complexity that makes the Stoics nod in their graves: there’s no such thing as “finally having it all figured out.” In a complex adaptive system, stability is a polite fiction — the kind we tell ourselves so we can get some sleep. The reality is more like one of those tide pools you crouched over as a kid: it looks serene until you notice the crab under the kelp plotting a coup against the starfish, while a wave from somewhere else entirely barrels in to upend the whole scene.

Ryan Holiday doesn’t really write about tide pools (at least, not yet), but he does write about something similar: the gap between what we can influence and what we can’t. He calls it “controlling the controllables” — which is just a rebranded version of Epictetus’s dichotomy of control — and in the context of complexity, it’s about choosing where to put your energy when the big picture is fundamentally ungovernable. You can’t predict how every customer, competitor, or climate event will behave. But you can influence the relationships, the feedback loops, and the quality of the decisions you make under uncertainty.

The trouble, of course, is that “controlling the controllables” is dangerously close to the kind of inspirational-poster fodder that makes complexity scientists break out in hives. Complexity doesn’t reward people who think they can tame it; it rewards those who can live in it without pretending it’s something else. This is where the Stoic acceptance of fate — amor fati — overlaps almost perfectly with the complexity mindset. Not resignation, but an active, curious embrace of the fact that you’re playing a game whose rules can change mid-play.

Take Boann, for example. In our work with social finance intermediaries, I’ve seen investments that look, on paper, like they’re following a neat, linear plan. Then you zoom out six months later and discover that the “plan” is actually a footpath that’s been rerouted through a swamp, up a cliff, and somehow into a community kitchen. It’s messy, but if the system is healthier — more equitable, more resilient, more creative — then that’s not a bug. That’s the point.

Marcus Aurelius had a way of putting this: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” This isn’t just Stoic self-help Instagram fodder — it’s a fair description of adaptive cycles in complex systems. Barriers aren’t interruptions to progress; they’re raw material for it. In forestry terms, the fallen tree becomes the nurse log. In business terms, the market failure becomes the catalyst for a new cooperative, or a whole new sector of the economy.

The trick, of course, is not getting too pleased with yourself when you spot this in your own work. Complexity has a way of humbling even the smug. (Especially the smug.) The moment you start thinking you’ve hacked the system, it throws you a pandemic, a tariff war, or — in my case — a life-altering accident just to see how you’ll adapt. And like any adaptive system, your first few responses will probably be terrible. That’s fine. The important part is you get a few more rounds to iterate.

Ryan Holiday, to his credit, doesn’t pretend he invented these ideas. He’s a translator — a marketer, really — for old wisdom. And that’s another overlap with complexity: sometimes your role isn’t to invent something new, but to help people notice the patterns that were there all along. Nature already knows how to build resilient systems; our job is to stop bulldozing them long enough to learn something.

The good news is, you don’t have to retreat to a monastery or a research lab to practice this. You can start in your own messy, hybrid ecosystem of a business. Here’s how I’ve seen the Stoic-complexity crossover play out in real life:

1. Negative visualization for market shocks.

Before a major expansion, imagine everything that could go wrong. Supply chain collapse? Key staff departure? A sudden spike in hop prices because some TikTok influencer convinced people hops cure anxiety? By rehearsing disaster in your mind, you’re not manifesting it; you’re building the mental agility to adapt when — not if — something blindsides you.

2. Voluntary discomfort as R&D.

In complexity science, we talk about “safe-to-fail experiments” — low-risk tests that teach you something about the system without taking it down if they flop. Stoics call this voluntary discomfort. Skip the comfortable path now and then so you know you can. For us, it looked like trying regenerative farming methods that, frankly, might have tanked yields. For you, it might mean pulling a profitable product off the shelf for a season to test something that could be better long-term.

3. Reframing as leverage.

When the system shifts, the meaning you assign to it matters as much as the shift itself. A bad harvest can be “the year we failed” or “the year we doubled down on innovation.” The facts are the same; the framing changes your options. This is vintage Stoicism, but also a key move in any adaptive system: the way you narrate change influences how others respond to it.

And because Stoicism insists on humility, you get to do all this without pretending you’re clairvoyant. That’s important. In complexity, the leaders worth following are the ones who admit — openly — that they can’t see around every corner. They build trust not by being right all the time, but by being transparent about what they don’t know and willing to change course when the evidence says they should.

Which brings me back to something Holiday says often but doesn’t always unpack: character is fate. In a system where you can’t script every outcome, who you are — your values, your habits, your tolerance for uncertainty — becomes the most reliable lever you have. Complexity will strip away your illusions, but it will also make visible the core you’re working with. If that core is brittle, the system will find out. If it’s resilient, the system will feed it.

The challenge is, Stoic or not, complexity will also make you tired. There’s no final level, no “win” screen. Just another cycle of growth, disturbance, renewal. Which is why, in true Stoic fashion, it’s worth finding joy in the process itself — and maybe even laughing at it. Because if you can’t find a way to laugh at the absurdity of trying to predict a non-linear system, you’ll end up screaming into the compost pile. And compost, as any farmer will tell you, already smells bad enough without your despair in it.

Section 7

Section 7 — Core Competency as an Evolving Organism

If you’ve ever sat through an MBA strategy module, you’ve probably heard the gospel of the core competency. Identify it once, write it in bold on a whiteboard, and then spend the rest of your career defending it like a castle wall in a medieval siege. This metaphor appeals to business school types because it promises stability, clarity, and a chance to use words like moat and battlements. But the problem with treating your core competency like a castle is that castles don’t move. And in a living, breathing, unpredictable environment — ecological or economic — anything that doesn’t move eventually becomes a museum. Or a ruin.

In the real world, especially in complex adaptive systems like businesses embedded in communities and ecosystems, competence is more like a migratory species than a fixed fortress. It needs to adapt to shifting conditions. It needs multiple survival strategies. It has to learn to operate in new territories without losing the essence of what it is. In other words, core competencies aren’t fixed assets; they’re dynamic capabilities. And if that sounds like I’ve just wrapped common sense in jargon, I have. You’re welcome.

The “Third Place” as a Competency, Not a Byproduct

When Persephone started, our core competency was supposed to be production brewing. We’d make beer. In cans, bottles, and kegs. We’d sell it wholesale, with a little tasting room on the side for locals to drop by and nod approvingly. Simple. Respectable. No one would have described it as an experiment in social architecture.

But then the farm happened. And the events happened. And the conversations around picnic tables happened. And slowly, without planning it, our real competency began to shift from making beer to making space.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “Third Place” to describe the social anchors outside of home (first place) and work (second place) where community happens: pubs, cafes, libraries, barbershops. They’re places where conversation flows, where relationships form, where you’re known by name. A third place isn’t just a venue; it’s a living system in which trust and familiarity circulate like oxygen.

We didn’t set out to be a third place, but once we became one, we realised this was the real glue holding our business together. Beer sales paid the bills, but the reason people came back was because they belonged — to the land, to the people, to the rhythm of the place. That’s a tricky thing to quantify, and it’s not something you can fake with reclaimed wood decor and a chalkboard beer list. It takes years of consistent interaction, a lot of listening, and occasionally the grace to let a conversation go long past closing time because the person across the table needed it.

And here’s the kicker: becoming a third place made us more resilient. When trends in beer shifted, or when a new brewery opened down the road, or when a pandemic made everyone panic about touching doorknobs, our core competency — being a community anchor — was still relevant. If we’d defined our competency purely in terms of product, we’d have been more exposed.

Intersections of Social and Ecological Competence

Nature has a way of teaching you that no organism survives on a single skill set. Even the cheetah — the fastest land animal — doesn’t survive just because it can run fast. It needs stealth, timing, and a functioning savanna ecosystem full of prey. In the same way, a business can’t just be good at one thing. It needs to be good enough at a whole set of interdependent things that, together, keep it alive.

For us, that’s been a blend of ecological literacy and social literacy. On the ecological side: knowing the land, the seasons, the soil, and how weather patterns will laugh at your best-laid plans. On the social side: knowing the rhythms of the people, the dynamics of the community, and how events, conversations, and relationships create value in ways spreadsheets can’t capture.

One of my favourite metaphors here is the ecotone — the transitional zone between two ecosystems, like the edge of a forest meeting a meadow. Ecotones are rich with biodiversity because they combine the strengths of both environments. In business, your “ecotones” are the intersections where your different competencies meet — the farm meets the taproom, the volunteers meet the professional brewers, the ecological awareness meets the commercial imperative. That’s where the unexpected magic happens.

And yes, there are times when that magic fails. Picture, for instance, a brewery deciding to run goat yoga classes because it looked cute on Instagram. Suddenly, you’re not in your natural ecotone anymore; you’re in a mismatched habitat, trying to make goats and craft beer play nice while wondering why your insurance premiums just tripled.

The Discipline of Letting Go

Complexity theory and Stoicism both warn you about clinging too tightly to things that no longer serve you. In complexity, we call it maladaptive persistence — the inability to stop investing in a failing strategy. In Stoicism, it’s just plain foolishness. In both, the cure is to prune.

Pruning is a normal part of a tree’s growth: branches that don’t get enough light are cut off so the tree can focus energy where it counts. Businesses should do the same with competencies that no longer fit. The hard part is that pruning can feel like losing a piece of your identity. It can also feel like failure — which is why so many companies cling to unprofitable product lines long past their expiry date.

We’ve had to prune too. Some ideas just didn’t fit with our ecosystem. I won’t name them all — mostly to protect the guilty — but let’s just say that in the Venn diagram of “Things We’re Good At” and “Things People Actually Want to Buy,” there have been a few experiments that sat way out in the unlit corner. Letting them go wasn’t a defeat; it was photosynthesis for the rest of the business.

Measuring Competence Beyond the P&L

Here’s where it gets awkward: you can’t really measure “core competency” the way you measure revenue or expenses. You can get proxies — customer retention, event attendance, volunteer hours, B Corp scores — but the things that make you competent in a complex, adaptive, human-ecological system are often qualitative.

Take B Corp, for example. We’ve certified and recertified three times, earning Best for the World honours along the way. These are lovely acknowledgements. They make for good press releases. But — and here’s the self-effacing bit — awards are mostly marketing. The real value is not in the seal or the ceremony; it’s in the day-to-day discipline of doing the work those assessments require. It’s in the relationships you build with suppliers, the small operational tweaks that reduce waste, the awkward but necessary conversations about equity and inclusion. Those things don’t always fit neatly on a plaque.

So yes, we measure what we can, but we also accept that the most important parts of our competency — trust, adaptability, mutual care — are felt before they’re counted.

Closing Reflection — Humility in Competence

In the end, a healthy tree doesn’t boast about its best branch. It invests in the whole canopy. It responds to storms, leans toward the light, and lets go of the limbs that no longer serve it.

Our own core competency, if we have one, might just be this: sticking around long enough to find out what it is. And maybe, if we’re lucky, having a pint in hand when we do.

Chapter 5 v2

Section 1 — A One-Time Detour into the Deeply Personal

I’m going to talk about something deeply personal in this chapter, and then I’m going to move away from it for the rest of the book.

Not because there isn’t more to say—there’s actually far too much to say—but because I want to keep the rest of this book focused on what it’s supposed to be about: doing business as a force for good.

The story I’m about to tell has a lot to do with that, but it’s not the thesis.

It’s more like a dense, knotted root that, if I don’t show you, will make the rest of the tree metaphor feel incomplete.

There will almost certainly be another book—one that gets into the full catalogue of what it’s like to go from a physically active, always-moving person to living with a permanent spinal cord injury. That book might include the thousand little realities of paralysis, like how to put socks on without throwing out your shoulder, or how to retrieve a dropped fork from under the table without turning it into a five-minute engineering project. Or how to tactfully explain to strangers that, no, you are not “so inspiring” just for leaving your house.

This is not that book.

This is the chapter where I acknowledge the accident, talk honestly about what it’s done to me, and—importantly—show how the community and system around me responded. Then we move on.

The short version is this: in 2023, I broke my back.

The medical term is “T3 complete spinal cord injury,” which means the connection between my brain and everything below my chest is permanently disconnected—no core muscles to hold me upright, no control over bowels or bladder, no control or feeling below the belt (so to speak), and my legs are now akin to Kermit the Frog.

One day, I was walking 35,000 steps before, during, and after a Tough Kegger—running events, hauling gear, fixing irrigation leaks, and riding our John Deere 4066 tractor to turn compost until I smelled like a particularly pungent farm-to-table perfume. The next, I was flat on my back in an ambulance, staring at fluorescent lights and wondering where my legs had gone. And I don’t mean in the abstract, philosophical way—I mean I could not tell where they physically were in space. If someone had said, “Oh, we left them behind in the ditch,” I would have believed them.

The early days were a blur: surgery, hospitals, beeping machines, endless prodding, and the slow dawning realization that the life I’d been living was not coming back. There was no “six-month recovery” plan, no physiotherapy timeline that ended with me walking again. This wasn’t an injury to heal from—it was a total rewiring of the operating system.

If you’ve been following the earlier chapters, you’ll know I have a fondness for ecological metaphors. Here’s the one that fits: the tree took a hit. Not a pruning. Not a lost branch. A main structural break.

When a tree loses a major section of its trunk, it doesn’t just grow back the same way. It adapts. It sends resources to new areas, strengthens other limbs, thickens its bark where the wound is. It will never look the same again, but it doesn’t stop being a tree. It just becomes… a different one.

That’s been me these past two years. And, in its own way, it’s been Persephone Brewing too.

Before I go further, I want to set a boundary:

This is not a “comeback” story.

It’s not “leadership through adversity.” Those are tidy, marketable narratives designed to make the reader feel good about someone else’s hard thing. And while I understand the temptation—they’d make for a snappy podcast intro—they’re not the truth.

The truth is, I’ve struggled. I’ve been less present as a leader. The business has felt my absence. I’ve felt the business’s absence in return. It hasn’t all been bad—some things have deepened, some things have clarified—but there’s no triumphant music swelling under this chapter.

If anything, the point of telling this story here is to show that when the system you’ve built gets stress-tested, you learn very quickly whether it’s as strong as you thought. And that is relevant to this book, because building a resilient, values-driven business isn’t about avoiding hard things—it’s about surviving them without losing your integrity or your people

In my case, the system held—mostly because of the roots. My family. My friends. My team. The extended community around Persephone. People showed up in ways I could never have predicted: fundraising, visiting, sending notes, covering for me at work, and generally pulling me back from some of the darkest moments of my life.

And that’s why this chapter belongs here. Not because my injury was some kind of “character-building” experience, but because it proved—painfully and clearly—that community is not just a warm, fuzzy concept. It’s structural. It’s load-bearing.

The details of those early months aren’t pretty, but they’re real. Learning how to sit upright without nearly blacking out. Learning how to navigate public spaces when half of them seem designed to make you feel like an inconvenience. Learning how to receive help without feeling like I’d lost all independence. And learning—slowly—that grief doesn’t follow a neat, linear timeline.

I grieved for the work I could no longer do on the farm—the early mornings in the fields, the mindless joy of tractor work, even the small rituals like walking through wet grass in my boots or touching the rough bark of a cedar tree while walking my dog. Those sensory things live deep in your nervous system; losing them is like losing a language you once spoke fluently.

And I grieved for the version of myself who had been able to step into any role at Persephone without thinking twice. That loss hit hard, because it wasn’t just about my own ego—it was about the contribution I felt I was no longer making.

But alongside the grief, there’s been growth. Our home is now finished, with a fully functioning elevator that gets me upstairs and out into the backyard, and a sunroom that serves as my office and my sanctuary. I get cold easily now—paralysis messes with body temperature regulation—so the sunroom is more than just a nice view; it’s a way to work without feeling like my body is conspiring against me.

I do still get over to the brewery from time to time—less than once a week, but enough to feel connected—and I can turn the compost or drag the rake up the driveway thanks to the lift now installed on the big tractor. It’s not about “overcoming” anything—it’s about participating again in the work that still feels like mine.

And through all of it, my family—Melissa, our boys Aldo and Mercer, and our daughter Freddie—have shown me more grace and patience than I probably deserved. They’ve adapted right alongside me, finding new ways for us to be together, to laugh, to keep our lives stitched together even as the fabric has changed.

So here’s the deal: for the rest of this chapter, we’ll stay here in the personal. We’ll talk about what it felt like, what changed in the business, and how the “living system” model of Persephone held under pressure. Then, when we’re done, we’ll zoom back out and carry on with the bigger story.

Because while this isn’t a book about my accident, you can’t understand the current shape of the tree without seeing where the break happened.

…. And, speaking of breaking thngs, here’s an excerpt of a letter I wrote to the Persephone team, shortly after the crash,

Brian's Notes

Zarah Gale

Jul 20, 2023

Here's an update directly from Brian, which he wrote for the Persephone Staff Newsletter but is willing to share with the Shareholder community.

Brian’s notes from (crashing on) the road:

I don’t have too many comments to make about Persephone’s operations these days as I’m a little bit removed, but I did want to highlight how much I appreciate the team is pulling together, working hard, etc. it seems from my vantage point you’re all doing amazingly well, and I can’t say how much that means to me especially in light of my inability to be helpful. I love the looks of the sales and I’ve gotten a couple of reviews from friends and investors lately that highlight the fact that the farm and brewery are doing great.

Here’s a recap of my accident for those wondering what the hell happened… (note, this is a little wordy and kind of graphic so maybe just skip to the next section if you’re not up for a little bit of darkness).

I was enjoying a lovely Sunday morning ride having dropped off my brother-in-law Shad at work and continued to ride up into an area called Forest Park in Portland. I’d rode in that area a number of times before so it wasn’t unfamiliar to me. However, the specific road I was coming down was new to me. I was coming down a slight decline doing something like 30 km/h and coming up to a right hand turn and then a quick left-hand turn. As I made the right hand turn my back wheel got very loose fishtailing (maybe sand or oil on the road) and I realized I had no braking traction whatsoever, I tried to get on the front brakes, but it became crystal clear that I wasn’t going to make that left-hand turn. So I went in hot into the ditch that was on the other side of the road, front wheel drop down into the ditch and I went over the handlebars, hitting my head, and then my back on the mountain wall far side of the ditch. The damage to my helmet seems to indicate that A it did its job and B I hit hard (lesson learned - wear a helmet!). According to my Garmin bike computer I was probably doing about 54 km an hour when I hit the wall. Whatever it was I was slipping on helped me accelerate significantly.

After hitting the wall, I fell on my back in the ditch. My bike fell on top of me. At some level I think I knew I was paralyzed almost right away. I couldn’t feel or move my body at all at first and I was in a lot of pain. After laying there for a couple of minutes, I realized I could move my hands and got one hand standing upright, waving, just above the ditch line. Which is what a passerby car saw and stopped to come help me.

A woman named Lauren jumped into the ditch and was trying to help right from the get-go. Mostly, I just needed her to hold my hand. Given the state of mind and pain I was in I consider her contribution to my survival up there with the surgeons. She absorbed a lot of raw emotion and immediate trauma I was going through, and just sat there and held my hand through it. I’ll never forget her.

Her partner Gregg called an ambulance which took about 15 minutes to get to us. They loaded me onto a spine board and into the ambulance and off to the hospital. Also, according to my Garmin, the ambulance got up to about 120 mph on the way to the hospital so I’m guessing they knew it was a pretty severe emergency. Went to Legacy Emanuel hospital in Portland which is a trauma one centre and I’m very grateful for the care that I received at the hospital. I have no idea what the bill is like but my guess is it’s well over $1 million in care I received during that first week. (lesson learned – thank goodness for our employee benefits package.)

All in all I had broken 11 ribs, six vertebrae, my sternum, and a bone in my left hand. My left lung was collapsed and the cavity was filling with blood so they had to insert a chest tube in order to get that stabilized. The emergency room did great, were very caring and considerate of both myself and my family. The next few days were rough with a ton of pain but the hospital was great and I’m grateful that I have two sister-in-laws that are both nurses too.

I had surgery on July 5 which lasted about eight hours, wherein they installed a bunch of hardware to fuse my spine from the T3 to T6 area. What that did was stabilize my spine and allow for both the healing of the broken bones and to help ensure that no further damage to my spinal cord would happen. What the surgery also did was confirm that there was indeed damage to my spinal cord, and that I likely won’t have the use of my legs or anything but below my chest for the rest of my life. It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely.

Since surgery I’ve been getting good care both in the US and here in Canada. It was pretty fun to fly in a medical airplane. Albeit the bumpy ride wasn’t lost on me.

Now, it’s kind of a waiting game and most of you know me well enough to know that I’m not one for patience. I’m mostly waiting for the broken bones to heal especially the ribs, sternum and hand which will allow me to get to work on therapy, learning to move my body and adapting to this new life. Needless to say myself, my family, and everyone around me is having to address the emotional and mental circumstances at our own pace and in their own way.

We are all having to grieve, because while I survived, there was still significant loss for each of us, and a nurse in Portland was, I think, insightful, in reminding me that grieving, the steps thereof, don’t happen in a particular order. I can see some folks stuck in anger, others are in sadness, others, like my brother in particular, who has moved fairly quickly to acceptance and looking forward. I don’t really know for sure where I’m at, personally, but I’m working on it.

Yesterday I had what I consider a small, but momentous, breakthrough in therapy. I was able to roll my body over by myself. Yeah, I was grunting like a pregnant gorilla and it hurt like hell but it will be those small steps that make a difference. I felt elated, remembering just how much I like to move my body and that physical work is good for my mental health.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the Coast. It’ll probably be, I’m not sure, maybe 6 to 8 weeks? And I’m really looking forward to getting back onto the farm, even if just to listen to the birds and watch the dogs.

My head is mostly clear for several hours a day. I am quite capable of the fun stuff like reading legal contracts, and reviewing pro forma spreadsheets. So I’m gonna stay at least partially active in our expansion campaign and forward-looking projects. At the same time I’ve got full confidence in the management group and the rest of our team and our community to continue to make Persephone the awesome thing that it is.

Update from Zarah: Late yesterday, July 19th, Brian and Melissa learned that he needs to go back into surgery today (July 20th) for more work on the titanium rods securing his spine. This is a setback, however as we all know, healing is non-linear. We'll update you again likely early next week.”

Section 2 — The Day Everything Changed

It was a Sunday morning, the kind of morning you feel in your legs before you even clip in. I was out for a ride with Shad — not just a friend, but my brother-in-law — doing what we’d done countless times before. We pedaled, talked, let the road do what roads do when you know them well. After a good warm-up, I dropped him off at work, feeling strong and not nearly finished for the day.

From there, I headed for Forest Park, a stretch I’d ridden several times before. The weather was perfect — that rare Goldilocks mix where you’re not sweating or shivering, just fully in sync with your own body. My legs felt great, the air was clean, and there was that familiar, smug sense of “I could ride forever” humming in my head.

And then, in a split second, it was gone.

Brakes locking. Tires getting loose. A blur of mountain rock. The kind of disorientation that doesn’t even feel like panic because your brain is still in this isn’t happening mode. But it was happening — and fast. The crash itself was blunt, ugly, and final.

A dozen broken ribs. A broken sternum. A broken arm. A collapsed lung. And, of course, the main event: a spinal cord injury. T3 complete.

I’ve ridden tens of thousands of kilometres in my life, and yet I lost control here, on a familiar trail, in perfect conditions. I’ve asked myself more than once — did I do it on purpose? That’s an unsettling question, but it lives somewhere in the mix of shock, self-reflection, and trauma. The answer is probably no. Probably.

What I remember next is raising my arm from where I’d landed in a ditch — more instinct than strategy — and seeing people stop. One woman, Lauren, got to me first. She stopped traffic, called an ambulance, and climbed down into the ditch to hold my hand because I asked her to. I’ve never really met her, but I’ll never forget her.

I remember asking her, in all seriousness, where my legs were. Not because I’d misplaced them in the crash, but because I couldn’t feel them and, somewhere deep down, I knew right away what that meant. I also remember saying, “What have I done?” while tears mixed with dirt on my face and shock hollowed out my awareness.

The next hours blurred into the kind of hospital time that doesn’t feel like time at all. Spine surgery in Portland to stabilize me enough to travel home. Painkillers layered on painkillers, turning everything into a surreal cocktail of dry mouth, shallow dreams, and mild hallucinations. My brothers were there — you’d think they’d use the opportunity to mess with me, but instead they showed up with the kind of quiet loyalty you don’t forget.

When I was finally cleared to leave, the trip back to Canada was a surreal, slow-motion movie: me strapped to a spine board in a Learjet with Shad beside me, the landscape rolling away below us in silence.

Vancouver General Hospital greeted me with the kind of medical efficiency you don’t truly appreciate until you’ve needed it. Within days, they discovered that the hardware installed in Portland wasn’t going to hold. One of the hooks had caused a break in my T6 vertebra, and the angle of it would eventually cause further damage. The solution? A second surgery, more than 12 hours long, to remove all the original gear and replace it with a far more extensive structure: rods, screws, the works. The Canadian medical system — nurses, doctors, care aides, and facilities — carried me, literally and figuratively, for nearly six months. I wish I’d written down every name.

And somewhere in that window, I wrote (or rather dictated) this update to our community. I’m preserving it here exactly as it was shared.

Brian's Notes from the Operating Table

Zarah Gale

Jul 26, 2023

July 24, 2023 - As we move through the motions of another week, I find myself taking long moments to reflect on the incredible network of support surrounding us. And so I wanted to open by saying thank you and I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to each one of you - our dedicated employees, steadfast allies, neighbours and valued shareholders, customers and friends.

Your messages filled with strength, positivity, and healing vibes have been a primary lighthouse in this journey toward recovery. The outpouring of love and support from our community has been overwhelming, inspiring, and deeply touching. It's this extraordinary spirit of unity and compassion that makes PBC not just a company, but a close-knit community. I can't help but feel incredibly lucky to be a part of such a community, and I promise to do my best to continue to reciprocate the tremendous value you all bring to my life, once I'm back on my feet (if I was prone to using emoticons, here's where I would put a ;-) but I'm not).

I think one could fairly title this next update as ... "Out with the Old, In with the New."

Below, you'll find two pictures which provide a snapshot of the medical journey over just the past five or six days. The first image depicts a set of rods and hooks, the initial hardware installed during surgery in Portland - this is the image that's a little darker gray, and it has a notable kink in the spine. Upon close inspection, you'll notice that the bottom hook, meant to connect to the T6 vertebra, resulted in a new break of that vertebrae, leading to an undesired curvature/kink of the spine. Over time, this break would have led to the deterioration of the vertebrae and spine between T3 and T6, eventually causing significant complications.

To mitigate that future deterioration, the medical team here in Vancouver decided to remove the initial set of equipment and replace it with a new, improved assembly. Instead of hooks, the updated setup uses screws for connection, providing enhanced stability - the screws are pretty obvious in the other picture and that's because they are really friggin long! The new gear, installed last Wednesday afternoon, extends from T2 to T10. With this change, I find myself a little bit more machine, and a little bit less man.

It's been a trying period, marked by frustration and brief flashes of anger, questioning why a second surgery was needed due to the inadequacies of the first. However, after discussing with the medical team, it was clear that the additional break at T6 could have occurred for numerous reasons and would have been challenging to predict by the original surgical team in Portland.

The cocktail of pain medicine I'm currently on is working very well so that makes me happy. And the Drs have begun removing some of the cords, hoses and wires so, I'm getting close to being comfortable. In general, I'm pleased with the progress and have restarted the ascent of this mountain of recovery once again. Yes, it's a little bit of a setback in terms of the extra time we are behind before we can get to work on therapy but that's OK because it means I also have a little bit of extra time for the ribs, sternum and broken bone in my hand to heal.

I'm not sure I have too much to offer in terms of insight into the state of my emotional and mental well-being. Since the additional surgery and because it was significantly more intrusive, I've had some pretty sad days and been largely uncomfortable and down. I'm grateful for the handful of people who have always been around my side, including Melissa, the kids, my brother and parents, my friends Jim, Mark, Kevin, Kristi and for the regular interactions with the team of managers and Persephone staff that always seem to have my back.As I was reading over this update this morning, Bob Dylan's song "Everything is Broken" was offering some good fun commiseration:

https://open.spotify.com/track/65Ywa7EspM0tSZreKwOmnL?si=95b21f306f0e4b6b

With a bit of luck, and roughly 17,567 grunts, I might be over at G.F.Strong by the time I offer some updates next week. Before closing this note, however, I wanted to circle back to where I began... reflecting on the value and potential that exists in a community such as ours.

I wanted to acknowledge the numerous times that folks, in reaching out and sending love, have said "please let me know how I can help."

I know with absolute certainty each of you ask that question with genuine sincerity. I know that each of you wants to help and I know that it's very hard to know how or what to do. With some of you I have been able to be specific… Mark, thanks for that donut the other morning it really hit the spot! But I haven't been able to be specific for many.

And, so I wanted to try and respond, albeit loosely at this point in time, offering some ideas, but also encouraging each of you to generate the ideas for how our community can continue to become stronger as a result of this situation. Admittedly, this is a gentle call to action and encouragement to not rest on our laurels of simply having asked. Let's not let inaction or uncertainty exacerbate our sadness and breed doubt or disappointment. THAT is what will really get me down.

Part of me wants to say, 'you are all brilliant and know what contribution looks and feels like. So, go do that. Go into our community and contribute something that you know has value. Maybe it's as simple as telling my story to your neighbour and encouraging them to go buy a glass of beer or maybe it's as simple as rereading the Aria project page www,PersephoneBrewing.com/aria and sitting down for an hour to write a chapter joining this collective effort. Maybe it's reaching out to our nonprofit partners on the Sunshine Coast to make a donation in the name of accessibility and inclusion.

Some of our community allies such as Gibsons Building Supply and Hansen Land & Sea have already stepped up and begun to put their money where their mouth's are. With them alongside us, both my family and our community will see improvements, including new, innovative ways for us to bring in people with accessibility challenges, and include them as leaders in our community.

Our PBC team has decided to forge ahead with another equity crowdfunding raise starting in August. Because so many of you have contributed to our expansion as both a business and community we're stronger than ever to keep going. Reach out to Zarah on our team to learn more about our 4Bs campaign that will have us expanding into even more communities and building more strength amongst them. Please help me grow this positive impact.

I have some more ideas about how we can leverage this crazy weird happening in my life to be a new source of positive community impact. And I'm going to share those ideas with you all in due time and I'm going to ask for your help to execute on some of them. But, in the meantime, bring your ideas to each other and me. Take a risk and make a suggestion, find someone that you care about, and bring them into our community of builders, activators, facilitators, donors, and investors. Step out of your comfort zone - I am certainly outside of mine.

With regenerative fields of love and appreciation, Brian.

The letter reads like it was written by someone trying to reassure everyone else more than himself — because that’s exactly what it was. It felt safer to write about rods, screws, and community resilience than about the reality of what I’d lost.

And the truth is, the list is long. Trail running with Melissa. Long rides together where we’d quietly match each other’s cadence. Wrestling with my kids until we were all laughing too hard to keep going. Collecting eggs from the chickens in the early morning, when the farm was still waking up. Playing basketball with friends. Chopping wood. The dozens of things my body could do without asking my brain’s permission — all of them gone in a single moment.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that it’s not the thing itself that determines your suffering, but how you respond to it. I’ve carried that line with me from the previous chapter into this one like a talisman, though on certain days it feels more like a dare. It’s one thing to admire Stoic philosophy when your biggest problem is a flat tire; it’s another to try to live it when your spinal cord is severed.

From the lens of complex adaptive systems theory, this was pure creative destruction. In the panarchy cycle, there’s a release phase — a rapid, often violent collapse that dismantles the old structure and frees up resources for what might come next. Well, my old body and my old life went through their release phase on that trail in Forest Park. The “resources” freed up are harder to identify — maybe patience, maybe perspective, maybe a stubborn refusal to let this define every part of me.

I’m still figuring out what renewal looks like. And I’ll be honest — there are days when it feels like all I’ve got is the destruction part of the cycle, without the creative spark to balance it. But I know the theory: ecosystems need disturbance to evolve. That’s where I am now — somewhere between loss and adaptation, trying to see what’s possible in the wake of something irreversible.

In the meantime, I keep coming back to the people who have stepped in — and my discomfort in accepting that help. There’s something humbling, almost destabilizing, about having the roles reversed and being on the receiving end of care. But it’s also a reminder that resilience, as I’ve said before, is rarely a solo project.

I didn’t choose this release phase, but I do get to choose what grows in the space it’s left behind. That choice isn’t always obvious, and it’s not always easy, but it’s still mine to make. And maybe — in some messy, imperfect, non-Stoic way — that’s where the creative part begins.

Section 3: The First Steps Toward No Steps at All (and Other Rehab Truths)

Opening Frame — Life Reconfigured

Before the accident, my days were a perpetual motion machine: trail runs with Melissa, weekend rides with Shad, wrestling with my kids in the yard, collecting eggs from the chickens before the coffee was even poured, walking the fields with wet boots, raking compost, and riding my bike to the brewery. On a good day, I could knock out 15,000 steps on the farm, 50–100 km on the bike, and still have enough energy left to chase the dog.

Now? Getting out of bed is an Olympic event, the bathroom routine could qualify for a Netflix docuseries, and the “morning commute” involves carefully transferring into a chair, checking tire pressure, and navigating door thresholds like they’re Alpine passes. I’m slower, yes — but also forced into a strange, enforced efficiency. Every movement counts, so waste is obvious. Every trip across the room has a mission.

The psychological dissonance is constant. My mental map of myself hasn’t fully caught up with reality. My brain still occasionally dispatches the old instructions: stand up, grab the rake, head to the field. My body returns the error message: Command not executable. It’s not just about mobility; it’s about having to recalibrate every assumption about who I am and how I operate.

Physical Adaptation

Rehab at G.F. Strong wasn’t about “getting better” in the Hollywood sense — no miracle scenes where I stand up and walk. It was about learning new tools and technologies: mastering wheelchair skills, experimenting with adaptive equipment, figuring out the right height for every counter in my life. It was endless trial and error, punctuated by the occasional triumph, like finally making a transfer without smashing a shin or an elbow.

At home, we installed a lift on the tractor so I could visit the compost piles or drag the rake — not the same as before, but enough to feel that connection to my past routines. When I can, I wheel out to turn compost, the smell and steam carrying me back to the sweaty, physical satisfaction of farm work. It’s a reminder that the work still happens, even if my part in it has changed.

Adaptation is inspiring in theory; in practice, it’s mostly a grind. It’s learning how to get your wheelchair into the van without scraping the paint, how to open the fridge door without it swinging back and smacking you in the arm, how to manage a public washroom without reenacting a slapstick routine. There’s no TED Talk glamour to it, just stubborn persistence.

Emotional and Identity Work

The temptation after a life-changing injury is to let it define you. I wrestled hard with that. The accident is a big part of my story now, but it’s not the whole thing. I’m still a father, a husband, a leader, a farmer — those roles didn’t disappear, they just look different. I still tuck my kids in at night, even if I can’t wrestle them to the couch like before. I still run a brewery and a farm, even if I’m not the one behind the wheelbarrow.

I’m grateful to be alive. I’m also furious about the limitations. Those two truths can exist together without cancelling each other out. Marcus Aurelius would say it’s not the thing but how you respond to the thing — and I try to live that. But let’s be clear: Stoicism is easier in theory than in the messy day-to-day of paralysis.

Complex adaptive systems theory — the stuff I used to talk about in business contexts — has its personal parallel here. Panarchy describes a phase called creative destruction — the necessary tearing down before regeneration can happen. That’s where I’m living. The “old me” had to collapse to make space for whatever comes next.

Community and Leadership

While I was adapting, the brewery, Boann, and the family farm were adapting too. Leadership became a more remote role — more delegation, more trust, more patience with how others approached problems. I stopped being the first one to jump in and fix something and started focusing on enabling others to do it. Turns out, they were more than capable.

Navigating visible disability in leadership brings its own complexity. Public perception doesn’t always match reality. Some people assume I’ve “slowed down” or can’t handle the demands. Others overcorrect with awkward hero worship. The truth is in between: I’m still fully capable of thinking, leading, and deciding — I just roll into meetings now instead of walking.

Humour and Perspective

Humour became both a coping mechanism and a leadership tool. There’s nothing like a good laugh to take the temperature down in a tense meeting — or to defuse a moment when my wheelchair gets stuck on a carpet seam mid-sentence.

There have been mishaps: ramps that looked perfectly fine until I was halfway up and gravity started negotiating my return, overconfident wheelies that ended in slow-motion tip-overs, and my ongoing education in “disabled parking” politics (pro tip: don’t assume the person you’re about to glare at is able-bodied).

Even the lift on the tractor has its moments — the first time I used it, I misjudged the alignment and nearly deposited myself into the compost pile. That would have been poetic, but not in a good way.

The August 2 Letter

This was the context in which I wrote the following update to the Persephone community — a mix of rehab milestones, early project ideas, and reflections on how the outdoors and movement were already becoming central to my recovery.

Brian’s Update — Aug 2

Zarah Gale, Aug 15, 2023

I’m excited this morning because I’ll be transferring from VGH over to G.F. Strong by mid-day. This is an indication of great progress from a medical standpoint. My body is now stable enough to really begin some rehabilitation. You can imagine how much this comes as great news and why I’m so excited.

Technically, I’m still on some precautions, particularly to do with my broken sternum and then I can’t really do any rehab that stresses muscles in that area and my broken bone in my hand still has some healing to do before I can do weight-bearing exercises it might not. But G.F. Strong will be able to start learning about things like rolling my body over and getting out of bed and weird things like catheterization. OK so maybe exciting isn’t quite the right word but it’s progress and that’s good stuff.

I wanted to share some ideas that have begun percolating about where my growth and redevelopment might convert into positive community impact. In particular, I’ve been thinking about and working on an idea to help people with accessibility challenges, such as paralysis like I have, to achieve good mental health, and therefore physical healing and health through being able to access the outdoors.

As I’ve been sitting in a hospital room now for over a month, I’m realizing how important being outside and in particular being active outside is for my mental health. As I think you know, I was a particularly active person before the accident, including typically accumulating 10 to 15,000 steps on the farm every day and cycling something like 50 to 100 km every week, not to mention dog walks, playing with the kids in the yard and so on. Each time I’m able to get up out of bed here and into a wheelchair I immediately notice my state of mind changing and my excitement at getting to move. Just getting to move!

As my family rolls me out onto the hospital stoop and the sun hits my skin and the breeze blows past, I am reminded how profound movement in the outside is. I suspect it’s an easy one for the able-bodied to take for granted, I know I certainly did. What’s more, I noticed that my physical health and recovery seem to be expedited by my experiences of just getting up out of bed, moving and getting a little bit of exposure to the outside. I haven’t done the heavy research yet, but my suspicion is there’s a direct link between movement, being outside, activity, mental health and physical health — that has certainly been substantiated by the nurses and doctors here at the VGH anecdotally.

So, this got me thinking about a next, fairly simple, community impact project. I’m already working on designing an accessible van to get me around. As most of you know, my home is not too far away from the farm but I can’t very well walk there! So I’ve been already thinking about what kind of vehicle I’m gonna need.

As I think you also know, Persephone is expanding and buying a place up in Powell River that includes a bowling alley, pub and other multi-use components of a real estate parcel.

I’ve also been thinking about what kind of wheelchairs I’m going to need to get me around the farm, home to and through trails, etc. I believe that through the process at G.F. Strong, they’ll introduce different types of wheelchairs and options and hopefully, we can find a mix that helps me stay off-road as well as on-road. And so the van will need to be customized to include not just getting me and my wheelchair in and out but also loading an off-road wheelchair perhaps including some camperized type of modifications, such as a bed, counters for overnight stays, sink, toilet, tools, cabinetry for medical equipment, maybe a built beer tap, etc.

You’ve no doubt seen the camperization version of these high-roof vans like Ford and Mercedes. I mean really it’s not that dissimilar from the custom builds for the Telus mobile health vans. I started thinking that the customized van that will help me get around my community might be something that lots of people would benefit from, particularly if they have mobility challenges too. And, if I’m going to need to raise $150K to build my van, maybe we should just raise $1 million to build eight vans and make them accessible to our community.

I picture people being able to pick them up at Persephone, take them for an overnight or into the backcountry of the Sunshine Coast or up to Powell River, and then drop them off on their way back to their homes in the city, for example. And if we can find the right partners on the builds and the vans, maybe we can make even more or customize them to be even more special of an experience, for people typically not able to access the outdoors, and really embrace that as part of their mental health and physical health journey.

Zarah and a friend Gerry Z., both PBC shareholders, have quickly become a couple of my pillars of strength for recovery and this project. They, among a number of allies, are forming a “fundraising council,” to help me imagine a number of forthcoming fundraising rounds and more broadly perhaps, a charity/foundation/fundraiser that connects my circumstances to an initiative and mandate that serves people with accessibility challenges, and our community writ large.

I don’t want to say too much more because who knows what this will all turn into but stay tuned to see if updates could include you contributing in some way.

On the mushier side of life… A friend wrote me a wonderfully written note this morning about her concern and care for me. It got me into a bit of a reflective frame of mind and so I thought I’d share a few thoughts excerpted from that response, “… To be perfectly honest I’m not sure exactly how to respond because I think I’m still very much in the throes of processing, grieving, and change. This shit is crazy. I’m a little over a month since I lost the use of my legs and it still catches me by surprise in the morning. 70% of the time I feel pretty good and positive and optimistic per the usual Brian that everyone knows. 30% of the time I’m completely confounded by this new reality that seems unbelievable.

I miss my dog, I miss walking in trails, I miss hearing birds on my farm, I miss riding my bike. Most of that list, I know I have to let go of and to replace it with new happy places and experiences. But it ain’t easy.

So many people have stepped up and said that they love me and that they want to know how to help. The way that my community has responded is well beyond what I would’ve expected. That feels good of course and I don’t want to take anything away from that and in time, I’ll learn how to respond, ask for help, and put their goodwill to work for both my well-being, and that of our community. Part of me wants to strike, while the iron is hot, and make the most of this goodwill and support before it fizzles and disappears but I’m not sure I know how to do that while also trying to remain focused on my own recovery and re-development.

I still love early mornings. I like waking up with the daylight and the first birds of the day. I love seeing my family and friends come through the curtain of my hospital room. I love the taste of chocolate. I love to brainstorm ideas with people and I love more than ever having conversations about the complex relationships between our bodies our minds and our emotions… Especially with my brothers. Not to take away from any of the great conversations I’ve had with my female friends and family, but it’s been sort of amazing to see how the men closest to me have responded with maturity and love and a willingness to be vulnerable with me. It has me crying tears of joy in seeing men be weak, and as a result, growing stronger with me.

Thank you, everyone, until next time. Brian

p.s. I miss the great view I have from my VGH window, including a front-row seat to the fireworks.

Bridge to Next Section

Looking back, those early rehab months weren’t just about me learning how to live in a wheelchair. They were about everyone around me — my family, my team, my community — adjusting to a new version of reality. Resilience here wasn’t an individual trait; it was an ecosystem property. The brewery could only adapt because the people within it could. The farm could keep running because leadership became a shared function.

That’s where the next section turns: to the deeper cultural nutrients — love, relationships, trust — that allow both people and organizations to survive creative destruction and grow into something new.

Section 4 — Basement to Sunroom

Before we move from hospital rooms to home renovations and the eventual sunny perch I now call my office, there’s one particular dispatch that deserves to be preserved in its entirety.

I wrote it from GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre, partly to keep friends and supporters in the loop, partly to keep myself sane, and partly because if you don’t laugh about bowel programs and catheters, you’ll cry. It’s the kind of update that contains absolutely nothing “inspirational” in the Instagram sense, but a lot of truth about the strange, unglamorous, and occasionally hilarious mechanics of learning to live with paralysis.

Here it is, unedited.

Brian’s Update - September 8, 2023

Zarah Gale

Sep 11, 2023

Everyone poops, even the paralyzed

Not everything is profound, sometimes the mundane is the most interesting. In many ways this past week has been largely unremarkable. However, fair warning this week’s update, as modest as it is in excitement it more than makes up for in gross detail. Some of you may have a hard time reading all the way through this one. And yet, in many ways this whole update may be boring as shit…. Speaking of bowels (I warned that we’d get to this topic eventually), btw, please put off reading this until after your breakfast.

Bowels are hard (yes, there may be a lot of puns in this section) to deal with when you’re paralyzed. Perhaps it’s obvious but I no longer have control of the muscle groups to make things happen down there. Typically, muscular contractions (peristaltic waves) in the walls of the colon move fecal material through the digestive tract to the rectum. And, the rectum is a distensible muscular tube that acts as a temporary reservoir for the waste material. As the rectal walls expand, stretch receptors from the nervous system, located in the rectal walls, stimulate the desire to defecate. The urge passes within one to two minutes if not relieved, and the material in the rectum is then often returned to the colon where more water is absorbed. If defecation is continuously delayed, constipation and hardened feces result. Lacking both the ability to sense and control things, leaves my brain mostly useless when it comes to pooping, normally. Thus, we need to figure out how to do it differently, or put another way, program our system to work with different stimuli and methods of evacuation. I think I’ve gone deep enough (uggh) into this topic without needing to describe how laxatives, suppositories, digital disimpaction and, of course, a lot of lube and cleaning are needed. Suffice it to say, it can be done and my system is slowly but surely being reprogrammed. And, I’m very glad for it. Bowel impaction (akin to constipation) is one of the major triggers for AD, which is something I wish to avoid at all costs. So, getting the bowel program tuned in is super important, boring as shit, but down right life saving, hence me dragging you through this paragraph.

And, speaking of being dragged along unwillingly, I have a new roommate at GF Strong. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am extremely grateful for being here with exceptional care, quality facility and rely superb doctors and nurses that are trained in spinal cord injury care specifically. If i’m not mistaken, GF Strong has the reputation as one of the top one or two best spinal cord facilities in North America. It’s awesome here, really. And, having a roommate has its pros and cons. Pros include having someone to relate to and share the ups and downs when family and friends aren’t around. Cons mostly revolve around a lack of privacy and being subjected to each others stuff, like it or not. For a mental picture, we literally share a room with just a curtain between our beds. Shared bathroom and sink too. My first roommate was here long before me and got the window to my jealous chagrin, whereas i now have the window - yeah! I know a lot of detail about these guys including their life story, their accident that got them here, how their rehab is going etc. etc. etc. My current guy, let’s call him Tom, is a 75 year old retired dentist that crashed an ultra light and is now paralyzed from the neck down. Earlier this morning, I heard Tom’s birthdate and it explains a lot. He was born in 1948, which explains why he is constantly yelling and swearing at Siri or Alexa or any other AI personality he can think of. That SNL skit is my life everyday. I’m not kidding. He barked “Wake Up”… “WAKE up”… “wake UP” no less than 7 times this morning. The phone never woke up and I’m over here in tears trying not to laugh out loud. I can currently hear him in the bathroom asking Siri something about shit… no joke. I feel very lucky and deeply troubled by hearing all of this.

Speaking of raising ones voice …. I barked at one of my nurses the other night and I still feel guilty about it. I was struggling with a catheter and she was well meaning but just too repetitive and off the mark of being helpful that I snapped. I owe her an apology and yet let me share the experience for context. Self catheterization is a very weird experience, at least at first, then it becomes as routine as peeing in the forest. Here’s the basic instructions (heads up this gets a little graphic). Male readers, I dare you to try to read through these instructions without cringing at least once:

How to Catheterize Yourself (Man):

1. Gather all the items you will need: A clean catheter, lubricating jelly, container to collect urine, bowl of warm water, soap, washcloth, and hand towel, Waterproof pad or bath towel

2. Wash your hands.

3. Get into position for inserting your catheter: Lie or sit down with your knees bent. Put a towel or waterproof pad under your penis. You may also stand in front of the toilet. Make sure the other end of the catheter is pointed into a container or down toward the toilet.

4. Clean yourself: Wash your penis with soap, warm water, and a washcloth. If you are not circumcised, pull back the foreskin. Wash the head and the urinary meatus (the opening where urine comes out). Rinse and dry your penis. Put the container close to you to collect the urine.

5. Put water-based lubricating jelly on the first 7 to 10 inches of the catheter: This will help decrease discomfort during the procedure.

6. Insert the catheter: With one hand, hold your penis straight out from your body. With your other hand, slowly put the catheter into the urinary meatus (not my term).

7. Gently push the catheter about 7 to 10 inches into your penis until urine begins to come out. Once urine starts to flow, push the catheter up 1 inch more and hold it in place until the urine stops.

8. Remove the catheter when you are finished: When urine no longer comes out gently and slowly pull the catheter out.

9. Clean the catheter or throw it away.

I don’t know how others feel, but having now done it several dozen times I still think … holy cow… 7-10 inches! Yep, that’s roughly how far the bladder is. And, just before getting into the bladder you bump up against a sphincter. No one warned me about the fact that the sphincter may or may not be cooperative. It may or may not want you to insert a plastic tube into its precious bladder. It might, such as when you have a UTI and it’s feeling especially protective, absolutely not want you to insert the catheter. Likewise, when you are having spasms (I have much to share about the irony of spasms for the paralyzed in a future update) it may be vehemently against insertion. On Tuesday night, while trying to empty my bladder around midnight I spent over an hour bumping up against that pesky, spastic and downright uncooperative sphincter. I was starting to feel extremely anxious because a full bladder can trigger AD and mine, per the ultrasound scan, was holding more than a litre! Multiple nurses were gathering all brainstorming ideas and few were experienced enough to have seen this problem before. This is where I barked at the well-meaning nurse with, what I felt was, a terrible idea. Finally, one nurse, with many years of experience, came to the rescue. It’s all about position - the solution was simply for me to move to a new position so that my spasm would release and the bladder would open up. I found that new position and, in the end, all was alright. In fact, more than that… it has happened a couple more times and using that same de-spasming move I’ve overcome the problem with ease. Not to put too fine a point on it but … what a relief!

Alright, seems I’ve subjected you to enough gore this week. I also rolled over and sat up on my own and for the first time since the accident slept on my side! I put my own shoes on once and tried a handcycle (see pic) for the first time! We’ve also made good strides on the “nature for health” initiative. I’ll save a bunch of those less graphic and more inspired updates for coming weeks.

Let me close by saying thanks again. The generosity of love and support (not to mention much needed dollars) continue to flow with abundance and I remain moved by you all.

With love,

Brian

The thing about that letter is that it’s almost impossible to “summarize” without losing its essence. It’s a time capsule: a mash-up of hospital absurdity, raw anatomy lesson, gallows humour, and the stubborn optimism that insists on seeing life as funny even when it isn’t.

Eventually, the updates started coming from a different setting — not a shared rehab room with a curtain for privacy, but the basement of our own house.

The basement was… functional. A kind of subterranean command centre wedged between the furnace and the laundry, with low light and the muffled soundtrack of family life overhead. It was close to Aldo and Mercer, who came down often, and Freddie, who bounced between floors like a social diplomat. It was also cramped, dark, and cold in winter — a place you could live, but not thrive.

Renovations were underway upstairs, including the installation of the elevator that would eventually become my express route to sunlight. There was dust, noise, the occasional argument over timelines. But when the lift was finally ready, the trip up to the main floor felt like a jailbreak — and the first arrival into the new sunroom felt like a coronation.

The sunroom was everything the basement wasn’t: bright, warm, open to the yard outside. It’s where I can look out at the oasis that Melissa has created.

If the basement was about survival, the sunroom is about living again. And as I settled into that light-filled space, it was clear that resilience isn’t just about the body adapting — it’s about the spaces and people around you adapting, too.

Section 5 — Melissa, the Kids, and the Quiet Reinforcements

If resilience has a proving ground, it’s not in the moments people post about — no tidy before-and-after arc, no inspirational soundtrack. It’s in the quiet, repetitive, unremarkable things that accumulate until they’ve become the scaffolding holding you up. In our house, that scaffolding is built by Melissa and the kids.

Melissa hasn’t taken on some epic, Hollywood-worthy transformation. She hasn’t rebranded herself as a caregiver-warrior or discovered a divine calling in my injury. She’s done something harder: she’s just dealt with what came. No drama, no monologues — just the pragmatic, day-in, day-out adjustments that pure stoicism demands. She’s grown and adapted, yes, but without announcing it or making it about her. I’m deeply grateful for that kind of steadiness because it doesn’t feed on recognition, and because it keeps our lives rooted in reality rather than narrative.

The kids — Aldo, Mercer, and Freddie — each play their part in this adaptation. Freddie is the quiet one, but her presence is constant. She notices details most people would miss — making sure something I’ll need is within reach or stepping in to help before I’ve even thought to ask. It’s not loud, but it’s deliberate.

The boys have their own unspoken rituals. In those first months after I came home, they started a habit without ever talking about it: whenever they passed my bed, they’d pull the blanket over my feet. No questions, no “is Dad cold?” — just an unconscious act of comfort. It still happens. Every time it does, it lands like a small anchor against the drift of everything else that’s changed.

Hugging had to be reengineered. The easy, upright, shoulder-to-shoulder embrace is gone. Now, when Melissa or the kids hug me, they lean in almost perpendicular so our chests meet. At first, it felt awkward, almost staged. But over time, it became ours. The embrace lasts longer. It’s less of a polite punctuation mark and more of a pause — an actual connection. My dad’s old, crude line that wheelchair hugs “look like a dog fucking a football” still holds, but we’ve found a way to make them mean something anyway.

There are new sounds in our house, too. The elevator, for example — a slow, mechanical hum that marks my movement between floors. It’s become a cue for our corgi, who assumes the elevator means I’m coming up with treats. She’s usually wrong, but she still comes running. It’s become part of the rhythm, one of the small adaptations that weave themselves into daily life until you can’t remember what it was like before.

The way our family has adapted reminds me of how old growth forests handle change. These forests have stood for centuries, weathering storms, fires, pest outbreaks, and still they persist — not by resisting change, but by absorbing it. They shift. They let new growth emerge in the wake of loss. The mycelial networks reroute. Shade-tolerant plants step into gaps where giants have fallen. Lakes do it too — adjusting nutrient cycles, redistributing energy when the balance shifts. A healthy system doesn’t just survive change; it incorporates it into its structure.

That’s what’s happened here. None of us sat down to design a “family response plan” for life after my injury. We didn’t hold a summit. The adaptations grew on their own: Freddie anticipating needs before they’re spoken, the boys covering my feet as they pass, Melissa’s unshakable pragmatism, the corgi’s misguided optimism. Like a forest, our family has bent around the disturbance and kept growing — not back to how it was before, but into something new that works.

It doesn’t look like resilience from the outside. It looks like ordinary life: a blanket pulled over feet, an awkward hug, a hum of machinery in the background. But that’s the point — resilience in any system, human or ecological, doesn’t announce itself. It’s built in layers, in habits, in countless small adjustments that keep everything alive.

….. before we leave families… here is an update letter that I wrote about 5 months after I’d moved back home and many things had started really falling into place. But, in this letter I reflect on how important family is during our darkest moments… especially if they bring the funny and the weird.

Brian's Update - April 30, 2024

Zarah Gale

Apr 30, 2024

Musings on Aloneness, Togetherness and the Brothers that are There

A dear sister (in law) recently, generously, said to me that she really enjoyed reading my writing and that she hoped I’d do more of it. Why would that be hard for me to hear, believe and respond to with any modicum of grace? Why do I have a difficult time accepting compliments? Why do I question whether I am worthy of praise? Perhaps it is because, at some level, I’ve often felt alone in spite of being together with others. But I digress…. Let me back up.

The last couple of weeks have been a veritable adventure in Spring Break travel antics, family and fun. At a cursory level, one might not think anything interesting happened but scratch beneath the surface and one discovers the nuance, the complexity, the richness that is travel, family and fun. There were no celebrity sightings, no major catastrophes, no injuries or moments of despair, deluge or decapitation. But, there were many simple, yet profound moments. Subtly meaningful moments. Moments that you walk (or roll) away from feeling gently confused but in a safe and secure and even sentimental way. Family is funny that way.

We decided to take the kids to New Mexico, Melis’ homeland, a pilgrimage we’d not made in several years. I love Melissa’s family with all my heart. No in-law jokes, no sarcasm, no jest…. Her people are my people and I feel as connected to them as I do my own. Melis’ brother Shad and my brother Jim (although since we were kids I call him Dean - a story for another time) were two of the most critically important people during the depths of my accident and weeks following. Two quick stories about these dudes…

After my first spinal surgery, down in the hospital in Portland, I was pretty jacked up on a cocktail of pain and painkillers. I mean 11 broken ribs and a broken sternum on top of a broken back will put one in quite a state of mind. Add in the profoundly confusing nature of instantly having two-thirds of your body suddenly stop working. When I was awake I felt well cared for and I wasn’t afraid, but I did have a few moments of confusion. One late evening in particular, my crew had all gone home and there weren’t any nurses around for what seemed like several hours. I fell asleep watching the Marvel Black Widow movie and things got weird….

Shortly after nodding off I was jolted awake by a sharp pain in my left wrist. As I looked down, I realized it wasn’t so much an injury as an incarceration. Then I noticed that both my wrists were restrained and there was a strap across my lower legs and chest too. I don’t remember being strapped down and, at first, I remained calm thinking that there is some good reasons including so that I don’t hurt my self further…. But then I come to my senses as alarms bells start going off in my head. Why am I strapped down? Where am I? Nothing seems familiar and I start to question everything that has happened to me in the past few days…

I am somewhere between a dream-state and a state of drug-induced-paranoia… it’s not a fun place to be. Verging on freaking out, I think to call for help - somehow my arm is free enough to reach my phone. Some things make sense and some don’t, which reinforces my belief that I’m being held captive and possibly being brainwashed or worse converted to a deadly assassin. Next thing I know I’m on the phone with my brother.

Quick side bar about my brother Jim. We are twins and we couldn’t be more unalike. Well that’s not completely true, our foundations were forged from the same family values and so at our base we are the same. Everything above the foundation though, is very different. We were best friends until our teens when we diverged out of disdain for one another. We came back to live together during our college years and then really haven’t been close close until we started having kids or maybe it’s because we both own/run businesses or maybe its because we see our Dad in each other. I’m realizing as I try to encapsulate my twin brother of nearly fifty years how impossible that task is going to be … let me get back to that fateful night in Portland, when I was nearly inducted into a life of indentured servitude slaying the sociopathic …. Alright, alright, as my brother would say, “that’s enough.”

So, I’m on the phone with my brother, I’m sweating and panicking and reeling and talking a mile a minute when he says, what might be the most important thing I’ve ever heard in my life, “do you want to talk or do you want to listen for a while?” I know that voice. I trust that voice. I want to listen for a while. I couldn’t tell you what he talked about but I know that his voice saved my life that night. All joking aside, anyone who has experienced paranoia, much less paranoia married with paralysis, will know how scary it is. I needed to call a lifeline and I called my brother. Thank goodness he answered.

Not more than a few days later, I was healing up and for all I (and the doctors) knew my bones were holding together. My vitals were all holding, I got the tubes removed from my lung and my veins and my nose and was all around pretty stable so, they started talking about getting me home to Canada. Now, I’m basically immobile, still pretty drugged up and still in a fair bit of pain with broken bones just starting to heal. However, docs all agreed that I could travel so arrangements for a flight home started to fall into place. And, maybe 5 minutes later an airplane was on its way to get me. It didn’t make sense for Melis to fly with me as we needed to get both Freddie and our truck home too. So, who jumps in? My brother (in law) Shadrach does. He’s already called to let his employer know that he’d not be coming in, had a backpack and was ready to roll 6 minutes later.

Quick sidebar about my brother Shad. We are not particularly alike, at least not based on outward facing appearances. He’s half Japanese, six foot six inches and lanky as all get up. He’s a true sweetheart, buckets of fun and an allrounder all the way around. He is one of the most natural Fathers I’ve ever met - one of those people that little kids gravitate toward, lean on and love. He and I have always had bikes and cycling as a shared passion/love/obsession. And, he and I were riding together half an hour before my accident. I hope that he didn’t/doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility as I was quite happy to drop him off at work before continuing my Sunday morning ride to the hills of Forest Park. He and I have had many cycling adventures ranging from serene and silent to stupid and super-dangerous. And, in a strange way, I think he and I were destined to take that airplane ride together.

The airplane is actually classified as a jet, a Learjet nonetheless. It is one of those super sleek, skinny jets that rock stars and millionaire business moguls use to jet set around the globe. Shad slithers his tall frame into a seat at the back of the plane which also appears to have enough medical gear for a year. I’m strapped, for real this time, to a spine board and every little twist and turn needed to get me through the tiny door, hurts like hell. Two EMT nurses are travelling with us in the back and come to think of it… I have no idea who is flying the plane. No matter, we’re up and down and in an ambulance from YVR to VGH before I know it. I remember saying yes to another painkiller during the flight but that’s about it. Next thing I remember is Shad sitting next to me in the VGH emergency ward - both of us exhausted and nodding off, uncomfortable but calm. Something about having my brother(s) with me makes me feel safe.

Ok, this is getting long, but let me squeeze one more story in… I’m in VGH, up on the spine ward, I guess it was day 3 or 4 being back in Vancouver. Shad is still with me (he sleeps almost completely upright for at least 3 or 4 days) and in walks one of my many doctors to talk about my broken hand. The Dr had with him an intern that right away I could tell he might be trying to impress. He examines my hand briefly before determining that we need to break the bone again before it healed crooked. I agree reluctantly and ask when that procedure would take place to which the Dr. responds… “right now.” He spins around once and twice and before I know it, he’s half way up on my bed trying to break a bone in my hand. At first, I was going to be tough and pretend like it ain’t no thing… but soon the 185 lbs doctor is reefing on my hand grunting with all his might and I’m in tears trying not scream. Does he? Does he break it? Nope, the bone never breaks and as he succumbs with disappointment, I look over at Shad and share a look of utter disbelief, both of us saying, without saying, “did that shit just really happen?! Did that motherfucker just try to break the one unbreakable bone in my body?!” Shad actually filmed it briefly, which I’m glad he did as hard as it was to watch it. Following some badly needed check-ins with Shad, I soonafter fall asleep probably exhausted both physically and emotionally…. While asleep I have this crazy dream… stick with me a little longer….

In the dream, I’m walking down into a basement of some commercial building along Broadway in Vancouver. It’s a dark lounge type setting. As I walk into the next room I see a glowing from around the corner. I stop and wait as the glowing light is coming around. It gets brighter and as the figure emerges it’s too bright to see exactly what or who it is, at first… until my eyes adjust, and low and behold, it’s Shad dressed head to toe as a 6 foot 6 inch glowing piece of bacon. I run over and give that big piece of bacon a big ol’ hug.

Alright, that seems like a good place to call it. I leave you with this picture of Shad embracing the new persona I dreamt up.

Brother Jim and brother Shad… I love you guys. Thanks for being there making sure that I wasn’t really alone, ever.

Section 6 — Leadership from the Margins

I didn’t plan for my leadership to become a case study in what happens when the founder disappears from the driver’s seat, but Persephone didn’t flinch.

When the accident pulled me out of the day-to-day, Sara, Anders, David, Paul, and Keegan stepped forward with a grace and steadiness that still humbles me. There was no dramatic boardroom takeover or heroic rallying cry — just an unshowy kind of competence rooted in care for each other and for the mission.

They didn’t just hold the line; they deepened it. The cultural mycelium — that fungal network of relationships, habits, and unspoken norms we’d spent years cultivating — didn’t fray in my absence. If anything, it thickened. It found new routes and redundancies. They built new connections across the business that I might have unconsciously monopolized before. It’s the kind of shift you can’t really design into an org chart — it only emerges when the system is tested.

I think of it the way forests respond when an old-growth giant falls. Light floods in where there was once shade. Nutrients are released into the soil. Saplings and undergrowth suddenly have the space to push upward. The canopy reorganizes itself without losing the integrity of the forest. That’s what Persephone’s leadership did — restructured, adapted, and kept the ecosystem healthy, even as a keystone species (if you’ll indulge me) went missing.

Leading from the margins is different. It’s quieter, less about the adrenaline of being in the room, and more about shaping the conditions for good decisions to be made without you. If I once fancied myself the “center” of things — coordinating strategy, troubleshooting in real time, playing air traffic controller for the business — now I’m often watching the weather patterns from the treeline. You see different things from the edge.

Ecologists call these spaces ecotones — the edges where two ecosystems meet. Think forest-meadow, river-ocean, mangrove-open sea. These boundary zones are places of heightened diversity and creativity because they’re less stable, more prone to flux. Things adapt faster there. For me, that’s the gift (and sometimes the frustration) of this new vantage point: you’re not buried in the monoculture of the core, but you’re also not dictating the pace from the center. You learn to notice patterns, to spot small shifts before they ripple into crises.

Slowing down has helped, though it wasn’t a voluntary sabbatical. When your physical speed is reduced, your mental pacing eventually follows. There’s more room for deep observation — though let’s not romanticize it too much. Sometimes that means staring at a spreadsheet until your eyes cross, but sometimes it means seeing the human currents under the operational surface in a way you missed before. I find myself less inclined to jump in and “fix” and more inclined to ask: What’s already working here that I don’t need to mess with?

Influence without proximity requires a different toolkit. Clearer communication. More deliberate mentoring. A willingness to let other people’s judgment stand even when it differs from yours. And the ability to use stories, metaphors, and the occasional sideways joke to keep the culture intact when you can’t model the behaviour yourself. The risk, of course, is misinterpretation or drift — your words get filtered through others’ tone, urgency, and agendas. But the counterbalance is trust. If the mycelium is strong enough, the culture can self-correct.

That’s what the Persephone crew has done. In my absence, they didn’t just execute; they evolved. Sara stepped into a level of operational stewardship that holds the farm and brewery in tight balance. Anders kept quality and brewing culture steady — the stoic craftsman at the heart of the brand. David bridged farm and business in ways that kept the regenerative work alive. Paul handled the less glamorous but essential infrastructure that keeps the place upright. And Keegan found his stride in the creative and community-facing work. Each one carried a different strand of the network, and none of them waited for me to tell them how.

Ecosystems survive shocks by distributing their essential functions. In a healthy forest, no single root system feeds all the trees; nutrients pass along multiple paths. In the same way, Persephone’s leadership proved resilient because it wasn’t dependent on one person’s constant input. My absence forced that decentralization, but their capability — and their care for each other — made it work.

It’s tempting to call this “delegation,” but that feels too managerial. This was more like succession planning on fast-forward, except nobody left. The leadership canopy didn’t thin; it became layered, more textured. There’s an elegance to that kind of adaptation. It mirrors what happens in nature after a fire or flood — the system reorganizes, keeping its identity while accommodating new realities.

What I’ve learned from the margins is that influence doesn’t require constant proximity. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is set the conditions, articulate the values, and then get out of the way. The fungal network will handle the rest. You just have to trust it — and be willing to let it surprise you.

And here’s the irony: the longer I’m away from the center, the more I realize how little “center” there ever was. We imagine organizations as hubs with spokes radiating outward, but in reality they’re more like mycelial webs — decentralized, adaptable, resilient when the conditions are right. My role now is more about tending the soil than directing the growth. The margins, it turns out, have their own kind of power.

Section 7 — The Business Still Grows

If you’d told me ten years ago that Persephone Brewing would one day run just fine without me, I probably would have taken it as an insult. Not a dagger-to-the-heart insult, but the kind that makes you rehearse a rebuttal in the shower: Of course they need me. I’m the founder. The visionary. The guy who knows where the weird-sized Allen keys are stored.

And yet here we are. The beer keeps flowing, the farm keeps farming, the events keep filling the parking lot, and the business — somehow — remains upright. Turns out the founder’s indispensability is a little like Santa Claus: comforting for children, charming in a holiday special, but mostly a story we tell ourselves until reality sets in.

This isn’t to say I don’t matter at all. (Let’s not go that far.) My fingerprints are still on the place — in the ownership structure, in the commitment to values, in the stubborn refusal to sell out to the highest bidder with a tap takeover and a marketing deck. But what Persephone has proven is that when the cultural DNA is embedded deep enough, the organism keeps metabolizing even when a chunk of its genome is out to lunch.

Chapter 4 already made the case that our values are more than wall art, and here’s the proof: those values didn’t vanish just because I wasn’t there to champion them in person. In fact, they seemed to multiply. Initiatives I would have hesitated to greenlight — because I was too busy or too cautious — somehow happened. Ideas that had been half-baked in my head for years came out of the oven fully risen. It’s humbling to realize that sometimes the biggest bottleneck in a business is the person who started it.

One example: the farm’s regenerative practices have gotten bolder. Without me second-guessing whether the community was ready for more cover cropping or more obscure heirloom varieties, they just… did it. And the customers responded, not because the change was marketed with a slick campaign, but because it felt right. The same thing happened in the taproom — new collaborations, fresh menus, events that felt risky on paper but worked in practice. It was like the business had been holding its breath for years and finally exhaled.

If this all sounds a bit like I’m describing myself as the problem, well… maybe I was, sometimes. Founders have a knack for oversteering. We confuse the act of touching the wheel with the act of keeping the car on the road. But there’s something liberating — and mildly insulting — about realizing your absence didn’t cause the ditch. In fact, the ride smoothed out.

And yes, there’s a part of me that wants to pretend this was all part of some master plan. That I engineered a “distributed leadership model” and then executed a brilliant “planned withdrawal” to prove it could work. But let’s be honest — my departure from the front lines was less Harvard Business Review case study and more “life drop-kicked me out of my own office chair.” The fact that the system held wasn’t strategy; it was culture. Culture built over years of shared wins, shared screw-ups, and more than a few awkward staff parties where someone always brings the wrong kind of hummus.

The real comedy is that customers barely noticed the change. No one came up to the bar and whispered, “Is the founder okay? The energy feels different.” They just kept ordering their pints, buying their merch, and Instagramming the sunflowers. Which, if you’re thinking about the long-term health of a company, is exactly what you want: stability so boring it doesn’t even make the gossip circuit.

And yet, behind that stability, something was shifting. The business wasn’t just surviving; it was growing in directions I couldn’t have predicted. Some of it I wouldn’t have even approved of — and that’s the point. Healthy ecosystems don’t ask permission before adapting. They respond to what’s in front of them. If a patch of sunlight appears, they grow toward it. If a predator shows up, they tighten their defences.

Persephone has done the same. They’ve diversified the product lineup, deepened community partnerships, and taken calculated risks — all without waiting for me to sign off. It’s not chaos; it’s competence. The kind that comes from a team that knows the roots are strong enough to support new branches.

So yes, the business still grows. And I’ve learned to take that as the compliment it is, rather than the ego bruise it could be. Because here’s the truth: if the work of your life can’t outlast your constant supervision, then it’s not a legacy — it’s a leash. And nobody wants to be remembered as the leash.

Section 8 — Asking for Help and the Reciprocity Economy

Asking for help is one of those things everyone says they value in theory but would rather perform amateur dentistry on themselves than actually do. It’s easy to admire vulnerability when it’s framed in a TED Talk with tasteful lighting. It’s less charming when you’re the one with the metaphorical pants down, in need of actual assistance.

When my accident happened, the offers poured in — meals, rides, visits, even an old acquaintance offering to “lend me their cousin’s wheelchair,” as if mobility devices were like spare beach chairs in a garage. I smiled, I thanked people, I politely deflected. Because here’s the thing: accepting help means admitting you can’t do something. And for those of us raised on a steady diet of self-reliance, that’s like admitting you can’t read a tape measure.

Then came the GoFundMe. Not my idea, of course — because I’m not wired that way. Kristina Fairholm Mader was the ringleader, thank goodness. At the time, it felt like a benevolent ambush. I could already hear the little voice in my head: This is charity. This is pity. This is not the brand you’ve been building for 40-something years. But Kristina, in her calm, laser-accurate way, reframed it: “This isn’t charity; it’s reciprocity. You’ve poured into your community for years. Now it’s our turn to pour into you. You’re providing us with the gift of being able to give. That’s how ecosystems work.”

She was right, damn it. Reciprocity is built into every healthy system. In forests, nutrients cycle endlessly — today’s fallen leaves are tomorrow’s soil. In a tidepool, food moves through layers of species, each depending on the other. In business, the same principle applies: if you’ve been giving, there’s a moment when you have to let yourself receive, or you break the loop. The problem is, humans are the only species arrogant enough to think we can run that loop one-way indefinitely.

Letting people help wasn’t easy. It still isn’t. Even with the reciprocity framing, I felt like I should have been able to “handle it.” (Whatever it is.) But there’s a strange alchemy in allowing others to show up for you. The act of receiving becomes its own kind of contribution — a signal that generosity is welcome here, that care is part of the operating system.

Some of the most meaningful help wasn’t financial. It was Anders dropping by just to talk about a new beer recipe, because not everything in my life had to be about paralysis. It was Aldo and Mercer making sure my feet were covered at night, a habit that stuck long after I could have pulled up the blanket myself. It was Freddie’s quiet presence — not fussing, not drawing attention — just being there in a way that made the air feel steady. It was Melissa, who, without fanfare or speeches about “finding strength,” simply folded this new reality into the fabric of our days, as if it had always been there.

This is the reciprocity economy: a system where giving and receiving are not moral opposites but two sides of the same process. It’s why communities survive storms, why families hold together, why certain businesses outlast their founders. And here’s the kicker — it’s not always warm and fuzzy. Sometimes help comes in the form of blunt truths or reminders you don’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s awkward, uneven, or poorly timed. But in nature, nutrient cycles aren’t tidy either. The forest floor is a mess, and that’s exactly why it works.

In my case, the GoFundMe and other forms of support didn’t just help us survive a financial shock — they rewired my understanding of business, leadership, and sustainability. It’s one thing to talk about mutual aid and social capital from the comfort of a boardroom. It’s another to feel the humbling relief of it in your own living room.

So now, when I talk about “resilience” in an organizational context, I think less about strong leadership or airtight strategy, and more about whether the system can handle a sudden shift in who’s giving and who’s receiving. Can the roles swap without resentment? Can the flow reverse without breaking? That, to me, is the test.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: the ability to ask for — and accept — help might be the single most regenerative principle in existence. It’s not dependency; it’s interdependence. And like a forest after a storm, the health of the whole depends on how well we share the load.

Section 9 — The Nature of Health

Health isn’t just about surviving — it’s about feeling like yourself again. Before the accident, “health” was measured in steps taken, compost managed, and muddy boots earned. Now, it’s shaped by smaller but no less meaningful things: the smell of pine resin on my skin, sun-warmed trail grasses under the wheels of my chair, or the simple presence of a tree’s bark beneath my fingertips.

I’ve wanted to turn that longing into something more — a concept we’ve dubbed the Nature of Health initiative. It’s not a formal program (yet). It’s more like a stubborn intuition that nature isn’t optional; it’s essential to wellbeing. We’ve floated ideas about collaborating with organizations like the Rick Hansen Foundation — but for now, it lives as hope, not protocol.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in thinking this. Physicians are increasingly integrating nature into treatment plans. In Canada, for instance, the PaRx program allows licensed health providers to literally prescribe nature — full access to parks, trails, and conservation areas — especially for patients with anxiety, fatigue, or chronic illness. Link Link This isn’t whimsy; it’s a clinical response to evidence that nature heals.

What evidence? Plenty. A large-scale UK study found that spending at least two hours per week in natural environments is consistently associated with better physical health and subjective wellbeing, even after accounting for income, activity levels, and urban density. Link Neuroscience-backed concepts like Attention Restoration Theory add texture: a walk in the woods isn’t idle time — it’s a reset button for our overstressed minds. Link

Then there’s Japan’s practice of Shinrin-yoku or forest bathing. Decades of research point to real physiological effects: lowered blood pressure, reduced cortisol levels, improved mood, and boosted immune function — including elevated natural killer cell activity well after just a weekend among the cedars. Link

More broadly, reviews link regular time outdoors to improved cognitive function, reduced all-cause mortality, better sleep, and lower cardiovascular risk. Link And intriguingly, the biodiversity hypothesis suggests that exposure to diverse environmental microbes — the very microbes that flourish in healthy soils — helps train our immune systems and ward off inflammatory diseases. Link

This is not woo. These are hard facts with epidemiological rigor, not attributed to our grand design or resilience alone.

What fascinates me is how human health and environmental health demand the same ingredient: access. Without access to parks, walkable trails, or green public spaces — conditions too often lacking in poorer neighborhoods or institutional facilities — these health benefits remain theoretical.

That’s where the Nature of Health concept lives: not as a feel-good mandate, but as an essential infrastructure idea. If walking into the forest — or even just a park view — is medicine, then access becomes the prescription. Designing for participation, not just compliance, is the goal. That doesn’t mean gimmicks. It means benches at the edge of trails, accessible slopes into the woods, inclusive trail surfaces, even chairs with good sightlines for quiet contemplation. It means reframing nature from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” — in both urban and rural contexts.

Personally, I’m invested in this not only as a community initiative, but as a thread of healing, one wheel push at a time. Because when you restore access to nature, you’re not just creating paths through the forest — you’re rebuilding pathways back to ourselves.

Section 10 — Resilience Without Romance

If you’ve read this far waiting for the “And then I bounced back stronger than ever” moment — sorry. There’s no bounce. No triumphant sprint to the finish line, no TED Talk title card with “Turning Setback into Opportunity” plastered over a slow-motion shot of me wheeling heroically into the sunset.

What there is — on a good day — is adaptation. On other days, there’s just acceptance, and occasionally, muttered profanity at the laws of physics.

Resilience gets romanticized because it makes for a cleaner story. Investors like it. Politicians love it. Social media can’t get enough of the grit-and-gratitude arc where the hero rebuilds and emerges shinier than before. But real resilience is messier and much slower. It’s not a trampoline; it’s a patchwork quilt stitched together over years, sometimes with mismatched fabric you didn’t choose.

For me, it looks like this:

• The scar tissue on my spine, a reminder of both damage and healing.

• An elevator in the house, humming its way into the daily soundtrack.

• The ability to roll onto the farm, smell the hops in late summer, and feel — in my chest if not my legs — that connection to land and work.

• Learning to write chapters like this one without sanding off the rough edges to make them more palatable.

In nature, resilience isn’t about snapping back to the way things were. A tree that’s lost a limb doesn’t regrow the same branch in the same shape. It heals over, shifts its weight, and grows in a new direction. You can see the asymmetry if you know where to look — not as a flaw, but as proof of survival. The same applies to lakes after a storm or forests after a fire: what returns is different, and that difference is the resilience.

Businesses aren’t much different. A healthy system can withstand a hit — whether it’s losing a key leader, a supply chain collapse, or a sudden market shift — not by pretending nothing happened, but by incorporating the change into its future. Culture is the mycelium in this metaphor: invisible, persistent, and ready to knit new connections when old ones are severed.

So my version of resilience is not a comeback story. It’s the ongoing choice to grow anyway — alongside the damage, not in spite of it. Wheel push by wheel push. Like sap finding its way around a wound in the bark. Like tides shaping a shoreline over decades.

There’s no Hollywood payoff. But there’s continuity. And in the long run, continuity might be the most underrated form of resilience we have.

Appendices with Letters from the Darkside

Brian's Notes

Zarah Gale

Jul 20, 2023

Here's an update directly from Brian, which he wrote for the Persephone Staff Newsletter but is willing to share with the Shareholder community.

Brian’s notes from (crashing on) the road:

Since surgery I’ve been getting good care both in the US and here in Canada. It was pretty fun to fly in a medical airplane. Albeit the bumpy ride wasn’t lost on me.

Brian's Notes from the Operating Table

Zarah Gale

Jul 26, 2023

I think one could fairly title this next update as ... "Out with the Old, In with the New."

I wanted to acknowledge the numerous times that folks, in reaching out and sending love, have said "please let me know how I can help."

With regenerative fields of love and appreciation, Brian.

Brian's Update - Aug 2

Zarah Gale

Aug 15, 2023

I'm excited this morning because I'll be transferring from VGH over to G.F.Strong by mid-day. This is an indication of great progress from a medical standpoint. My body is now stable enough to really begin some rehabilitation. You can imagine how much this comes as great news and why I'm so excited.

Technically, I'm still on some precautions, particularly to do with my broken sternum and then I can't really do any rehab that stresses muscles in that area and my broken bone in my hand still has some healing to do before I can do weight-bearing exercises it might not. But G.F.Strong will be able to start learning about things like rolling my body over and getting out of bed and weird things like catheterization. OK so maybe exciting isn't quite the right word but it's progress and that's good stuff.

I wanted to share some ideas that have begun percolating about where my growth and redevelopment might convert into positive community impact. In particular, I've been. thinking about and working on an idea to help people with accessibility challenges, such as paralysis like I have, to achieve good mental health, and therefore physical healing and health through being able to access the outdoors.

As I've been sitting in a hospital room now for over a month, I'm realizing how important being outside and in particular being active outside is for my mental health. As I think you know, I was a particularly active person before the accident, including typically accumulating 10 to 15,000 steps on the farm every day and cycling something like 50 to 100 km every week, not to mention dog walks, playing with the kids in the yard and so on. Each time I'm able to get up out of bed here and into a wheelchair I immediately notice my state of mind changing and my excitement at getting to move. Just getting to move!

As my family rolls me out onto the hospital stoop and the sun hits my skin and the breeze blows past, I am reminded how profound movement in the outside is. I suspect it's an easy one for the able-bodied to take for granted, I know I certainly did. What's more, I noticed that my physical health and recovery seem to be expedited by my experiences of just getting up out of bed, moving and getting a little bit of exposure to the outside. I haven't done the heavy research yet, but my suspicion is there's a direct link between movement, being outside, activity, mental health and physical health - that has certainly been substantiated by the nurses and doctors here at the VGH anecdotally.

So, this got me thinking about a next, fairly simple, community impact project. I’m already working on designing an accessible van to get me around. As most of you know, my home is not too far away from the farm but I can't very well walk there! So I've been already thinking about what kind of vehicle I'm gonna need.

As I think you also know, Persephone is expanding and buying a place up in Powell River that includes a bowling alley, pub and other multi-use components of a real estate parcel.

I've also been thinking about what kind of wheelchairs I'm going to need to get me around the farm, home to and through trails, etc. I believe that through the process at G.F.Strong, they'll introduce different types of wheelchairs and options and hopefully, we can find a mix that helps me stay off-road as well as on-road. And so the van will need to be customized to include not just getting me and my wheelchair in and out but also loading an off-road wheelchair perhaps including some camperized type of modifications, such as a bed, counters for overnight stays, sink, toilet, tools, cabinetry for medical equipment, maybe a built beer tap, etc.

You've no doubt seen the camperization version of these high-roof vans like Ford and Mercedes. I mean really it's not that dissimilar from the custom builds for the Telus mobile health vans. I started thinking that the customized van that will help me get around my community might be something that lots of people would benefit from, particularly if they have mobility challenges too. And, if I’m going to need to raise $150K to build my van, maybe we should just raise $1 million to build eight vans and make them accessible to our community.

I don't want to say too much more because who knows what this will all turn into but stay tuned to see if updates could include you contributing in some way.

On the mushier side of life... A friend wrote me a wonderfully written note this morning about her concern and care for me. It got me into a bit of a reflective frame of mind and so I thought I'd share a few thoughts excerpted from that response, "... To be perfectly honest I'm not sure exactly how to respond because I think I'm still very much in the throes of processing, grieving, and change. This shit is crazy. I'm a little over a month since I lost the use of my legs and it still catches me by surprise in the morning. 70% of the time I feel pretty good and positive and optimistic per the usual Brian that everyone knows. 30% of the time I'm completely confounded by this new reality that seems unbelievable.

So many people have stepped up and said that they love me and that they want to know how to help. The way that my community has responded is well beyond what I would've expected. That feels good of course and I don't want to take anything away from that and in time, I'll learn how to respond, ask for help, and put their goodwill to work for both my well-being, and that of our community. Part of me wants to strike, while the iron is hot, and make the most of this goodwill and support before it fizzles and disappears but I'm not sure I know how to do that while also trying to remain focussed on my own recovery and re-development.

I still love early mornings. I like waking up with the daylight and the first birds of the day. I love seeing my family and friends come through the curtain of my hospital room. I love the taste of chocolate. I love to brainstorm ideas with people and I love more than ever having conversations about the complex relationships between our bodies our minds and our emotions… Especially with my brothers. Not to take away from any of the great conversations I've had with my female friends and family, but it's been sort of amazing to see how the men closest to me have responded with maturity and love and a willingness to be vulnerable with me. It has me crying tears of joy in seeing men be weak, and as a result, growing stronger with me.

Thank you, everyone, until next time. Brian

p.s. I miss the great view I have from my VGH window, including a front-row seat to the fireworks.

Brian's Update - Aug 13, 2023

Zarah Gale

Aug 15, 2023

I'm a little late for my "weekly" update, but hopefully, you will cut me some slack. I'll begin this update on a sombre note, but please stick with me, as I plan to end on a high one.

I'm now using a power wheelchair to get around and the first time I was oriented to it, I experienced a playground-like feeling of slowly rising up a bump in the road to then quickly coming over the top and shooting down the other side. It felt like the most extreme rollercoaster I'd ever ridden in spite of the fact that the bump in the sidewalk was about 3 inches high. Come along for the rest of this week's ride.

Admittedly, this past week has been filled with as many lows as highs. In that I mean I've had as many tears of despair as tears of joy, maybe more. It's been hard. I've had to wrestle with some emotions and some emotional reactions that were way out of my comfort zone. I'm no poet though I wish I was in order to share with more nuance, specificity and meaning the depth to which immobility affects one's state of mind. To say that it gets me down doesn't do justice to mine or anyone's emotional scope or scale of being. At times this week I have felt pathetic ... let me just pause and clarify that I'm not sharing this so that anyone will feel sorry for me. Please don't do that. I'm trying to tell this story so that we may better understand the human condition from what is, for many, a damn scary vantage point. I am not sharing so that people will feel sympathy, pity or anything of that ilk.... ok, getting back to being or at least feeling pathetic.

One evening, early last week, a loved one and I weren't able to see eye to eye (yes, metaphorically and literally;) and so that had me upset already and as I asked the nurse to sling me into bed I felt any sense of power or strength slipping further and further away. The nurse picked me up with a sling to put me into bed and as I looked down at my legs they curled in a way that no one would have let them, if in control. The nurse wasn't doing anything wrong nor was I upset with her, I just watched, impotent to adjust my legs in a way that anyone would be inclined. As I got settled into bed the nurse made sure I was comfortable and safe and clean, including using wipes to ensure my private parts were well, clean. Until you've had someone clean your nether region it may be difficult to imagine the depth at which emasculation is possible. On one hand, no big deal it's just another part of my body and, clinically speaking, it needs to be clean or else. On the other hand, it's the most private of private parts and previously only a select few have been welcome in the area - ya know?

I woke the next morning, around 5:45am, rested but feeling a lingering sense of self-pity and that's when no matter what email or webpage or Slack thread I was attending I found tears appearing. I'm the kind of guy that, previously, rarely cries at the moment, rather I often find myself crying after the fact. This is good. It felt good to shed some water weight and I knew why I was crying and it also allowed me to, strangely, focus as I wrote to touch base with my loved one with whom I'd argued and generally re-orient my disposition toward the positive and away from the negative. Soon enough the day began with my morning bowel routine (I'll spare you more detail about the intersection of bowels and paralysis... for now ;), an occupational therapy appointment, etc. And, I'd scheduled a call, which further challenged, enlightened and buoyed me.

As many of you now know, some friends have begun a GoFundMe page for me and my family. The premise is that this is life-changing and is going to be friggin costly. House renos, vehicle adaptations, wheelchairs (i.e. $45K for a wheelchair capable of getting me around the farm?!) it's going to add up. Many, many thanks to those who've already contributed, I really appreciate it. However, I want to highlight my friend Kristina who is providing the steam behind the campaign to get the word out. She is one of those amazing individuals who quietly changes the course of our worlds, for the better. She is one of the most impressive, powerful and wise people I've had the privilege to know. Her combination of being powerful and wise is an incredible combination that positions her to change whole systems not just the elements within. I didn't ask her permission to include her here so won't give away any more details about her identity, but if you can find your way to her I highly recommend spending as much time as you can get, in her midst.

She and I shared a phone call earlier this week that helped me unpack a piece of baggage that I didn't know I was carrying - I'll call it the stigma of poverty. Kristi and I both have done work in disability and anti-poverty, social justice sectors. I worked in the downtown eastside of Vancouver for nearly a decade trying to address poverty and cycles of dysfunction through social enterprise and impact investing. So, I've of course seen lots of people destitute to the point of needing to beg. We've all seen people begging and you're not human if at least some small part of your heart doesn't hurt to see it and to imagine oneself in that circumstance. 'Can you spare some change?' 'I just need something to eat.' Putting aside the myriad of reasons for how they got there, we have to admit that it's frightening to consider ourselves in that condition. And yet, why is it so scary? I've had to confront my fear of having to ask for money because I now need help. And part of my fear is related to my assumptions about what people will think of me. Thanks to my friends I've come to terms with asking for help because just as for all of us, life, at one point or another, can throw us into circumstances that places us in need. For some, life throws us into addiction, for some life throws us into mental illness, for some life just throws us into a ditch. Our humanity prevents us from ignoring one another in times of need, thank goodness.

I wasn't sure what to expect with the GoFundMe though I'll admit that I underestimated how memorable I have been. Folks from as far back as my elementary school have contributed. Evidently, people want to give. It is a part of our culture to give to each other when needed. My roommate at GF Strong is likewise working his way through paralysis and lives on one of the Gulf islands. He too has been surprised by the outpouring of generosity from his community, in response to his family's need. Or, perhaps we should reframe that... perhaps it is less in response to one's need and more in reciprocity to one's contributions. Many people have written to say thank you for all that I've done and that they want to "pay it back." It is awe-inspiring to consider the order of magnitude with which social capital is robust in our community. If this is the response to my situation and then we multiply that by all of the amazing people in our community... I believe that the abundance of the web of security, safety and care that underpins our community can likely withstand any adversity we might face.

Few things have lifted me up more than the love of my community and yet I want to name 'getting outside' as another critical element to my recovery. You may recall my recollection of the first time I rolled out of the hospital and how important the feel of the sun and breeze was to my state of mind. That connection to being outside and moving outside has only been reinforced as absolutely vital to my well-being. In fact, I've started seeking data/research to show the clear connection between good health and being outside as I think there is a very real opportunity to improve our world by giving more people more access to the outdoors. However, I want to highlight one particular outdoor adventure that added more to my recovery than any other to date... I went to the Barbie movie.

I rolled to and got on a Skytrain, I rolled into a theatre and, with a packed crowd I watched a movie and after the movie we got hotdogs! Gosh, now that I try to write it out it doesn't seem very monumental. This is the high note that I thought it was worth you making it to the end? Come on Brian. Well, I guess you'll just have to imagine how exhilarating it was to get outside, move and just be with others. Move and just be with others, that's the moral to my (anti-climatic) story.

Closing on that note, I want to say thanks again. Thanks for the generosity, the love and the learning that I could not enjoy without you by my side.

Much love, Brian

Brian's Update - September 8, 2023

Zarah Gale

Sep 11, 2023

Everyone poops, even the paralyzed

Not everything is profound, sometimes the mundane is the most interesting. In many ways this past week has been largely unremarkable. However, fair warning this week's update, as modest as it is in excitement it more than makes up for in gross detail. Some of you may have a hard time reading all the way through this one. And yet, in many ways this whole update may be boring as shit.... Speaking of bowels (I warned that we'd get to this topic eventually), btw, please put off reading this until after your breakfast.

Bowels are hard (yes, there may be a lot of puns in this section) to deal with when you're paralyzed. Perhaps it's obvious but I no longer have control of the muscle groups to make things happen down there. Typically, muscular contractions (peristaltic waves) in the walls of the colon move fecal material through the digestive tract to the rectum. And, the rectum is a distensible muscular tube that acts as a temporary reservoir for the waste material. As the rectal walls expand, stretch receptors from the nervous system, located in the rectal walls, stimulate the desire to defecate. The urge passes within one to two minutes if not relieved, and the material in the rectum is then often returned to the colon where more water is absorbed. If defecation is continuously delayed, constipation and hardened feces result. Lacking both the ability to sense and control things, leaves my brain mostly useless when it comes to pooping, normally. Thus, we need to figure out how to do it differently, or put another way, program our system to work with different stimuli and methods of evacuation. I think I've gone deep enough (uggh) into this topic without needing to describe how laxatives, suppositories, digital disimpaction and, of course, a lot of lube and cleaning are needed. Suffice it to say, it can be done and my system is slowly but surely being reprogrammed. And, I'm very glad for it. Bowel impaction (akin to constipation) is one of the major triggers for AD, which is something I wish to avoid at all costs. So, getting the bowel program tuned in is super important, boring as shit, but down right life saving, hence me dragging you through this paragraph.

And, speaking of being dragged along unwillingly, I have a new roommate at GF Strong. Now, don't get me wrong, I am extremely grateful for being here with exceptional care, quality facility and rely superb doctors and nurses that are trained in spinal cord injury care specifically. If i'm not mistaken, GF Strong has the reputation as one of the top one or two best spinal cord facilities in North America. It's awesome here, really. And, having a roommate has its pros and cons. Pros include having someone to relate to and share the ups and downs when family and friends aren't around. Cons mostly revolve around a lack of privacy and being subjected to each others stuff, like it or not. For a mental picture, we literally share a room with just a curtain between our beds. Shared bathroom and sink too. My first roommate was here long before me and got the window to my jealous chagrin, whereas i now have the window - yeah! I know a lot of detail about these guys including their life story, their accident that got them here, how their rehab is going etc. etc. etc. My current guy, let's call him Tom, is a 75 year old retired dentist that crashed an ultra light and is now paralyzed from the neck down. Earlier this morning, I heard Tom’s birthdate and it explains a lot. He was born in 1948, which explains why he is constantly yelling and swearing at Siri or Alexa or any other AI personality he can think of. That SNL skit is my life everyday. I’m not kidding. He barked “Wake Up”… “WAKE up”… “wake UP” no less than 7 times this morning. The phone never woke up and I’m over here in tears trying not to laugh out loud. I can currently hear him in the bathroom asking Siri something about shit... no joke. I feel very lucky and deeply troubled by hearing all of this.

Speaking of raising ones voice .... I barked at one of my nurses the other night and I still feel guilty about it. I was struggling with a catheter and she was well meaning but just too repetitive and off the mark of being helpful that I snapped. I owe her an apology and yet let me share the experience for context. Self catheterization is a very weird experience, at least at first, then it becomes as routine as peeing in the forest. Here's the basic instructions (heads up this gets a little graphic). Male readers, I dare you to try to read through these instructions without cringing at least once:How to Catheterize Yourself (Man):

1. Gather all the items you will need: A clean catheter, lubricating jelly, container to collect urine, bowl of warm water, soap, washcloth, and hand towel, Waterproof pad or bath towel

2. Wash your hands.

5. Put water-based lubricating jelly on the first 7 to 10 inches of the catheter: This will help decrease discomfort during the procedure.

6. Insert the catheter: With one hand, hold your penis straight out from your body. With your other hand, slowly put the catheter into the urinary meatus (not my term).

8. Remove the catheter when you are finished: When urine no longer comes out gently and slowly pull the catheter out.

9. Clean the catheter or throw it away.

I don't know how others feel, but having now done it several dozen times I still think ... holy cow... 7-10 inches! Yep, that's roughly how far the bladder is. And, just before getting into the bladder you bump up against a sphincter. No one warned me about the fact that the sphincter may or may not be cooperative. It may or may not want you to insert a plastic tube into its precious bladder. It might, such as when you have a UTI and it's feeling especially protective, absolutely not want you to insert the catheter. Likewise, when you are having spasms (I have much to share about the irony of spasms for the paralyzed in a future update) it may be vehemently against insertion. On Tuesday night, while trying to empty my bladder around midnight I spent over an hour bumping up against that pesky, spastic and downright uncooperative sphincter. I was starting to feel extremely anxious because a full bladder can trigger AD and mine, per the ultrasound scan, was holding more than a litre! Multiple nurses were gathering all brainstorming ideas and few were experienced enough to have seen this problem before. This is where I barked at the well-meaning nurse with, what I felt was, a terrible idea. Finally, one nurse, with many years of experience, came to the rescue. It's all about position - the solution was simply for me to move to a new position so that my spasm would release and the bladder would open up. I found that new position and, in the end, all was alright. In fact, more than that... it has happened a couple more times and using that same de-spasming move I've overcome the problem with ease. Not to put too fine a point on it but ... what a relief!

Alright, seems I've subjected you to enough gore this week. I also rolled over and sat up on my own and for the first time since the accident slept on my side! I put my own shoes on once and tried a handcycle (see pic) for the first time! We’ve also made good strides on the “nature for health” initiative. I’ll save a bunch of those less graphic and more inspired updates for coming weeks.

Let me close by saying thanks again. The generosity of love and support (not to mention much needed dollars) continue to flow with abundance and I remain moved by you all.

With love,

Brian

Brian's Update - Oct 11, 2023

Zarah Gale

Oct 12, 2023

Gabor Mate, “To wallow in self pity conveys the comfort but muddy trap of perennially feeling sorry for oneself. Self pity takes a kind of solace as seeing oneself as an unfortunate character beleaguered by fate. It undermines healing by reinforcing the stories that keep us ensconced in a world of hurt and by discouraging responsibility for our own point of view. Self compassion by contrast doesn’t resist how things are and does not swaddle the pain in layers of narrative gauze. It just says I am hurting.”

Learning to love one’s body after paralysis and at 49 years old, is a project. With excess weight to drag around, parts that straight refuse to do anything, pain, etc. it’s a little hard to say I love my body. I woke this this morning, however, and noticed my legs were warm to the touch. That shouldn’t surprise me but it did. I can’t feel them after all so at times, when comfortable, I kind of forget about them - almost like they’ve been amputated. Feeling warm legs, felt nice. What’s more I was admiring my feet.

Since the accident I have had pretty bad edema. For those unfamiliar, edema is simply fluid retention in some part of the body, often feet and lower legs. For some people this can be a dibilitating condition but for me, not feeling a thing down there, it’s only bothered me when I look at them. A couple of months ago I had exceptionally fat feet and cankles. People would look at them and say things like, “oh damn! Those are huge! You’re sinking straight to the bottom of the lake if someone throws you in!” Compression socks, in my limited experience, work a bit but inevitably since I’m not using the muscles down there which would normally push the fluid out, the water collects at the bottom thanks to gravity.

Lately though, my feet are normalizing, especially at night. Almost as soon as I get in bed they start draining… where’s all that water go? The bladder. It’s not a direct route but that’s where it ends up and fairly quickly too. Within about two hours of laying down, I can find more than a litre of urine in my bladder. And, two hours later, another litre. By the way, this urine is almost clear as it’s mostly water, almost no yellow color, almost, dare I say, drinkable?

Yesterday (and this is why I was compelled to offer an update) my lower body made me feel joy, big smile on my face and shared joy with another person (my physio). But, before I tell that story, first a few words on spasms… Google “spacicity after spinal cord injury” and you’ll find yourself in a bottomless canyon of information, research, stories, and advice. One scientific article describes it this way, “Spasticity is a common comorbidity [strange choice or words?] of spinal cord injury (SCI) that is characterized by velocity dependent tone and spasms manifested by uninhibited reflex activity of muscles below the level of injury. For some, spasticity can be beneficial and facilitate functional standing, transfers, and some activities of daily living. For others, it may be problematic, painful, and interfere with mobility and function.” In other words, your muscles contract and release unexpectedly or at least not because you told them too… we’ll that’s not entirely true…

A friend, quadriplegic of 40+ years, told me that 13 years ago, he figured out how to trigger one of his spasms to pee… wait what?!? That’s right, 25 years after paralysis he learned his spasms so well that he can start and stop one of them so that he can urinate naturally - and hasn’t used a catheter since! He talks about “being in relationship” with his spasms and that his spasms have saved his life. Wow. My spasms have not been bad, relatively speaking. They aren’t painful or, for the most part, in convenient. Mostly I notice them at night as my body goes from being in the sitting position for 6+ hours to being supine. Then the spasms in the back start talking. But (back to the good news story I started above) yesterday I started to recognize I could trigger and utilize one of my spasms for transfers…. Wait, a few words on transfers...Transfers, in this world, are both seemingly minor thing and a huge deal.

Transferring refers to moving from one location to another - bed to commode, commode to bed, bed to chair, chair to physio plynthe, chair to car, chair to couch, etc.. etc. The act of transferring one’s lower half with only the use of my arms, upper back and chest is a learned skill and only has become possible as I’ve gotten stronger and learned where my new balance points are. ANNNND (continuing my story from above) learning my spasms. Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that if I move my body in just the right way, I trigger a spasm in my lower back that straightens my left leg. If I time that spasm with lifting my body in a transfer then my legs are doing part of the ‘heavy lifting.’ This has been a rather incredible revelation, at least for me. I don’t need to be all about grunt-muscling, I just need to use that spasm!

Yesterday I did a transfer of almost 6 inches in height difference (doesn’t sound like a lot but it is and admittedly this was under supervision of my PT) without any difficulty at all. Revelatory and incredible are words not out of place with this experience. I looked at my PT who, likewise, had a similar incredulous look and big smile on her face, “did that just happen?!” Yes, it did. Ok, it’s possible it’ll go away as spasms change over peoples’ life times and it’s possible that writing about it has jinxed the whole development. But, that’s ok because my point in sharing this is two-fold: first, I love my body - as weird as it may be (typing this sentence brought tears to my eyes (so much so I had to stop typing because I couldn’t see hahaha!)) and second, that my mind-body relationship isn’t broken, it’s merely evolving. Both of these insights were almost unimaginable just a few short months ago. Take away of the day? Love your body.

Warmly (legs and all),

Brian

Brian's Update - April 30, 2024

Zarah Gale

Apr 30, 2024

Musings on Aloneness, Togetherness and the Brothers that are There

Alright, that seems like a good place to call it. I leave you with this picture of Shad embracing the new persona I dreamt up. Brother Jim and brother Shad… I love you guys. Thanks for being there making sure that i wasn’t really alone, ever.

Chapter 6 v2

Section 1: Sap Flows and Capital Flows

Let’s begin with something sticky. Literally.

Sap — that slow-moving lifeblood of trees — is not unlike capital. It’s essential for growth. It carries nutrients to the places that need them most. And if you’re not careful, it gums up everything it touches, attracting ants, dust, and armchair economists who suddenly have opinions about your flow rate.

Money, like sap, is both life-giving and prone to misbehaving. Especially when it comes in a surge or gets locked up in a knot. In nature, sap doesn’t move at the same rate year-round. Temperature, sunlight, and the health of the tree all influence its flow. Capital is no different. Your business doesn’t have a single, steady drip of money 365 days a year. It pulses, ebbs, and sometimes stops entirely — and the real skill is learning to work with those rhythms rather than pretending they don’t exist.

At Persephone in Gibsons, we live and die by seasonality. Summer is high season — the taps are running full, both with beer and with cashflow. Our tasting room and events are packed, weddings and music nights fill the farm, and tourists swarm the coast like pollinators in a blooming orchard. In those months, the sap runs high. On paper, it should be enough to build a reserve to get us through the rest of the year. In practice, that “surplus” often dribbles away by the time the leaves start to fall, thanks to the unromantic realities of payroll, loan payments, and the unexpected expenses that seem to hunt us down in October.

Then comes winter — and winter is starving season. Not for ideas or ambition, but for cash. Traffic slows, events quiet, and we enter months of running deficits, tightening belts, and watching the bank account the way a farmer watches the last bales of hay in February, hoping they’ll last until grass grows again.

Interestingly, our Powell River location — The Alley — runs on almost the opposite cycle. In that town, bad weather is good business. Rainy fall and winter days bring people indoors, gathering over coffee, beer, and live music. Summer? People vanish to the beach, the lake, or the cabin, and The Alley feels like a half-empty forest after the birds migrate. The contrast between the two locations is a constant reminder that “seasonality” isn’t universal — it’s hyper-local, shaped by climate, culture, and community habits.

For us, this dual reality forces a more nuanced view of cashflow. It’s not as simple as “make hay while the sun shines.” It’s also “store enough hay to feed both horses and goats through two entirely different winters, at the same time.”

That’s why sap is the perfect metaphor for capital. In a tree, sap doesn’t just go where it wants; it moves with intention, guided by the needs of leaves, buds, and roots, and by the environmental signals around it. In business, capital should do the same — flowing where it’s most needed, in the right volume and at the right time. Too much too soon, and you risk overextending. Too little too late, and you risk drought stress. Both in forestry and finance, the art is in managing the flow so that life keeps moving through the system — not just in the peak of summer, but through the leanest months too.

The rest of this chapter is about that art. It’s about understanding what kinds of capital exist, how they behave, and how to direct them so they nourish your enterprise without drowning it or starving it. And just like sap can carry sugar, hormones, or defensive chemicals, capital comes in many forms — each with its own quirks, strengths, and side effects.

But before we start naming those types, let’s pause to appreciate that in both ecosystems and enterprises, the flow itself is the thing. Not every drop makes it to the canopy. Some is used up in the roots. Some is stored for the next season. And some just leaks out in ways you’d rather not talk about at your next board meeting. The point is: if you can understand and work with those flows, you have a much better shot at long-term health — for your business, your community, and the soil you both depend on.

Section 2 — Why Impact Investing Is Like Farming with a Bank Loan

Impact investing has a reputation for being shiny and new — a clever idea dreamed up in a think tank sometime in the late 2000s. In reality, it’s as old as the first time someone lent a neighbour a goat in exchange for help with the harvest. It’s simply the act of placing capital where it can do some good and come back — ideally with a few friends in tow.

In the forestry world, sap doesn’t just flow to the highest branches for the sake of show; it flows to where it will nourish the entire organism. Impact investing works the same way. It’s capital that aims to strengthen the whole system — the roots, the canopy, the surrounding ecosystem — not just fatten one branch for harvest.

At Persephone, every dollar we’ve raised has had a job beyond “make more dollars.” It might have been building a barn that doubled as an event space, planting food crops between hop rows, or expanding inclusive hiring. The intention was always to create multiple returns at once — social, environmental, and financial. We wanted to grow community wealth, strengthen local food systems, and still pour a pint worth drinking.

But here’s the unvarnished truth: we also needed capital in the same way a young orchard needs fencing. The vision may have been about pollinators and shade and fruit, but without a perimeter to keep the deer out (or in our case, the cash to buy tanks, pay people, and keep the lights on), the whole thing would have been chewed down before it had a chance to grow. Romantic ideals don’t buy tractors — or fermenters — or insurance.

This is why the “farming with a bank loan” analogy works so well. In agriculture, you front-load expenses — seed, soil amendments, equipment repairs — long before the harvest. You have to balance the risk of weather, pests, and market swings with the hope of a healthy yield. The same holds true for an impact business. You invest early, often on less-than-perfect forecasts, hoping your harvest — financial and otherwise — will cover the cost of both past debts and future growth.

There’s also the question of what you’re cultivating. Not every tree in the forest produces the same kind of sap. Sugar maples are prized for their sweetness. Pines produce resin that can protect against insects. Willows carry compounds used in medicine. In the same way, not every dollar of capital is designed to produce the same kind of return. Some comes with strict expectations for financial yield. Some is intended to produce measurable social outcomes. The art is in matching the capital type to the job you need it to do — a lesson we’ve learned the hard way when a source of funding was too restrictive or the repayment terms were more aggressive than the season’s growth could sustain.

Impact investing at its best feels like tending a mixed forest: diverse, resilient, and capable of weathering storms. It’s not about pouring money into the tallest tree and hoping the rest of the forest benefits from the shade. It’s about nurturing many species so the whole ecosystem thrives — even if some trees take longer to bear fruit.

At Persephone, we’ve seen this in action when a single project unlocked multiple layers of value. The tasting room expansion wasn’t just about selling more beer; it created a gathering space for local musicians, a venue for non-profits to host fundraisers, and a reason for people to spend more time (and money) in our corner of the coast. That’s the kind of return impact capital is meant to chase — one that can’t be measured on a spreadsheet alone but is still tangible, like the first flush of sap in early spring, signaling that growth is coming.

Section 3 — Blended Capital: The Mulch (and Sap) of the Money World

We know it’s a little ridiculous to let a metaphor run the show. Sap as capital? Mulch as finance? This isn’t an Agatha Christie novel where everything ties neatly together at the end. But in this case, we can’t help ourselves. Sap moves through a tree the way money moves through a business—rising and falling with the seasons, nourishing what’s alive, and occasionally getting stuck in odd places that turn into lumps and knots. And mulch? That’s the protective, slow-release layer that keeps the whole thing from drying out in the first hot wind. So yes, we’re leaning into it—sap, mulch, the whole forest floor.

If soil health is about biodiversity—minerals, organic matter, fungi, bacteria, the occasional worm with a questionable work ethic—then capital health is about blending. A monoculture of funding, just like a monoculture crop, leaves you fragile. Rely only on equity and you’ll be vulnerable to dilution. Lean entirely on debt and you might find yourself spending more time in meetings with your banker than with your customers. Blended capital is about mixing your money sources so that, like healthy soil, you can weather both droughts and floods.

The Ingredients in Our Mulch Pile

At Persephone, we’ve layered our mulch pile over the years with some unconventional ingredients:

• Grants: Early SCACL funding allowed us to build inclusive hiring practices without having to squeeze cash flow until it squeaked. Grants are like the nitrogen in the soil—they give you a burst of growth, but you can’t live on them forever. They’re also a bit like a lucky rainstorm in August: you welcome it, you use it wisely, and you don’t bank on it happening again next year.

• Preferred Equity (Beer Barons): Investors in our Beer Baron program get their “dividends” in the form of cases of beer, not cash. For them, it’s a tangible and tasty return; for us, it’s a way of keeping ownership in the community while avoiding the constant outflow of hard currency. Like sap, this capital flows in a slow, steady rhythm—seasonal but dependable.

• Common Equity: Across multiple crowdfunding rounds (and yes, the occasional kitchen table pitch), more than 600 shareholders have invested directly into Persephone. They’ve provided both start-up and growth capital, but their value goes far beyond the balance sheet. They are loyal customers, passionate brand ambassadors, and in many cases, suppliers and partners. When your shareholders also buy your beer, promote your events, and recommend your farmstand to their neighbours, the capital flowing through your roots isn’t just financial—it’s moral support and market demand bundled together.

• Shareholder Debt: Early loans from friends and locals were the equivalent of a slow-drip irrigation line—small, steady, and always there in the background. They didn’t flood the system, but they kept the roots alive when we needed it most.

• Commercial Debt: Our long-standing relationship with Sunshine Coast Credit Union has been a lifeline. They were willing to see the potential in a farm-based brewery before it was trendy, offering the structural support that’s more like a trellis than a leash. Without them, the sap would have slowed, and the canopy would never have reached its current height.

Each of these ingredients had its own texture, its own timing, and its own role to play. Together, they made a mulch layer that buffered us from the extreme heat of sudden expenses and the frost of slow seasons.

Why Layering Matters

A good mulch layer isn’t just thrown together; it’s curated. In capital terms, that means timing each type of financing so it matches the stage of your growth. Grants in the early days give you enough moisture to germinate ideas. Patient equity arrives when you’re ready to branch out but don’t want to hack off limbs just to keep the lights on. Commercial loans are best taken when your trunk is strong enough to bear the extra weight.

For us, the rhythm is seasonal in the most literal sense. In Gibsons, summer is high tide for sap flow—cash comes in fast and heavy, filling every vessel in the system. But winter? That’s when we tighten belts and count every drop, hoping the reserves from summer will carry us through. Spoiler: it rarely lines up perfectly. In Powell River, at The Alley, it’s the opposite—winter brings the bustle, summer slows to a beach-town trickle. Understanding these cycles is as critical to our capital strategy as knowing when to prune or fertilize.

The Risk of Mulch Rot

Too much mulch, poorly managed, traps moisture where it doesn’t belong and invites rot. In finance, this is capital that’s technically “secured” but bound so tightly by conditions it can’t move where it’s needed. Overly rigid covenants, labyrinthine approval processes, quarterly reporting that eats more hours than it justifies—this is the equivalent of a wet, moldy layer choking the roots. We’ve seen businesses suffocate under the weight of “support” that was supposed to help them grow.

Real-World Models of Blended Finance

Globally, blended finance is a powerful concept—though rarely accessible to small businesses without expert partners. It’s the art of layering concessional capital (grants, low-interest loans) with market-rate investments to achieve both financial returns and measurable social or environmental impact.

• One Acre Ventures (East Africa): Building on One Acre Fund’s work with smallholder farmers, they start with grants for sustainable crops, then bring in low-interest loans, and finally commercial lenders once yields and markets are stable. It’s a patient process, much like building soil fertility—layer upon layer, season after season.

• Sustainable Development Investment Partnership (Global): This multi-stakeholder platform pools philanthropic, public, and private money to finance infrastructure in developing countries. They don’t just drop in one lump sum; they orchestrate capital in stages, like filling the canopy one branch at a time.

Global Impact Investors Using Blended Structures

Two standout examples:

• PEG Africa (West Africa): Expands access to solar home systems using a mix of grants, debt, and equity, allowing rural households to pay in small increments via mobile money. Their approach ensures the sap keeps flowing steadily, even to the smallest branches of the energy tree.

• LeapFrog Investments (Africa & Asia): Combines catalytic and commercial capital to grow companies in healthcare, insurance, and climate solutions. They measure not only the height of the tree (financial returns) but the breadth of the canopy (impact reach).

Strategic Layering in Action: Powell River

When we expanded into The Alley in Powell River, the capital stack was an eclectic but functional blend:

• A small grant for accessibility improvements—enough to open the door (literally), if not to transform the space.

• Common equity from community shareholders in both cash and in-kind contributions, reinforcing local ownership from day one.

• Preferred equity in the form of a promissory note tied to a shareholder loan, giving us some breathing room before repayment kicked in.

• A vendor take-back mortgage, where the seller of the real estate became our lender, financing the bulk of the purchase.

All of this created a patchwork quilt of capital—functional, if not elegant. And here’s the unvarnished truth: every improvement we’ve made since closing day has been either cobbled together from the scraps left over from the real estate transaction or borrowed from the parent company, Persephone. In forestry terms, it’s been a bit like building a boardwalk through the woods from offcuts—practical, creative, and occasionally prone to wobbling. But it works, and it keeps the sap moving.

Section 4 — Social Finance Intermediaries: The Capillaries in the Capital System

If the trunk is strategy and the roots are values, then the capillaries of a business’s financial system are its conduits—the thin, almost invisible vessels that carry life-giving resources to every bud, leaf, and fruit. In trees, this is the xylem and phloem, tirelessly moving sap up and down in an elegant, gravity-defying dance. In the world of impact investing, these capillaries often take the form of Social Finance Intermediaries (SFIs)—organizations that exist to move capital from those who have it to those who can use it well.

In a healthy forest, nutrients don’t just leap from the soil to the highest branch; they pass through a vast network of roots, fungi, and vascular tissue. Similarly, in healthy economies, capital doesn’t (and shouldn’t) leap directly from an institutional investor to a start-up social enterprise. There’s a whole ecology in between: people and organizations who understand how to translate impact ambitions into financial instruments, how to structure deals that won’t choke the young saplings, and how to connect investors who are looking for more than just an annual report full of bar charts.

What SFIs Actually Do (When They’re Good at It)

At their best, SFIs are translators, matchmakers, and gardeners all at once. They speak the language of institutional capital—the acronyms, the risk-adjusted returns, the reporting templates—and they also speak the language of entrepreneurs who are usually too busy unclogging a drain or finalizing a grant application to think about debt covenants. They bridge the gap, ensuring that impact capital actually reaches where it’s intended, in forms that are usable and, ideally, not lethal.

Good SFIs do more than move money. They:

• Aggregate capital from multiple sources—public, private, philanthropic—so that no single investor bears the full risk.

• Structure deals so that the type of capital (grant, debt, equity, guarantee) matches the stage, need, and capacity of the enterprise.

• Provide technical assistance—the kind of non-financial support that can make the difference between thriving and barely surviving.

• Measure and communicate impact in ways that satisfy both the institutional investor and the community being served.

It’s easy to forget that even the tallest trees depend on countless tiny channels to keep their leaves alive. SFIs are those channels.

The Canadian Canopy

In Canada, the SFI canopy has been growing steadily over the past decade, nurtured by patient capital and the slow but steady cultural shift toward seeing finance as a tool for social and environmental good. Organizations like Thrive Impact Fund, Community Forward Fund, VERGE Capital, and New Market Funds operate in this space, each with their own niche.

For example, Thrive Impact Fund (based in British Columbia) pools money from values-aligned investors to provide flexible, patient loans to social enterprises and community organizations—exactly the kind of slow-release nutrient that helps build a resilient root system. They don’t just write a cheque and wish you luck; they stay connected, offer advice, and sometimes help navigate the gnarlier parts of growth or restructuring.

Community Forward Fund is another example—offering loans to nonprofits and charities that traditional banks often won’t touch. They understand that the “off-season” for cash flow doesn’t mean the work stops; it means you need capital that understands your rhythm.

This isn’t abstract for Persephone. Without institutions like these—whether in the form of SFIs or their more informal predecessors—the odds of securing the right type of capital at the right time would be slim. Our own journey has been made possible by local versions of this ethos: credit unions willing to listen, investors who care about more than just the IRR, and community members who show up with both chequebooks and shovels.

Beyond Our Borders: Global Lessons

Globally, SFIs take many shapes. Some are regionally focused, like Root Capital in Latin America and Africa, which finances agricultural enterprises that strengthen rural communities. Others are thematic, like Acumen, which invests in companies tackling poverty through energy, agriculture, and health solutions.

The mechanics are often similar: pool different types of capital, structure it to match the needs of enterprises, and blend financial returns with measurable impact. What changes is the local context—just as sap flows differently in a maple than in a mangrove.

These global examples matter because they remind us that the intermediary role isn’t an accident—it’s a critical function in the ecosystem. Without it, much of the capital earmarked for “impact” would sit in spreadsheets, never touching the soil.

The Persephone Parallel

At Persephone, while we haven’t been an SFI ourselves, we’ve benefited from playing in the same ecosystem. Our multiple crowdfunding rounds via FrontFundr, for instance, acted like a micro-intermediary process: a platform that connected us with hundreds of retail investors who might never have encountered us otherwise. These rounds didn’t just bring in capital; they brought in people who became customers, advocates, and even suppliers.

And when we launched The Alley in Powell River, the role of intermediaries—formal and informal—was clear. The vendor take-back mortgage from the seller was itself a form of intermediation: someone willing to bridge the gap between our available capital and the total purchase price, using their position to enable the deal. Likewise, the small grant for accessibility upgrades acted as catalytic capital—it didn’t fund the whole project, but it made the rest of the structure possible.

Even our relationships with credit unions like Sunshine Coast Credit Union and First Credit Union have an intermediary quality. They understand the nuances of our seasonal cash flow cycles in a way that would be impossible for a traditional bank to replicate. They’ve provided financing that flows in rhythm with our operations, not against it.

SFIs as Sap Managers

If we stretch the metaphor (and we will), SFIs are the forest’s sap managers. They don’t generate the sap, but they make sure it reaches the buds that need it most, in the right concentration, at the right time. They manage flow rates, prevent blockages, and occasionally even redirect flow to where it can spur the most growth.

This is particularly critical in a world where small businesses—especially social enterprises—often find themselves excluded from large pools of capital simply because they don’t fit the underwriting template. Without SFIs, many of these businesses would be left high and dry, no matter how strong their roots or how promising their buds.

Why This Matters for Small Enterprises

For small enterprises, the presence of a capable SFI can be the difference between surviving a cash flow drought and becoming another stump in the clearing. SFIs help de-risk investments for institutional funders, making it more likely that small, mission-driven businesses can access loans or equity without mortgaging their future. They also open doors to blended finance structures—something that’s typically out of reach for businesses that can’t afford the consultants or legal teams to put them together.

It’s worth noting that Persephone’s own capital journey—layering grants, preferred equity, common equity, shareholder loans, and commercial debt—is a kind of homegrown version of what SFIs do at scale. We’ve built our own micro-stack, but with more formal intermediation in the ecosystem, stacks like ours could be more common, more efficient, and less dependent on individual relationships or chance opportunities.

The Takeaway

If blended capital is the mulch, SFIs are the gardeners who know how to spread it, when to water it, and when to let the sun do its work. They’re the quiet operators ensuring that sap flows steadily from the thickest roots to the furthest leaf tips, season after season.

For impact investing to truly work—for capital to be as life-giving as it claims—it needs these intermediaries. Without them, the canopy may look impressive for a while, but the moment the weather changes, the flow slows, and the leaves start to wither.

Section 5 — Measuring the Flow: Tracking Impact Without Choking the Roots

In every living system, feedback matters. Trees don’t rely on a single data point to decide whether to send more sap to the upper canopy; they continuously monitor moisture, sunlight, and temperature, making micro-adjustments to keep the system in balance. Businesses—especially those claiming to create social or environmental value—need their own feedback loops.

But here’s the trick: in natural systems, measurement happens organically and unobtrusively. In human systems, measurement can become a full-contact sport. The risk is that in trying to prove your worth, you end up diverting so much energy into data collection that you starve the very branches you were trying to nourish. The key is to measure enough to guide decisions and demonstrate accountability, but not so much that you’re stuck weighing leaves instead of growing them.

Why Measure at All?

It’s tempting to think that the good work will speak for itself. After all, Persephone’s farm is visible from the road, our beer is in local fridges, and our events are open to the public. Surely people can see the impact without us quantifying it? The problem is, in the capital markets—impact or otherwise—visibility isn’t the same as evidence.

Investors, grantors, and even some customers want to see the numbers. How many people did you employ who face barriers to work? How much local produce did you purchase? How many events did you host that were free or low-cost to the community? These are not just vanity stats; they’re proof points in a story that needs to stand up under scrutiny.

For us, this has meant developing internal tracking systems that are—let’s be honest—still a work in progress. We’ve leaned heavily on straightforward, operational metrics: seasonal employment numbers, percentage of ingredients sourced locally, the financial value of beer dividends paid to preferred shareholders, and the size of our community event calendar.

The Challenge of Defining “Impact”

Here’s where it gets complicated. Unlike liters of sap or board feet of timber, “impact” is maddeningly hard to standardize. A job created in Gibsons isn’t the same as a job created in Powell River, especially if the seasonal rhythms are reversed. A dollar spent at a local farm isn’t the same as a dollar spent at a multinational supplier. And a beer enjoyed in the garden during a fundraiser for the local food bank might have a ripple effect that’s impossible to capture in a spreadsheet.

SFIs wrestle with this all the time. The best ones don’t force a single metric across all enterprises; they help design measures that are both relevant to the business and credible to the capital providers. Sometimes that means mixing qualitative stories with quantitative data—much like a forester looking at both tree-ring measurements and the overall health of the grove.

When Capital Wants Different Stories

Part of the art is recognizing that not all capital providers care about the same things. For example:

• Credit unions often care about local economic development: jobs created, local procurement, contributions to community projects.

• Grant providers may be more focused on specific social outcomes: accessibility improvements, reduced carbon footprint, youth engagement.

• Equity investors want to see both financial resilience and social/environmental returns—evidence that their capital is building long-term value.

Persephone’s own financing stack has had to navigate all three. Sunshine Coast Credit Union has appreciated our role as a local employer and anchor institution. Grantmakers have been drawn to our inclusive hiring and farm-based education programs. Crowdfunding investors have wanted to know that we’re both financially solvent and staying true to our mission.

Each of these audiences has required a slightly different “impact report”—a different way of bottling the sap, so to speak, without diluting its essence.

Lessons from The Alley

When we acquired The Alley in Powell River, the capital stack—vendor take-back mortgage, small accessibility grant, in-kind equity, and a promissory note—came with a variety of reporting expectations. The grant required proof of accessible upgrades. The vendor wanted reassurance that the mortgage would be serviced without fail. Persephone’s own internal oversight wanted to know whether The Alley could eventually carry itself without constant infusions from the parent company.

This layered accountability mirrors blended finance structures: different capital providers, different expectations, same enterprise. In nature, the analogy might be different branches drawing slightly different nutrient mixes from the same root system. The trick is to ensure the flow meets each branch’s needs without robbing the rest of the tree.

The Role of SFIs in Measurement

Social Finance Intermediaries aren’t just conduits for capital—they often help enterprises develop credible measurement frameworks. In some cases, they even act as the aggregator and storyteller, compiling impact data from multiple investees to present a coherent picture to upstream investors.

Imagine if, instead of us juggling the varied expectations of grants, debt, and equity providers, we could hand our operational data to an intermediary that would translate it for each audience. Not only would this save us time, it would increase the credibility of our reporting—especially for investors outside our immediate community who don’t know us personally.

This is already happening in other regions and sectors. For example, Root Capital doesn’t just finance agricultural enterprises; it also tracks and reports on everything from farmer income to environmental stewardship, making it easier for global investors to understand the impact of their capital. Similarly, New Market Funds in Canada provides portfolio-level impact reports to its investors, easing the burden on individual investees.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Measurement isn’t without its hazards. A few of the most common:

1. Measuring what’s easy instead of what matters – It’s tempting to focus on metrics you can easily pull from your POS system, but these may not capture the deeper social or environmental change you’re creating.

2. Overburdening the enterprise – Constant reporting requests can feel like a slow bleed of time and energy, especially for small teams.

3. Gaming the system – When certain metrics are tied to funding, the temptation is to optimize for the measure rather than the mission.

The healthiest approach is proportionality: the scale of your measurement effort should match the scale of the capital and the importance of the outcome.

Where We’re Headed

At Persephone, we’ve been experimenting with leaner, more integrated tracking systems—things that fit into daily operations rather than living as a separate reporting burden. This includes:

• Embedding local procurement tracking into our purchasing system.

• Linking volunteer and community event records directly to our scheduling tools.

• Using periodic surveys with staff and community partners to capture qualitative outcomes.

The goal is to keep the sap flowing naturally, with enough checkpoints to ensure health without constantly tapping the tree for samples.

The Bigger Picture

Ultimately, measuring impact is about stewardship. Just as a tree doesn’t hoard nutrients but cycles them back into the soil through fallen leaves and decaying wood, enterprises in the impact space have a responsibility to cycle information back into the system—to investors, to community, and to the public.

Done well, this creates trust, attracts aligned capital, and strengthens the entire ecosystem. Done poorly, it creates cynicism, misaligned incentives, and donor fatigue. The stakes are high, but so is the potential payoff.

Impact measurement is not the end goal—it’s a way to ensure that the flows of capital, time, and energy are actually nourishing the canopy we claim to be growing. And if we can get it right, maybe we can spend more time building the forest, and less time proving it exists.

Section 6 — The Channels of Flow: Social Finance Intermediaries and the Art of Connection

If impact capital is the sap, then Social Finance Intermediaries (SFIs) are the xylem and phloem—those intricate channels that move the good stuff from where it’s stored to where it’s needed most. Without them, the flow is either blocked, misdirected, or so slow that the canopy above withers while the roots drown in excess.

In the world of social finance, SFIs are the connectors, translators, and matchmakers between investors who want their money to do more than earn interest, and social enterprises that need capital to grow their mission-driven work. They are the often-overlooked infrastructure of the impact investing ecosystem—working quietly in the background to get the right kind of money to the right people at the right time. And if that sounds simple, it isn’t.

Why SFIs Exist (and Why They’re Essential)

Most social purpose organizations—whether they’re nonprofits, co-ops, or mission-driven businesses—aren’t built to navigate the capital markets. They may have deep community trust, strong leadership, and a product or service that meets a real need. But they often lack the financial architecture, investor networks, or due diligence capacity to raise larger-scale, patient capital.

On the other side of the equation, many impact investors—especially institutional ones—are looking for portfolio-ready opportunities that meet their risk and return criteria while also delivering measurable social or environmental benefits. They don’t have the time or resources to sift through hundreds of early-stage or community-based enterprises to find the ones that are investment-ready. SFIs exist to close that gap, bridging two worlds that, without careful tending, might never connect.

In Canada, this role is carried out by organizations such as Community Futures, Thrive Impact Fund, New Market Funds, and Raven Indigenous Capital Partners. Internationally, Root Capital—working with agricultural co-ops in Latin America and Africa—and Acumen—investing in enterprises tackling poverty—illustrate the potential of these intermediaries to channel capital to places traditional finance won’t touch.

SFIs in Action

An SFI is part gardener, part irrigation engineer. They assess the soil of a community to understand its needs and constraints. They choose the seeds—the social enterprises with potential—and then design an irrigation system: the capital structure that will give those enterprises the resources they need to grow. They also monitor conditions along the way, making adjustments to ensure the capital keeps flowing and the enterprises stay healthy.

In practice, this means that SFIs do the heavy lifting on both sides. They source and screen opportunities from networks of community organizations and incubators. They work directly with potential investees to strengthen governance, improve financial management, and install operational systems so that the organization is ready for outside investment. They structure the investment in a way that blends capital sources—grant funding for the riskiest components, patient debt for long-term projects, and equity where growth potential justifies it. And because they know both the investor and the investee, they translate between the two, converting the investee’s story into terms investors understand and converting investor demands into something that doesn’t overwhelm the organization.

The Persephone Connection

While Persephone Brewing has never formally been an SFI, our financing journey mirrors much of the thinking SFIs bring to the table. When we’ve raised capital, we’ve done it in a way that reflects not just a need for money but an intent to build community wealth—social, environmental, and cultural capital alongside the financial. Our financing history has included grants, often in partnership with the Sunshine Coast Association for Community Living; common equity, with over 600 shareholders whose contributions provided both start-up and growth capital as well as moral and procurement support; preferred equity in the form of our Beer Baron shares, which pay dividends in beer rather than cash; shareholder debt to support expansion; and commercial debt, almost entirely through the Sunshine Coast Credit Union, which has been a trusted partner from our earliest days.

That mix of instruments—grants, common equity, preferred equity, debt—is, in miniature, a blended capital stack. SFIs operate on the same principle, pulling together different types of capital to make a deal work when one single instrument wouldn’t be enough.

The Alley in Powell River: Blended Finance Without the Middleman

When Persephone purchased The Alley in Powell River, we put together a financing arrangement that could easily be mistaken for an SFI-structured deal. The majority of the purchase price came through a vendor take-back mortgage from the seller, providing favorable terms we wouldn’t have found in a conventional bank loan. We secured a small grant to improve accessibility. Community members invested cash and offered in-kind contributions in exchange for common equity. We also created preferred equity in the form of a promissory note to secure a shareholder loan. And because the building needed ongoing improvements, Persephone as the parent company continued to channel funds into The Alley as needed.

This wasn’t orchestrated by an intermediary, but the thinking was the same: no single source could meet the need, so we stacked multiple sources, each with its own expectations, risk profile, and repayment timeline.

The Value SFIs Add

Where SFIs have an advantage is in smoothing out the rough edges of these complex structures. Without them, every investor relationship and funding source must be negotiated individually, with the enterprise carrying the entire burden of reporting, coordination, and problem-solving. SFIs bring efficiency to this process, helping investors pool resources and spread risk across a portfolio of enterprises, and giving enterprises a single point of contact instead of juggling multiple funders.

Globally, the impact of SFIs is substantial. Root Capital has disbursed over $1.6 billion to agricultural enterprises that support smallholder farmers, often blending philanthropic capital to absorb higher risk with repayable loans from impact investors. Acumen uses grant funding to make risk-tolerant, long-term investments in enterprises in energy, agriculture, and healthcare. In British Columbia, Thrive Impact Fund blends capital from foundations, credit unions, and government sources to finance social enterprises with repayment structures that match the ebb and flow of mission-driven revenue streams. Raven Indigenous Capital Partners designs deals that combine patient capital with deep cultural and governance alignment, enabling Indigenous-owned enterprises to grow without compromising their identity or autonomy.

For enterprises like Persephone, SFIs represent both an opportunity and a relief. The opportunity is access to larger pools of capital from aligned investors; the relief is having an intermediary who understands both the heartbeat of the business and the language of institutional finance. In the same way that a healthy tree relies on unseen channels moving water and nutrients from root to crown, the impact investing ecosystem depends on SFIs to keep the capital moving. Without them, too much potential impact simply evaporates before it ever reaches the branches where it could bear fruit.

Section 7 — Trust, Sap, and the Occasional Squirrel in the System

If you’ve spent enough time in the woods—or in finance—you know that flows don’t always behave as planned. Sap sometimes runs cloudy. Investors get spooked. Deals dry up. And every so often, a squirrel chews through your lines. (In this metaphor, the squirrel might be a well-meaning but overzealous investor, a sudden shift in market conditions, or that one board member who read half an article on ESG and now thinks they’ve discovered the Holy Grail of impact measurement.)

Here’s the truth: capital flows best when there’s trust. Not the contractual, handshake-at-the-lawyer’s-office kind of trust—though that’s important too—but the kind built through shared understanding, consistent communication, and the occasional “I’ll take the hit this time” moment. In trees, sap travels through vessels called xylem and phloem. In business, trust is the vessel. Without it, no amount of clever structuring will keep the flow steady.

The Human Side of Money

Impact investing—at least the kind we care about—doesn’t happen in an algorithmic vacuum. It happens between people. That means you can have the perfect business model, airtight projections, and a pitch deck that looks like it fell out of a Stanford case study, but if your investors think you’re going to ghost them the moment the ink dries, good luck.

At Persephone, our best investor relationships have been the ones where we’ve been able to say, “Here’s the honest picture: this quarter’s been rough, the septic backed up again, and we might have to push the next dividend back a bit.” In return, the best investors have been the ones who say, “Thanks for the update. Let’s figure out how to get you through this patch.” That doesn’t mean unconditional patience—impact investors still expect performance—but it does mean they value being in the loop over being kept in the dark until there’s a crisis.

Communication as a Flow Regulator

Think of investor communication like tapping a maple tree. You can’t just drive in a spile, walk away, and hope for the best. You’ve got to check the bucket, clear the ice, and keep an eye out for leaks. For us, that’s meant finding ways to communicate regularly and openly—without turning every update into a marketing campaign. Our investor newsletters have sometimes read more like farm reports: “Crops are coming in late, but the beer garden is packed.” Other times, they’ve been more like cautionary tales: “We tried a thing, it didn’t work, here’s what we learned.” Investors remember those moments because they see the reality behind the brand.

That said, communication isn’t just about reporting bad news. Sharing wins—especially unexpected or community-driven ones—reminds investors why they’re here in the first place. The year we won the “Best for the World” B Corp award, we didn’t just post the press release. We told the backstory: the long days, the changes we made, and the fact that the celebration beer got delayed because the label printer jammed.

The Slow-Drip of Relationship-Building

Trust doesn’t arrive all at once—it’s more of a slow drip. We’ve had investors start small—buying a few Beer Baron shares for the annual beer dividend—and then, over time, increase their stake once they’ve seen how we operate. Others came in with larger amounts right away, but stayed because they felt like part of something bigger than a transaction.

One of our longest-standing relationships is with the Sunshine Coast Credit Union, who’ve backed us through expansions, seasonal cash-flow crunches, and more than one “creative” collateral arrangement. This isn’t just about money; it’s about shared history. We’ve sat in their boardroom and talked about local food systems. They’ve walked our fields. Over time, the line between “lender” and “partner” blurred—in the best possible way.

When Trust Breaks (and How to Fix It)

Even in the healthiest ecosystems, branches break. Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding about expectations; sometimes it’s because someone assumed “impact” meant “risk-free.” We’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to over-explain the risks upfront than to patch up bruised relationships later. When things do go sideways, speed matters. Call. Explain. Offer a path forward, even if it’s just, “We’ll have a better answer in two weeks.”

The worst thing you can do? Go silent. In forestry terms, that’s like discovering a crack in the trunk and deciding not to mention it because “it might heal on its own.” Spoiler: it won’t.

Investors as Part of the Ecosystem

The best investors don’t just bring money—they bring perspective, networks, and a stake in the shared mission. When we raised funds through our three FrontFundr crowdfunding rounds, it wasn’t just about bringing in capital. It was about adding hundreds of people to our extended root system. Some of those 600+ shareholders have gone on to become suppliers, advocates, or even staff. They’re also our most honest critics. When a new product doesn’t land, we hear about it—sometimes in the checkout line.

This is where the tree metaphor holds strong: in a healthy forest, trees share resources through the underground mycorrhizal network, helping each other through lean times. In our world, that network includes investors who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves when needed. We’ve had shareholders pitch in at events, connect us to grant opportunities, and advocate for policy changes that benefit local producers.

Humor as a Bonding Agent

And then there’s humour—seriously underrated in investor relations. We’ve found that laughter cuts through the stiffness of financial updates. Yes, we’ll talk EBITDA, but we’ll also throw in a line about the stubborn raccoon that keeps raiding the compost. Investors remember those details because they’re human. We’re not trying to be a stand-up act, but we also know that nobody lies awake at night reminiscing about the clean formatting in an annual report.

We once slipped a joke into an investor update about how “cash flow is like sap—it only runs smoothly when conditions are just right, and sometimes we have to wait for the thaw.” Half the responses were about the actual update. The other half were people sharing their own “sap flow” metaphors. One even mailed us maple syrup.

The Long Game

In forestry, the tallest, strongest trees are often the oldest—those that have weathered storms, droughts, and seasons of scarcity without losing their grip. In impact investing, the longest-standing relationships are built the same way: not on perfect performance, but on the ability to adapt together over time.

For us, the goal isn’t to dazzle investors with short-term gains. It’s to cultivate relationships that can survive the inevitable ups and downs of running a mission-driven business. That means putting in the work, keeping the channels clear, and not forgetting to occasionally invite them out to the farm, pour them a pint, and remind them why we’re all here in the first place.

Section 8 — The Mycorrhizal Middle: Social Finance Intermediaries

In a forest, trees don’t just exchange nutrients directly from root to root. They rely on a vast, invisible fungal network—the mycorrhiza—that ferries carbon, nitrogen, and water between species. Sometimes it even redistributes resources from the tall, sun-soaked elders to the shaded saplings that would otherwise struggle. If you’re still with me in the metaphor (and I warned you we’d be leaning into it), Social Finance Intermediaries—SFIs—are the mycorrhiza of the impact investment world.

You might not see them in the glossy photos at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. They rarely get the headline credit when a social enterprise secures funding or when a community project comes to life. But without them, the flow of capital to many social entrepreneurs would slow to a drip, or stop entirely.

What SFIs Do (And Why It Matters)

Here’s the short version: SFIs connect capital with impact. But unlike a traditional investment bank or brokerage, they specialize in matching the right type of money to the right type of venture at the right time. They understand that a women-led co-op in a rural food desert doesn’t need the same financial structure as a clean-tech startup in Vancouver, and they design the flow accordingly.

They do the hard, unglamorous work of structuring deals, aggregating smaller investments into something big enough to be viable, and providing ongoing support so the investee doesn’t drown in reporting requirements or misaligned repayment terms. In other words, they don’t just shovel money over the fence and wish you luck—they stick around, like a good neighbour who brings soup and cleans the kitchen.

SFIs in Canada’s Ecosystem

Canada has its share of strong SFIs—Community Futures Development Corporations, credit unions with dedicated impact arms, and funds like Renewal Partners, Vancity Community Investment Bank, and Thrive Impact Fund. Each has its own niche. Thrive, for example, focuses on Vancouver Island and the surrounding region, bringing together local capital to invest in social purpose organizations that would otherwise struggle to secure financing. Their portfolio is as diverse as a mixed-species forest, spanning everything from arts spaces to sustainable food ventures.

These SFIs often act as translators, helping impact entrepreneurs speak “finance” and investors speak “impact.” Without them, you’d have two groups talking past each other: one focused on the urgency of their mission, the other asking about internal rate of return.

SFIs as Sap Stabilizers

For Persephone, we haven’t always worked directly through SFIs—our capital-raising efforts have mostly been hands-on—but we’ve been influenced by the model. In our own way, we’ve occasionally played an SFI-like role in helping other small producers and community projects navigate financing. We’ve introduced local farmers to credit union managers, brought emerging food entrepreneurs into conversations with grantmakers, and even advocated for small-scale producers in policy consultations. We’re not a formal intermediary, but the impulse is the same: strengthen the connective tissue so the ecosystem holds together.

One of the best examples of this was the campaign to save the Rio Theatre in East Vancouver. In 2018, the beloved independent venue was under threat of being redeveloped. The community rallied, but the financing challenge was complex—how do you piece together enough capital to purchase and protect a cultural institution, especially when traditional lenders see only risk? Persephone stepped in alongside others to help design a financing structure that blended community crowdfunding, institutional financing, and equity contributions. We also invested directly. The result: the Rio was saved, the neighbourhood kept its cultural heartbeat, and—bonus for us—we secured a great beer account.

It wasn’t a textbook SFI operation, but the DNA was the same. We acted as a connector, a translator, and a small contributor to a larger capital stack that wouldn’t have come together otherwise. The Rio’s survival showed us that community financing doesn’t just keep businesses alive; it can preserve spaces of belonging and joy that make cities worth living in.

How They Work the Stack

Remember the “financial stack” from earlier? SFIs are master stack-builders. They know how to layer grants with patient loans, or pair a small equity investment with a loan guarantee to unlock bank financing. For example, an SFI might secure a $100,000 grant to de-risk a project, which then gives a traditional lender the confidence to put in $250,000, with another $150,000 coming from community investors. Alone, none of these pieces would be enough. Together, they work.

This approach mirrors the way a healthy forest hedges its bets. No single tree depends entirely on one nutrient pathway—resources move through multiple channels so that if one gets blocked, another can pick up the slack.

Beyond Canada: A Global Mycorrhizal Network

SFIs aren’t unique to Canada. The model has taken root globally, often under different names. In the UK, Big Society Capital acts as both an investor and an aggregator, channeling dormant assets into social impact funds. They’ve helped build the infrastructure for an entire social investment market, funding everything from housing for vulnerable populations to social enterprises creating jobs in marginalized communities.

In Kenya, the Kenya Climate Innovation Center operates as a hybrid SFI-incubator, providing not just financing but also technical assistance to green entrepreneurs tackling climate challenges. They’re effectively cultivating an entire understory of early-stage ventures that would otherwise wither in the harsh light of commercial finance.

These global examples show the power of SFIs to adapt to their environment. Like mycorrhizal networks in different climates, they evolve to fit the specific needs of their ecosystems.

The Challenges They Face

Of course, SFIs aren’t magic. They operate on thin margins, often dependent on government support or philanthropic capital to cover operating costs. Their role requires deep local knowledge, which can make scaling tricky. And because their work is largely behind the scenes, they can struggle to demonstrate their value to funders who want visible, quantifiable results.

But here’s the kicker: without them, much of the impact investing sector would collapse inward, like a tree whose root network has been severed. The capital might still exist, but it wouldn’t reach the places that need it most—or it would arrive in forms that did more harm than good.

SFIs and Persephone’s World

While Persephone hasn’t relied on an SFI as a primary source of financing, the lessons they embody are ones we’ve tried to internalize. We’ve seen firsthand that when the connective tissue is strong—when relationships and trust are in place—the flow of capital is smoother, more resilient, and more likely to benefit the whole ecosystem.

It’s why we’ve cultivated deep partnerships with credit unions like Sunshine Coast Credit Union and First Credit Union (another B Corp!), which, while not strictly SFIs, share the same DNA. And it’s why we keep an eye on funds like Thrive, not just as potential partners but as bellwethers for where the impact investment ecosystem is heading.

If we think of Persephone as a single tree in the forest, SFIs are the network that ensures we—and our neighbours—can thrive even when conditions shift. They’re not glamorous. They don’t make front-page news. But they keep the sap moving.

Section 9 — When the Sap Flows Smoothly (and When It Doesn’t)

By now, you’ve likely caught on: we’re not really writing a forestry manual. We’re using sap—the sticky, life-giving, occasionally messy substance—as a stand-in for capital. And while it might feel ridiculous to let a metaphor run this far, I’ll say it plainly: sap fits. It’s seasonal, uneven, and essential. And if you’ve ever tried running a business that depends on both summer tourists and winter resilience, you know that the way cash flows (or doesn’t) can feel like spring thaw, mid-summer gush, or January famine.

At Persephone, our cash cycle is as predictable as the tide and just as unforgiving. Summer brings the influx—customers filling the beer garden, weddings and music events on the farm, a glut of wholesale orders. It’s sap rising, strong and plentiful. But come November, the flow slows. Expenses keep marching—salaries, equipment maintenance, insurance, taxes—but the revenue trickles. Month after month, the ledger bleeds red. If we’ve built up a surplus from the summer, we can weather it. More often than not, we find ourselves stretching, tightening belts, and looking for creative ways to keep the roots nourished until the sun comes back. It’s not failure; it’s the rhythm of our environment.

The irony? Our Powell River location, The Alley, runs on the opposite cycle. When the coastal weather turns dreary and no one wants to sip a lager on a patio, people pack into the Alley for music, movies, and pints. In summer, when the beach calls, the place slows. For us, it’s as if one branch swells with sap while the other rests. Together, they balance—though not perfectly. It’s a reminder that ecosystems rarely run on one calendar. Diversity of operations, like diversity of species, builds resilience.

The Stack and the Network

This is where the financial stack comes in. No one type of capital can carry you through all seasons. Grants can seed new ideas, equity can provide long-term commitment, loans can bridge gaps, and community crowdfunding can rally support while strengthening loyalty. But it’s the combination—the layering—that makes survival possible.

Persephone has tapped (pun very much intended) multiple sources over the years: common equity from 600 shareholders who gave us both capital and moral ballast; loans from credit unions who understood our weird hybrid of farm and brewery; crowdfunding campaigns on FrontFundr that brought in both cash and new advocates; grants for accessibility that made The Alley more welcoming; and even vendor take-back financing that made a real estate purchase feasible when banks wouldn’t touch us. None of these alone would have been enough. Together, they formed a stack sturdy enough to support growth, hiccups, and long winters.

And sometimes, like with the Rio Theatre, we’ve acted as a makeshift Social Finance Intermediary ourselves. Helping to piece together crowdfunding, institutional financing, and private investment to save a cultural hub wasn’t just about beer sales (though, let’s be honest, we were happy about those too). It was about showing that when communities stack their resources, improbable things can happen.

Sap Doesn’t Flow Without Channels

Here’s where the metaphor stretches but holds: sap doesn’t move just because it exists. It needs channels. In trees, it’s xylem and phloem. In communities, it’s SFIs—those mycorrhizal middlemen who keep the flow steady, equitable, and properly directed. Without them, capital coagulates at the top of the canopy, serving only those already bathed in sunlight. With them, it reaches the shaded understory, nourishing saplings that might one day become canopy trees themselves.

We’ve learned that lesson both directly and by observation. Our reliance on credit unions, community investors, and cooperative networks has been less about chasing the cheapest money and more about ensuring that flows are aligned, steady, and reciprocal. It’s no good taking a cheap loan if it drags you into repayment terms that gut your cash flow in February. Better to work with partners who understand that capital, like sap, comes in pulses.

Mess, Stickiness, and Growth

Let’s be clear: sap is sticky. It clogs your hands, gums up your tools, and makes you swear when it gets on your clothes. Financing is no different. Every capital source has strings, obligations, and reporting requirements that can feel like scraping dried resin off your boots. But the mess is part of the process. Without sap, there’s no tree. Without capital, there’s no business.

The trick is to remember that the goal isn’t accumulation. Trees don’t hoard sap in barrels. They move it, use it, and transform it into leaves, branches, cones, and seeds. In business, the goal isn’t to stockpile cash (though a rainy-day fund never hurts); it’s to deploy it into people, spaces, products, and relationships that generate more than financial return. That’s how ecosystems grow. That’s how businesses matter.

The Closing Reflection

So what do we take from all this? First, that sap—capital—is cyclical, and pretending otherwise is foolish. Second, that no one source is sufficient; stacks matter. Third, that without channels—SFIs, networks, intermediaries—the flow doesn’t reach where it’s needed. And finally, that the point of sap isn’t sap itself. It’s growth, resilience, fruit, and seeds for the future.

At Persephone, we’re still learning. Some years, the sap gushes; other years, it sputters. Sometimes we’ve stacked the capital just right; other times we’ve scrambled with duct tape and goodwill. But if there’s a thread through it all, it’s this: money, like sap, is at its best when it circulates, nourishes, and sustains—not when it’s bottled up.

If you remember nothing else from this chapter, remember this: embrace the stickiness, build your stack, and trust the flow. The forest—and your business—depends on it.

But not all capital flows are financial. Some are sappy — and not in the pejorative sense. These flows run deeper: beneath the spreadsheets, beneath the strategy, beneath even the bark we present to the world. Before we get to the trunk, let’s take a detour through the heartwood — where love circulates, slowly but surely, like the lifeblood of the whole damn tree.

Chapter 7: Love as Foundational Capital

“There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?”

— Mary Oliver

1. Love is Not Fluffy (It’s Just Been Misused)

Love.

Yes, I said it. The word that makes economists twitch, board members shuffle in their seats, and HR professionals prepare a harassment training module just in case. It’s a word that’s been banished from the business lexicon for sounding too… human. Too soft. Too liable to generate an awkward pause in a quarterly earnings call.

But let’s be clear: I’m not talking about romance. I’m not talking about office crushes, inspirational wall art, or performative “love your job” slogans printed on swag bags. I’m talking about love as a force — the steady, platonic, principled kind that nurtures people, holds communities together, and reminds us that we belong to each other and to the Earth. The kind of love that, when embedded in systems, becomes a radical act of reclamation. And yes, the kind of love that might actually save your business — not from market forces, but from meaninglessness.

The truth is, love has always been present in the margins of our economic lives. We see it in caregiving, in mutual aid, in the informal networks that quietly support our most vulnerable citizens. But in the dominant economic model? It’s been treated like a liability. Or worse, an irrelevance. We build businesses around competition, scale, efficiency, and “value creation,” but rarely ask: Value for whom? And fueled by what?

I didn’t come to this realization through a Harvard Business Review article or a management consultancy’s rebrand. I came to it, as many do, through community. In the early 2000s, I found myself working alongside people in and adjacent to the disability movement, including Al Etmanski and PLAN (Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network). These were people and families navigating the terrain of exclusion and institutional neglect — not with cynicism, but with a quiet, determined belief in the inherent value of every life.

Out of this work emerged something called the Philia Dialogues — a series of national conversations that asked a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to belong? These dialogues weren’t just about policy or service delivery; they were about re-humanizing our systems. They proposed love — not as sentiment, but as a civic value. Not as charity, but as infrastructure. Not as a distraction from the economy, but as its most neglected foundation.

That experience changed me. It embedded in me the belief that love isn’t an add-on to social innovation or business strategy — it is the strategy, if you’re paying attention. It’s the strategy that reminds you why you started in the first place, who you’re accountable to, and how to stay whole when everything else fractures.

Now, decades later, working in impact investing and regenerative business, I can see the thread clearly. Whether we’re talking about capital flows or compost, shareholder reports or soil health, the same question applies: Is this rooted in love, or extraction? Are we building ecosystems that care for the people and places that sustain us — or just strip them bare and call it profit?

This chapter is an argument for love — not as a fuzzy ideal, but as a form of capital. A capital that compounds through care, that circulates through trust, and that refuses to be measured in quarterly returns alone. Love is not the opposite of rigour — it’s what gives rigour its reason.

Let’s begin.

2. Love as a Relational Currency

For a society obsessed with balance sheets, we’re remarkably poor at accounting for what really holds us up.

There’s no ledger line for the colleague who covers your shift without being asked, or the customer who brings in soup when you’re sick. There’s no valuation method for a community that rallies around you — not because it’s good optics, but because they love you, and that’s what love does. Yet these moments are the true collateral of a regenerative business. They’re the difference between survival and collapse — not just for people, but for companies, ecosystems, and entire economies.

I learned this, or maybe remembered it, the hard way.

After my accident — a sudden reordering of life, identity, and mobility — the care I received was immense. It came from family and close friends, yes. But it also came from unexpected places: past colleagues, partners, customers, even competitors, and especially from the team at Persephone. It came from the businesses I helped build. It came from the kind of cultures we’d cultivated — cultures where people didn’t just clock in and out, but actually gave a damn.

And it came in quiet acts that still undo me.

Like the way my sons — both of whom work at Persephone — started instinctively checking if my feet were covered. It sounds like a small thing. But when your body changes, warmth becomes a different kind of need. And when your children, who are technically your coworkers, carry that awareness with them into the day-to-day — that’s love. Not as sentiment, but as attentiveness. A kind of relational intelligence that transcends roles and job descriptions.

I still feel that love now, two years later. It hasn’t faded. It’s baked into the culture of Persephone — this strange hybrid of brewery, farm, venue, and living organism. We’ve wrapped our arms around a lot of people over the years: one team member who had a stroke, another who became a new parent (twice), someone who couldn’t afford a brake job. None of these moments appeared in our annual report. But they’re etched into the real story of who we are.

This is what I mean when I talk about love as a relational currency. It’s a force that compounds over time. It builds trust, deepens loyalty, and creates an emotional infrastructure that sustains people through shocks — personal, economic, or global. It’s not just “good culture”; it’s antifragility in action.

But to treat love as capital, we have to shift our understanding of capital itself.

We’re already familiar with social capital — the networks, norms, and trust that enable coordination and cooperation. It’s an essential part of any healthy organization or community, and it’s adjacent to love capital, though not the same. Social capital is about connectivity and mutual benefit. Love capital is about mutual care. Social capital is a web. Love capital is the glue.

Neither appears on traditional financial statements. And yet both determine whether a company can weather a crisis, retain talent, attract aligned partners, and generate not just revenue, but meaning. These are not soft metrics. They’re just invisible in systems that refuse to look beyond quarterly profits.

Which brings us to a new idea:

What if we stopped trying to wedge love and social capital into old frameworks that were never designed to hold them?

What if we created a new framework entirely — a living balance sheet — where relationships, trust, care, and cultural resilience are accounted for as real assets?

Because let’s be honest: a business that runs a deficit in love will always be one broken meeting away from collapse.

And one rich in love? That’s a business with a surplus of meaning — the kind that no market correction can devalue.

3. The Systematic Removal of Love from Business and Finance

At some point — and no one can quite say exactly when — we decided it was inappropriate to bring love to work. Not illicit love (that’s always found a way), but the basic kind: care, concern, compassion. The feeling that what happens to someone else — or something else — matters.

It wasn’t always like this. Even Adam Smith — the philosophical father of modern capitalism — wrote an entire book before The Wealth of Nations called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, arguing that humans are driven not just by self-interest, but by a capacity for empathy and moral concern. But history, like markets, tends to favour the profitable parts. So it’s Smith’s invisible hand that got canonized — not his recognition of the heart.

We’re not here to deliver a lecture on economic theory. Frankly, we’re not experts. And maybe no one is — or maybe everyone is, if you’ve ever worked a job and wondered why being a decent human didn’t make it into the performance review.

What we can say is that, over time, a very specific version of rationality took hold in business: one that sanitizes emotion, flattens relationships, and treats love — along with vulnerability, moral responsibility, and actual human care — as inefficiencies. We built institutions that reward detachment, and we trained ourselves to believe that feelings were friction.

This wasn’t a conspiracy; it was design. As businesses scaled during the industrial age, they began modeling themselves on the machines they ran — efficient, standardized, interchangeable. And just like a machine, any part that didn’t serve output — including relational nuance — got discarded or automated.

Even now, in the age of “empathy mapping” and “human-centered design,” love is still treated like a tactic, not a truth. Something we train into frontline workers but politely leave out of boardroom conversations. It’s a performance, not a principle.

And part of the reason this logic holds is because our legal and financial systems continue to reinforce it. In most jurisdictions, corporate fiduciary duty doesn’t require love. It doesn’t even allow much room for it. Your job is to protect shareholder value — everything else, from childcare to clean air, gets sorted into a tidy little footnote known as an externality.

Let’s pause on that word: externality.

It’s how economists describe the consequences of business activities that don’t show up on the balance sheet — like pollution, ecosystem collapse, mental health breakdowns, and fractured communities. And it’s in those omissions that we can see how thoroughly love has been designed out of the system.

Because what’s really being externalized here is relationship. When we don’t feel love — for the people on the factory floor, for the birds in the canopy, for the water table we can’t see — we can more easily ignore the damage we do to them. Without love, they are objects. With love, they are kin.

And it’s not a leap to say that this same extraction logic is responsible for much of the ecological devastation we now face. The same mindset that abstracts workers into “labour inputs” abstracts forests into “timber yields.” Animals — aware, intelligent, sentient — become protein commodities. Soil becomes a lifeless medium for chemical inputs. Biodiversity becomes irrelevant, until it’s gone.

But here’s the tricky part: just because someone says they love something doesn’t mean they’re acting in ways that sustain it.

We’ve seen farmers who say they “love farming” — and what they mean is that they love driving the tractor. They love the power of reshaping land, the productivity of tilling, the visible order of monoculture rows. And yet, without intending to, they may be destroying the very soil they rely on — compacting it, sterilizing it, breaking the relationships between fungi, bacteria, and roots that make the land truly alive. They may “love” the work and simultaneously poison the ecosystem.

So love, too, must be held accountable. Love without awareness is sentiment. Love without feedback can do harm. Which is why this chapter — and this whole book — approaches love not as an ideal, but as an inquiry. What does it mean to love well? What does it mean to build a company or a financial model that loves wisely, practically, and with humility?

We’re not looking to reinstate some soft-hearted utopia. We’re looking to restore what should never have been removed: a deep, grounded awareness that how we treat one another — and the living systems we depend on — matters. Not just ethically, but operationally. Existentially.

Because if love were on the balance sheet — if care and connection were recognized as assets — the math of extraction would never add up.

4. Love in Practice — Business as a Site of Care

It’s one thing to talk about love as a concept. It’s another to ask what it looks like with its sleeves rolled up.

Because love in a business doesn’t show up wearing flowing robes and humming affirmations. It shows up with coffee for a tired colleague. It shows up in late-night texts when someone’s in crisis. It shows up in brake repairs, parental leaves, casseroles, and quiet acts of kindness that never make it into the KPI dashboard. It shows up in a footnote, if at all — but it’s the reason the place holds together.

When I was recovering from my accident — a time of deep personal upheaval and slow physical healing — I didn’t expect love to come pouring out of a business. But it did. Not just from friends or family, though they were essential. It came from Persephone. From a company. From the people I’d worked alongside, built with, hired, collaborated with — and even from people who weren’t actively involved anymore, but still felt connected.

It came in the form of practical help and moral support. In the form of flexibility, patience, silence when needed, and noise when I needed distraction. It came from people who knew how to care, not because it was in their job description, but because it was part of the culture we had quietly — sometimes haphazardly — built together over years.

One moment stays with me. It wasn’t big or dramatic. It was the way my sons — both of whom work at Persephone — would keep an eye on my feet. After the accident, I had no sensation in my legs, which meant I couldn’t always tell if my feet were exposed or cold. But they noticed. They’d adjust a blanket, cover me up. That, of course, is an act of familial love. But it’s more than that. It’s what happens when love is part of the air a business breathes. When care isn’t siloed into “personal life” and “work life,” but moves freely across both.

Persephone, as it turns out, has been a site of care for a long time. One of our team members had a stroke. We held the job open, checked in constantly, made sure he felt part of things even when he wasn’t on site. Another became a parent — twice — and we flexed around that. Someone else needed a loan to fix her car brakes. Others have faced quieter battles — grief, anxiety, breakups, breakdowns — and found people around them who didn’t turn away.

None of this was formalized. We didn’t write “acts of love” into our employee handbook (though now that I say it, maybe we should). But the culture emerged anyway. Not perfectly, not universally, but meaningfully. Over time, through a thousand tiny actions, we built a business that didn’t just talk about community — it acted like one.

And let’s be clear: this wasn’t always easy. It’s not like we all walked around hugging and high-fiving every day. Sometimes care looks like telling the truth even when it’s hard. Sometimes love means letting someone go because the fit is wrong — and doing it with integrity, not indifference. Sometimes it means holding someone accountable because you care, not because you want to punish.

Love doesn’t mean avoiding conflict. It means staying in it. It means not reducing people to roles, or outputs, or problems to solve. It means asking, “What do you need?” — and meaning it.

This kind of culture isn’t just nice to have. It’s infrastructure. It’s what makes a company resilient when things go sideways — which, let’s face it, they often do. When people feel seen and supported, they stick around. They innovate more freely. They show up for each other. And sometimes, when life pulls the rug out from under you, they show up with blankets.

In an age of disconnection and corporate performativity, love is a kind of counterculture. It doesn’t scale easily — not through policies or org charts. It spreads through attention, through tone, through the hundred daily choices that say: “This is how we are with each other.”

And when it works, it doesn’t just change the people inside the business. It changes how the business shows up in the world. Customers notice. Partners feel it. The brand stops being a façade and becomes a mirror — reflecting back not perfection, but care.

None of this is revolutionary. It’s ancient. But it feels radical only because we’ve spent so long pretending that businesses are machines, not ecosystems. And ecosystems, as we know by now, thrive not on competition, but on cooperation. Not on abstraction, but on mutuality. Not on fear, but — say it with me — on love.

5. Love Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All (It’s Complicated)

Let’s not get carried away.

Love in the workplace isn’t simple. It isn’t always soft. And it sure as hell isn’t the same for everyone.

What feels like a warm, caring environment to one person might feel smothering to another. What feels like respectful distance to one employee might read as cold neglect to someone else. Even expressions of appreciation can land differently depending on the recipient. There’s no universal setting on the love dial.

Enter the concept of love languages — a framework from relationship psychology that many have adapted (somewhat awkwardly) to work and leadership. You’ve probably heard of them: Words of affirmation. Acts of service. Quality time. Physical touch (nope). Gifts. In a workplace setting, these often translate to appreciation, mentorship, active listening, collaborative time, thoughtful gestures.

The point isn’t to force every relationship into a framework. The point is to recognize difference. To understand that people experience and express care in different ways — shaped by upbringing, trauma, culture, and power.

And that matters, especially in leadership.

I’ve had staff members who carried deep wounds from previous workplaces — particularly, in some cases, from men in authority. For one woman who worked with us, my position of leadership — and, let’s be honest, my gender — triggered responses rooted in past experiences. She called me out repeatedly. At first, I felt defensive. Then, I tried to listen. Her manager and I engaged in what we hoped was a progressive, thoughtful disciplinary process. Ultimately, it didn’t work out. She was let go. I made sure others were involved in the process — not to protect myself, but to ensure accountability. I still carry that outcome with me. I don’t think we got it wrong, but I also know it wasn’t clean.

Another woman took years to feel heard — years of struggling to assert herself in ways that didn’t feel exaggerated or dismissed. Eventually, we got there. But it required patience on both sides. And love, even if we didn’t call it that.

Another employee — a manager — was underperforming. It took us too long to address it. That’s on me. When we finally did, we offered multiple on-ramps to stay engaged. They declined each time. Toward the end, they accused me of being nefarious — not a word you want thrown your way, especially when you’re trying to act in good faith. I had a colleague involved throughout, to ensure fairness and document the process. Still, it hurt. I think they needed to go, but it still hurt.

And yes, I’ve made mistakes. Sometimes big ones.

There was a moment in a managers’ meeting where I cracked a joke I knew was walking the line — a sexist joke. I thought we were close enough as a team to handle it, to see it for the intended irony. I was wrong. Sara and Anders both called me on it. Sara, especially, was clear: the joke wasn’t just off-colour — it betrayed the very values we claimed to hold. I was mortified. Not just because I’d offended someone, but because I’d betrayed my own principles in a moment of careless ego.

I apologized. To Sara directly, and to the whole team in writing. I was embarrassed, and I should’ve been. I’d failed. But that moment became something else, too — a test of whether love was real among us, or just a tagline. And you know what? It was real. Sara and I are stronger now. Our team grew from that experience. Not because of the joke — but because of the repair.

These stories aren’t here for redemption points. They’re here to make a point: love in business is not a fairy tale. It’s messy. It’s uneven. It asks for maturity. It requires constant learning, unlearning, and doing better next time.

And it doesn’t always move in both directions.

I’ve given years of care to this work — built systems, led teams, poured myself into it. And yet, truth be told, I rarely get explicit appreciation from staff. I’m not fishing here — I’ve been recognized in other spaces, and I know I’m valued. But in day-to-day organizational life, there’s a strange asymmetry. Leaders are expected to give care — to be emotionally available, ethically sound, financially stable, and psychologically bulletproof — and often receive very little in return.

I don’t say this to complain. I say it because I know I’m not alone.

I know B Corp founders, nonprofit leaders, and social finance innovators who haven’t taken a salary in years. Who shoulder risk invisibly. Who make payroll out of personal lines of credit. And they do it not for glory, but for belief — belief in what we’re building. But that belief needs fuel. It needs care, too. Not just critique.

And yet, somewhere along the way, we stripped love out of company culture. Maybe because the old structures were exploitative and love got tainted. Maybe because hierarchy makes people suspicious. Maybe because we’re all a little burnt out and wary of giving more than we get.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

We can reinvent love in the workplace. Not by pretending we’re a family (we’re not). But by acting like a healthy community — one where care flows in all directions. Where leadership is held with humility, but also lifted up. Where mistakes are acknowledged, but also forgiven. Where love is not weaponized, but witnessed — as real, as flawed, and as necessary.

Because the truth is, no one’s building a better world alone. And without love, why build at all?

6. Love, Like Soil, Is a Living System

By now, we’ve explored love in the culture of business. But before we wrap, let’s root this idea — quite literally — in the ground.

Because here’s the thing: nature has been modeling loving relationships all along. Scientists might call them mutualisms, symbioses, co-adaptive behaviors. But squint a little, and you’ll see them for what they are: interdependence, generosity, reciprocity — the very traits we celebrate in people we love.

Take soil and roots. The roots feed the soil through exudates — sugars, amino acids, and other secretions that attract microbial life. The microbes, in turn, help break down nutrients the plant couldn’t otherwise access. It’s a two-way gift economy, no Venmo required.

Or think of the worm and the soil: a tireless relationship of turning, aerating, and nourishing. The worm doesn’t do it out of altruism. It does it because that’s how it lives. But life begets life — and the whole system thrives.

Or sap and branch: the quiet circulation of nourishment through xylem and phloem, flowing upward, downward, outward — sustaining the structure not by brute force, but by flow. If that’s not a metaphor for good leadership, I don’t know what is.

This is why Wendell Berry — poet, farmer, prophet of common sense — insisted that good farming is an act of love. Not just in theory, but in practice. To tend the land without exploiting it. To care for your neighbour without monetizing them. To live in place, not just on it.

Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, called for a “land ethic” — an extension of moral concern to soil, water, animals, and ecosystems. His call was not a romantic plea. It was an ecological necessity: We can’t thrive in a world we treat as disposable.

And modern ecologists like Buzz Holling and Lance Gunderson have helped us understand this through the science of panarchy — the study of complex adaptive systems. They show how human and natural systems are deeply intertwined, operating in cycles of growth, release, reorganization, and renewal. In short: ecosystems feel a lot like businesses — the healthy ones, anyway. And just like in business, the ones that ignore love — that fail to value relationship, resilience, and reciprocity — are the ones most likely to collapse when the winds shift.

If you’re still thinking, “Sure, but where’s the empirical evidence?” — well, check out the 1000 Farms Initiative by the Ecdysis Foundation. They’re testing regenerative practices on real farms across the U.S. to prove that healthy ecosystems and healthy economics aren’t mutually exclusive. The data may be quantitative, but the story it tells is emotional: Farms flourish when relationships — between organisms, humans, and land — are cared for, not commodified.

And all this brings us back to the tree — the central metaphor of this book. Trees don’t grow in isolation. They are part of forests. They are connected by mycorrhizal networks. They are cared for by birds and insects and decaying leaves. A healthy tree doesn’t hoard; it exchanges. It contributes. It bends toward light, but not at the expense of its roots.

The same should be true for business.

We bend toward growth, yes — but not at the expense of our soil.

We reach for sunlight — but not alone.

We live best when our branches brush against others.

We thrive when we are fed by love.

And if that all sounds a bit too poetic for your spreadsheets, consider this:

Even spreadsheets have cells. And without love in the system, nothing multiplies — except maybe cynicism.

So here’s your quarterly KPI:

More compost. More kindness. Fewer jerks.

Because at the end of the day, love isn’t fluffy. It’s fibrous.

It’s what holds the web together — whether you’re a CEO, a sapling, or a slightly tired soil microbe wondering if anyone appreciates your work.

Spoiler: We do.

Chapter 8 v2

Section 1: Strategy Is Not a Crystal Ball (But It Should Still Be Sharp)

Strategy is not magic. It is not a map of the future. It is not a mystical act of corporate clairvoyance performed in front of a flip chart while someone tries to spell “synergy” without gagging.

And yet — we treat it that way. Or at least, I used to. I’ve sat in enough off-site retreats, wandered through enough frameworks, and scribbled enough arrows between boxes to know that we often mistake the planning of a thing for the thing itself. That if we just arrange the language just right — vision, mission, values, objectives, key results, stretch goals, hockey-stick growth — we’ll somehow be protected from the inconvenient truth that no plan survives contact with a human, a market, or a Tuesday.

So what is strategy, then?

To me — and to us at Persephone — strategy is best understood not as a static plan or a statement of intent, but as a living design. It’s a way of structuring how we respond to reality. It’s an evolving pattern of decisions that helps us stay true to what matters while dealing with what’s changing. It doesn’t pretend to predict the future. It helps us prepare to meet it — with as much clarity, humility, and creativity as we can muster.

It’s less of a fortress, more of a field kit.

And like any good tool, it needs to be well-made, well-used, and well-worn.

We Had a Business Plan — It Just Didn’t Match the Planet

Let’s not pretend we launched Persephone without a plan. We had one. It had numbers, and timelines, and some glossy optimism that now reads like the fine print of a startup fairy tale. We knew what we wanted — a farm-based craft brewery rooted in community, agriculture, and shared values — and we had a rough sketch of how to get there. But it was simplistic. It didn’t account for, say, the intricacies of ALR land use regulations, or how quickly a tractor breaks when you forget to grease the fittings.

Our plan didn’t anticipate wildfire smoke, invasive pests, labour shortages, climate weirdness, or a global pandemic. It didn’t include a tab for “CEO breaks spine in freak cycling accident.” And it certainly didn’t model out the emotional cost of caring this much for a place, a team, and a dream.

But what the plan did do — even in its naivety — was plant a flag. It gave us a sense of direction, if not a detailed map. And that, it turns out, is where real strategy begins: not with certainty, but with intention.

The first draft of any plan will be wrong. But if it’s honest, it can still be useful.

Standing on Shoulders to See What’s Next

One of the most well-worn expressions in history — often attributed to Newton, though probably borrowed from someone with less marketing budget — is that we stand on the shoulders of giants to see farther. It’s a phrase that gets tossed around in tech presentations and commencement speeches, usually just before someone claims to be “disrupting” breakfast or “revolutionizing” shoe laces.

But in this case, the phrase is both literal and deeply meaningful.

Every business — whether it’s a sleepy corner store or a climate-fintech-B Corp-social-enterprise hybrid with a mission statement you could embroider on a hemp tote bag — owes its scaffolding to those who came before. We owe debt to the thinkers who gave us tools: the Business Model Canvas, SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces, value curves, lean startup logic. We owe it to economists and ecologists, managers and marketers, publicans and permaculturists. And we owe it to the unnamed thousands who did their work quietly, thoroughly, and without a Medium post to announce it.

If Persephone has been able to experiment with using business as a force for good, it’s only because we had enough height to see farther. That visibility — to emerging social needs, to planetary thresholds, to community potential — didn’t come from ego. It came from perspective.

The evolution of business into something more life-giving isn’t about moral superiority. It’s about maturation. We’re not better than those who came before. We’re simply born later, with new challenges — and with more tools to meet them. The best thing we can do is use those tools with gratitude, critique, and care.

Structure Without Rigidity

What those tools have helped us learn is this: structure matters. But rigidity kills.

There were seasons at Persephone where we tried to grow too fast, or tried to do too many things at once (farm, brewery, events, policy change, food systems education — and sure, why not an on-site bookstore?). The ambition wasn’t the problem. The lack of adaptive structure was.

We weren’t asking, “Does this fit the plan?” — because there wasn’t one we trusted anymore. Our business plan was outdated. Our values were clear, but values alone aren’t enough. They’re a compass, not a chassis.

Eventually, we began to shape a strategy that had both spine and flexibility. We started asking different questions. What’s actually working? Where are we overreaching? What’s creating energy in the system, and what’s draining it? Where are we over-built, over-extended, or over-promised?

And we began using strategy tools not as gospel, but as scaffolding. The Business Model Canvas helped us notice our over-reliance on events. Theory of Change pushed us to differentiate between intention and outcome. Sometimes the simplest visuals — like sketching revenue sources with a crayon — created breakthroughs. Simplicity is not the enemy of insight. False certainty is.

Love as a Design Principle (Whether We Admit It or Not)

There’s something else we don’t usually name in strategy meetings, but we probably should: care.

The most durable strategic choices we’ve made at Persephone didn’t come from market data or competitive analysis. They came from love. Not the romantic kind, or the performative “we love our customers” kind printed on coffee mugs. I mean the real stuff — the kind that checks in on a struggling colleague, or pushes back on a decision because it doesn’t sit right, or lets a beloved but broken idea die with dignity.

Love, in a business context, often shows up as restraint. The decision not to exploit a loophole. The refusal to cut corners. The care to pay attention when nobody’s watching.

It can also show up as stubbornness — the kind that keeps showing up for the hard conversations, the kind that protects values in the face of pressure, the kind that redesigns a space to be accessible even when it costs more and isn’t visible on Instagram.

If strategy is how you align structure with intention, then love might just be the invisible glue that holds the alignment together. It’s the thing that stops you from drifting — into irrelevance, or indifference, or just plain exhaustion.

We don’t always name it. But it’s there, in the design. It shows up in our hiring policies, our pricing decisions, our willingness to be wrong. And as strange as it sounds, I’ve come to believe it might be the most strategic resource we have.

Section 2: Business as a Living System

We didn’t set out to build a systems-based business. I don’t think any of us even used that term at the start — unless you count “I think the irrigation system’s broken again,” or “this payroll system makes me want to scream into a barley sack.”

What we were trying to do was connect things that made sense to us: growing ingredients, making beer, inviting people in, feeding the soil, building community. It was only later — after the patterns emerged, the feedback loops kicked in, and we started accidentally quoting Donella Meadows without knowing who she was — that we realized we weren’t just running a business.

We were participating in a system. A living one.

That system was messy, beautiful, sometimes redundant, often unpredictable. But it was also how we survived. And in hindsight, it might be the most strategic thing we never formally planned.

We Farmed Into Systems Thinking

The idea of “systems thinking” sounds intimidating — like something that comes with whiteboard hieroglyphics and flow charts designed by someone with two MBAs and a nervous tic. But our version came from a more humble place: observation. Trying. Failing. Fixing. Repeating. Drinking.

Take our composting loop. We start with barley and hops, malt and water. The by-products — spent grain, hop sludge, yeast cake, even the stuff scraped from the bottom of tanks — all get hauled out back. It’s heavy, smelly, and full of potential. Our crew (often with questionable footwear choices) turns it into compost. That compost nourishes the soil. The soil grows ingredients — hops, herbs, fruit, even flowers that confuse the bees and delight the Instagrammers.

Then those ingredients come back through the brewery. Into the tank. Into the glass. Into the body. Back to the land.

If that sounds poetic, it’s not always. Sometimes the compost piles freeze, or stink, or collapse because someone (me) forgot to turn them. Sometimes the hops get mildew. Sometimes the brewhouse gets short-staffed and the grain doesn’t get hauled in time and we end up with a rodent issue we call “unscheduled protein integration.”

But even with the mess — maybe because of the mess — this system holds. Not because we designed it perfectly, but because we kept noticing what wanted to connect.

We didn’t read a systems thinking book and then apply it. We fumbled into a system, and later realized that’s what we were doing.

Circular Economy (but With Dirt Under the Fingernails)

There’s a whole literature now about circular economy, closed-loop systems, cradle-to-cradle design. I love that people are thinking this way. But I also think some of it gets abstract fast — spinning elegant diagrams where inputs become outputs and waste becomes value with suspicious ease.

The reality on the ground (and in the soil) is grittier.

The loop leaks. The truck burns diesel. The compost isn’t perfect. The hops are late. The cold chain breaks. And yet — the direction is still right.

What we’re trying to do isn’t to make a perfect loop. It’s to tighten it where we can. To shorten the distance between use and reuse. To reduce the violence of extraction, even if we can’t eliminate it. And to remind ourselves that waste is only waste if we lack the creativity or capacity to reimagine it.

If we ever get to the point where nothing is wasted, we’ll celebrate. But until then, the real achievement is this: we built a loop that teaches us. One that reminds us how things connect. One that makes it harder to lie to ourselves about consequence.

Interdependence Isn’t Just Nice — It’s Strategy

One of the most liberating shifts for us — and also one of the hardest — was realizing that nothing exists in isolation.

That sounds obvious. But in practice, it changes everything.

A decision about brewing schedule affects our farm crew. A choice about packaging impacts our wastewater load. Hosting an event changes our relationship with neighbours, with the liquor board, with our own staff’s energy. Hiring a new team member affects culture, workflow, and probably the playlist in the tasting room.

Everything ripples.

And while that can feel overwhelming, it can also be clarifying. Once you admit that you’re part of a web — not a ladder, not a pyramid, but a relational, entangled, often contradictory web — then you can start making decisions that are aligned, not just efficient.

One year, our septic system (ah, the glamour of farm-based entrepreneurship) began to strain under the dual pressures of event season and wet winters. We could’ve just paid to expand it. But instead, we used the pressure as a prompt: Should we be hosting this many events? What’s the actual return — not just financially, but in terms of staff burnout, community value, brand alignment?

That line of questioning changed how we approached everything from bathroom use to brand strategy.

Complexity isn’t the enemy. Denial of complexity is.

Complexity Doesn’t Mean Chaos

Here’s what we’ve come to believe: complexity is not something to be controlled. It’s something to be in relationship with.

Systems have patterns. Feedback. Delays. Tensions. They’re not random. But they resist prediction. Which means strategy has to become something closer to choreography than command. You don’t script every move. You learn the rhythm. You train for adaptability. You watch for changes in tempo.

We’ve learned to work within — and sometimes against — overlapping systems: agricultural zoning, liquor control regulations, labour standards, local government bylaws, public health rules, land use planning, food safety, Indigenous relationships, youth employment programs, disability access. Each of these is a system in its own right, and they often clash like unpracticed jazz musicians.

It’s not always fun. But it’s real. And the more we treat it as dance — not warfare — the better we do.

This is where love sneaks back in. Because when systems collide, the grease that keeps the gears from grinding is often relational. It’s care. It’s trust. It’s the willingness to explain — again — why we can’t pour that beer that way or host that event that late or add that product without running it past the farm crew who just replanted the orchard.

Strategy, in this view, is not an answer sheet. It’s a way of caring for complexity without running from it.

We Grow Things Better Than We Can Measure Them

And finally — a confession.

For all our talk of loops and systems and intentionality, we still struggle to measure half of what matters. Some of that’s on us. We could invest more in dashboards, metrics, KPIs, cost-benefit ratios. (We do track some of these, and thank god for the accountants and ops managers who speak fluent spreadsheet.)

But some of it just resists measurement. The mood in the room. The shift in tone. The resilience of a team that’s been through loss together. The community goodwill that shows up with lasagna when a colleague’s partner gets sick. The magic of watching someone on their first day — nervous, uncertain — start to laugh by hour three.

These things don’t show up in quarterly reports. But they’re real. And they’re strategic.

Which is to say: if you’re building a business that acts like a living system, your metrics will never be enough. You’ll also need stories. You’ll need sense-making. You’ll need people who can feel when something’s off, long before the data shows it.

This doesn’t mean abandoning rigor. It just means recognizing that living systems are known not only by counting, but by caring.

And if that sounds soft, just try running a business without it.

Section 3: Enter Panarchy — When Systems Revolve and Revolt

The first time I heard the word Panarchy, it wasn’t in an academic journal or a business workshop. It came from Al Etmanski, who introduced me — and a number of other social innovation folks — to the concept well before I ever dreamed of running a brewery. At the time, I was working in community development and disability justice, and I remember thinking the framework was powerful, maybe even profound. But it didn’t quite take root. Not right away. It sat there, like a seed in dormancy — waiting, biding time, until the conditions were right for it to sprout.

That happened years later, after Persephone was already up and running. By then, I’d seen enough cycles of growth and collapse — not just in our business, but in my own body and identity — that I started to look back at Panarchy not as an abstract model, but as a real-world lens. Something that might help explain why certain things fell apart and others flourished. Why change so often felt nonlinear. Why systems — living ones, human ones, and the organizational weirdos that exist somewhere in between — didn’t just evolve. They revolved.

Panarchy didn’t give me all the answers. But it helped me ask better questions. And more importantly, it helped me recognize patterns that, once seen, couldn’t be unseen.

The Adaptive Cycle — Patterns in Forests, Ponds, and People

Panarchy theory didn’t originate in business schools or consulting firms. It emerged from the work of ecologists like C.S. Holling and Lance Gunderson, who were studying ecosystems — specifically forest stands, lakes, and wetlands — to understand how they changed over time. What they discovered challenged the prevailing idea that systems strive for equilibrium. Instead, they saw that healthy systems weren’t stable at all. They were in constant motion — growing, accumulating, collapsing, and reorganizing in dynamic cycles.

These ecologists began mapping what they called the adaptive cycle, a recurring sequence of four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. They observed this cycle in the regrowth of forests after wildfires, in the nutrient dynamics of shallow lakes, and eventually in a wide range of complex adaptive systems — including human communities, organizations, and economies. In other words, Panarchy was not a metaphor borrowed from nature; it was a framework derived through nature, and later applied back onto human systems.

Each phase in the cycle serves a function. Growth and exploitation allow for expansion and experimentation — new shoots pushing through disturbed soil, new businesses flooding a gap in the market. Conservation builds structure and stability — a mature forest canopy, a well-oiled company with documented SOPs and a CRM system that only three people know how to use. Then, inevitably, something gives. Fire strikes. Funding dries up. A founder burns out. This is the release phase, often painful, sometimes sudden, always disruptive. Yet it’s followed by a liminal, fertile stage: reorganization. Here, the system reshuffles. New actors emerge. Old patterns decay. Space is created for renewal, invention, and sometimes — if we’re lucky — transformation.

Unlike traditional business models, which often imagine growth as a staircase or hockey stick, Panarchy invites us to think in cycles — not static loops, but dynamic, ever-evolving spirals. And perhaps most importantly, Panarchy refuses to isolate these cycles. It insists that they are nested and linked — operating at multiple scales, each influencing and being influenced by the others.

Complex Adaptive Systems and the Beauty of Entanglement

To appreciate Panarchy is to step inside the logic of complex adaptive systems — networks of interacting parts that adapt and evolve based on internal dynamics and external influences. These systems don’t follow linear cause-and-effect patterns. They exhibit emergence, feedback loops, thresholds, and nonlinear change. You don’t control them. You participate in them.

Businesses, of course, are quintessential complex adaptive systems. They are made up of people — each with emotions, histories, dreams, traumas, relationships — nested within teams, nested within departments or functions, nested within the organization itself, which exists within regulatory systems, market systems, environmental conditions, social norms, and, if you’re lucky, a few feral raccoons.

Each layer has its own adaptive cycle. But none of them spin in isolation. They tug on one another. They constrain or catalyze what’s possible. They ripple.

A tough week for your brew team because someone’s dad is in hospice care might slow down production, which pushes back deliveries, which affects cash flow, which delays that equipment order, which means the next expansion project stalls. But flip the dynamic, and it can be generative too: a surge of creativity in the tasting room sparks new product ideas, which energize the marketing team, which opens up new community partnerships, which gives the farm crew fresh purpose. The personal becomes structural. The structural becomes communal.

This nested, interlinked dynamic is what makes Panarchy so powerful — and so humbling. You realize just how deeply interdependent things really are. A change in the COO’s mental health can alter the mood of a team, which alters productivity, which alters customer experience, which alters brand perception. We often don’t recognize these linkages in the moment. But we feel them. And, if we’re lucky, we come to appreciate them in hindsight.

The Ripple Effect (and the Liberation of Small Actions)

What’s even more astonishing is that the influence doesn’t only flow downward — it can also flow upward. A shock, insight, or innovation at a lower system level can trigger transformation at higher scales. In ecology, this might be a new species of fungus that reshapes an entire forest floor. In social systems, it might be a single act of courage — a bus seat refused, a speech given, a truth spoken — that ignites a movement.

That principle isn’t just poetic. It’s practical. And deeply empowering.

Because if you’re a single person in a large system, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by complexity. Climate change, economic inequality, toxic political culture — it all feels like too much. But Panarchy reminds us that small actions — when timed well, when rooted in care, when amplified through relationship — can send shockwaves through nested systems. You might not know how far the impact goes. But that doesn’t mean it’s insignificant.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one.” That call to virtue — to act with integrity even in the face of uncertainty — is the emotional twin of Panarchy’s structural insight. Don’t wait for the system to grant you permission. Act with care. And let the cycle do the rest.

What This Means for Strategy

So what do you do with all this as a business leader, or strategist, or overcaffeinated founder trying to juggle mission, margin, and morale?

You stop thinking of strategy as a fixed plan. You stop chasing linear forecasts. You stop pretending you can optimize your way out of every complexity.

Instead, you start asking new questions:

• What phase of the adaptive cycle are we in — as individuals, as teams, as an organization?

• Where are we holding on too tightly? What needs to be released?

• What emergent energy is showing up at the edges?

• Where are we trying to scale something that actually needs to collapse?

And perhaps most importantly: How can we honour the nested nature of these systems — not just to survive, but to evolve with care?

Because Panarchy doesn’t just describe how things fall apart and come back together. It gives us a way to be in relationship with that pattern. To see the rhythms beneath the noise. To act — even when we can’t control.

And in a world increasingly defined by disruption, that might be the most strategic posture we can take.

Section 4: Panarchy in Practice

One of the uncomfortable truths about Panarchy is that you often only recognize the cycle after you’ve been spun through the wash a few times. When you’re in the thick of it — the rush of early growth, the bureaucratic cement of institutionalization, the unexpected collapse — it doesn’t feel like a pattern. It feels like chaos. Or worse, like failure.

But with distance, the shape of the cycle becomes clearer. And if you’re lucky, you start to notice the pattern while it’s still unfolding — which gives you just enough perspective to move with the disruption rather than get flattened by it.

We didn’t build Persephone Brewing with Panarchy in mind. But looking back, the cycles were always there — nested, linked, influencing one another like yeast in a warm tank: invisible, but active.

Here are three stories that show how Panarchy isn’t just a theory we’ve read — it’s a framework we’ve lived. And in some cases, barely limped through.

1. Brewing Waste, Compost Intelligence, and the Logic of Loops

In the early days, we didn’t think of spent grain as part of a system. We thought of it as… heavy. Wet. Sticky. Something to get out of the brewhouse before it turned into a wasp buffet.

But waste, in a complex adaptive system, is never just waste. It’s information.

The piles of spent grain, yeast sediment, and hop sludge were the byproduct of our production process — the trailing edge of the r→K arc. Growth and maturity produce output, yes, but also saturation. Excess. When systems reach that point, they need release.

So we shoveled it out back. Eventually, someone — possibly Anders, possibly one of our overenthusiastic farm interns — asked what would happen if we just let it break down. We started composting. Not perfectly. Not according to a white paper. Just… practically. Slowly. Sometimes with more raccoons than necessary.

That compost turned out to be gold. It fed the soil. The soil grew herbs and hops, raspberries and rhubarb, apples for cider. The stuff we once thought of as muck became the raw material for new experiments, new products, new cycles.

We didn’t set out to build a circular system. We just noticed that the loop wanted to close — and we let it. Not out of ideology, but out of attention. And yes, it’s still leaky. We still use a lot of water, a lot of energy. We don’t have the carbon accounting dashboard of our dreams. But the lesson stuck: when the release phase is cared for, it becomes reorganization. When the system is composted, it feeds the next phase.

Panarchy isn’t just for grand narratives. Sometimes it lives in the back corner of a barn, steaming gently in the fog.

2. “Save the Beer Farm”: Policy Disruption as an Adaptive Spark

This one started with a letter.

Or maybe it was a form. Some official notification that, due to Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) regulations, Persephone Brewing was not in compliance. That we weren’t “farm enough” to justify being located on farmland. That our business model — combining brewing with agriculture and community — didn’t fit the existing boxes.

Suddenly, what we had built felt like it was under threat. Years of sweat, vision, and compost were at risk of being overturned by a bureaucratic interpretation of what counted as real farming.

This was an organizational Ω moment. A disturbance. A potential collapse. And it could have gone badly — shrink operations, move off the land, pivot into something less contested. But instead, we invited the community in. Literally and figuratively.

We launched the “Save the Beer Farm” campaign. We didn’t have a war chest or a PR firm. We had relationships. Local partners. Customers who gave a damn. We hosted events, wrote op-eds, met with politicians, invited regulators to see the actual farm. People showed up. The media took interest. Policy-makers started listening.

And then something strange and beautiful happened. The reorganization phase kicked in — not just for us, but for the policy itself.

The province ultimately changed the rules. They amended the ALR guidelines to allow for more diverse, value-added farm uses. We went from potential eviction to sector-wide impact. Our crisis triggered innovation beyond our walls.

This is Panarchy in full bloom: a disturbance at one system level (Persephone’s farm use) became a catalyst for transformation at a much higher level (provincial land use policy). Nested cycles, linked in real time.

It’s easy now to retell this as a story of strategic foresight. It wasn’t. It was messy. Emotional. There were days I wanted to walk away, and others where I felt like we were carrying too much — not just for ourselves, but for every small agri-business trying to do something different.

But we didn’t walk. We acted. We cared. And we listened for what the system might be ready to become.

3. Spinal Cord Injury, Identity Shift, and Organizational Renewal

I didn’t ask for this one. There was no strategic review, no planning retreat. Just one moment — a turn, a crash, a break.

When I became paraplegic, my body entered an Ω phase that felt total. Release, in the truest and hardest sense. My old mobility was gone. My role at the brewery was instantly different. I couldn’t walk the fields. I couldn’t lift kegs. I couldn’t pretend things were fine. They weren’t.

But even in that moment — and more clearly in the months that followed — I could see the system beginning to reorganize. Not just me, learning to live differently, but the people around me. My family. My staff. My partners. My community.

My stepping back created space for others to step forward. The company, which had leaned on me more than I admitted, began to distribute leadership. Team members took initiative. Decisions were shared. People started asking new questions about design, access, inclusion, pace.

We became a different company — not because of a visioning exercise, but because of a shared response to personal crisis. My α phase became a company-wide renewal. Slowly. Unevenly. But unmistakably.

Panarchy tells us that personal and organizational cycles are nested. But living that truth is something else entirely. It’s humbling to see how deeply connected things are. My injury wasn’t just a private event. It altered culture, operations, public engagement, and — I believe — our ability to be present with others’ pain.

That might be the most important adaptive learning of all: that systems evolve not through control, but through compassion.

The Quiet Power of Disruption

What I’ve learned through these experiences — and what Panarchy makes clear — is that collapse is not the opposite of strategy. It’s part of it.

If we recognize the phase we’re in, we can move with more honesty. If we care for the system — even when it hurts — we create the conditions for reorganization. And if we stay humble enough to listen, we might even begin to anticipate the next phase before it breaks us open.

Not everything is compostable. Not every fall has a bounce. But systems want to adapt. And when we honour their cycles — as growers, brewers, business owners, citizens — we get to be part of something larger than ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we always know what’s next. It just means we trust that something is.

Section 5: The Hidden Power of Disruption

Let’s be honest: nobody writes “Collapse” on the Q4 roadmap.

There are no sticky notes at strategy off-sites that say, “Let’s lose our top staff member, blow the budget, fight with the liquor board, and spiral into a mild identity crisis by July. Then regroup.” And yet, here we are — many of our most important turning points at Persephone have come not in spite of disruption, but because of it.

Panarchy, in all its looping, adaptive elegance, suggests that collapse isn’t just a failure. It’s a phase. A necessary one. And as strange as it sounds, that knowledge can be weirdly comforting. Like realizing the storm isn’t a detour from your journey — it is the journey. Pack your raincoat.

Disruption, when held with some care and curiosity (and possibly a beer), has surprising power. It teaches what comfort won’t. It moves what inertia refuses to. It reintroduces us to ourselves — stripped of illusion, bloated planning docs, and that one product line no one liked but we kept around for sentimental reasons.

This section is about disruption’s quiet gifts — the ones we tend to unwrap after the fact, bruised but grateful.

Collapse Is Where the System Gets Honest

In Panarchy, the release phase — the Ω phase — is often where the system dumps what it’s been hoarding. Resources locked up in rigid structures suddenly become available. Energy stuck in “the way we’ve always done things” starts leaking into possibility. But that doesn’t make it pleasant. If you’ve ever been laid off, pulled the plug on a beloved program, or had your top salesperson quit and start a kombucha stand across the street, you know the feeling. Collapse is rarely gentle. But it is clarifying.

Disruption has a way of cleaning the windshield. Suddenly you can see what was in your blind spot: the culture drift, the overextension, the undercooked assumptions. The things no one questioned because “it was working fine.”

It’s like opening the fridge after a power outage. You thought everything was chill in there. Turns out, no. And also, what is that smell?

At Persephone, some of our most useful learnings came in the messiest moments. When COVID shut down our tasting room, we lost a core revenue stream. Panic? Yes. But also, clarity. We saw just how dependent we’d become on in-person events. We rethought packaging, diversified our customer base, and started treating our website like a storefront instead of a polite afterthought.

Would we have chosen that disruption? Hell no. Are we stronger because of it? Absolutely.

Comfort Is a Terrible Teacher

Comfort whispers, “Don’t change.” It says, “You’re doing great, sweetie.” It hands you a warm cookie and a vague sense that someone else will handle it. Comfort is, in some ways, what good strategy tries to preserve — stability, margin, predictability. But comfort rarely teaches. Discomfort, on the other hand, rolls up in a duct-taped van, throws open the door, and yells, “Get in. You’re about to grow.”

There’s a moment in every leader’s life — usually at 2:37 a.m., heart racing, phone face-down, worst-case scenarios breeding like fruit flies — when disruption stops being theoretical. Something breaks. Someone quits. Some regulator demands you prove that your hop yard qualifies as “meaningful ag.” And you realize, with a mix of fear and quiet resolve, that the plan isn’t coming to save you.

This is the moment disruption does its real work. Not in the headline. In the shift.

You start to ask better questions. What’s essential? What’s just legacy weight? Who’s really carrying this thing? Who needs support, not a performance review? What needs to die — lovingly, but decisively — to make room for something new?

I once heard a farmer say, “The frost teaches you what belongs.” Same goes for strategy.

Micro-Crises, Macro-Lessons

One of the most useful things about Panarchy’s nested system structure is that it dignifies the small stuff. We’re trained to look for transformation at the macro scale — sweeping policy wins, multimillion-dollar pivots, keynotes with fireworks. But often, the most important adaptive shifts begin at the tiniest levels: a frustrated employee, a stalled meeting, a glitch in the supply chain.

We had a situation once — minor, but telling — where a bottling line backed up for the third time in a week. The equipment was fine. The team was tired. Turns out, a new scheduling pattern had disrupted a delicate rhythm, and no one had flagged it because, well, we were busy.

What looked like a technical error was actually a signal from the system: “Something’s off. Pay attention.” Nested disruption. Micro-phase shift.

And that’s the trick with complex adaptive systems. You don’t always need to overhaul the whole business to initiate change. Sometimes, tending to the cycle at the smallest level — a conversation, a calendar shift, an apology — can ripple outward. It’s the butterfly effect, but with stainless steel tanks and union breaks.

Releasing What No Longer Serves (With Minimal Flailing)

Letting go is hard. Anyone who’s ever shut down a project, stepped out of a role, or retired a beloved but financially irrational product (RIP: farm yoga) knows the ache.

But systems — healthy ones — know how to release. Trees drop leaves. Muscles shed tension. Farmers rest fields. Only in business do we cling to dead things and call it innovation.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight for things that matter. We should. But there’s a difference between resilience and resistance. Resilience knows when to flex. Resistance just locks the knees and waits to fall over.

At Persephone, we’ve had to let go of programs that felt meaningful but weren’t sustainable. We’ve pulled back from events that drained more energy than they gave. We’ve simplified our offerings when we found ourselves explaining too much and selling too little. Each time, the release stung. But each time, space opened.

In farming, composting is an act of love. You let things rot on purpose so that something new might live. We’re trying to build a business that can do the same. Less flailing. More fermenting.

Disruption as a Moral Act

The word “disruption” has been hijacked by tech bros in Patagonia vests, sipping $17 coffee and claiming their app will democratize parking. But there’s an older, deeper kind of disruption — the kind tied to ethics, not ego.

Disruption, at its most useful, is a refusal to let dysfunction keep operating in peace. It’s a moral act. A demand that something change because the current form is causing harm — or at least, causing stagnation.

Think of whistleblowers. Organizers. Teachers. Care workers who refuse to work with broken systems quietly. They disrupt not because it’s fun (it’s usually not), but because something inside them says, “No. Not like this.”

That same instinct can live inside organizations. We’ve had moments at Persephone where the easiest thing would have been to let something slide — a hiring pattern, a pricing model, a vendor relationship. But care, stubborn and inconvenient, kept getting in the way.

Sometimes love doesn’t look like soft music and chamomile tea. Sometimes it looks like saying no. Rebuilding. Risking. Cutting off the limb so the rest can heal.

As Marcus Aurelius put it — and I imagine he was talking about seasonal staff and grain contracts — “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” Virtue doesn’t require victory. It just requires that we act.

Becoming a Business That Learns

If disruption is inevitable — and I’d argue it is — then the only real question is whether we’ll waste it or work with it.

Organizations that survive aren’t the ones with the best funding or the smartest strategy. They’re the ones that learn. That adapt. That say, “Well that didn’t go how we planned — what did it teach us?”

To do that, we have to treat disruption not as a betrayal, but as a teacher. One who shows up uninvited, drinks all the beer, and still somehow leaves us wiser.

If we can build organizations that expect disruption — that plan for compost, not just harvest — then maybe we won’t just weather change. Maybe we’ll grow through it.

Even if it smells like yeast and heartbreak for a little while.

Section 6: Designing for Impermanence

At some point, you realize everything’s going to change — and not in a gentle, Oprah-voice kind of way. No, more like the floor shifts, your plan unravels, your “must-have” app gets discontinued, and someone says “We’ve always done it this way” right before the ceiling falls in.

This isn’t a failure of strategy. It’s the nature of reality. Businesses, bodies, beer recipes, branding trends, team dynamics, supply chains, personal convictions — all of them change. Some slowly. Some overnight. Some with ceremony. Some with a quiet “oh no” whispered into a spreadsheet.

And yet, we plan as if permanence is a feature, not a fantasy. As if we’ll find the perfect model, freeze it in amber, and pass it along to our successors like a family heirloom. Never mind that the moment you laminate a strategy, the world reshuffles its deck and plays a card you didn’t know existed.

Designing for impermanence isn’t giving up on structure. It’s giving up on control. It’s acknowledging that systems live and die — and that’s not a design flaw. It’s the whole gig.

Nothing Lasts (Not Even This Chapter)

You could fill a bookshelf with books promising how to build a business that lasts. You could also fill a compost bin with those same books after ten years of reality testing. This isn’t to say longevity isn’t a worthy goal — but let’s be clear-eyed about what kind of longevity we’re talking about.

We’re not building cathedrals here. We’re not carving our operating models into granite and hiding them in a pyramid for future generations to misinterpret. We’re building systems that breathe. Businesses that pulse. That sweat. That forget things and remember them again, sometimes a little sideways.

At Persephone, there have been seasons where everything felt like it was just beginning — ideas sprouting, teams humming, beer flowing like gospel. And then, not long after, something shifted. A key staff member left. A regulation changed. The market sneezed. And suddenly, we weren’t in the same system anymore. The rules had changed, and our beautifully crafted strategies looked like an instruction manual for a product no longer in stock.

Impermanence isn’t just a Buddhist concept or a Stoic coping mechanism. It’s an operating condition. Once you accept that, the goal stops being to make things last forever. It becomes to make things matter while they last. And, where possible, to leave behind the kind of compost that helps something new grow.

The Myth of the Legacy Move

There’s this myth, especially in founder culture, that the goal is to build something “that lasts long after I’m gone.” Sounds noble. Also sounds like a bit of an ego trip wrapped in succession planning.

Here’s the truth: most of what we build will change. Our companies will evolve. Our principles will be reinterpreted. Our clever innovations will be replaced by something that’s hopefully more effective and less likely to crash on Tuesdays.

And that’s okay. More than okay — it’s necessary.

Because if we do our jobs right, we won’t just build businesses that replicate what we did. We’ll build systems that know how to evolve. We’ll build cultures that reward questioning. We’ll build strategies that know how to fall apart gracefully — like a good croissant or an emotionally stable founder post-exit.

Our job isn’t to insulate the future from change. It’s to hand it the tools to work with it.

So maybe the real legacy isn’t a company that lasts forever. It’s a company that lasts long enough to do good work, teach its people how to listen, and then — when it’s time — lets go with some damn grace.

Building for Wind, Not Weather

A lot of business planning still treats volatility like a temporary condition. “Things are wild right now,” someone will say, as if the chaos is just a seasonal storm and soon we’ll return to some mythical era of calm spreadsheets and predictable margins.

But what if the volatility is the climate now?

Designing for impermanence means building windbreaks, not bunkers. It means preparing your business to bend without breaking. To flex when things shift. To release what’s no longer working before it becomes dead weight. And to do it all without becoming brittle from the pressure of pretending it’s not happening.

At Persephone, we’ve had to let go of some dearly held ideas. The belief that we could be everything to everyone. The hope that running events would always make financial sense. The dream that local government might return emails before the next fiscal year. Gone. Released. Filed under: nice while it lasted.

But what’s stayed — what’s deepened — is the ability to respond. To learn. To be wrong and recover. That’s not weatherproofing. That’s climate maturity.

We’re not invincible. But we’re mobile. And sometimes, that’s better.

Death, Decay, and the Hopeful Mess of Renewal

One of the most misunderstood parts of Panarchy — and systems thinking in general — is the idea that things falling apart is a problem. It’s not. It’s a function.

If you’ve ever had to rip out an invasive plant, rework a broken compensation model, or shut down a promising product line that just wouldn’t take, you know the heartbreak. You also know the relief.

Because letting go creates space. Decay makes nutrients available. Death, uncomfortable as it is to name in business contexts (unless you’re in “killer pitch mode”), is not the end of value — it’s often the redistribution of it.

Think of a role that was eliminated. Yes, someone lost a title — maybe even a job. But did it also clarify responsibilities? Unblock a team dynamic? Free up budget for something more aligned?

That’s not ruthless. That’s responsible. That’s responsive. That’s designing for impermanence without pretending you’re building an empire.

Also: if we can’t let go of things at work, we’re probably not doing it well in life either. And nobody wants to be the person clinging to a Jenga tower yelling “This is fine!” as it wobbles toward collapse.

The Last (Unstable) Word

So here we are — full cycle.

You start with a dream. You build something. You protect it. It starts to calcify. Something breaks. You panic. You grieve. You learn. You adapt. You grow something else. And then, just as you start to feel comfortable again… another tremor. Another chance to evolve.

It’s exhausting. It’s beautiful. It’s called being alive.

The longer I do this work — build things, break things, rebuild — the more I’m convinced that the best strategy is the one that can survive its own obsolescence. The one that doesn’t need to be right forever, but useful for now. The one that knows its time will come, and doesn’t confuse that with failure.

So if you’re in the conservation phase? Don’t panic — but don’t hold too tight.

If you’re collapsing? You’re not broken. You’re releasing.

If you’re reorganizing? Take your time. There’s no rush to pretend you’ve figured it out.

And if you’re in full growth mode? Enjoy it. Just keep one eye on the compost pile.

Designing for impermanence doesn’t mean giving up on what matters. It means knowing what matters enough to let it change.

Because even the best chapters end.

Even this one.

But if we’ve done it right, the next page will have something new — not because we preserved what was, but because we prepared for what could be.

And if not, well… there’s always beer.

Chapter 9 v2

Section 1: The Honest Autopsy — Reading the Rings of a Living Business

There’s a reason no one cuts down a tree just to see how it’s doing. The rings are private. Hidden. A kind of woodgrain diary, etched year by year in alternating bands of flourish and restraint. You can walk past a Douglas fir that’s older than Confederation, and unless it’s been chainsawed by a particularly sentimental arborist, you’ll have no idea what that tree has lived through. Droughts. Fires. Invasive beetles. Love songs from squirrels. Entire industries have risen and fallen while that tree just… stood there. Taking notes.

But here’s the thing: trees are always recording.

And if we had any sense, we’d do the same.

The science of reading these records is called dendrochronology, which is a deliciously clunky word meaning “the study of time through trees.” (Dendron = tree. Chronos = time. Logos = fancy Greek suffix that means we can probably publish this in Nature.) Dendrochronologists use these rings to date everything from ancient architecture to climate shifts to volcano eruptions. That timber frame holding up the barn might just contain a thousand years of weather data—if you know how to read it.

Turns out, trees remember what we forget.

The World’s Most Honest Historians

Let’s start with the basics. Growth rings form because trees grow faster in the spring and slower in the fall. The light part of the ring is springtime wood—lush, exuberant, full of water and hope. The dark band is late-season wood—denser, slower-growing, built for endurance. You get one ring per year, more or less. But within that ring lies a full biography of conditions: rainfall, temperature, pest pressure, soil nutrients, fire, pollution, even moonlight. (Okay, not moonlight, but it sounds poetic, doesn’t it?)

The width of a ring tells you how generous the year was. The shape and density tell you how the tree responded. Was it basking in sunlight or fighting for it? Was it stretching up or holding on?

Some trees have scars that form after lightning strikes or after a nearby tree falls and opens a patch of light. These scars don’t mean the tree is broken. They mean the tree adapted. And if that’s not a metaphor for business, I don’t know what is.

Dendrochronology has even been used to cross-date trees from different locations, aligning their rings like a jigsaw puzzle of ecological memory. Want to know when a long-dead building was constructed in the American Southwest? Check the beams. Want to match it to a volcanic eruption? Compare it to trees in Alaska. Trees don’t lie, embellish, or forget. They record faithfully, even when no one is looking.

Imagine if our businesses did the same.

The Case for Slicing Your Business in Half (Metaphorically)

Which brings us to us. Because while no one’s likely to fell your company with a chainsaw and count the lines inside the office drywall, your business has rings too. You’ve just likely buried them under HR policies, old Dropbox folders, and that unopened folder called “Lessons Learned” that everyone quietly agreed to ignore.

We all have rings:

• The first year of giddy overwork when everything felt like a win.

• The year the market turned, and the spreadsheets became scary bedtime stories.

• The year of the rebrand, or the new product line, or the team walkout.

• The quiet recovery that followed, where nothing looked great on paper but something in the soul of the business began to shift.

If you’ve been around more than a minute, you’re not just a company—you’re a layered organism. The question is: have you ever stopped to count your rings?

Not the superficial year count—“we were founded in 2013, so we’re 12 years old.” That’s just math. I’m talking about the rings that matter. The ones that carry story, scar, and strategy. The ones you can feel even if you can’t name them.

The Subtle Science of Seasonal Business Memory

Here’s the kicker: the most valuable rings might be the ones you didn’t notice forming.

The year you made less money but discovered what your team could actually handle.

The year the community rallied behind you, not because your beer was better, but because your values were visible.

The year you stopped chasing trends and started paying attention to what your land, your people, and your instincts were telling you.

There’s a subtlety here that most business books miss. Not every ring is a victory lap. Some are adaptation curves—records of endurance, not expansion. And that’s okay. Trees don’t aim for maximum girth every year. (Although let’s be honest, Maximum Girth would be a hell of a name for a double IPA.)

This is where tree rings teach us humility. Because they’re not strategic. They don’t plan. They respond. They grow when they can, hold back when they must, and adapt without whining to a podcast audience. They don’t fake momentum. They don’t rebrand failure as “learning opportunities.” They just grow.

What If Businesses Were More Like Trees?

Let’s pretend for a moment that every decision you make this quarter—every hire, every product tweak, every sweaty morning trying to make payroll—is contributing to a future ring.

Now imagine that one day, long after you’re gone, someone will slice through your company metaphorically (or literally, depending on your filing system) and count those rings.

What will they see?

• Will they see consistent, slow, intentional growth?

• Or sporadic bulges of activity followed by long periods of atrophy?

• Will they see trauma, but also recovery?

• Will they see values etched into the grain?

• Will they know what mattered to you—not because you said it, but because you grew that way?

This chapter, and this section in particular, is an invitation to start looking at your business as a living system with memory. To consider that your past isn’t just behind you—it’s holding you up. Like heartwood. Like a scaffold made from every weird, hard, beautiful year you survived.

So, before we dive into specific Persephone growth rings (yes, there will be chickens), take a moment. Close your laptop, squint thoughtfully into the distance, and ask:

What are my rings telling me?

And more importantly: What kind of ring am I growing right now?

Section 2: Tree Rings Don’t Lie — But They Do Judge Silently

Tree rings are honest.

Uncomfortably so. They don’t soften the story or offer PR spin. They don’t frame things as “learning moments” or bury a rough year behind a glossy rebrand. Tree rings say: this is what happened. And more than that, this is how I responded.

It’s not just what the world did to the tree. It’s what the tree did in return.

In this way, trees are better storytellers than most founders. No elevator pitch. Just structure. Just memory. Just… evidence.

And here’s where things get awkward: if your business was sliced open today, what would the rings say about you? And would you try to talk over them?

Panarchy on Parade

Let’s zoom out for a second. You might remember from earlier chapters (or your dusty copy of Ecology for Overachievers) that nature operates in nested adaptive cycles—what the brainy folks call Panarchy.

The short version: every living system grows, accumulates, releases, and regenerates. Slowly. Non-linearly. With overlapping feedback loops at multiple scales. Forests, ponds, economies, organizations, households—all doing the same four-part dance of growth, conservation, collapse, renewal.

Tree rings are the biological autobiography of that cycle. They’re like timestamps on the spiral staircase of life: “Here’s the year I expanded. Here’s when I held tight. Here’s when the deer chewed off half my bark and I had to focus on not dying.”

That same pattern applies to any business worth its compost. The growth years, the holding patterns, the breakdowns, and the bounce-backs—they all leave a mark. But here’s the kicker: the marks don’t just say what happened. They say what you valued enough to preserve, and what you were flexible enough to release.

You Can’t BS a Tree Ring

Let’s say you’re telling your team a story about the time you bravely held the line during a market downturn. “We didn’t lay anyone off,” you say. “We held our values. We rode it out.”

Nice story. Warm. Uplifting.

But if we had growth rings for businesses—and I mean real, physical ones—what would we find?

• Did you freeze all innovation that year?

• Did you make strategic hires or hide in a spreadsheet bunker?

• Did you double down on community engagement, or ghost the world while quietly cutting all non-essential expenses, including coffee?

• Did your culture hold together… or did it quietly unravel, ring by ring?

The ring doesn’t lie. The ring remembers. And unlike that “Leadership in Crisis” keynote you gave two years later, the ring doesn’t require applause.

There’s something wonderfully brutal about that.

The Ghost Rings of Business

Some trees grow what are called false rings—secondary growth bands that show up in the same season due to temporary stress or sudden shifts in water or temperature. These can be confusing for dendrochronologists, who expect one ring per year. But real life is messier than the textbook.

And business? Business is a false-ring festival.

• The new product launch that looked like growth, but was really a panic response to declining core sales.

• The year you hired too fast, looked big on LinkedIn, and quietly shrank your soul.

• The moment you added “regenerative” to your brand deck without having a single clue what your soil organic matter was doing.

False rings are about appearances. But over time, they get found out. The next few years expose whether that surge was real—or just cosmetic muscle from an AdWords binge.

The trees know. They keep the record.

The Rings of Regret (and Renewal)

Of course, not every narrow ring is a mistake. Some are necessary constrictions—the years where you pulled back, focused, protected your team, or just did what you had to do to stay standing.

These aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of responsiveness.

In fact, some of the strongest wood forms under stress. Slow growth leads to denser fibres. It’s not the photogenic stuff, but it’s what holds up a canopy in a storm.

If you’re reading this and wincing at your own last few rings, good. That means you care. It also means you might be ready to stop bullshitting yourself about what “growth” is supposed to look like.

Judgment-Free Zone (Mostly)

Despite the subtitle of this section, tree rings don’t actually judge. They’re not passive-aggressively circling your mistakes like a red Sharpie. They just exist. A matter-of-fact record of survival.

It’s us who project the shame, the pride, the narrative arcs.

That’s fine. Stories are how we learn. But let’s at least tell the right ones. Let’s stop pretending that every year has to be wide, or every pivot has to be profound.

What if, instead, we measured success by the honesty of the ring? By whether it reflected what actually mattered to us—our people, our place, our values—not just our margins?

Flashback to the Roots

Let’s connect this back to Chapter 2 for a moment. You remember the roots—the deep values, the fungal networks of purpose, the stuff beneath the surface that actually nourishes the tree?

Well, guess what? Those roots are what shape the ring.

You don’t get resilient rings from weak values. You don’t get coherent years from chaotic ethics. When your roots are shallow, the first drought sends cracks all the way to the bark.

But when your roots are deep—when your purpose has been stress-tested, when your culture is more than a mural in the staff kitchen—then the ring will hold. Even when the season sucks.

So yes, rings tell us about the year. But they also tell us about the system the year was part of.

TL;DR: Count Your Damn Rings

This isn’t a call for nostalgia. It’s a call for structural memory.

Because we don’t do this enough in business. We chase “what’s next” with such manic energy that we forget to trace where we’ve already been. Or what it cost us to get here. Or what we left behind.

So take a breath.

Pull out your metaphorical coring tool (or your actual financials, staff survey results, and that dusty “Lessons from the Year” doc you meant to read back in January). And listen to the rings.

They’re not judging you. Not really.

But they are watching. Silently. Stoically. Like a 70-year-old cedar that’s seen some shit.

Section 3: The Startup Curve is a Lie (And Also a Terrible Tattoo Idea)

In the sacred scrolls of startup mythology, no symbol is held in higher esteem than the hockey stick graph. It’s a fixture in pitch decks, business accelerator keynotes, and the motivational posters of incubator walls everywhere. The curve starts flat—quiet, humble, patient. And then, with the suddenness of divine intervention or a viral tweet, it shoots upward in a perfect arc of exponential growth. This, we are told, is what success looks like. It’s elegant. Predictable. Worthy of framing.

And it’s also fiction.

Real growth doesn’t resemble a hockey stick so much as it does a spiral staircase in an old lighthouse—tight turns, uneven steps, and the occasional seagull shitting on your head. It doubles back on itself, hesitates at landings, and sometimes drops you off somewhere you didn’t intend to go. If you want straight lines, try drawing them with a ruler in a hurricane.

When we started Persephone, we didn’t sketch out a formal growth curve. We were farmers and brewers, not consultants. But if you’d asked us back then to diagram our hopes, the line would’ve trended sharply upward. We imagined a clear trajectory—start with a hopyard, launch a few beers, build a community of customers and co-owners, win some awards, and then steadily scale up into our vision of regenerative beer utopia. That wasn’t hubris, exactly. It was more like earnest optimism, lightly marinated in inexperience.

And for a little while, it looked like we were on track. The first couple years brought media buzz, community energy, and tangible momentum. We expanded production, planted more hops, hired staff, and added new sales channels. From the outside, it looked a lot like that mythical hockey stick. The line was going up.

But then came the friction points that no graph ever seems to chart. The regulatory fight with the Agricultural Land Commission. The stress of cash flow juggling. The existential questions about whether we were growing too fast, or not fast enough. The tricky balance between our community-first values and the unforgiving math of a seasonal business. It wasn’t a crash. It was just… complex. And the graph didn’t have a line for that.

Here’s what we came to understand: growth doesn’t move in a straight line. Not for trees. Not for ecosystems. Not for businesses trying to align their daily decisions with long-term purpose.

Instead, growth tends to move in spirals. It returns to familiar themes—capacity, purpose, clarity, overwhelm—but with new information, different constraints, and (hopefully) a bit more humility. You don’t graduate out of the hard stuff. You revisit it with a deeper understanding of how everything is connected.

In ecology, we see this everywhere. Trees spiral upward, roots spiral downward, vines spiral around whatever’s nearby. Even soil systems—those gloriously chaotic biomes beneath our feet—operate in layered, cyclical patterns of decomposition and renewal. What looks like stalling or backtracking from above may actually be an essential reorganization happening below.

We saw this in ourselves too. Some years looked flat from a revenue perspective, but were rich in learning and integration. Others were bursting with new product launches and market expansion, but left us culturally strained and unsure whether we were still on mission. The most mature seasons often followed the most turbulent ones—not because we conquered anything, but because we’d been humbled enough to listen more carefully. To our staff. To our customers. To the land.

The business world doesn’t often celebrate this kind of spiral development. It likes big moves and bold bets and quarterly leaps. But we’ve learned that integration years matter. So do years of consolidation. Even plateaus—those dreaded flat years—can serve as rest stops. Time to metabolize what’s come before, to stabilize systems, to reconnect with the “why” before charging ahead into another cycle.

None of this fits on a hockey stick graph. But it fits in a tree ring. Some years are dense and tight. Some are wide and exuberant. Some are distorted by stress, others shaped by sudden light. Taken individually, they don’t reveal much. But in sequence, they tell the story of a living system that has responded, adapted, and endured.

That’s why, if we ever did tattoo our growth story, we’d skip the hockey stick. We’d opt for the asymmetrical spiral, or better yet, a messy but faithful cross-section of wood grain—something uneven and a little scorched, but undeniably real. Because that’s what we are: not a startup chasing a curve, but a business growing by responding to conditions, one ring at a time.

Section 4: Persephone’s Ring Calendar

If you could slice Persephone Brewing down the middle—not in an M&A kind of way, but with a metaphorical coring tool—you’d find a cross-section riddled with stories. Some wide with celebration. Others thin and bruised. But all of them part of the living architecture that holds us up.

We don’t have a ring for every year. Some years deserve more than one. Others blend quietly into those around them, like a season that did its job without drama. But there are a few we can point to with the clarity of hindsight and say: That was a ring year. Something shifted. Something stuck.

What follows isn’t a chronology so much as a dendrochronology—a memory map etched in wood and grit.

2013: The Seed Ring

This was the year Persephone was born—or, perhaps more accurately, the year the seed coat cracked. August 21st, 2013, to be exact, marked the first beer sold. It wasn’t just a transaction. It was a signal: the dream was now real enough to drink.

We were already farming, planting the first rows of hops that would stretch toward the Gibsons sky in slow, eager spirals. We didn’t know much about trellising or lupulin ratios, but we did know we wanted to create something rooted—both in place and in purpose. It was a year of germination, of muddy boots, and of optimism slightly stronger than our capital reserves.

This ring is wide but soft. Full of promise. A little naive. Like any true first ring.

2014: The Community Harvest Ring

In our second year, we did something both practical and quietly profound: we invited the community to help harvest the hops.

They came in flannel and gumboots, with baskets and kids and an enthusiasm that made up for their general inexperience. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing people yank vines and laugh while doing it, even if half the hops ended up in Instagram shots instead of drying racks.

These annual harvests became ritual. They weren’t efficient, exactly, but they were effective. They drew people into the ecosystem. They made the work visible, the beer traceable, and the place feel shared.

This ring, if you could see it, would sparkle just a little. Not with revenue—there wasn’t much—but with connection.

2015: The Regulatory Ring (a.k.a. The Ring of Bureaucratic Fire)

Then came the curveball. Or more accurately, the curve filing—a dispute with the Agricultural Land Commission that questioned whether brewing beer on farmland was a righteous act of agricultural expression or a zoning violation in artisanal disguise.

We believed we were advancing farm-based value creation. They suspected we might be operating a cleverly disguised bar. What followed was a year of hearings, letter-writing campaigns, legal limbo, and public outcry. We learned more about land use policy that year than most developers learn in a career.

This ring? Tight. Tense. Etched with frustration but also laced with solidarity. The community rallied. The press took notice. And we emerged more grounded in our belief that values don’t mean much until they’ve been tested.

2017: The Chicken Coop and Warehouse Ring

This is the year we moved the chickens and built a warehouse, which sounds like a country song, but was actually a strategic inflection point.

We needed space. Not just to store grain or cans, but to grow into the version of ourselves that could meet increasing demand without cracking under logistical pressure. Moving the coop wasn’t symbolic—it was literal. And slightly chaotic. Chickens, as it turns out, are not great fans of change.

The warehouse, on the other hand, gave us room to breathe. It also marked a maturing phase—more infrastructure, more capacity, more clarity about the size and shape of the business we were becoming.

This ring is solid. Functional. Less romantic than earlier years, but undeniably important.

2018: The Chicken Orchard Ring

The following year, we planted what became known as the chicken orchard—a living experiment in regenerative agriculture, where trees, hens, and understory crops coexisted in a kind of messy harmony.

It wasn’t a cash cow. It was a values play—a gesture toward what farming could look like when you let ecosystems guide design. The chickens fertilized the soil. The trees shaded the chickens. The whole system whispered, “You’re on the right track,” even if it wasn’t writing thank-you notes in the form of profit.

This ring was philosophical. Nutrient-dense. The kind of growth that doesn’t show up in QuickBooks but rewires your sense of what’s possible.

2017–2023: The Ownership Rings (Crowdfunding, in Waves)

Over the course of six years, we ran three crowdfunding campaigns—in 2017, 2021, and 2023. Each was a financial necessity, yes, but also a declaration: we are not building this alone.

Opening the company to community shareholders wasn’t just about capital. It was about redefining ownership as participation. The campaigns brought in hundreds of new co-owners—some beer nerds, some social investors, some curious neighbours who believed in the project more than they understood the risk.

Each round left a ring. Not just in the cap table, but in the ethos. It shifted how we thought about accountability, communication, and what it means to steward a business on behalf of others.

These rings glow with fingerprints. They’re a little chaotic, a little mismatched, but very much alive.

2020: The COVID Ring (Already Covered, But Worth Mentioning Twice)

As described earlier, this was a paradoxical year. What could have been our most stunted ring—tight, brittle, compromised—turned out to be unexpectedly robust. Thanks to a well-timed rebrand, a pivot toward food delivery for vulnerable neighbours, and the sheer advantage of outdoor space, we made it through with strength.

This ring is both scar and flex. Not because we thrived while others suffered, but because we stayed rooted when the wind hit hardest.

2023–2024: The Deep Losses Ring

The most recent ring—still forming as this chapter is written—is narrow, fibrous, and carrying weight we didn’t ask for. Inflation, supply chain pressure, rising costs across the board… and a year-end financial statement that felt more like a sigh than a number.

It’s tempting to judge this ring harshly. But it deserves respect. It speaks of perseverance, recalibration, and the unglamorous truth of trying to hold a complex, values-based enterprise together in the face of late-capitalist absurdity.

This ring may not impress investors, but it should earn quiet admiration from anyone who’s tried to grow something that matters.

What About This Year’s Ring?

It’s still forming. We don’t know what shape it will take, what conditions it will respond to, or what story it will someday tell. But we do know this: it will be part of us. And the next one will be, too.

Because this is the rhythm now. Not just building, but becoming. One ring at a time.

Section 5: Growth by Experiment (a.k.a. Throwing Compost at the Wall)

There are businesses that scale with surgical precision—clean, linear, strategic. And then there are those of us who grew more like a compost pile: warm in the centre, a little wild at the edges, and steaming unexpectedly in places we didn’t plan.

Persephone has never been a five-year-plan kind of outfit. At best, we’ve been a five-month, trust-your-gut, keep-it-mostly-upright kind of place. Our growth wasn’t orchestrated in spreadsheets; it was discovered in soil, in cans, in event calendars, and in the ever-evolving responses from our staff and community.

We learned to make decisions the way good gardeners do: plant a few things, see what takes, rip out the ones that bolt too fast, and listen when the bees seem happier than the board.

It wasn’t elegant. But it worked.

The Experimentation Ethos

We didn’t set out to build a brewery that doubled as a farm, an events venue, a social enterprise, a classroom, and a borderline therapy dog sanctuary. That happened because we tried things.

Some were strategic. Some were pure instinct. Some were the result of well-intentioned brainstorming sessions fuelled by late-night coffee and a misplaced belief that you can, in fact, get a zoning variance in under six weeks.

Over time, a rhythm emerged: we’d spot an opportunity or a need, try something small, squint at the results, and decide whether to scale, shelve, or compost. That rhythm became a kind of muscle. It taught us that you don’t have to be right all the time. You just have to stay open—to feedback, to failure, and to the signs that something unexpected is quietly taking root.

The Regenerative Power of Low-Stakes Failure

One of the hidden benefits of being bootstrapped and values-driven is that you’re generally too broke to make catastrophic mistakes. Which is great. Because it forces you into a discipline of low-stakes failure—trying little things, watching carefully, and letting the failures break down into nutrient-rich insight.

Some call it agile development. We called it “eh, let’s give it a go.”

We brewed experimental beers that didn’t always land. We hosted events that flopped, fundraisers that overperformed, workshops that should have been emails, and infrastructure projects that taught us more about drainage than anyone wanted to know.

And yet, almost every failed experiment added something to the system. Sometimes knowledge. Sometimes humility. Sometimes a beautiful mistake that bloomed into a new product or process.

The point isn’t that we failed gloriously. The point is that we gave ourselves permission to fail at all, without it being fatal. And that built a culture—not of recklessness, but of responsiveness.

From Crowdfunding to Chicken-Orcharding

A few of our most enduring features started as modest experiments:

• The chicken orchard, now a regenerative case study, began as a quirky idea with a permaculture diagram and a free Saturday.

• Our first crowdfunding campaign was equal parts hope and hustle—a way to fund infrastructure, sure, but also a way to invite people in.

• The Tough Kegger? A logistical headache on paper. A community cult classic in real life. No one asked for it. But once it happened, we couldn’t not do it again.

Each of these had what you might call ecosystem logic—they didn’t just benefit us. They generated positive externalities. They created stories, relationships, pollination. They made people feel like they belonged.

That’s not always the case in business. But when you let your experiments be shaped by values—not just revenue potential—you end up with rings that hold more than just income. They hold meaning.

Composting the Ones That Didn’t Work

Some experiments didn’t pan out.

We brewed a beer in partnership with a cause we didn’t research properly. We launched a program that wasn’t resourced enough to thrive. We tried new systems that overcomplicated what had previously just… worked.

At Persephone, we don’t run official post-mortems. We don’t gather around a whiteboard and dissect what went wrong in front of a stack of gluten-free muffins. Our debriefs are usually more organic. A conversation in the field. A shrug over a beer. A quiet decision not to do that thing again.

But what we do have is a culture of composting. Not just in the literal sense (although yes, that too), but in the way we process experience. We let things break down. We turn it over. We grow from it. Mistakes aren’t buried—they’re repurposed.

And that’s the difference between learning and accumulating shame. One feeds the next season. The other just makes you twitch when someone brings up Q3.

Learning from Nature, Not Just Reports

Nature doesn’t issue quarterly earnings. It doesn’t hit KPIs. It adapts. It responds to pressure, to opportunity, to shifts in sunlight. It tries, fails, adjusts, and seeds the future with what survives.

Our growth strategy wasn’t handed down on a stone tablet. It was shaped by weather, margins, and gut calls in parking lots. But the more we practiced that kind of iterative thinking, the more we came to trust it. Not as a fallback, but as a methodology.

We started watching what the land was telling us. We stopped forcing product launches just because it was Q4. We noticed when people’s energy was off and adjusted timelines accordingly. We created space for seasonal rhythm—not as a metaphor, but as a literal design principle.

The business didn’t just grow. It started to self-organize. It started to resemble an ecosystem that was learning how to be itself.

The Quiet Genius of Trying Anyway

Here’s the thing about experimentation: it rarely feels genius when you’re doing it. More often, it feels like fumbling. Like amateur hour. Like making it up as you go—which, let’s be honest, you are.

But over time, those little experiments accumulate. They stack. They teach. They shape the culture into something resilient, curious, and quietly brave.

You don’t need a lab coat or an MBA to be an experimental organization. You need only two things: a willingness to try and a refusal to waste the compost.

At Persephone, we still throw things at the wall to see what sticks. But we’ve gotten better at checking the wall first. We’ve learned that experimentation doesn’t mean chaos—it means care. The kind of care that listens, that notices, that learns fast and forgives faster.

And when something doesn’t work? We don’t panic.

We stir it back into the pile and wait for the next season.

Section 6

Section 6: Tough Keggers and Other Rings of Joy

Not every ring forms in pain. Some are shaped by joy—by laughter echoing through the forest, the clink of shared glasses at sunset, and the brilliant absurdity of four grown adults hauling a water-filled keg through the woods for no discernible reason other than love, sweat, and community pride.

At Persephone, we’ve come to understand that joy is not decorative. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s structural. A load-bearing beam in the ecosystem of a regenerative business. And the rings it leaves behind? They’re not just memories. They’re blueprints.

This is the ring chapter made of laughter lines, sore legs, gold medals, and the radical notion that fun is as essential as finance. Or, as we’ve formalized it in our list of Operating Principles: “Have fun, or don’t come to work.”

The Tough Kegger: Why Yes, That Is a Keg on Your Shoulder

What started as a tongue-in-cheek idea—half inspired by mud runs, half by farmers who really needed a reason to blow off steam—quickly evolved into one of Persephone’s defining traditions. The Tough Kegger became our muddy, heart-pounding, grin-stretching love letter to all things community, chaos, and craft.

Each team of four—often mixed gender, always fully committed—was given a single water-filled keg. The course? A roughly 7-kilometre loop through forest trails, logging roads, fields, and occasionally someone’s backyard, if we’re being honest. It began and ended at the farm, but in between was a topographic buffet of obstacles, elevation, and “how the hell are we going to carry this thing down that hill?”

And no, the kegs weren’t filled with beer. We’re reckless, not wasteful.

The rules were simple: keep your team together, keep the keg intact, and try not to lose your shoes in the mud. Creativity was encouraged. Costumes were common. There were banana suits, tutus, synchronized chants, and at least one team that used the race as an excuse to debut matching kilts. There was never a tire flip, but frankly, we now regret that omission.

It was silly. It was strenuous. It was completely brilliant.

Why It Mattered (And Still Does)

The Tough Kegger wasn’t built for ROI. It didn’t show up in our financial statements with a tidy net profit margin. But it gave us something more valuable: a ring made of sweat, laughter, and belonging.

It created the kind of social glue that no amount of team-building workshops or laminated core value posters could replicate. People showed up not just to compete, but to cheer, to volunteer, to cook pancakes, to take photos, to be part of it. Staff. Neighbours. Total strangers who’d heard about “the beer race with the mud and the keg thing.”

Events like this don’t just grow customer loyalty. They grow cultural root systems. They deepen the network of relationships that hold everything together during the inevitable droughts and downturns.

We still talk about the best costumes. The weirdest wipeouts. The time someone tried to carry the keg solo and nearly disappeared into a blackberry bush. These aren’t footnotes. They’re part of our operating system. Joy is a nutrient, and this event fed us in ways no spreadsheet ever could.

Sunshine Coast Beer Festivals: One of Our Babies, All Grown Up

Another joyful ring formed when we launched the Sunshine Coast Beer Festival—an event we initially founded and ran ourselves, complete with vendor wrangling, table layout debates, and more extension cords than we ever thought we’d need.

For the first few years, it was ours: a celebration of the Coast’s emerging beer scene, an invitation to locals and visitors alike to taste what the region was becoming. It featured music, community partners, food trucks, and, of course, generous pours from a mix of passionate brewers.

But as it grew, we did something that felt both unnatural and exactly right: we let it go.

We handed the festival off to the Gibsons Public Market, where it evolved into their annual fundraiser. The event lives on, bigger and better than we could have managed on our own. And every time we see it flourish—when we see the tents go up, the glasses clink, the coast come alive—we feel a kind of quiet pride.

It’s not the only project we’ve spun off over the years. It’s become a bit of a pattern. Seed something. Nurture it. Then trust the ecosystem to take it from there. Some businesses scale through control. We’ve found another way—generative succession. It’s slower, but it leaves healthier rings.

The Glory of the Gold (and the Humility of What Comes After)

Not all joy is raucous. Some of it comes with a gold medal and a small burst of validation.

Our Dry Irish Stout has the distinction of having won back-to-back gold medals, and even now we’d put it up against any stout brewed on this side of the Atlantic. It’s not flashy. It’s not trendy. But it’s ours—and it’s good.

Winning awards in the craft beer scene is a funny thing. You don’t get money. You get trophies. Maybe a sticker for your cans. A bit of attention. And then… the pressure.

Because now it’s not just your favourite. It’s a medal winner. People expect it to be perfect. Every time. Forever.

And yet, those wins still felt good. They honoured the craftsmanship of our brewers. They validated the processes, the ingredients, the patience. They confirmed that you can, in fact, grow quality from a farm brewery with a mud-splattered van and a secondhand forklift.

The trophies now sit somewhere between our staff kitchen and a shelf full of backup parts. Visible, but not idolized. Celebrated, but not sanctified. Because the real win wasn’t the medal. It was the sense of coherence—the way those beers felt like an extension of who we are.

Joy Is Foundational (No, Really)

We wrote a whole chapter on love. About its role as foundational capital in any system trying to last. About how love in business isn’t soft—it’s soil. Fertile. Structural. Life-giving.

Well, joy is love in motion. And at Persephone, we’ve always tried to cultivate a culture where joy isn’t a Friday afternoon extra. It’s core. Mandatory, even. Hence: “Have fun or don’t come to work.” Not as a joke, but as a boundary. If we can’t find joy in this work, then something is broken.

Joy keeps us supple. Keeps us connected. Keeps us from mistaking performance for presence. It’s how we metabolize tension, celebrate resilience, and signal to each other that we’re still human, no matter what the margin report says.

So yes, the Tough Kegger left a ring. So did the beer festivals. The awards. The dance parties. The bonfires. The silent victories and loud costumes and small moments of shared absurdity.

These rings might not be visible from space. But they’re felt—every day—in how we show up, hold each other up, and keep growing, even when the forecast looks grim.

Because if you can carry a keg through a muddy forest with three friends and a banana costume, and laugh the whole way through—what can’t you do?

Section 7: The COVID Ring (Already Covered, But Worth Mentioning Twice)

If trees keep record of their years in rings, then 2020 should have left a burn mark—a blackened stripe of grief and uncertainty, the kind of year that compresses everything and starves the outer bark. For many, it did. Across the world, businesses shuttered. Lives were lost. Dreams deferred or undone entirely. It was a year of contraction and involuntary stillness. A tight, brittle ring.

But for us—for Persephone—it wasn’t.

And even now, it feels strange to say that out loud.

It’s a little like confessing that the flood that took out half the village left your garden blooming. The right response isn’t gloating or self-congratulation. It’s gratitude laced with awe, and a quiet curiosity about why your roots held when others washed away.

Our COVID year didn’t bend us. It grew us.

That might seem counterintuitive, especially for a business so dependent on community gathering, seasonal events, and the general willingness of people to be in close quarters, breathing and laughing and sharing things. But sometimes resilience doesn’t show up in the places you expect. Sometimes it’s not the sturdy structure that saves you, but the spongy understory—the network of relationships and intentions just beneath the surface.

A few things aligned early.

Just before the pandemic hit, we had finished a full rebrand of our core beer lineup. The new labels were bold, clean, and spoke in a visual language that stood out on shelves. And as people retreated into their homes and began lining up at liquor stores like they were preparing for the end times, our beer—unexpectedly and somewhat absurdly—popped. It wasn’t just available. It was visible.

But the rebrand alone wasn’t the thing that held the ring open. That spring, as the pandemic tightened its grip and social isolation became a public health strategy, we pivoted in a way that had nothing to do with product and everything to do with people.

Our delivery trucks—normally tasked with bringing kegs and cases to restaurants and retailers—were suddenly free. Our fleet of sales vehicles had no meetings to attend. So we put them to work. We started delivering beer directly to customers, yes, but more meaningfully, we partnered with our local grocery store to deliver food to those who couldn’t safely leave home.

This wasn’t a business opportunity. It was a community response. Seniors, immunocompromised neighbours, and anyone feeling the weight of isolation could now receive their groceries and, if requested, a six-pack of Persephone Pale Ale to go with it.

It started small. But word spread fast. And as the demand grew—and the costs grew with it—our local credit unions quietly stepped in, offering grants to help keep the deliveries flowing. It was one of those perfect ecosystem moments. A small, values-driven business. A community grocer. A few regional credit unions. All leaning in, loosely coordinated, lovingly improvised.

There was something weirdly beautiful about it. Here we were, a farm-based brewery in the middle of a crisis, functioning as a kind of informal logistics hub—less Amazon, more bee colony. And as strange as it sounds, it was… fun. Not in the party sense. But in the this matters and we’re doing something about it sense. The joy of usefulness. Of purpose served hot.

Meanwhile, our open-air farm—once seen as quirky or inefficient—became one of our greatest strengths. While urban tasting rooms were shuttered or scrambling to tape off booths and install plexiglass, we had acres of sky.

And here’s where things got even more interesting: our liquor license was expanded to include virtually the entire farm. This meant our visitors didn’t need to huddle on a patio or stand in awkward six-foot queues. They could roam. Stretch. Breathe. Sit beneath an apple tree. Sip a beer in the long grass. Picnic with their pandemic pod by the hops. Families came cautiously at first, then gratefully, for what was—by accident or design—something approaching reprieve. A safe way to be together. To feel human again. To see other faces and hear other voices in a setting that felt less like lockdown and more like… life.

For many, it was their first real experience on an active farm. They weren’t just sipping a local pale ale. They were standing in the soil it came from. Chickens clucked in the background. Children played at distance. The air was clean. The sky was open. There was something idyllic about it—unpolished, real, and maybe even healing. Nature, it turns out, is quite good at hosting a pandemic-safe gathering.

We weren’t untouched. Like everyone, we carried fear, uncertainty, and the weight of not knowing what the next day would hold. But beneath it all was a feeling not of chaos, but of clarity. That year, our decisions felt strangely simple. Not because they were easy, but because they were guided by what we already believed.

We’d built Persephone on the idea of service—to land, to people, to community. COVID didn’t change that. It just made it more obvious.

And still, as all of this unfolded in the outer ecosystem, something shifted inside the company as well.

Just before the pandemic, we had hired Jenn Vervier as CEO—a bold, exciting move. Jenn had come from New Belgium Brewing, one of the most respected B Corp breweries in the United States, with a reputation for operational excellence, environmental stewardship, and strong employee culture. She brought with her a wealth of experience, and within a short time had already made an impact—sharpening our systems, deepening our analysis, and helping us reinforce the very culture we prided ourselves on.

But as the pandemic began to close borders and isolate families, Jenn was confronted with a much more personal responsibility. Her son, who lives with a profound set of disabilities, needed her nearby. The risks of staying in Canada, away from him, became too great.

Jenn made the incredibly hard decision to return to the U.S.—not in a flurry, not in a panic, but with grace and care. She didn’t leave us in the lurch. In fact, in some ways, we had already sensed a mutual parting was on the horizon—amicable, respectful, and timed by forces bigger than either of us could fully plan around.

To this day, Jenn remains an ally and a champion. She’s served on our board for years since, and her fingerprints are still on much of what we do well.

But her departure also marked a turning point.

Without a formal CEO, the burden of leading through crisis fell on the shoulders of the remaining managers—and mine. There was no command-and-control hierarchy. There was just us, squinting into the fog of the pandemic, leaning on each other, and figuring it out as we went. No heroics. No clean story arcs. Just collective resilience, built from years of trust, love, and the quiet confidence that comes from doing hard things together.

That year, we didn’t just hold the business. We held each other.

Financially, paradoxically, it was our best year. But again, that’s not the story.

The story is that our love—yes, love—was functional. That our values weren’t just a poster in the staff kitchen. They were operational. They were how we loaded trucks. How we made decisions. How we treated each other when the world started to close in.

This was the year that proved what Chapter 5 first hinted at: resilience is relational. That people don’t stay strong in isolation—they stay strong because they’re held, seen, needed. And it was the year that brought our Chapter 7 principle—love as foundational capital—into focus with crystal clarity. Not as a metaphor. But as strategy. As structure. As ring.

So yes, 2020 deserves its own ring. Not to romanticize a disaster. But to name what happened in its margins. The quiet growth. The deepening roots. The weird joy. The logistical grace. The human infrastructure that held.

It’s not a ring we planned for.

But it’s one we’re proud to carry.

Section 8: Feedback is Fertilizer

Not all growth comes from within. Sometimes it arrives in the form of feedback — uninvited, unfiltered, occasionally unsolicited, and frequently true.

In forests, growth is nudged along by external forces: sunlight angles, shifting water tables, the hungry mouths of deer or the trampling boots of hikers. In business, it comes from customer reviews, staff debriefs, grumpy suppliers, and that one investor who always emails you before their second coffee. The world is not a passive backdrop to your greatness. It is an active participant in your learning curve.

And if you’re paying attention — if you’ve built your company with ears as well as ego — then feedback isn’t a threat. It’s fertilizer. Sometimes it’s rich and nourishing. Other times it smells like… well, manure. But either way, if you know how to process it, it can be the difference between stagnation and surprise growth.

Let’s be clear: not all feedback is created equal. Some is pure projection. Some comes with ulterior motives or half-baked assumptions. But even the worst of it contains a seed — some latent truth or tension point that, if mulched correctly, can decompose into insight. The trick is knowing what to compost and what to ignore.

At Persephone, feedback came in all flavours. Some sweet. Some sour. All instructive, eventually.

The Crowdfund as Confession Booth

When we first launched our crowdfunding campaign in 2017, we thought we were telling our story. Turns out, we were about to hear it.

Back then, crowdfunding wasn’t just a way to raise capital. It was an early feedback mechanism — a mirror held up by the very community we claimed to serve. People voted with their wallets, yes, but also with their questions, their hesitations, their impromptu comment threads under our social media posts.

“Will this money go to beer or land?”

“Why does a brewery need me to invest?”

“What happens if you guys get bought out by Molson tomorrow?”

These weren’t attacks. They were early signals that we hadn’t fully explained our ownership model, our intentions, our risks. And so we rewrote. We clarified. We learned that a story is only strong if it can survive scrutiny — and that every great campaign is part pitch, part public workshop.

By the time we launched again in 2021 and 2023, we weren’t just better at crowdfunding. We were better at listening. Better at anticipating the friction points. Better at earning belief, not just asking for it.

The Customer Comment That Stings (and Sticks)

Some feedback arrives less formally. It sneaks in sideways.

“I really liked that lager you used to make. Why’d you stop brewing it?”

That question came from a longtime customer in 2019. He said it casually, with a half-smile, standing in the tasting room like someone asking why you painted over your living room wall. We had our reasons — rotating taps, seasonal focus, trying something new — but in that moment, it was clear: we’d made a call that didn’t land. Or rather, it did land — just not in the way we’d hoped.

There was no memo. No Yelp review. Just a sentence. One that lodged itself quietly in our production planning conversations for months after.

Sometimes the loudest feedback is whispered.

The Internal Interventions

Of course, not all feedback came from the outside world. Some of the most powerful — and uncomfortable — came from within.

Staff meetings at Persephone were not the cliché “open door” exercises where everyone nods and no one speaks. They were often honest to the point of awkward. And bless our team for that. There were times when someone would call out a blind spot in our management decisions or a tension in how we were applying our values. It wasn’t always gentle. But it was real.

I remember one exchange when we were discussing seasonal layoffs and someone said, “It doesn’t feel very ‘fair trade’ when we ask farm staff to be purpose-driven, then let them go for the winter.”

Oof.

They weren’t wrong. We had to sit with that one. And eventually, it led to a reworking of how we structured off-season roles, how we communicated expectations, and how we thought about employment as part of our social impact — not just a labour line item.

This kind of feedback isn’t fun. But it’s how integrity grows. Not from perfection, but from the willingness to evolve under pressure.

Compost Happens

Here’s the thing about fertilizer: you don’t always know what’s in it. Sometimes, buried deep in the compost heap of half-formed opinions and slightly aggressive emails, there’s something worth holding onto.

We learned to filter feedback without neutralizing it. Not everything needed to become a policy shift. But everything deserved a hearing.

• A supplier once told us our order system was “like trying to schedule a date with someone who only replies in riddles.”

• A farmer asked why we weren’t sourcing more of our grains locally when we talked so much about land stewardship.

• A brewery neighbour gently suggested we check the pH of our wastewater a little more regularly.

Each one — annoying in the moment. And yet, each one added something to the mix.

Not just improvements, but humility. A reminder that being a B Corp or an impact business doesn’t mean you get a free pass. It means you get a higher standard, and more people watching to see if you’ll live up to your own mythology.

We didn’t always. But we tried. And we kept trying.

That’s the feedback loop: not a single moment of enlightenment, but a process of messy, iterative digestion. Take it in. Let it break down. Apply it. Grow a little. Repeat.

Feedback as a Love Language

What we eventually came to understand — and this may sound weird, but hang with me — is that feedback is love.

It’s not the fluffy kind. It’s the tough kind. The kind that cares enough to say the awkward thing. The kind that believes you’re capable of more, even if you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing fine. It’s the kind of love that shows up as a challenge.

In that sense, feedback was a nutrient, not just for our operations, but for our relationships. Between customers and company. Between staff and leadership. Between a community and the brewery they believed in.

We still messed up. Still missed cues. Still had to apologize or double back. But the feedback kept flowing. And that, in its own weird way, was a sign of health. The silence is what kills you.

If nobody’s telling you anything, they’ve already given up.

Section 9: The Invisible Rings — Grief, Change, and Quiet Resilience

Some rings don’t show up until long after they’re formed.

They don’t announce themselves with new buildings or product launches or a quarterly spike in EBITDA. There are no ribbon cuttings, no photos on social media, no witty captions. These rings form slowly, inwardly—etched not in wood but in the way a team moves together when the wind picks up.

For us, one of those rings began the year everything changed—though not all at once, and not in ways that were immediately visible. There was no singular event, no decisive plot twist that made the headlines. Just a slow accumulation of difficulty. Of grief. Of adjustment. Of doing the best you can with a situation you didn’t choose and can’t control.

It started, in part, with my spinal cord injury. One day I was walking the farm, checking on the orchard, ducking into the hop yard, grabbing a wrench to fix something that probably needed a professional. The next, I wasn’t.

The injury left me paraplegic, which is the kind of life event that comes with its own weather system. You don’t just learn to use a wheelchair. You learn how to ask for help when your pants are stuck halfway on. You learn how to be still when you used to be in constant motion. You learn how to lead from a different place—not from the field, not from the forklift, but from the edge of the action, from the sunroom office that used to be the mudroom, from Zoom calls where the screen shows your face but not your wheels.

You also learn what your business is really made of.

Because when you, as a founder, stop being the physical and visible centre of everything, a vacuum opens. And it’s not a given that the space will be filled with grace. Some organizations scramble. Some fall apart. Ours didn’t.

That’s not because we had it all figured out. It’s because the roots were already there.

What emerged in that season wasn’t some heroic comeback story. It was quieter than that. It was the realization—mutual, gradual—that we were going to have to do things differently. That decisions couldn’t bottleneck through me anymore. That others would have to step into more visible leadership. That I would have to tolerate being behind the scenes, or worse, misunderstood.

That year didn’t bring a spike in sales or a new taproom or a bold strategic pivot. But it brought something deeper. A recalibration. A strengthening. A set of invisible rings.

One of our longest-serving managers told me later that it was the year she really learned to trust herself. Not because I said so, but because she had to. That’s not an insult—it’s a gift. Because if a business can’t survive the partial absence of its founder, it’s not really a business. It’s a bottleneck with a logo.

During that time, I also learned what it meant to be led. Not just to lead differently—but to be held up by others. To watch teammates make good calls without needing validation. To accept that some meetings would happen without me, and that maybe, just maybe, that was a good thing.

And through all this, we saw the emergence of a cultural truth we’d suspected but never stress-tested: that love really was foundational. Not the fluffy, HR-mandated, “we’re like a family here” version. The sturdy kind. The kind that says, “We’ve got you,” and then actually shows up. The kind that adapts to changing needs, respects new limits, and isn’t afraid to laugh through the hard parts.

Culture, it turns out, isn’t what you put in a slide deck. It’s what shows up when the plan goes sideways and everyone’s tired and someone still brings coffee. It’s the stuff that lives in the cracks—in the awkward, in-between moments when nobody’s quite sure what to do, but they do it anyway.

And let’s be honest: it wasn’t all graceful. I fumbled. Others did too. There were miscommunications, dropped balls, hard conversations. But woven through that messy, human process was something incredibly strong: mutual care.

In ecology, heartwood is the dense inner core of a tree. It doesn’t transport nutrients anymore. It doesn’t participate in photosynthesis. But it’s what keeps the tree standing. It’s strong, decay-resistant, and beautifully stubborn. It’s formed from old xylem that has done its job and now exists purely for structure—for holding.

That year, we formed heartwood.

Not just in me, or because of me—but across the organization. Because grief is rarely a solo performance. Around that same time, everyone on the team had to deal with some version of letting go—of assumptions, routines, dependencies. They had to lead differently. Speak up more. Trust each other more deeply. Be a little braver.

And perhaps most importantly, they had to trust that the business itself could flex and stretch and hold.

Invisible rings don’t get celebrated. But they’re the ones that determine whether the next visible ring can even form. They’re the foundation for everything that follows.

So if you find yourself in a season of grief, or transition, or just plain exhaustion—don’t assume you’re stalled. You might just be forming heartwood. Quietly. Deliberately. Without applause.

And if someone asks you how things are going and the answer is too complicated to fit into a LinkedIn post, just smile and say, “We’re adding rings.”

If they ask what kind, you’ll know.

The strong kind.

The invisible kind.

The kind that holds.

Section 10: Read Your Rings — Then Read Them Again

At some point, you have to stop strategizing, budgeting, firefighting, innovating, and all the other gerunds that keep you busy in business—and take a quiet, honest moment to look at the rings.

Not the spreadsheets. Not the KPIs. Not the pitch deck or the B Corp recertification survey with its well-meaning but overly prescriptive definitions of impact. No, I mean the real rings. The lived years. The seasons etched into your company like tree rings beneath the bark—some wide and easy, some tight and scarred, but all of them part of the truth.

The danger, of course, is pretending those rings don’t matter. That they’re relics. That you’ve outgrown them, evolved past them, moved on. Growth culture, especially the Silicon Valley variety, teaches us to be ashamed of our past iterations—to scrub them clean, erase the weirdness, and retcon a clean narrative. But the only thing worse than ignoring your past is misreading it entirely.

We like to tell ourselves stories of linear improvement. We used to be scrappy but confused, now we’re refined and wise. We started out as beer nerds with a dream and a tractor, and now we’re leaders in regenerative beverage-based capitalism. But that’s not really how growth works—not in nature, not in business, and definitely not in a post-pandemic, climate-volatile, emotionally frayed world where even the trees are starting to sweat.

Growth is not a smooth curve. It’s not a J-curve. It’s not even a series of hockey sticks. Growth is a looping, adaptive, recursive dance through time and terrain. It’s panarchy. It’s the adaptive cycle. It’s birth, death, and rebirth nested inside one another at multiple scales. It’s a startup launching a wild experiment, getting slapped by regulators, adapting to public scrutiny, finding unlikely allies, and emerging more rooted than before. It’s a farm becoming a brewery becoming a gathering place becoming a platform for organizing and resistance and joy.

When we first learned about panarchy, it felt like a fancy academic term for what we already knew intuitively. We had lived it. The loops, the phases, the awkwardness of reorganizing when it would be easier to just pretend nothing had collapsed. But understanding panarchy gave us a language. It helped us see that our failures weren’t detours—they were the process. That resilience wasn’t about resisting disturbance, it was about metabolizing it. Composting it. Using it to grow something new.

And the rings show you that process. If you look closely, you can see the feedback loops. Not just the ones that gave you applause—those are easy to spot, they come with press coverage or trophies—but the loops that stung. The ones where you launched a product that flopped, or hired someone for the wrong reasons, or tried to expand into a new market because you read a case study on LinkedIn and mistook it for gospel. The rings remember. And the smart businesses—the ones with depth—don’t ignore those rings. They learn from them.

There’s something deeply humbling about realizing how much of your so-called strategy was just opportunistic pivoting. That you didn’t actually “foresee a market opportunity” so much as respond to a weird confluence of circumstances, instincts, people, and panic. That sometimes you succeeded not because of visionary insight but because the stars aligned and you didn’t get in the way. That your best move in a crisis wasn’t a playbook—it was your community.

Take the COVID year. It’s easy now to summarize it with a neat moral—about resilience or values or digital transformation. But what happened at Persephone that year was less moral and more biological. Organic. Complex. The systems bent and flexed because there were deep roots. There were strong ties. There were people who cared. There were farm trails to run through and trucks to deliver groceries. There were hop vines that didn’t know there was a pandemic and kept climbing anyway.

And sure, some of it looked strategic from a distance. Our rebrand, our pivot to food delivery, our licensing miracle. But none of it was part of a plan. It was just a team of people adapting like any good forest would—by sensing, responding, and growing sideways if that’s what it took. The rings that year didn’t widen because we crushed it. They widened because we let the system breathe. Because we stopped trying to control every damn thing and started listening to the feedback around us.

This is what it means to read your rings. Not just as record-keeping, but as a way of seeing. Of interpreting the loops you’re in. Of identifying when you’re reorganizing versus growing versus conserving versus collapsing. Of recognizing that sometimes you’re all four at once, depending on the zoom level. And maybe most importantly, of knowing when it’s time to prune. To cut a branch. To let a product go, or a narrative, or a role that no longer fits. Because the rings don’t just tell you what you did—they whisper about what you might need to do next.

Looking back now, I see how much of our success wasn’t about the size of any single year, but about how those years built on each other. How one experiment made the next one possible. How the Tough Kegger wasn’t just a fun community race—it was a practice in belonging, in shared effort, in sweaty, beer-fueled intimacy that made everything else feel more possible. How the beer festivals seeded by our team became community assets in their own right, spinning off into the world like fully grown children who still send us the occasional postcard.

And then there are the invisible rings—the ones you don’t see in the books. The years marked by injury, or burnout, or quiet changes in leadership. The years when what changed most was not your product line but your internal clarity, your cultural core, your sense of who you are. Those years matter just as much. Maybe more. Because that’s where the heartwood forms—the dense, unseen center that gives the tree its true strength.

So if you’re running a business, or dreaming of one, or recovering from the mess of one, I’ll leave you with this: make time to read your rings. Not just annually, when the accountants make you. But regularly, as a kind of practice. Look at what grew, what withered, what bent, what snapped, what held. Read the signs of complexity. Acknowledge the patterns. Welcome the weirdness. Resist the urge to tidy it all up into a PowerPoint.

And then ask yourself: what’s next? Not based on what the market says, or what the competition’s doing, or what the consultants recommend. But based on who you’ve actually become. The business you’ve actually built. The soil you’ve actually tended.

Because soil, as we said way back in Chapter One, is where it all starts. But rings—rings are where the truth lives.

And if you can be brave enough to read your rings, not just once but again and again, you might just build something that lasts longer than a trend cycle. You might build something that can weather the storm. Something that matters.

Something alive.

Chapter 10 v2

Section 1: Field Notes from a Living Business

If Chapter One was about the soil—our context, our origin, our humble start with spent grain on our rubber boots—then this chapter is about what emerged once we decided to plant something. Not just hops and kale and a few overly optimistic apple trees, but something stranger and more complicated: a living, drinking, dancing, compost-generating business.

And like any ecosystem, what grew wasn’t just what we planned. It was both what came and went.

Walk the fields in spring and you’ll see more than seedlings. You’ll hear warblers returning, bees bumbling between cover crops, and—if you’re lucky or late—coyotes heading home from a long night of management consulting (or whatever coyotes do when we’re not looking). You’ll smell soil waking up and maybe, depending on where you’re standing, the faint whiff of wastewater or chicken manure. That, too, is part of the story.

This chapter is our field journal. A record of what bloomed and what bolted. What fermented beautifully and what exploded in the walk-in. It’s not a neat taxonomy. We’re not here to offer a linear business case study. It’s more like pulling back the branches to see what’s actually living beneath—and asking what it takes to keep the system alive.

The Business as Ecosystem (Not Metaphor, Reality)

We didn’t always use the word “ecosystem” when talking about the brewery. At first, we were just a farm with beer ambitions and a moral compass that pointed vaguely toward sustainability. We knew we wanted to grow something—and that beer, strangely enough, seemed like a good place to start.

But it didn’t take long before we realized that what we were doing had more in common with ecology than economics. This wasn’t just a factory for fermenting and canning. It was an interdependent, ever-shifting system—composed not only of products and people but of weather, microbes, moods, regulatory drift, Friday night live music that got too loud for the neighbour’s dog or Sunday morning driveway raking that was too loud for the neighbour – (one of our neighbours actually through a rock at me on the tractor – is 5:45am really too early to rake your gravel driveway?).

Business books tend to treat growth with a graph: clean, upward, linear. Ecosystems know better. They grow in pulses and plateaus, ebbs and flows. They shed as much as they produce. They depend on diversity—not just to thrive but to survive.

The question became: what kind of ecosystem were we cultivating?

Was this a carefully balanced forest with an understory of quiet complexity and an overstory of sturdy, revenue-bearing trees?

Or was this a tangled thicket full of invasive species, too many shiny new varietals, and the occasional wild animal making its home in our delivery van? (For the record: that bear was never charged for any free beer she might have consumed.)

Biodiversity: Essential, Unstable, and Often Overlooked

Ecologist E.O. Wilson wrote that the key to understanding the health of an ecosystem is not the number of species it contains, but the relationships between them. In other words, it’s not just about diversity—it’s about connection. (I smell a mycorrhizal network coming around the corner.)

That insight applies equally well to what lives on our tap list.

Over the years, we’ve released more than 100 different beers, ciders, seltzers, and non-alcoholic beverages. Some were enduring successes—our version of the salmon that keeps coming home. Others were fleeting, photogenic, and gone by the next season. A few were quietly retired after discovering that not all ideas deserve carbonation.

But each one had its place, even if only temporarily. Together, they taught us about how to listen to customer curiosity, how to respond to local ingredients, how to stretch our capacity without snapping it.

And more importantly, they reminded us that diversity in business, like in nature, isn’t a bonus. It’s the buffer that allows the system to absorb shocks, explore edges, and stay nimble when conditions change. As they always do.

Thriving… or Just Sprawling?

There’s a fine line between being an ecosystem and being a mess.

And we’ve walked that line. Sometimes blindfolded. On stilts.

We chased ideas. We launched things we weren’t quite ready for. We doubled down on too many directions at once. Not because we lacked discipline (though sometimes, yes) but because it felt like saying no would be closing off possibility.

Possibility, it turns out, is expensive. And it rarely cleans up after itself.

Which brings us to a more grounded truth: not all growth is good growth. Some growth is just the natural result of fertilizer and inattention. Blackberry brambles grow, too. That doesn’t mean you want them taking over your tasting room.

Learning when to cut back—when to let go of a product, a service, an idea—is part of what has helped us mature. Not in the “we’re now a mature company” way (God forbid), but in the way a forest matures: slowly, unevenly, through cycles of disturbance and renewal.

From Chaos to Complexity

We don’t regret the experimentation. It was necessary. And fun. And sometimes, depending on the beer, legally questionable.

But we’ve also come to appreciate that complexity is not the same as complication.

Complexity is what happens when things are alive and interdependent. Complication is what happens when no one knows what’s in the walk-in and you have six half-finished pilot projects sharing one hose bib.

Our shift—slow, deliberate, and sometimes reluctant—has been toward complexity with coherence. Toward building a business that can support variety without dissolving into noise.

Setting the Stage

So that’s what this chapter is about.

It’s not a catalogue of products. It’s a reflection on what diversity looks like in a living business. What we’ve learned about core offerings, fringe experiments, seasonal guests, and long-term companions. About what it means to use our beer, our space, our brand, and our community as tools not just for profit, but for participation.

We’ll talk about the beers that stuck, and the ones that didn’t. The people (like Anders and Sara) who hold the centre. The events and food and third spaces that nourish the whole. And the moments where we looked at the forest we’d grown and wondered if we were still the right ones to tend it.

No tidy answers here. Just a field notebook from the edge of the clearing.

Let’s step in.

Section 2: Creatures of the Can — What We’ve Made and Why

Once upon a product roadmap, someone might’ve told us to “focus.” But focus, in our early years, often meant “don’t drown.” There were brews to launch, taps to keep flowing, tanks to clean, staff to train, regulators to please, and customers with wildly varying ideas of what makes a good beer.

What emerged from that mix wasn’t a tidy product line—it was more like a rogue’s gallery of liquid experiments. An unruly tap list that sprawled across beer styles, fermentation methods, sweetness levels, and occasionally, reason itself.

And yet, for a long time, it worked.

Somewhere between the core beers, the seasonal flair, the benefit collaborations, and the “we-had-honey-so-let’s-try-it” brews, we created a kind of living catalogue. A record of what the farm had to offer, what the community was interested in, and what our brewers were curious enough to try.

It wasn’t planned diversity. It was emergent diversity.

The Keystone Five

Through all the experimentation, a handful of beers held the line. The ones people came back for. The ones whose names you didn’t have to explain.

• Coast Life Lager – a fridge-staple in Sunshine Coast homes and the beer most likely to survive the apocalypse.

• Pale Ale – loyal, balanced, citrusy. Like a good manager or a Golden Retriever.

• Dry Irish Stout – the sleeper hit. Nitro-poured, no-nonsense, surprisingly sessionable.

• Goddess Golden Ale – subtle, floral, and slightly bitter. Interpret as you will.

• India Pale Ale – bold, boozy, the hophead’s handshake.

These were our anchor species. They weren’t flashy. But they kept the system grounded.

The Seasonals, Migrants, and Flaky Cousins

Then there were the beers that fluttered in, made a scene, and vanished with the next full moon.

Some seasonals were tied to the land—like the Farmhouse Snakebite, brewed with local cider and just enough funk to be divisive at dinner parties. Others were flavour bombs made to test our margins and our brewers’ patience—Imperial Gingerbread Porter, Mocha Porter, the occasional IPA with more hops than a harebrained business pitch.

We called them “seasonals,” but that was generous. Some were barely tolerated. Others developed cult followings that made us question our grasp on reality. There was a time when we brewed a gose with cucumber and pink peppercorn. People still ask about it. Like an ex we’re not sure we broke up with.

Then there were the genuinely weird ones. A smoked beer inspired by a foggy morning on the dock. A short-lived sour with too much lacto and not enough common sense. These were more than products. They were creative releases disguised as SKUs.

Not Just Beer: Branching Out in All Directions

At some point—probably during a particularly enthusiastic operations meeting—we decided that if we could brew beer, we could ferment anything.

And so we did.

• Dry-Hopped Cider – crisp, subtle, zero sugar. Popular with wine drinkers, oddly enough.

• Honeycomb Hard Seltzers – fruity, bubbly, low-ABV attempts at staying relevant. Also: a way to use honey and once again link our products to ag.

• Water Kefir – a non-alcoholic probiotic experiment that was, for a brief period, popular among kids, yogis, and kombucha avoiders.

This wasn’t diversification as strategy. It was curiosity with a production schedule.

But even here, we weren’t just throwing things at the wall. These products responded to things we saw around us: changing tastes, non-drinkers in the crowd, seasonal gluts of fruit, and a genuine desire to include more people in what we were building.

Our kefir never actually stabilized enough for us to invest in a sales strategy so it remains an on-farm-only product. Our seltzers made space for people who wanted to enjoy the beer garden without feeling like they had to drink beer. That mattered more than the margins.

What We Learned from the Tap List

You can learn a lot from what people drink—and what they politely decline.

Some styles bombed. Some surprised us. A few, like our New Boots IPA, emerged from our “Pink Boots” women-in-brewing initiative and became something more than just a seasonal; it became a signal. A flag planted in the land of representation and pride.

What we’ve learned over time is that a product isn’t just a product. It’s a story, a decision, a bet on what the community might want next. And more importantly, a product is a commitment: to make something, stand behind it, and be okay when it doesn’t sell.

There’s freedom in small-batch failure. There’s also humility.

And if nothing else, it gives you material for the next Tough Kegger emcee set. (“Remember the beet stout? We don’t either.”)

Looking Ahead

This catalogue—sprawling, unpredictable, and often inefficient—taught us how to listen. Not just to customers, but to the business itself and ourselves. To our team. To our capacity, our spirit.

It also taught us that product diversity doesn’t mean doing everything. It means doing the right things, at the right scale, with the right story behind them.

As we’ll explore in the next sections, we’ve learned to prune. To focus. To let some fields go fallow. But we wouldn’t have known what to keep if we hadn’t tried so much.

That’s what this chapter really traces: the movement from exuberant, seasonal chaos to a kind of structured complexity—a system with room for emergence, but not for entropy.

A tap list as ecology, not as ego.

Section 3: Pruning Without Losing the Plot — When to Let Go (and Why It Hurts)

If you ever want to test the limits of optimism, try managing a walk-in fridge that has too many half-kegged dreams and seasonal flings taking up space you don’t have. There’s nothing quite like shuffling through a labyrinth of expired ambition, tripping over a milk crate full of rogue bottles from 2018, while muttering, “maybe we’ll rebrand it as vintage.”

This is the part of the story where we talk about cutting back.

Not in the corporate buzzword way. No synergies here. No pivot decks or strategic realignments. Just the plain truth: if you make too many things, you eventually have to decide which ones matter most. And if you care about your business (and your sanity), you learn to let go.

A Tangled Tap List and a Million Good Intentions

Our product portfolio didn’t start as a problem. It started as a celebration. The Pale Ale for hopheads. The cider for the wine crowd. The peach punch sour for the new agers (yes, subtle judgment inferred). Each new release felt like a generous widening of the tent, a way to say: “you belong here, too.”

But eventually, the tent starts to sag under the weight of its own inclusivity.

Diversity is a gift—until it’s a spreadsheet that takes three scrolls to view. Until your brewers can’t remember which ale is in which fermenter. Until your sales team politely asks if you could maybe stop inventing new things for one quarter, just one – who am I trying to kid, sales reps always want more.

In nature, this kind of unchecked proliferation has a name: succession gone sideways. What begins as vibrant undergrowth turns to bramble if you don’t manage it.

And that’s when you need to start pruning.

When You Love All Your Weird Children

Letting go is hard. Not because we can’t see what needs to go, but because we can. And we remember why it was planted in the first place.

Take the Rumrunner Red Ale (aka Hopyard Red Ale). One of the first beers we ever brewed and it was going to be our attempt at competing in the crowded IPA category without having to call it an IPA. It was hoppy, malty, smooth, slightly rebellious. It wasn’t just a beverage. It was a love letter to my own taste in beer, written in cascade hops and caramel malt. People liked it. I loved it. We brewed it longer than we should have, even after the numbers told us it was time to move on.

That’s the danger with darlings. They can keep you from seeing what else might thrive if you made room.

Letting go of a product, an initiative, a beloved but labor-intensive event—it never feels like a win. It feels like loss. Like failure. Like betrayal of your own past self.

But in ecosystems, loss is often the first step toward renewal.

This is the creative destruction phase of the panarchy cycle—where breakdown precedes breakthrough. Where the old tree falls and sunlight finally reaches the forest floor. Where space becomes available for something new.

We came to understand that pruning isn’t just about trimming back. It’s an act of faith. That there’s something better coming. Or maybe just something more aligned.

People Are Not Products, But…

Here’s where we make an uncomfortable but important detour.

Because all this talk about diversity and pruning and letting go isn’t just about products. It brushes up against people, too. Teams. Cultures. Identity.

From day one, Persephone embraced diversity—not as a policy but as a principle. One of our first investors was SCACL and some of our first team members had developmental disabilities, and that inclusion was never a PR move. It was just us being who we wanted to be.

As the DEI movement gained momentum, we recognized in it something familiar, affirming, and necessary. Diverse teams bring perspective, depth, creativity, and resilience. Sometimes it makes you slow down – which is a good thing. They challenge assumptions and grow the culture.

But even here, there’s a lesson from the tap list: diversity without reflection can lead to confusion. Without shared purpose, without thoughtful curation, too much difference—in vision, in values, in capacity—can strain the very system it’s meant to strengthen.

In both beer and people, inclusion doesn’t mean chaos. It means weaving variety into coherence.

And sometimes, painfully, that means acknowledging when a role, a structure, a way of working is no longer serving the whole. We don’t let go of people the way we let go of beers. But we do evolve the way we work together. We redesign the environment so that all kinds of teammates can thrive.

Which brings us back to the pruning.

Sometimes letting go isn’t about subtraction. It’s about invitation. Making room for new energy, new growth, new coherence.

Not Every Wild Idea Needs a Keg Collar

There were products that excited us but never found their rhythm. Ciders that never filter well. Seltzers that confused the regulars. The kefir that, despite its noble intentions, mostly just baffled us, exploded and foamed out of control.

There were good ideas we couldn’t execute well. Great beers we couldn’t sell consistently. Collabs that sounded better over text than they tasted in the glass.

The problem wasn’t ambition. It was dispersion. The more we stretched, the less rooted we became.

So we started saying no. Or not yet. Or “great idea, but let’s do it once a year as a treat.”

We learned to see pruning not as punishment but as clarity.

We moved from complexity to coherence—still diverse, still open, but not drowning in our own generosity.

And in that clearing, new things began to grow.

An “In Memoriam” Toast: Rumrunner Red Ale

Let us raise a glass to some of the shoulders (or bomber bottles) on which we stand.

To Rumrunner Red Ale: hoppy, malty, sturdy, rebellious. You poured your heart into our early years and graced more pint glasses than we can count. You were the flavour of our youthful optimism, our go-to when we didn’t know what to offer, our default darling.

More than once, I told locals and visitors alike, “I started a brewery so that I could have as much of this beer, as I wanted.”

You hung on longer than you should have, not because the market demanded you, but because we did. Because I did. Because letting you go meant admitting that we had changed.

But here’s the truth, old friend: we only knew who we were because you helped show us.

So cheers to you, Rumrunner Red Ale. May you live on in our hearts, and in the occasional pilot batch when we get sentimental.

Gone, but not forgotten.

Section 4: Holding the Centre — People, Roles, and Quiet Strength

It’s easy to mistake the visible for the essential. The new product release gets the press. The new hire gets the applause. The event gets the Instagram carousel and the little heart emoji. But often, what holds a business together isn’t loud or shiny or new. It’s the slow-burning constancy. The people who are there, really there - not for accolades, but because it’s who they are.

In nature, these are the keystone species. Not always the flashiest. Sometimes not even noticed. But remove them, and the whole ecosystem begins to unravel in slow, subtle ways.

In our system, one such keystone is named Anders.

The Brewmaster’s Quiet Craft

Before we’d filled a keg, poured a pint, or even decided on a final logo, Anders McKinnon was already in. He was the first person I hired. It wasn’t a job posting kind of hire—it was more like, “I think we’re doing this, are you in?” And Anders, with his signature quiet nod and unflinching calm, was.

If you picture a brewmaster as someone who gives eloquent, raucous speeches on dry-hopping techniques or waxes poetic about Brettanomyces in front of a roaring crowd, Anders will disappoint you beautifully. Actually that’s probably not true, he has surprised me more than once, but he does not perform. Actually that’s not totally true as he once performed a karaoke that left everyone in the room speechless. However, when it comes to his profession… he crafts. He does not shout. He brews. He has been the stoic undercurrent of Persephone’s liquid identity from the start—calm in the chaos, deliberate in the madness, and methodical in a world that so often runs on vibes and spreadsheets.

The beer wouldn’t be the same without him. Frankly, I’m not sure the place would be either.

Anders is the kind of person who earns respect the old-fashioned way: by doing good work every day, without needing to talk about how hard it is. He is not prone to existential discussions about regenerative finance or circular economies. He’s more likely to point out that a gasket is going to fail before week’s end and that we should probably address it now, not during the weekend rush. And he’ll be right.

That kind of presence—firm, quiet, dependable—is a stabilizing force. You don’t always see it until something goes wrong and you realize who you’ve leaned on all along.

The Human Ecology of a Brewery

Persephone isn’t just a place where we ferment beer. It’s where people have fermented too. That’s not a hygiene comment. That’s a cultural one.

We’ve had a whole ecosystem of team members—many of them drawn by Anders’ example—who’ve taken on roles without glamour or glory and simply… held them. The brewers who clock in before the sun rises. The delivery drivers who navigate ferry schedules and foggy logging roads to get a keg to some pub on the outer edge of cell service. The taproom staff who can handle a stagette, a screaming child, and a hops-splaining uncle in a single shift and still pour a perfect pint.

These are the people who don’t just work when it’s fun. They work when the glycol unit fails, when the truck breaks down, when someone calls in sick. They work because it matters to them that the system keeps running. Not because they’re trying to climb the corporate ladder. (We don’t have one. We have a stepladder someone borrowed from the greenhouse.)

Over the years, some of our best employees weren’t the ones with the most experience or the slickest resumes. They were the ones with curiosity and consistency. People who leaned into problems instead of flinching from them. People who fixed things without being asked. Who noticed when someone else was struggling and stepped in.

That’s the kind of leadership that doesn’t come with a title. It’s the kind that keeps you alive.

We Don’t Do Heroes Here

There’s a cultural myth in business that great organizations are built by great visionaries. That some charismatic force of nature steers the ship, weathering storms with a combination of instinct and caffeine, while the rest of the team adjusts the sails.

That’s not how this works. Not here.

If anything, I’ve often been the destabilizing agent—the one pushing for too many new ideas, tossing out “what if we…” suggestions like candy at a parade, then moving on to the next shiny thing before the first has been budgeted for. I know my strengths. I also know my chaos.

Which is why people like Anders are not just important—they’re vital.

They tether the balloon to the Earth.

A business like Persephone doesn’t run on charisma. It runs on people who make good beer, fix broken pumps, and tell you when your idea is dumb—but kindly. It runs on steady hands, clear eyes, and folks who know when to clean the lines and when to cut you off.

The Problem With Consistency

Of course, the trouble with people like Anders—if you can even call it trouble—is that they make it look easy. And in doing so, they can be taken for granted.

When someone is always dependable, always steady, you stop noticing the weight they carry. Until they take a holiday. Or have a sick day. Or leave.

Then you realize they weren’t just doing a job. They were holding a centre.

We’ve learned the hard way that if you don’t recognize and honour that kind of consistency, you risk burning it out. You risk mistaking stoicism for inexhaustibility.

Quiet strength still needs recognition. Still needs care. Still needs room to breathe.

A Toast to the Anderses

So here’s to the people who keep the system coherent.

To the ones who train others with patience, who fix things without drama, who take responsibility not because they’re asked to but because it’s in their bones.

To the Anderses.

They won’t be the first to speak in a meeting. They might not speak at all. But when they do, you should probably shut up and listen.

Their words come sparingly. Their beers come steadily. Their leadership shows up in fermentation charts, mentorship moments, and the strange peace that comes from knowing someone has your back without ever having to say it.

These are the people who make it possible to try new things, because they keep the old things from falling apart.

They are the infrastructure of trust.

And in a business like ours—fluid, experimental, built on a mix of agricultural chaos and small-town dreams—that trust is the only real currency we’ve got.

Leadership Without Ego

Anders never asked to be featured in a book. He never asked for the spotlight. He never asked for anything, really, except maybe that we try not to rush the lagering process again.

But that’s exactly why he deserves this chapter.

Because there’s a kind of leadership that doesn’t come from being the loudest in the room. It comes from being the most consistent. The most generous. The most grounded.

It’s easy to celebrate the people who give great speeches. It’s harder—but far more important—to celebrate the ones who just make everything better by being in the room.

So if you’re reading this and thinking about the Anders in your world—the person who holds your system steady—tell them. Thank them. Buy them a beer.

And maybe, just maybe, give them a week off once in a while. (Just warn us first so we can plan accordingly.)

Section 5: Growing Into It — Leadership, Learning, and the Rise of Sara

In the natural world, growth is rarely linear. Some trees shoot up fast and skinny, only to snap in the wind. Others inch upward slowly, thickening with time, learning how to bend before they ever reach for the sun. Resilience takes shape not through speed but through adaptation—the quiet miracle of adjusting to your environment, day by day, season by season, until one day you find yourself standing strong in a place you once tiptoed through.

That’s what happened with Sara.

The Admin Assistant Who Said Yes

When Sara joined Persephone, she didn’t come with a roadmap, a resume full of buzzwords, or a five-year plan to climb the proverbial ladder (we’ve established: we own one step-stool and it’s covered in dirt). She came in as an administrative assistant, back when our idea of “office infrastructure” was a chalkboard, a coffee maker, and a sense of purpose.

She handled whatever needed handling. Orders. Schedules. Emails. Phone calls. Dogs on the loose. People on the loose. That first summer, she probably fielded more random farm questions than the agricultural extension office. And she did it all with a kind of gentle competence that didn’t announce itself. It just got shit done.

Over time, the jobs shifted. Bookkeeping needed support? Sara learned it. Delivery logistics in a muddle? Sara mapped it. HR systems from the Stone Age? Sara modernized them. She became a quiet cartographer of our internal operations, drawing order out of chaos, one system at a time.

Not everything went smoothly. There were mistakes. Tensions. Miscommunications. But Sara didn’t shrink from any of it. She met each challenge with the same response: not defensiveness, not bravado, but curiosity.

That’s what made her indispensable. Not just that she could do a dozen jobs. But that she wanted to understand how each one fit into the larger organism we were building.

The COO With the Soil Still on Her Boots

When you grow into leadership from within, there’s a different texture to how you lead. You don’t manage from a place of abstraction. You don’t have to guess how hard the work is, because you’ve done it. You’ve cleaned the bathroom after a busy Saturday. You’ve worked the till on a sweaty day with a wedding party, a crying toddler, and a dog-owner who is demanding 12 flights of cider at once. You’ve seen the system break and been the one to tape it back together.

By the time Sara stepped fully into the role of Chief Operating Officer, she wasn’t managing a team so much as nurturing an ecosystem she knew by heart.

She led with context. With memory. With that rare combination of lived experience and strategic foresight.

And she did it without losing her sense of humour, her calm presence, or her quiet insistence that we could always do better—together.

Learning in Public

One of the unspoken truths of running a values-driven business is that you’re always a little bit over your head. The systems you need haven’t been invented yet. The roadmaps don’t match your terrain. And the challenges you face—climate, equity, burnout, bullshit—don’t come with tidy resolutions.

Sara never pretended otherwise. She didn’t wear a mask of certainty. She showed up ready to learn.

She learned from vendors. From coworkers. From delivery drivers. From auditors. From her own mistakes. She learned where our blind spots were by poking around in the dark. She learned which systems were secretly held together by duct tape and hope.

And most importantly, she kept asking: what are we missing? Who isn’t being heard? How do we do this better next time?

That kind of leadership doesn’t look like celebrity. It looks like a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, a deep breath before a hard conversation. It looks like someone re-running payroll on a holiday weekend because something glitched and it matters that people are paid on time.

It looks like care.

Culture Is a Team Sport

Part of what made Sara so good at this job is that she never mistook herself for the hero.

She knew how to center other people’s expertise. How to get the right voices in the room. How to run a meeting that left people feeling seen instead of steamrolled.

She’d throw the spotlight, not hog it. Celebrate someone else’s win. Diffuse someone else’s panic. Hold the line when it mattered, and let the small stuff go.

The culture of Persephone—scrappy, earnest, values-driven, absurd at times—wasn’t just upheld by Sara. It was partly authored by her.

And not because she set out to write it. But because every day, in a hundred quiet ways, she made the work feel like something worth doing.

Growth Without Ego

There’s a saying in permaculture: slow and small solutions.

Sara’s leadership was never flashy. It was iterative. Cumulative. Grounded.

She didn’t demand authority. She earned trust.

And because of that, she became the person I lean on most. The one I trusted to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” The one who understood not just how things worked, but why we were doing them in the first place.

That matters. Especially in a business that runs on purpose as much as it runs on hops.

The Roots That Matter

We like to celebrate entrepreneurs. Founders. Big ideas.

But if you really want to understand how a place works, talk to the person who remembers what version of QuickBooks you started with. Who has had to field angry supplier calls that haven’t been paid in weeks because our cashflow had no room in it. Who can tell you when the first order of growler labels arrived. Who remembers the look on your face the time you said something sexist and got called for it.

Talk to the person who built the systems that held all the good intentions in place.

Talk to Sara.

Because if Persephone is a tree - messy, rooted, regenerative, and occasionally squirrel-infested - then Sara is part of the trunk (I’m not sure she’d appreciate that comparison).

The superhighway of nutrients and knowledge and the structure that keeps it all straight.

Here’s to the people who grow into their role so completely that you can’t imagine the system without them.

Here’s to the ones who learn out loud. Who lead without ego. Who evolve with the system and, in doing so, help evolve the system itself.

Here’s to Sara. Rooted and rising.

Section 6: Tough Keggers and Other Rings of Joy — Fun as Serious Strategy

Let’s talk about joy.

Not the fleeting, dopamine-hit kind that comes from refreshing your inbox and discovering that someone else replied-all with a typo. I mean the kind of joy that roots into your bones. That reminds you why you started this madness in the first place. The kind that bubbles up when strangers become friends, kegs become challenges, and an ordinary Saturday becomes the stuff of community folklore.

At Persephone, fun has never been an afterthought. It’s been part of the design. Or maybe it just leaked into everything, like beer foam under a poorly cleaned tap handle. Either way, we knew from early on that if we weren’t having fun, we were probably doing it wrong.

And nowhere was that more hilariously, chaotically, and physically manifested than in the event we affectionately—and masochistically—called the Tough Kegger.

The Tough Kegger: Fitness Test, Beer Run, Fever Dream

The concept was simple: teams of four. One full-sized keg. Seven kilometers of trail, gravel, and elevation. No motorized assistance. Just sweat, strategy, and arguably poor life choices. Oh, and costumes were encouraged. Because nothing says “endurance” like running uphill in lederhosen while carrying 58.9 kilograms of dead weight.

This was not an event sanctioned by any formal athletic commission. But it was sanctioned by the community, which showed up year after year—some to run, many to spectate, all to laugh.

The course wound from the farm through nearby forest trails and back again, with checkpoints staffed by volunteers who took their job of heckling and hydrating very seriously. Teams plotted who would carry what, when to switch, and whether it was worth the risk to sprint the final hill (spoiler: it wasn’t). Winners got glory. Losers got beer. Everyone got sore.

But here’s the thing—it wasn’t just a novelty event. It was a cornerstone of our cultural strategy. An annual ritual. A kinetic celebration of who we were: scrappy, irreverent, rooted in community and willing to get a little ridiculous in the name of good beer and good company.

We called it a Tough Kegger, but it was also a soft power play.

It forged relationships between departments. It attracted volunteers who later became employees. It created memories that outlasted product launches and social media campaigns. It made people feel part of it—and that, my friends, is a strategic asset no spreadsheet can measure.

Beer Fest and the Art of Communal Mayhem

Not long after the Tough Kegger had proven its worth (and the tensile strength of our staff’s knees), we launched the Sunshine Coast Beer Festival. In its earliest incarnation, it was hosted at the farm and drew a crowd that far exceeded what our facilities—and our septic system—were designed for. But somehow, it worked.

Dozens of breweries. Hundreds of beer lovers. Live music. Lawn games. Spontaneous dance-offs. Good food. And that inevitable moment when someone tried to convince us that “technically cider is a kind of beer.” (It’s not.)

We ran the festival for a few years before passing the torch to the Gibsons Public Market, where it continues as a successful community fundraiser. And that’s part of the lesson: sometimes your job is to spark the thing, build it to a place of stability, and then get out of the way so it can evolve beyond you.

Like good compost, the best contributions break down and nourish what comes next.

These festivals weren’t just fun—they were laboratories. They allowed us to test new beers, observe consumer behaviour in its natural habitat (half-drunk and overly confident in beanbag toss), and build brand equity through shared experience rather than manufactured scarcity.

They also became anchor points in our organizational calendar—the kind of events people plan around. The kind that staff are proud to work at, despite the chaos, because they feel like something real.

And when you’re running a business that traffics in values as much as it does in hops, “real” is a scarce and sacred currency.

Pollinator Pilsner and the Power of Purposeful Brewing

Not all of our fun came in the form of sweaty races and dance tents. Some of it came in the form of benefit beers—a quieter but no less joyful way to express what we cared about.

Take the Pollinator Pilsner, for example. This wasn’t just a light, crisp lager with mass appeal. It was a message in a can. It highlighted the role of pollinators in regenerative agriculture. It told the story of food system traceability. And it gave drinkers a small but real way to participate in change—one twelve-pack at a time.

We’ve done similar beers to support the One Straw Society, Young Agrarians, Farm Folk City Folk, SCACL, and even a beer called Missing? that drew attention to the collapse of the herring fishery.

None of these efforts made us rich. Some barely broke even. But they stitched our brand into the fabric of causes we believed in. They signaled to our community—internal and external—that beer could be more than a product. It could be a platform.

And that? That was fun too.

Because fun doesn’t always mean frivolous. Sometimes it means playing with purpose.

The Strategic Utility of Joy

Look, we live in a time when joy is often treated as a luxury. Something you earn after the grind. But that’s not how nature works. Nature is exuberant. Playful. Sometimes outrageously wasteful in its beauty.

Fun is not a bug in the system. It’s a feature.

At Persephone, we tried to bake that into our culture—not because we didn’t take the work seriously, but because we took it seriously enough to know we’d burn out without it.

When we talk about Love as Foundational Capital, this is what we mean. Not just the solemn love of duty and sacrifice, but the unruly, laughter-filled, dance-while-you-keg kind of love. The kind that builds resilience not through stoicism, but through shared celebration.

We even put it in writing: “Have fun or don’t come to work.” It’s one of our operating principles. Not a joke. A warning.

And if you’ve never brewed a batch of beer while singing along to Whitney Houston with three other humans who haven’t slept properly in weeks, then I’m not sure you’ve truly experienced the restorative power of joy.

Dry Irish Stout and the Taste of Triumph

Let me end on a note of pride—our Dry Irish Stout, which won back-to-back gold medals and earned a reputation as one of the best in the region.

That beer is Anders’ handiwork, of course, but it’s also the result of the culture that allowed him to refine it. The space to experiment. The feedback loops that told us what was working. The shared palate of a team that cares enough to keep pushing for better.

And maybe, just maybe, the fact that joy makes things taste better.

Ask any chef. Ask any brewer. Ask anyone who’s ever cried laughing in a barn full of fermenters while the power went out and the mash tun overflowed.

Joy is not a garnish. It’s the main course.

Section 7: When the Market’s a Swamp — Constraints, Compost, and the Cost of Cool

You don’t notice the swamp at first. At the surface, it can look like a lush wetland: vibrant, teeming with promise, photgenic even. A new hazy IPA trend rolls in like a mist over the cattails. Someone in Vancouver has just put garlic scapes in a saison. A brewery in Portland made a beer using soundwaves to influence fermentation (actual thing). The ecosystem feels alive, buzzing, irresistible.

But when you step in too quickly, the ground wobbles. Your boots sink. You realize it’s not all loamy richness and unbridled innovation. It’s a saturation zone. And every new step takes more energy than the last.

Welcome to the craft beer market in BC, between 2015 and 2025.

We’ve been there. We are there. And we’re still figuring out how to keep our feet under us without getting sucked into the artisanal quagmire.

Let’s Talk About the Cool Tax

The craft beer world is nothing if not relentlessly inventive. It’s part of what makes it fun. It’s also what makes it exhausting. Somewhere along the line, “innovation” became not just a differentiator but a demand. You can’t just make a good pilsner. You have to make a dry-hopped, cold-lagered, photogenic pilsner infused with a backstory and a carefully curated font.

And while we’ve absolutely played in this sandbox (have you seen our can art lately?), we’ve also felt the strain of keeping up. Not just creatively, but operationally and financially. Every new beer means new labels, new SKUs, new placements, new sales talking points, new staff training, new social posts, and sometimes, new equipment.

It’s exhilarating. Until it isn’t.

The truth is, chasing the cool comes at a cost. And not just the cost of capital. It can slowly erode your core. The products that built your loyal following become harder to find because your tap list has turned into a rotating bingo wheel of experimentation. Your production team feels whiplash. Your brand starts to look like it has a personality disorder.

We know this because we lived it. At one point, we had over a dozen active SKUs in the market. We were running seasonal releases with the fervour of a craft-mad Willy Wonka. And sure, some of them landed beautifully. But others? Well, let’s just say the Lavender Coriander Saison had a very passionate fan base. Of six people. [I don’t think we actually made that beer but to be honest, I can’t remember.]

Compost as Business Strategy

What we’ve started to learn—a little late, perhaps, but with conviction—is that the key to surviving the swamp isn’t to sprint across the surface. It’s to compost.

Composting, in the literal sense, is controlled decay. It’s the process of letting go of what’s no longer thriving, breaking it down, and letting its nutrients feed what’s next. In a regenerative business, compost isn’t waste. It’s wisdom.

And if you’re looking for a framework that dignifies the process of letting go, compost and all, let us briefly introduce the Two Loop model from the Berkana Institute — a concept we’ll unpack more thoroughly later in the book. In short, it maps the transition between old systems that are in decline and the emergence of new, regenerative alternatives. Picture two overlapping loops: the dominant system waning on its arc, while the new system begins below, nourished not by dominance, but by values, experimentation, and community.

The space between the loops is where composting happens — the patient, sometimes painful work of transforming what no longer serves us into fertile ground for what might. Not all systems go down in flames; some quietly mulch themselves into the understory of what’s next.

In our case, that’s looked like rethinking product lines, pulling back from bloated distribution networks, and asking whether chasing one more trendy seasonal beer is worth the creative burnout it leaves behind. It’s not about quitting — it’s about composting strategically, so that something new can grow from better soil.

We began to look at our product line the way a forest looks at fallen logs. What was rotting? What could be turned into support for the rest of the system?

Rumrunner Red, a beloved original, was among the first to go. We didn’t toss it - that would’ve been cruel. But we stopped brewing it regularly and instead made space on the brew schedule for products that better aligned with our current strategy (and, let’s be honest, with what people were actually drinking).

That small act - letting go of a beer I once loved like a pet - became symbolic of a larger shift.

The Cost of Saying Yes

In business, saying yes feels like progress. New product? Yes. New partner? Yes. New distribution channel? Yes. We built Persephone on that kind of optimism. The yeses were how we discovered what worked, what delighted, what mattered.

But eventually, you run out of yeses. Or rather, each new yes costs more than the one before.

Yes starts to mean extra meetings, extra complexity, extra coordination. It stops feeling like growth and starts to feel like unraveling. That’s when you know it’s time to prune.

We started asking different questions:

• What are we uniquely positioned to do?

• What can we do better than anyone else?

• Where are we spreading ourselves thin to chase margins that don’t exist?

The answers weren’t always what we wanted to hear. But they were honest. And honesty, as it turns out, is a decent fertilizer.

Constraints as Care

We used to think of constraints as problems to solve. What if, we think of them as signs to read.

A limited tank schedule isn’t a barrier; it’s a prompt. A cashflow crunch isn’t just a headache; it’s a spotlight on what’s unsustainable. Running out of label stock? An invitation to ask whether this beer needs its own label at all.

In the natural world, limits are part of life. The sun sets. The seasons shift. A tree doesn’t complain when its growth slows in winter. It consolidates. It deepens. It prepares.

We’re trying to do the same. Not as an excuse to retreat, but as a strategy for resilience. Scaling back isn’t failure. It’s composting. It’s knowing that pulling back today creates room for better growth tomorrow.

The Fan Who Misses the Red Ale

Every time we post about a new beer, someone comments, “Still waiting for Rumrunner Red to come back…”

We get it. Some flavours linger in the soul. But the ecosystem we’re stewarding now is different than the one that birthed the Red. And just like the forest lets go of certain species when the canopy changes, we have to trust that not everything is meant to be forever.

(That said, we have been known to sneak in a batch when the stars align and the tanks are free.)

The Lesson of the Swamp

There’s one more thing about swamps. They’re not bad. In fact, they’re essential. Swamps filter water, support biodiversity, and store carbon. They’re just tricky places to build a road.

Same with the market.

A saturated, trend-heavy, unpredictable landscape isn’t the enemy. It’s just the wrong terrain for fast growth. It demands adaptation. Reflection. Restraint. And an appreciation for the long game.

So that’s what we’re doing. One pruning cut at a time. One honest compost pile after another.

Making room for what really wants to grow.

Section 8: Business as Biome — Lessons from the Beaver and the Understory

If you want to understand the real health of a forest, don’t look at the flashy birds or the wildflowers. Look down. Get low. Find the understory.

Or better yet, find a beaver.

The beaver isn’t flashy. It’s not sexy. No one is writing poems about beavers (except maybe in Canada). But they’re the ultimate ecosystem engineers. They build dams that slow down water, create wetlands, boost biodiversity, and help forests survive drought. They gnaw on what’s overgrown. They reconfigure the landscape for the benefit of everyone—whether or not anyone thanks them.

We like to think we’ve got a bit of beaver in us.

At Persephone, we’ve had our showy moments—the limited releases, the splashy events, the seasonal one-offs with labels so pretty we almost forgot to price the product properly. But behind the scenes? Quiet systems were being built. Culture was composting and rebuilding itself. And yes, beer was aging. Slowly. Stubbornly. Sometimes in my pantry, beside the dog food.

This is a section about those parts of the business - the ones that don’t trend, but endure.

Beneath the Buzz: The Understory That Holds It All Up

The understory is the forest’s support crew. It’s the moss, ferns, fungi, and stubborn little saplings that don’t make the calendar photos but hold the soil together. Without it, the whole canopy comes crashing down at the first decent storm.

Same goes for business.

There are the kinds of things that an/our understory might include (?):

• The vintage payroll software held together by a decade of duct-taped updates and one mysterious macro that only Sara understands.

• The laminated emergency contact sheet taped to the keg fridge, featuring at least two people who no longer live in the province.

• The rotating septic schedule, now sacred scripture, with “DO NOT IGNORE THIS TIME” written in four colours and underlined angrily by three different managers.

• A logbook titled “Freezer Temperature Readings” that doubles as a journal of existential dread from shift workers on closing duty.

• The delivery van maintenance folder, stuffed with cryptic invoices, tire quotes, and a handwritten note: “Never trust the second spark plug. Ever.”

• A half-archived Dropbox folder named “New POS” that includes five different point-of-sale systems and exactly zero instructions for how to reset the password.

• The whiteboard in the office that still says “Q3 Priorities – 2016” underneath a newer, shakier line that reads “Repaint Whiteboard.”

• The food safe certificate taped above the sink that expired during the Obama administration but remains proudly laminated and untouched.

• The shop radio permanently stuck between two stations—sometimes music, sometimes weather, occasionally the voice of a disgruntled former employee (we think).

• A seasonal décor bin labeled “Winter Vibe” containing three broken strings of lights, some fake snow, and a glitter-covered reindeer missing its head.

• The staff bowling league sign-up sheet that’s been hanging since 2019, mostly used now to test dry-erase markers.

• A beer label prototype folder filled with brilliant ideas we were definitely going to use once we “found time” for a brand refresh in 2020.

• A dusty bottle of something barrel-aged, hand-labeled “Do Not Touch – Anniversary?” sitting in the break room fridge since before the last GST audit.

• The compost bin that smells like hope, despair, and yesterday’s citrus peel, depending on the season.

It’s the stuff no one sees in the press release. But if we’ve learned anything, it’s this: resilience is built in the unglamorous layers. It’s not a KPI; it’s a compost bin. A stable, slightly smelly miracle of regeneration that holds everything together when the weather turns.

Cellared Lessons and Dusty Bottles

There’s a whole corner of my pantry dedicated to past mistakes and slow-burn brilliance. It’s where our aging barleywines live.

Over the years, we brewed a series of barleywines—rich, high-ABV, end-of-season indulgences that required patience and a bit of masochism. Most were brewed with intention. A few were brewed because we had extra grain and unresolved feelings.

They’re still there. Aging. Sometimes improving. Sometimes just sitting in silence like elderly uncles who won’t admit they’re lost.

We didn’t make them to be trendy. We made them because they felt right. They were expressions of time, place, and mood. Some were brilliant. Others should’ve come with a warning label. But they remind us of a truth we keep relearning: not everything needs to go to market in a sprint. Some things should stew. Or cellar. Or be quietly forgiven.

And sometimes, when the time is right, you crack one open and find something beautiful. Or at least educational.

The Two Loops: Composting the Old to Nourish the New

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s Two Loop Model gives us a way to name what we’ve lived. It’s a framework for understanding how systems transition—not by sudden revolution, but by gradual composting. As the old system begins to fall apart, elements of the new one quietly begin to emerge. Over time, these new patterns become viable alternatives. But the magic happens in the messy middle—the compost heap between paradigms.

We’ll dig into the Two Loops later in more detail. For now, picture one curve declining as another rises. Between them is a kind of chaotic stew of half-failed ideas, cultural drift, and someone shouting “Let’s try kefir again!”

That stew is fertile ground. But only if we’re willing to let go of what no longer serves us. That’s why we phased out certain beers, shifted our events model, and started rethinking distribution. Not because we failed. But because we needed to compost.

And composting takes humility. It’s admitting that the brilliant idea from 2018 is now an awkward guest who won’t leave. It’s letting the lavender saison die a quiet, dignified death (for real this time). It’s choosing to be a beaver, not a brand strategist.

Wendell Berry, With a Chisel

I’m not sure if Wendell Berry ever wrote about beavers. But he understood slow systems. He understood that permanence comes from patience, not panic.

He wrote: “The good work of agriculture or forestry is determined by the character of the place, as well as by the character of the worker. It has to be done in the right way, and at the right time.”

Business is the same. Or at least it should be.

We’ve tried to learn what our place demands. Sometimes we guessed wrong. Sometimes we overreached. But when we slowed down and paid attention—really paid attention—we noticed the contours of what was ready to emerge. Not the flashy growth curve. The subtle, rooted stuff. The beaver work.

Doing Less (Better), and Being Okay With That

There was a time when we thought we had to be everything: brewery, farm, venue, gift shop, doggy daycare (briefly, during a staff meeting with no child care). We imagined we were building the Amazon of Agriculture. The Etsy of Ale.

Turns out, we were just tired.

What we’re learning instead is how to not do things. How to let some dreams go fallow. How to accept that a well-run taproom might matter more than a national launch of a pumpkin spice IPA. (Actually, Anders made me promise that we’d never make a pumpkin beer… so far, so good.)

This isn’t resignation. It’s reorientation.

We’re not shrinking. We’re thickening. Like the forest understory after a fire. Like a team that’s grown scar tissue and skill in equal measure. Like a beaver dam that holds, not because it’s perfect, but because someone kept rebuilding it after every flood.

What’s Worth Holding Onto

There are still dreams in the pantry. Beers we haven’t brewed yet. Partnerships we haven’t launched. A someday-bookstore called “Upstart Upstairs” that lives in the half-joked, half-funded realm of persistent imagination.

But now we hold those dreams differently. Looser. With more humor. With more clarity about what it costs to build something real—and what it’s worth to do so with love.

We’re learning to ask:

• What will still matter fifty years from now?

• Who does this serve, beyond our ego?

• Does this idea compost well?

That last one’s serious. If we can’t break it down, feed it back into the system, and grow something stronger—then maybe it’s not worth growing at all.

Final Thoughts from the Dam

So, no. This chapter isn’t ending with a breakthrough beer release or a repeat worthy lesson on scale. It’s ending with a nod to the beaver. And the fungi. And the weird, beautiful, overlooked parts of the system that quietly make everything else possible.

Business, like a forest, is shaped as much by what’s buried as by what’s blooming.

And if you’ve got a dusty bottle of Persephone barleywine aging in your pantry, maybe now’s the time to open it. Share it with someone who remembers the early days. Drink it slow. Raise a toast to the compost.

And get ready for what’s next.

Section 9: Diversity With Roots

We used to think innovation meant always chasing the next big thing. Or at least the next weird thing. Sour beers brewed with foraged mushrooms. IPAs hopped to the point of existential crisis. A non-alcoholic stout that tasted like regret and licorice – nah, we never tried for an non-alcoholic beer…. It’s a principle thing. We did however try a lot of things though, most of them intentional. Some of them, the result of a mislabeled grain sack and a brewer having an off day or an IBC of apple juice that embraced wild yeast before we could design it differently.

But over time, we’ve learned that innovation doesn’t have to mean novelty. In fact, constant novelty can become a kind of sugar rush for a business—a spike of excitement followed by a crash of confusion, fatigue, and that hollow feeling you get when you’ve released your twelfth limited edition in a year and can’t remember why you started the brewery in the first place.

Now, we’re still playful. Still experimental. Still up for brewing something funky when the mood strikes and the yeast behaves. But we’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea that depth matters more than dazzle. That rootedness matters more than reach. That coherence is a better long-term strategy than chaos with a good sepia filter.

This doesn’t mean we’ve become boring. It means we’ve become coherent. It means we’ve started asking questions like:

• What is this product really for?

• Who is it serving?

• Does it strengthen the whole ecosystem, or just siphon off resources from something more essential?

We still experiment, but we do it with more intention. Less as a marketing stunt, more as a conversation with our customers and our land. We pay attention to which products resonate, not just in sales, but in spirit. We look for the ones that spark stories, community, curiosity. The ones that build connection rather than just shelf space.

We’ve let some things go. With sadness, sometimes. And occasionally, with a bottle of Rumrunner Red Ale raised in solemn tribute.

But letting go has made space. Space for the beers that feel truer. Space for new ideas that come from listening instead of lunging. Space for systems that can actually hold what we’re trying to grow.

It’s not the tidy arc most business books would recommend. We haven’t gone from minimum viable product to explosive growth to successful exit. We’ve gone from field to beer to pumpkin patch to staff bowling night to farm tour to back to beer again. It’s a circle. A spiral. A fungal network.

And we’re still figuring it out. Still listening. Still learning what wants to emerge.

What we know for sure is this: business is not a factory. It’s a forest. It’s a living biome. It’s a dance between growth and decay, sunlight and shadow, ambition and humility.

And if we get it right - if we keep asking the right questions, composting the right ideas, and staying rooted in the place that made us - then maybe we’ll get to keep building something worth handing down.

Not just a brand. But an ecology. Not just a product line. But a place.

And somewhere in that place—between the food forest, the chicken coop, the community garden, and the staff potluck featuring five kinds of lentils and one suspiciously unlabeled IPA - you might spot a dandelion.

We don’t pull them anymore. They’re messy. They’re persistent. They’re not always welcome.

But they show up early. They feed the bees. They remind us that not all growth is planned.

Some of it just knows where the cracks are. And chooses to bloom anyway.

Section 10: Roots and Shoots — Innovation That Actually Belongs

The dandelions were never the problem.

We used to mow them from the lawn in front of the tasting room, worried they looked unkempt. Not on brand. Too wild. It took Melissa to remind us that those bright yellow bursts were some of the first food of the season for the bees.

Now we leave them. We’ve even argued for their strategic value.

This is the section about those kinds of decisions—the ones that don’t show up in the pitch deck, but quietly define whether your innovation actually belongs in the ecosystem you’ve built. It’s about roots and shoots: what holds you down, and what insists on growing anyway.

And it’s a gentle push against the cult of innovation. The one that tells you to disrupt, to scale, to pivot harder, to monetize your newsletter, to build the app version of your ethics. We’re not saying there’s no place for newness. We’re just saying it better have a reason for being—one that’s rooted, responsive, and real.

Growth Without Displacement

We’ve watched other companies chase growth like a weed takes a crack in concrete—forceful, fast, unbothered by context. A new product here, a location there. And sometimes it works. We’re not above admiring a well-executed expansion.

But the kind of growth we’re interested in isn’t the kind that displaces what came before. It’s the kind that learns from it. Like a sapling that grows in the shadow of the mother tree, its roots interwoven in the same mycorrhizal network.

We’ve tried new products, new events, new ways of doing old things. Some of it stuck. Some of it felt wrong halfway through and quietly disappeared (RIP, kombucha soda). What we learned is this: not everything you create needs to scale. Some things are meant to be small, situational, and sacred.

Like the dandelions. Or the 3pm staff toast on Fridays. Or the community fridge we kept stocked during the early pandemic waves, even when the shelves inside were bare.

These things didn’t make us money. But they made us whole.

Innovation as Listening

True innovation, at least the way we’ve come to understand it, isn’t invention for its own sake. It’s listening carefully to what the system is telling you it needs. It’s noticing that customers keep asking for non-alcoholic options, not because they’re trendy, but because they want to participate in your place without the pressure to drink. It’s hearing the whisper of a staff member who says, “What if we tried this differently?” and taking it seriously.

Some of our best ideas weren’t ours.

They came from the crowd, the taproom, the farmers, the teenagers who played their first live show on our patio. They came from the awkward silences in staff meetings and the messy chalkboard sketches after a long delivery day.

The Pollinator Pilsner wasn’t dreamed up in a strategy session. It emerged from our increasing awareness that if we didn’t advocate for pollinator habitats, we wouldn’t have much of a farm left. The benefit beer wasn’t a product extension. It was a response. It was also really expensive to make so we discontinued it as a core offering.

So was the Rio Theatre account, born from our decision to invest in saving a beloved cultural institution. Our participation wasn’t about market share. It was about being apart of something bigger than us, about collective action. And yes, it also turned out to be pretty damn fun.

The Risk of Novelty Addiction

There is a real and present danger to being known as the “innovative” business.

Once you get that reputation, people expect fireworks. They expect surprise and delight and something new every quarter. And eventually, if you’re not careful, you start chasing that reaction instead of listening to what actually needs to evolve.

We’ve been guilty of that. We’ve launched things because we thought we should, not because we knew why. We’ve played with packaging for novelty’s sake. We’ve made beers we wouldn’t want to drink twice, but figured someone out there might.

That’s not innovation. That’s anxiety with a marketing budget.

The better path, we think, is slower. Quieter. Rootier. It’s noticing that the idea you had three years ago is finally ready, not because the market says so, but because you are.

Innovation isn’t a funnel. It’s a fungal network.

Revisiting the Dandelion

A dandelion is opportunistic, sure. But it’s also generous. It grows where it’s needed. It signals compacted soil, aerates it, feeds the bees, and quietly disappears when the summer canopy fills in. It doesn’t compete. It complements. It prepares the ground for what’s next.

We want to be more like that.

The idea of “roots and shoots” isn’t just a cute way to talk about business. It’s our reminder that any innovation worth growing should be rooted in care, and should offer something that nourishes the system around it.

And here’s where we cheat a little. Because sometimes that nourishment looks like a new product. And sometimes it looks like restraint. Like not launching. Like stopping.

We don’t get it right every time. But we’re getting better at asking, before we make a move: Does this serve the soil? Does this build something we’d want our kids to inherit?

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it’s dandelions.

Chapter 11 v2: Branching Out — Exploring New Markets, Customer Segments and Territory

Section 1: Not Every Branch Bears Fruit (And That’s Okay)

Let’s start with a(nother) confession.

We thought we’d be everywhere by now. We really did. A Persephone pub in every postal code. Kegs of Pollinator Pilsner flowing freely from Galiano to Gander. A nationwide beer-based barter system wherein hopheads exchanged pints for political change. You know, the usual startup dream.

But nature—both literal and economic—had other plans.

You see, when you’re raised in the religion of growth, expansion is your sacrament. Branching out is the sermon. It’s what good businesses do, right? Find a new market, plant your flag, reap the rewards. There’s no caveat on the whiteboard that says ”…unless it’s Alberta in February and we can’t find a decent agency to rep us.”

We were branching like a keener maple in spring. Eager limbs flailing in every direction, just assuming the sunlight would come.

Turns out, not every branch bears fruit. Some don’t even leaf out. Some snap off halfway through the fiscal quarter. Some ooze a sticky sap of regret. And some? Well, they’re still up there somewhere—dead wood we haven’t had the heart (or ladder) to prune.

There is a Locus Tree in our picnic area, by the pond, that when young a kid grabbed and ripped the branch off, tearing a catastrophic strip down its trunk. I remember Melissa being almost in tears (as much rage, as sadness) as that kind of damage often means the demise of the tree. However, some 10 years later the tree is big and beautiful – one might even call it a hallmark of that area.

But that’s the thing about trees. They don’t waste time mourning every failed shoot. They keep growing. And sometimes, that failure becomes future mulch.

The Myth of the Fruitful Branch

Every entrepreneur has a mental map where expansion is always forward, always up, and always to the right. It’s the gospel of scale, preached from stage and vc presentations. Growth is framed as inevitable—as if opening a new market is just a matter of finding the right unlock code.

But try growing avocados in the Yukon and get back to us.

The myth goes something like this: great brand + strong mission + half-decent Instagram = global success. And sure, it works—if you’re selling digital dog portraits or drop-shipping mushroom lamps. But for us? For a purpose-driven brewery on ALR land with questionable parking and a deeply non-linear business model?

Branching out isn’t a plug-and-play proposition. It’s more like mycelial networking in a windstorm. You can spread, but whether you fruit is another story.

Failure, Reframed (With Compost)

In the forest, failed branches serve a purpose. They shade the roots. They decay into the soil. They host fungi and lichen and the occasional curious raccoon. In short: they give back.

In business, we’re told to cut our losses. To pivot. To pretend the branch never existed. But the truth is, every sidetrack and spindly offshoot has taught us something. And we’re still growing through the compost of our own misfires.

Like that time we thought Alberta would be a slam dunk because of its “thirsty, farming” demographic. Or the time we launched e-commerce during a shipping crisis that everyone and their dog were suffering from. Or, when we tried reaching out to all the local barberships and movie theatres hoping they’d stock our stout and take what we were enjoying at the Rio to another level – not that simple, fools.

The Branches You’ll Meet Along the Way

Just to prepare you for the journey ahead, here’s a short field guide to some of the more common branch types we’ve encountered:

• The Flailing Limb: Shoots up fast, no structural integrity, collapses under the weight of one bad quarterly report.

• The Snapback: Grows well until a sudden frost (or Instagram controversy) kills momentum.

• The Frankenstein Graft: A forced partnership with something genetically incompatible. May survive, but nobody’s happy.

• The Ornamental Shoot: Looks great in marketing decks. Serves zero actual purpose. Requires constant pruning to keep up appearances.

• The Dandelion Sprout: Technically a weed, but good for pollinators. Grows everywhere. Nobody knows who planted it.

(Spoiler alert: we’ve been all five.)

Why We Tried Anyway

We weren’t naïve. Okay, we were a little naïve. But mostly, we were optimistic and had a modicum of comfort with the intersection of risk and ambiguity … and just scrappy enough to be dangerous.

We tried to branch out because:

• We wanted to reach more people.

• We wanted to prove that values-driven beer could scale.

• We thought it might help the bottom line.

• And, if we’re being honest, because we got bored staring at the same trees.

Also: cash flow. Always cash flow.

There’s something intoxicating about imagining your product in a new city, in new hands, making new memories. It’s the dopamine hit of potential. But just like a romantic weekend getaway with someone you barely know, branching out can quickly turn from fantasy to flounder.

We didn’t always succeed. We didn’t always even break even. But we moved. We tried. And every attempt gave us more than just sales data—it gave us stories. And sometimes, those stories turned into roots.

On Growth, Grafting, and Gumption

Let’s pause here and acknowledge something: this isn’t just about sales strategy. It’s about culture. Belonging. The human impulse to connect across distance.

Because branching out, at its best, isn’t an ego trip. It’s an ecosystem play. It’s a belief that your weird little brewery on a farm might matter to someone a ferry ride away. Or a thousand kilometres north. Or in a red velvet seat at the Rio Theatre.

So yes, we’re going to tell you about our biggest wins and our awkward stumbles. About Powell River and The Alley. About the Yukon’s mysterious love for us. About reps, flops, and sleeper hits. About why a pub in a bowling alley makes more sense than an email marketing campaign ever will.

And we’ll tell you with humour, because humour is how we prune regret and fertilize perspective.

But before we dive into all that, just remember:

Not every branch needs to bear fruit. Some offer shade. Some break. Some become homes for moths. And some - bless them - are just there to make the tree a little more interesting.

Section 2: Being Local Somewhere Else — The Trouble with Transplants

Some trees don’t like to be moved. You can dig the hole perfectly, add compost, water diligently, even whisper sweet affirmations, but the damn thing will just stand there, sulking. Leaves droop. Roots recoil. It knows it’s not home.

It’s not just the soil, or the sunlight, or the clumsy way you jammed it into the ground. It might be the mycorrhizal network. The fungi. The whispers underground. That tree used to be plugged into a whole system of nutrient-sharing gossip and symbiotic generosity. Now it’s isolated. It’s not that the new place is bad—it just doesn’t know the tree.

This, in case the metaphor isn’t already smacking you over the head like a wind-felled branch, is what happens when a business tries to expand to a new region and assumes that being a “values-driven brand” is enough to be welcomed. It’s not. Especially not in craft beer.

For a while, we believed it. “We’re Persephone! We have a farm! We have awards! We’re a B Corp! We love the Earth and also made a beer for bees!” But none of that matters if the people walking into the liquor store have never heard of you and are already loyal to their buddy’s cousin’s microbrewery with a dog on the label.

Scaling is seductive. The numbers always look so clean in a spreadsheet. Population growth projections. Average consumption per capita. Distribution margins. You start drawing expansion maps on whiteboards with arrows like military generals—only your enemy is obscurity, and your secret weapon is a mixed pack.

But let’s be real. Stepping into a new region without deep local roots is like releasing a critically acclaimed indie film with no marketing budget. Maybe it gets picked up by a weird theatre in Nelson. Maybe it gets buried beneath five Iron Mans. Either way, you don’t get to control the outcome.

Craft beer, in particular, has a dangerous mirage of openness. The shelves look inclusive. The labels are colourful. Every brand tells a “story.” There’s a kind of performative quirkiness that can lull you into thinking your authenticity is enough. Spoiler: it may not be.

We had moments of hope. Sales meetings where people loved the story. Liquor store managers who visited and got misty-eyed about our farm. New customers who enthusiastically bought a six-pack - once.

But story doesn’t scale if it doesn’t belong. Our beer sitting in a cooler in a town we’ve never walked through, staring longingly out from behind the glass? It looked like a dog that wandered into someone else’s family picnic. Confused. Out of place. Still lovable, but not quite part of the moment.

And that’s the thing about “local.” It’s not geography. It’s emotional. It’s relational. It’s whether you’re seen as part of their story, not just your own.

This misfire wasn’t anyone’s fault. We didn’t make bad beer. We didn’t lie about who we were. We just assumed that good values travel well. And sometimes they do. But often they don’t. Because “place” isn’t just a set of coordinates - it’s a cultural code. A rhythm. A smell. A memory bank. And unless you’ve actually shared a meal, pitched in, and earned your stripes (or at least your tap handle), you’re not local.

What we learned - slowly, and with a few costly invoices - is that being “not from here” isn’t a cute backstory in most markets. It’s a strike against you. In an industry obsessed with community, you are either in the circle or circling the drain.

This is humbling. And humbling is good. It means you’re still learning. Still connected to reality.

It also means you start asking different questions. Instead of “How do we scale?” you start asking, “Where do we belong?”

Which brings us to Powell River. Not a conquest. Not a sales territory. But a place where we already had soil under our nails. Where the stories overlapped. Where our people already were. And more importantly—where we were already part of the community, even before we built anything.

Before we get there, let’s name one final lesson: Being local somewhere else isn’t impossible - but it’s not a brand strategy. It’s a relationship strategy. And relationships take time. You don’t grow roots by launching a marketing campaign. You grow them by showing up, listening, and being useful. I have friends in Whitehorse that are some our most generous boosters and are always, always asking for Persephone at the liquor store. These relationships are strong and primarily underpinned by our shared values, worldview and conviction for doing something good with business and capital.

And if you can’t do that, well… enjoy being that lonely six-pack sitting in the cooler like an out-of-town cousin at a family reunion.

The Yukon Outlier (and Bless Those Who Live There)

Ah, the Yukon. Proof that relationships matter more than reps.

We never launched a campaign there. We never hired a regional sales manager. We barely understood how logistics worked north of Whitehorse. And yet, we had traction. Good traction. Why? Because of people.

The kind of people who share your story around a campfire, or while pouring beers at a local music festival. People who buy a round for the table and say, “This one’s from Gibsons. You’ll like it.” The kind of people who - true story - tattoo your logo on their forearm and don’t even ask for a discount.

Call them ambassadors, superfans, or a rogue branch of our marketing department—we call them legends. That kind of support can’t be bought, only earned… usually with shared values, good stories, and the occasional road trip keg delivery in the back of a 1964 Fargo dump truck.

Yes, the Fargo. It doesn’t get much use these days. The brakes are sketchy, the bench seat’s seen better decades, and it drinks gas like a teenager at a cola fountain. But it looks magnificent. Big blue beast. Flatbed with wood rails. Vintage curves. A license plate that says BEER. It’s basically our spirit animal on wheels.

Section 3: A Place to Belong — Powell River and the Poetry of Purpose

Some stories don’t begin with strategy. They begin with people. With trust. With a phone call that feels more like an invitation than a proposal. Powell River is one of those stories.

We didn’t “expand” to Powell River. We were invited. And we said yes because our partners — Ryan Hansen and Catherine Macleod — made it clear this wasn’t just about business. It was about legacy.

The bowling alley they brought to our attention had been in the same family since the 1940s. A place where generations had gathered — to play, to flirt, to bowl, to grieve, to celebrate. The owner didn’t just want to sell a building. He wanted to pass on a story. And Ryan and Catherine saw the possibility: a chance to honour what was while imagining what could be.

That kind of stewardship — reverent but forward-looking — is rare. And in this case, essential. Because the building was tired. The lanes were too many for 2025. The amenities were worn. And yet, the bones were solid. The community memories thick in the air. You could almost hear the echoes of league night and the smell of cheap pizza clinging to the walls. It wasn’t dying — it was waiting.

Ryan and Catherine didn’t come to us with spreadsheets and revenue projections. (Though, yes, those existed.) They came with a vision. One where a legacy space could be infused with new energy. One where Persephone’s values could meet Powell River’s sense of place — not by taking over, but by settling in. Not as conquerors, but as collaborators.

Two years later, that vision is alive and bowling.

Yes, we’ve renovated. Yes, we’ve rebranded. But more than anything, we’ve listened. We’ve let the building, the neighbourhood, the people — especially the youth — shape what the space needed to become. It’s still a bowling alley. And now it’s also a bar. A cultural venue. A music hall. A third place that isn’t just where you go to do something, but where you go to be someone — with others.

We host drag shows and classical concerts. We pour pints during the Loud Qathet heavy metal festival, and then again for the intermission crowd from PRISMA on the Beach. The same bar serves teenagers on bowling league night and retirees on their third blonde ale. The place has range. And that’s not an accident — it’s an ethic. One that Ryan and Catherine embedded from the start.

Their partnership has been quiet but unwavering. They’ve pulled off the rare feat of making significant change without alienating the regulars. The space feels both familiar and refreshed. You’d hardly notice the new systems, upgraded lane mechanics, or safety improvements unless you knew what to look for. But you feel the difference. It’s safer. Warmer. Healthier. Less like a business, more like a hearth.

And for us, Powell River isn’t just a place of growth. It’s a place of personal reckoning.

We first started entertaining the idea of buying the Alley before my accident. We closed the transaction while I was still in hospital. And we’ve only ever operated it with me in a wheelchair. That fact alone added a kind of radical honesty to the entire endeavour — a visceral grounding that no pitch deck could simulate.

Melissa and I even toyed with the idea of buying property up there — maybe putting down some roots of our own. We believed in the place. Still do. In the end, we invested our own money — a convertible shareholder loan into Persephone — to help close the deal and secure the property. It wasn’t just a financial move. It was personal. And hopeful.

And then… the ramps.

Powell River, it turns out, is not exactly a bastion of universal design. The bowling alley, beautiful and storied as it is, was no exception. We didn’t so much buy a turnkey business as we did a masterclass in inherited inaccessibility. But now? Now we’re excited. We have the opportunity — not just to upgrade a building, but to maybe, incrementally, help shift a town.

The local Special Olympics bowling team has been playing at the Alley for years. And since our arrival, they’ve felt an even deeper connection to the space — not just as bowlers, but as part of something. Our story, their story — they’re not parallel. They intersect. That matters. That’s how belonging works.

And in the middle of all this growth, a gift arrived.

A mural — currently being painted as we write this — that captures everything we hoped this place could be, but could never have articulated ourselves.

Designed by artists in the qathet region in collaboration with local youth from the Tla’amin Nation, this mural is not branding. It’s not decoration. It’s cultural storytelling rendered in shape and colour and symbolism. It’s medicine, memory, and invitation. It is — quite literally — a face of the building. And it gives the structure a kind of dignity that no amount of signage ever could.

We’re humbled by it. Grateful. And yes, a little nervous — because the best gifts come with responsibility. The community hasn’t seen the finished piece yet. We’re crossing our fingers that they feel what we feel: awe, pride, connection.

We could try to explain what it means, but we’d only get in the way. So instead, here is the artist’s full explanation. Read it not as a press release, but as a teaching:

kʷakʷɛm — to be alive

Collectively, these designs demonstrate the beauty, strength, and resilience of our people. “kʷakʷɛm / kwa-kwem / To Be Alive” highlights the historic and ongoing relationships ɬaʔəmɛn people have with the natural world around us, and how that relationship provides us with gifts and allows us to experience them as Human Beings.

“t̓agəm / tah-gum” in our language is the word for both Sun and the Moon, as they are two parts of one whole. Being represented together in this design demonstrates the balance their relationship enacts, and serves as an example we can follow in our own lives.

“lamətohʊkt / lamuh-toh-hukt” in our language is our word for wool blanket. These expertly woven blankets have been crafted in our communities and have served many great purposes for our people since time immemorial. They function as robes of protection against the elements, for our spirits, for ceremonial purposes, and as physical examples of abundance which distinguished hawhɛgus / haw-hey-goos (leaders/wealthy people of the community) would distribute to the people at nohom / no-home (feasts).

Within this design, the blanketing of the personified Sun visually demonstrates our respect and reverence for the abundant offerings the Sun brings our people. The Sun cradling the Moon demonstrates balance and care, working in tandem, it gently pulls us in the directions we need to go to grow, guiding us on our paths while walking in Our Way of Life.

“kʷakʷatɛlaq / kwa-kwa-tel-aq” is the general word for butterfly in our language. The one depicted in this design is more specifically a local species called the “clouded sulphur,” a low-flying insect relative. Who enjoys pollinating our plants and helping our medicines grow with help from the Sun’s rays, depicted in the adjacent design. Above the clouded sulphur, rests the North Star, bringing us guidance and light to follow through our darker nights.

Underlying these designs is a xʷoxʷop̓ɛʔɛč / xwoh-xwoh-peh-ech (basket weaving) design. These baskets were also expertly woven and used in our everyday lives, as well as extravagant gifts, displays of artistry, and familial ties within our communities. These vessels were tightly woven, intricately designed. Some of these baskets were so tightly woven they were capable of holding water as well as any of our other finest treasures, without letting them fall. Including them in this design represents our dedication as a community and as qaymɩxʷ / qaye-mew-xw people to hold the teachings of our ancestors, which these designs carry.

We didn’t ask for this mural. We didn’t commission it with a marketing brief. We created space. We built relationship. And then, through those relationships, the design emerged.

That’s how regeneration works. Not with mandates. With mycelium. With threads. With trust.

If we measure success not in profit but in belonging, then Powell River is already one of our biggest wins. Not because it’s easy — it’s not. Not because it’s wildly profitable — it isn’t yet. But because it’s real. It matters. And it feels like a place we’ve been heading toward for a long time, even before we had a map.

Some expansions are transactional. This one is devotional.

Section 4: The Bookstore Upstairs

The bookstore wasn’t in the original plan.

Like many good ideas in regenerative business, it sprouted in a quiet moment of dissatisfaction, floated down from a conversation canopy, and then found root in a half-used space we didn’t quite know what to do with.

The space upstairs from the Persephone tasting room took many forms over the first ten years including meeting room, part-time residence, secret shareholder space, propagation house, etc. If you’ve ever been in a tasting room on a busy summer weekend, you’ll understand how quaint the idea of meetings feels. In the early years, the extra room upstairs hosted investor pitches, board members, community organizers, staff training sessions, and a few too many earnest discussions about our “strategic direction,” most of which ended with a whiteboard full of ideas no one could read by Monday.

At some point, the room began to feel unwanted or like it wanted something more. Or maybe we did.

Enter Upstart Upstairs.

The name is equal parts nod to our partner (Upstart & Crow, a Vancouver-based literary project with a taste for cultural mischief) and a wink at the spatial pun. It’s also, conveniently, a declaration of mood. We didn’t want a sanitized gift shop or a branded merch corner. We wanted a corner of the building that whispered (and occasionally shouted) ideas into people’s heads. We wanted to be a brewery with footnotes. A farm with a reading list.

And we knew that if we didn’t curate this cultural space, someone else would fill it with fridge magnets and socks that say “If You Can Read This, Bring Me Beer.” (Which, to be clear, we still sell downstairs. We’re not assholes.)

Not Just Books

There are two kinds of bookstores in the world: the kind that makes you feel smarter just walking in, and the kind that makes you wonder if you’ve stumbled into a last-minute airport gift shop. We tried to make Upstart Upstairs the former.

Upstart & Crow isn’t just a bookstore — it’s a cultural project rooted in literary mischief and civic imagination. Founded by Ian Gill and Rebecca Caines, the shop first emerged as a refuge for writers and readers who believe that books still matter in a world increasingly allergic to nuance. Their flagship space in Vancouver’s Granville Island district feels more like a think tank with better lighting — and occasionally better wine — than a retail outlet. Which is fitting, because its proprietors are not your typical shopkeepers.

Ian Gill, in particular, brings a rare hybrid of journalism, activism, and entrepreneurial flair to the project. Formerly a reporter with The Vancouver Sun and the CBC, Ian went on to lead Ecotrust Canada, where he fused ecological integrity with economic innovation in a way that predated — and perhaps presaged — many of today’s social finance movements. He’s written extensively on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the perils of extractive capitalism. His book All That We Say is Ours offers one of the most compelling narratives of Indigenous-led land stewardship on the West Coast. For those of us at Persephone, Ian’s work reads like a mirror to our own: place-based, unflinching, and unwilling to separate story from system.

Our partnership with Upstart & Crow is less about co-branding and more about shared DNA. It’s about creating space for critical thought, uncomfortable truths, and radically hopeful ideas to ferment — upstairs from the beer, nestled above the hop-scented din. It’s about proving that business, like literature, can be subversive, poetic, and necessary.

The selection is activist-heavy, climate-aware, occasionally angry, and often hopeful. Wendell Berry is there. So is Mary Oliver. Vandana Shiva. The classics of ecological economics, regenerative agriculture, post-growth futurism, Indigenous reconciliation, feminist theory, land back movements, the odd poetry collection, and at least one graphic novel about the end of capitalism that somehow still manages to be funny. We might be particularly proud of the banned books labelled as such and shared with fervor.

There’s a curated shelf of B Corp reading material (including a few books by companies that never quite lived up to their own blurbs), and another dedicated to food sovereignty and land stewardship. There’s a local section, too, with publications from the Coast and self-published chapbooks that smell like ambition and toner.

And yes, there’s a reading chair. Because sometimes you need a safe place to collapse while wrestling with the late-stage implications of planetary collapse.

We’ve had people cry in that bookstore. We’ve had impromptu strategy sessions, awkward first dates, and one unexpected game of hide and seek (which is mostly fine, except when someone hides in the shelf behind Braiding Sweetgrass, which is sacred ground).

But here’s what it’s really for: fermentation.

Cultures Take Time (and a Little Mold)

Culture, in the microbial sense, takes time. You can’t rush sourdough. You can’t schedule a kombucha revolution. And you definitely can’t build an authentic company culture by posting a few values on the wall and hoping your staff won’t notice that your actual practices smell more like burnt toast than fresh-baked bread.

Bookshelves are slow. Reading is slow. So is thinking. So is change. We made this space upstairs to give people — ourselves included — a little room to be changed by ideas, not just convinced by them.

This, we’ve learned, is a profoundly inefficient business strategy. But it’s a brilliant human one.

Fungi, Books, and What We Don’t Talk About in Boardrooms

A mycelial network is a fungal superhighway. It’s how forests talk to each other. It’s how nutrients get redistributed, how elders feed the young, how warnings are whispered through soil. It’s invisible. It’s foundational. It’s kind of gross if you think about it too hard. And it’s exactly how ideas move through culture.

The bookstore is our above-ground mushroom — the fruiting body. The weird, whimsical expression of a vast underground web of relationships and ideas. You don’t get the bookstore without the network: without Upstart & Crow, without activist publishers, without the conversations around the fire pit, without the writers and organizers and mischief-makers who paved the spore-laden path before us.

Like fungi, we operate quietly until we don’t.

Learning to Decompose (and the Business Case for Rot)

If we’re going to talk seriously about business as a living system, then we have to get comfortable talking about decay. Compost doesn’t smell like roses, but it’s where the magic happens. It’s where dead things become soil. Where failure becomes foundation.

In business, we tend to obsess over innovation and ignore decomposition. But ask any good gardener: it’s the compost that makes the tomatoes sing.

We’ve failed at a bunch of stuff. We’ve launched products that no one bought. Hired people we couldn’t afford. Opened cans of beer that exploded. Printed T-shirts with typos. Made decisions that looked smart in a spreadsheet and disastrous in real life. If we were more fragile, we’d call that a crisis. But we’re not fragile. We’re fungal.

Fungi are brilliant decomposers. They break down lignin and cellulose — the hard stuff. They turn death into sustenance. They make room for the next generation. And, crucially, they do it without making a fuss.

A regenerative business must be fungal in this way: able to metabolize its own mistakes. To feed forward. To treat failure as a nutrient cycle, not a branding issue.

The Berkana Two Loops and the Beauty of the Middle

This is where the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops Model becomes more than a visual aid.

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s diagram is a kind of map for system change. One loop is the old system — dominant, declining, increasingly brittle. The second is the emergent system — experimental, relational, barely visible. Between them is the compost zone. The place of hospice, harvesting, and hunches. The awkward middle, where old stories are deconstructed and new ones haven’t quite congealed.

We’ve been in that middle space more than once. With the brewery. With our expansion to Powell River. With the idea of being a farm in the first place. We’ve carried dying systems lovingly to the compost heap, and watched new sprouts emerge from the mess. Sometimes we’ve been the sprout. Sometimes the heap.

The bookstore is one of those sprouts. So is our benefit beer program. So is every awkward conversation we’ve had about equity, land, gender, purpose, or the price of beer in a capitalist system that pretends it can optimize joy.

In the Two Loops model, there are three key roles: hospice workers, harvesters, and pioneers. We’ve worn all three hats, often at once. (Occasionally with a fourth hat that says “Don’t Panic” in Sharpie.)

But what matters is that the transition doesn’t come from powerpoints or pivots. It comes from compost. From paying attention to what is dying and what is quietly coming alive. From nurturing networks. From letting the fungi do their work.

Business as Sporulation

To spore is to send out potential. To release something small, unseen, and full of possibility.

Our bookstore doesn’t make a lot of money. It doesn’t scale easily. It likely won’t be franchised. But it spores. It nudges people toward ideas that matter. It starts conversations that don’t show up in our sales reports but do show up in how we treat each other. In how we hire. In how we think about land, water, equity, and culture.

There are faster ways to grow a business. But few are as deliciously weird and richly alive as letting fungi teach you how to build an ecosystem…. I wonder if a bowling alley needs a bookstore?

Section 7: Third Spaces (To Be Continued)

If the first place is home, and the second place is work, then the third place is where your soul goes to stretch its legs, mispronounce a few words, and maybe flirt with someone over nachos. Or books. Or beer. Or five-pin bowling.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe those crucial, informal gathering spots that hold society together — cafés, barber shops, pubs, parks. They’re where community gets fermented. Not planned, not scheduled, just… allowed. Invited. Witnessed. And if we’re honest, we didn’t start Persephone Brewing thinking we’d become curators of third spaces. But that’s what we’ve become, over and over again. Sometimes by accident, sometimes out of necessity, and occasionally as an act of rebellion against a world that would rather we just all stay home and consume things alone.

Persephone began as a beer farm. But it quickly became a theatre of the possible — a place where kids climbed hay bales while their parents listened to live music. Where local food trucks pulled up and farmers set up stalls. Where folks came not just to drink, but to belong. It turns out people were thirsty for more than beer.

Of course, the economics of third spaces are a mess. They’re not tidy, scalable, or particularly profitable. You don’t monetize a drag show in a bowling alley the same way you monetize craft lager in a liquor store. But you do get something out of it — something that smells a lot like cultural preservation and tastes suspiciously like purpose.

Take Powell River. We didn’t just inherit a bowling alley; we inherited a kind of social contract. A promise to keep the lights on — not just literally, but metaphorically. And it’s working. The music venue we’ve created in The Alley has become a rotating altar of subcultures: classical performances one weekend, screaming metal the next, a sold-out drag brunch by Sunday. It’s gloriously incoherent. And it’s exactly what the town needed.

Same with the “spare room” Bookstore upstairs. It doesn’t generate blockbuster revenue. It doesn’t trend on TikTok. But it matters. It’s a small, stubborn outpost of thoughtfulness. A fungal node in our wider mycelial network. It offers a slower metabolism in an overclocked world. And it connects us — through words, through silence, through surprise author visits and rainy Tuesday conversations about ecofeminism.

Third spaces like these are where values come to life — not laminated in a boardroom but embodied in real-time, often over coffee or a shared table. They’re where a brewery becomes a community center. Where a business model becomes a moral proposition.

They’re also where we try and fail and learn. We’ve hosted movie nights where the projector died. We’ve thrown festivals that lost money. We’ve experimented with comedy nights that were so sparsely attended the crickets got uncomfortable. And still we try. Because it’s not about maximizing ROI — it’s about cultivating ROE: Return on Experimentation.

Now, let’s stretch the fungal metaphor a bit further (why stop now?). Think of these third spaces as fruiting bodies — the visible, juicy part of the underground fungal web. Mycorrhizal networks, remember, do the real work in the dark: nutrient exchange, mutual aid, soil repair. But every once in a while, they send up a mushroom. That’s the bookstore. That’s the music venue. That’s the beer garden.

But mushrooms are temporary. Ephemeral. They bloom, they spore, they decay. So do third spaces. Which means we have to tend the compost.

Enter the Berkana Two Loops model. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, it’s a framework developed by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze for understanding how systems evolve — or more accurately, dissolve and reassemble. In the model, one loop represents the dominant system in decline. The other loop, looping under and up, represents the emergent system — the new ways of being, organizing, living.

Third spaces live in that middle zone. The compost heap between what’s falling apart and what might just be starting. They are not permanent. They are not safe bets. But they are alive. They help people find each other. They build the social DNA that future systems will need.

Our bookstore doesn’t need to last forever. Neither does the bowling alley. What matters is what gets cross-pollinated while they exist. What spores get released. What ideas, alliances, friendships, and memories germinate in the soggy mulch of the moment.

And yes, it’s exhausting sometimes. Hosting, holding, hoping. There are easier ways to sell beer. But there are few better ways to grow a life.

So, no, we don’t have a five-year plan for our third spaces. We have a fungal intention. We’ll keep nourishing the soil. We’ll keep noticing where the mushrooms pop up. And we’ll keep showing up with our sleeves rolled and our boots muddy, ready to catch the next beautiful, absurd, unscalable opportunity to hold space for strangers who might just become kin.

To be continued.

Section 8: Conclusion — Not Every Branch Bears Fruit

If you plant enough things, something’s bound to grow. But here’s the inconvenient truth: not every branch bears fruit, and not every shoot deserves to become a trunk. Some stay spindly and confused. Some flourish briefly then wither, a flash of chlorophyll and optimism before succumbing to the weight of market forces, staff burnout, or, you know, winter.

And still, we branch. Because reaching is what trees do. Even the gnarled ones.

If there’s a lesson in all this wandering—from ferry terminals to heavy metal festivals—it’s that branching out is not a linear success story. It’s a systems dance. Some offshoots die off. Some become shade trees. And some, against all odds and planning spreadsheets, become the soul of the thing.

Vancouver Island? Withered branch. Alberta? A branch that never fully emerged from the bud—ambitious but frostbitten. The Yukon? A rogue seed blown far from home, rooted by the wildness of community, not the predictability of market analysis. Powell River? A full limb. Crooked, yes—but strong, strange, and flowering.

The trick, as we’ve come to learn, isn’t in treating every opportunity like it has to work. It’s in knowing when to nurture and when to prune. Even the healthiest trees drop limbs in a storm, redirecting energy inward. They let go. They compost their failures. They feed the soil.

We’ve done our fair share of pruning. But we’ve also made space for weird new growth: a mural on a bowling alley, drag queens on a beer-sticky stage, a bookstore in a hayloft, a love letter to a theatre saved from condos. These aren’t revenue lines. They’re root systems.

And that’s probably the final word on this: when we say not every branch bears fruit, we’re not just talking about financial returns. We’re talking about the stuff that feeds the organism in other ways. The invisible mycorrhizal networks. The gifts you don’t see coming. The sense that maybe—just maybe—you’re helping create the kind of forest you’d actually want to live in.

We’ve gotten things wrong. But we’ve kept branching. Not for empire. For canopy.

And with any luck, what we’ve planted will outlast us—even if it’s a little wild, a little unruly, and blooming in places we never expected.

Chapter 12: Leaves of Productivity — The Panarchy of team

Section 1: Complex Creatures and Creative Destruction

You can only say “people are our greatest asset” so many times before someone asks you to name even three of them.

That’s the thing about the people part of a business: everyone claims it matters, but no one really wants to talk about how hard, awkward, and emotionally murky it can be. The part where someone you trained quits unexpectedly. The part where you give someone honest feedback and they never quite meet your eyes again. The part where you’re trying to be a caring leader, and suddenly you’re their dad, their therapist, or the disappointing uncle who forgot their birthday.

So yes, this chapter is about people. But not in the soft-focus, inspirational-quotes-on-the-wall kind of way. This is about what it means to build a human system inside a business. A living, breathing, emotionally unpredictable system that changes when you least expect it, challenges you when you’d prefer compliance, and teaches you more about yourself than any leadership book ever could.

Let’s get this out of the way: we have employed PhDs and we have employed people with developmental disabilities. We’ve employed those with trauma backgrounds, people who were actively grieving, people who were hilariously bad at customer service but wonderful human beings, and a few wonderful customer service folks who, if left unsupervised, would probably start a cult. We’ve employed people who needed very little guidance, and people who needed regular feedback, affirmation, a hug, and sometimes a firm “no, you can’t keep a duck in the walk-in cooler.”

What all these people have in common is that they’re human. And therefore, unpredictable. And therefore, fundamentally part of what makes a business not just functional, but alive.

If you’re still holding out hope that businesses can be designed like machines, with culture installed like a software patch and performance maintained like tire pressure, I encourage you to take a long, unaccompanied walk through our Tasting Room.

It is not the Apple Store. It is not IKEA. There is no laminated script. What there is: a quiet buzz of voices, a wandering chicken or two, children making elaborate forts out of coasters, a patio that sometimes smells like manure and sometimes like heaven, and a team of people who have, through both conflict and care, made it what it is.

And believe me, that Tasting Room has not been a straight line.

We have had a lot of Tasting Room Managers over the years. Some were charismatic and visionary. Some were methodical and spreadsheet-forward. Some were a bit feral, but magnetic. Each one shaped the space in a way we didn’t fully understand until they left.

And when they did leave — often painfully, sometimes mysteriously — it felt like a loss. I took some of those departures personally. One manager left for a job at a social service agency, working with youth. I remember him telling me he was looking for something more meaningful, and I nodded, trying to be supportive. But it stung. Later, I heard through a mutual friend that he’d left because he “didn’t feel like Brian trusted him.”

Ouch.

To be fair, that might be true. I have a long-standing habit of not staying in my lane. I hover. I care. And sometimes my care shows up as “here’s a bunch of unsolicited suggestions.” That doesn’t always feel like trust.

Another employee, not a manager but a real gem, left unexpectedly. When I asked why, she said I hadn’t given her enough feedback. She didn’t feel seen. She didn’t know if she mattered.

Double ouch.

Here’s the thing: I did value her. Deeply. But we’ve over 50 employees at any one time, and more than 500 since we started. Trying to calibrate who needs a check-in, who wants a compliment, who is quietly spiraling because I forgot to comment on their tap handle arrangement—it’s a full-time job. And it’s not the one I was hired to do.

Still, the lesson stuck: people leave for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s your fault. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s a gift in disguise.

That same Tasting Room manager? He’s still working in social services, doing great work with kids. The employee who wanted more feedback? She’s got a beautiful family now, a life that fits her better than we ever could. And the Tasting Room? Every time someone leaves, it evolves. A new manager comes in with a new vibe, a new Spotify playlist, a new habit of reorganizing the fridge, and somehow, the whole experience deepens.

That’s the thing about human systems. They grow by letting go.

We talk a lot about complex adaptive systems in our work at Persephone. It’s one of those phrases that sounds academic until you realize it explains basically everything.

A complex adaptive system is a living network that learns and changes in response to feedback. Think ecosystems, economies, the human brain, family dinners with teenagers. There are nested scales. There are feedback loops. There is adaptation through disturbance.

Panarchy theory, which I was introduced to by Al Etmanski, is especially helpful. It shows how systems at one scale influence, and are influenced by, systems at other scales. A person leaves their job, and a company changes. A company changes, and a person finds a new sense of purpose. These shifts are rarely symmetrical, and never neat. But they’re real.

You can see this in forests: a single tree falls and creates an opening for sun-loving plants. Those plants attract new insects. Those insects change the soil composition. Over time, the entire system shifts.

At Persephone, a Tasting Room Manager resigns and the whole vibe changes. A new manager brings a different playlist, a different approach to training, a different laugh. Suddenly, regulars stay longer. Tips go up. Someone starts a Sunday trivia night that turns into a local ritual. That’s panarchy. That’s the system learning.

We didn’t design that. We let it happen.

This isn’t to say it’s easy. Losing people is hard. Firing people is harder. Especially when they’re good. Especially when they try. Especially when they believe in the mission but create chaos on the team or can’t quite stop microwaving fish in the staff kitchen.

Letting someone go — when they’re not toxic, just misaligned — is a particular kind of heartbreak. It forces you to hold two truths at once: this person is worthy and good, and this relationship is no longer working. It’s like breaking up with someone who’s wonderful on paper, but who keeps playing the same Nickelback song during sex.

Every time we’ve done it — carefully, clumsily, sometimes too late — it’s made us better. Not because we got it right, but because we got closer to what right feels like. We developed scar tissue. We got smarter about hiring. We got clearer about what the Tasting Room is for.

It’s not just about pouring beer. It’s about hosting a moment. A feeling. A story that someone takes home. That can’t be automated. And it sure as hell can’t be laminated.

People leave. People change. So does culture. If we’re lucky, it deepens. If we’re paying attention, we learn. If we’re really lucky, we laugh about it years later, preferably over a well-poured pint.

So no, I don’t believe in designing culture. I believe in composting it. I believe in holding space for the mess. I believe in recognizing that each person — neurodivergent, neurotypical, academic, neurotic, wildly gifted or just wildly on time — is a system unto themselves.

And all those systems? Nested. Interacting. Changing one another, all the time.

That’s the canopy we’re building. Not symmetrical. Not perfect. But layered, breathing, beautiful in its own unruly way.

And maybe, on a good day, just the right amount of weird.

Section 2: Seasons of Change — Complex Systems, Real People, and the Unruly Symphony of Relationships

Let’s say it up front: people leave. They burn out, they burn bridges, they disappear into the fog of new opportunity, or they ghost you like a bad Tinder date. And when they do, it can hurt. Especially in a place like Persephone, where relationships aren’t a line item on a corporate value statement — they’re the messy, marvelous, maddening core of the whole operation.

In any truly living system, nothing is static. Not the soil, not the seasons, and definitely not the humans who come, go, return, evolve, stall out, or light the place up with a spark you didn’t even know you were missing. We’ve seen this play out more times than we can count, and it’s taught us that grief and growth aren’t opposites. They’re dancing partners in the long, looping waltz of organizational life.

If you want to understand what this looks like in practice, try thinking of a publican. Yes, a proper one — not someone with a name tag and a tap list, but someone who belongs in a room in the same way roots belong in soil. At Persephone, that person is Fraser. He’s part bard, part neighbour, part question mark. Some days, he’s reading in the corner with the kind of intensity usually reserved for chess grandmasters or tax auditors. Other times, he’s playing music or holding a casual PhD-level discourse with anyone who’ll join. But he’s not staff. He’s not management. He’s something older, odder, and maybe wiser: a semi-permanent cultural fixture.

Fraser disappeared once. Quite suddenly, in fact. It wasn’t ghosting — it was illness, serious enough to leave us concerned and not entirely sure what to do. But the tasting room team knew. They checked in, kept him in the loop, kept his seat metaphorically (and sometimes literally) warm. It wasn’t performative compassion or a line item in an HR playbook. It was simply relationship — a complex, cyclical, multi-nodal ecosystem of mutual care that exists in a place where people stay long enough to see one another through more than just a shift.

And when Fraser returned? He brought with him the gravity of someone who had seen hard things and still chose to re-enter community. The fact that our tasting room had any gravitational pull for him at all is maybe one of the best performance reviews we’ve never written.

Fraser, like any human system, has cycled through the four stages of the adaptive cycle — exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization — many times. He is a system. So are we. And when those systems overlap for long enough, influence flows in all directions. His health shaped his presence. His presence shaped our space. Our space shaped his reintegration. None of this is sentimental. It’s just how systems work.

That, in essence, is panarchy: nested systems of change influencing each other across scales and timelines. And if that sounds like a PhD thesis, fear not — the tasting room is a better teacher than any academic journal. Because while we talk about complex adaptive systems with jargon when we have to, mostly we just live them.

Still, for those playing along with their resilience frameworks at home, let’s take the adaptive cycle one layer deeper.

Picture a Mobius strip, but made of compost and unreturned glassware. That’s resilience in a human system. It’s not just the ability to bounce back; it’s the capacity to adapt meaningfully in the face of disruption. The vertical dimension in the panarchy cycle — that little z-axis of transformation — is where resilience lives. And it’s also where our best managers grow up.

Losing good people can feel like a personal failure. And sometimes, it is. Let’s not pretend otherwise. We’ve had talented folks walk out our door and tell mutual friends they didn’t feel trusted or valued. One told a friend he left because “Brian didn’t trust him.” Oof. Hard to hear, especially when it hits a little too close to a truth I’d rather not admit. I’ve been known to have a rather loose interpretation of the phrase “stay in your lane.”

Another former employee told me, long after leaving, that they didn’t feel validated. That stung — partly because I really liked this person, and partly because there are only so many hours in the day to tell every employee they matter. And even if I tried, how do you know who needs the affirmations and who just wants to get on with their work and be left alone? (Seriously. Someone invent that mood ring already.)

The thing is, these moments — the departures, the feedback, the cringey realizations — they’re not breakdowns. They’re compost. Painful, pungent, occasionally acidic compost that helps build the conditions for something better to grow.

The social service organization that TR manager went to? He’s still there, thriving. The employee who needed more validation? She’s got a family, a new chapter, a good life. The sadness of losing them wasn’t false. But neither was the sense of renewal that followed. Each departure shook up our system just enough to let new energy, new leadership, and new storylines enter.

And let’s be honest, it’s not just the leavers who grow. Our managers — the ones who’ve stayed and the ones still learning — get forged in the fire of those transitions. Hiring is one kind of challenge. Firing is a different beast altogether. Having to let go of someone who is a good person, but the wrong fit — that’ll test your commitment to being a values-based organization faster than any B Corp audit.

It’s in those moments that our managers stretch. Not always gracefully. Not always evenly. But stretch they do. And on the other side, they’re less afraid of conflict. More attuned to nuance. A little more porous, in the best way.

Which brings us back to panarchy. The adaptive cycle doesn’t just happen once. It loops. And it nests. Personal shifts inform team shifts inform organizational evolution — and sometimes, vice versa. One person’s decision to quit might catalyze a whole new way of onboarding. One community member’s re-emergence from illness might subtly rewire the culture of care.

It’s all connected. Which is annoying, because it means you can’t just fix one thing and be done. But it’s also liberating, because it means no single failure has to be final. The system remembers. And if you’re willing to learn, it evolves.

So, the next time someone leaves, or something breaks, or you find yourself staring into the emotional void of yet another exit interview, just remember: you’re composting. And that’s not nothing.

You might not get closure. You might not even get your tasting room keys back. But you will, eventually, get a new shoot breaking through the soil — someone new, or something new, or some weird new idea that grows because the conditions are finally right.

And that, friends, is how you build a team.

You don’t keep everyone. You don’t get it right every time. But you make meaning. You make room. You stay curious. And if you’re lucky, someone like Fraser shows up again one day, books in hand, guitar nearby, and says, “Good to be back.”

And you nod, grateful not just for the return, but for the system that made space for it.

Section 3.

If you’ve ever had to let someone go and then run into them at the farmers market the next week, you know the particular brand of emotional indigestion we’re dealing with here. You’re pushing a cart full of radicchio and social anxiety, and there they are—smiling politely, holding a loaf of sourdough, and possibly still wounded by a decision you made while stress-eating corn chips in your office. Welcome to the soggy middle ground of hiring and firing: a place where perfection goes to compost and something more human, more complex, and ultimately more resilient begins to grow.

At Persephone, we’ve hired people who were the perfect fit on paper and inexplicably allergic to teamwork. We’ve also hired people we weren’t sure about, only to discover they were the quiet keystones of culture—the yeast in the bread, so to speak. We’ve fired people we genuinely liked. We’ve held on to others too long. And in the vast, muddy middle of it all, we’ve tried to learn not how to get it perfect, but how to get it wrong a little better each time.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those sanitized HR handbooks: People don’t leave their quirks at home. And thank God for that. Perfection is a branding strategy, not a human trait. Real people bring baggage, brilliance, burnout, and the kind of ideas that start revolutions or at least result in beer labels that win awards.

The creative tension is baked in. Our sales team is tuned into the whims of the consumer like a beach radio scanning for the next big wave: salted lime lagers, mango saisons, cans that glitter like unicorn tears. They’re hunting for novelty, buzz, momentum. Meanwhile, the production team is over in the brewhouse fending off chaos with clipboards and clamps. They want consistency, efficiency, and to not have to redesign the entire kegging schedule because someone heard that yuzu is having a moment on TikTok.

This isn’t dysfunction; it’s ecology. Different niches, different needs. Sometimes, the species compete. Sometimes they collaborate. And sometimes one has to die off so another can flourish. That sounds dramatic, but it’s just panarchy: the adaptive cycle of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization that governs not just forests and economies, but human organizations too.

Hiring someone new is the rapid growth phase—exciting, slightly chaotic, full of optimism. Holding on too long can lead to conservation that strangles innovation. Firing, painful though it is, is the release. And what comes next is the messy, fertile beauty of reorganization. We’ve been through that cycle more times than we can count. Not because we failed, but because that’s what living systems do.

And let’s be honest: leadership is often the last one to admit when something’s not working. I’ve had tasting room managers leave and only find out through a friend that they didn’t think I trusted them. I didn’t mean to be untrusting; I just have this unfortunate habit of being involved in… well, everything. Some people call that being hands-on. Others call it micromanaging. Still others just leave without saying much.

Another staff member told me after she quit that she didn’t feel valued—not because the team didn’t appreciate her, but because I didn’t personally tell her often enough. I wish I had. But when you have 50 employees and a to-do list that includes “clean the septic filter,” it’s hard to track which people need feedback and which ones just want you to stay out of the way.

What I’ve learned is that imperfection—in communication, in fit, in timing—doesn’t always mean failure. Sometimes, it means the system is evolving. That employee who didn’t feel validated is now thriving in Nova Scotia with three beautiful kids. That tasting room manager who felt underappreciated is doing meaningful social work. The parting was painful, but it made space for new energy, new relationships, and a tasting room that now reflects an even deeper sense of character and welcome.

This, too, is the work. Learning to read the signals not as threats but as symptoms of a cycle in motion. Accepting that what looks like a personnel issue might actually be a systems issue. Or a leadership issue. Or just the natural ebb and flow of a complex adaptive organization that happens to brew beer and raise chickens.

There are no clean lines between departments at Persephone. But there are subtle tensions that make themselves known over time. The sales team may never fully understand the constraints of the brewers. The brewers may never understand why the sales team keeps promising the impossible to distributors. But they work it out. They get annoyed. They vent. They drink a beer. They try again.

Creative destruction, in this context, isn’t just a poetic phrase. It’s a practical tool. Sometimes, the best way to grow is to let something go: a process, a person, an expectation. That doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you compost.

And compost, as we’ve established, is where all the good stuff begins.

We are not a company that prizes polish over substance. We don’t reward emotional suppression or mistake-free performance. We reward learning. We reward coming back. We reward the ability to make a mess and then make meaning from it. Not everyone thrives in that environment. But the ones who do—they make Persephone what it is.

It’s worth noting that there has never been conflict between the sales team and the farm team. Maybe it’s because the chickens are less demanding than the bar managers. Or maybe it’s because the farm, in all its unpredictability and unruliness, has taught us something essential about acceptance.

In the end, building a team is not about assembling a perfect set of roles and personalities. It’s about cultivating the conditions where complexity can do its thing—where people can adapt, falter, contribute, and evolve. Sometimes they’ll grow with you. Sometimes they’ll outgrow you. Sometimes, they were just meant to be a season in your cycle.

You won’t get it right every time. But if you’re lucky, and honest, and open to the wisdom hiding inside each mess, you might get it wrong better than the last time.

And that’s enough.

Section 4: The Island of Misfit Toys — Belonging Beyond Boxes

Somewhere in the middle of a forest, tucked behind a hop yard and a crooked cedar fence, there’s a place where cape-wearing chicken wranglers, neurodivergent cellar workers, flamboyantly gender-fluid bartenders, and your occasional silent-type brewer all show up for work — and not just metaphorically. This is not a parable. It’s Tuesday at Persephone.

The Island of Misfit Toys has been used so often it teeters on cliché, but we use it with affection, not irony. Because the truth is, when you start a business that makes space for one kind of difference — whether that’s hiring someone with a disability, working around someone’s need for a quieter sensory environment, or just letting someone wear glitter to their shift without making it A Thing — you don’t just attract misfits. You become them. It’s contagious in the best possible way.

This didn’t start as a grand strategy. We didn’t have a CSR campaign or a DEI roadmap with a budget line and a consultant team. What we had was a relationship with the Sunshine Coast Association for Community Living (SCACL), a local organization supporting people with developmental disabilities. They asked if we’d be open to hiring someone. We said yes. That’s it. That was the plan.

Then came Amanda, Josh, Wes, Brian and Brian and Amber. Then Kara. Then a dozen more, each with their own way of navigating the world, each rewriting the social contract of what work could look like. Man, listing these amazing folks brings back SO many memories and not all of the warm and fuzzy.

Speaking of warm and fuzzy, can you imagine holding a baby duckling? Warm, soft, so sweet and innocent. Just want to cuddle them all day long, right? Well, one of our people, Ben, was severely bothered by baby ducks so he grabbed them from our pond and pulled their heads off… yeah, seriously. Anders witnessed it and was quick to make sure Ben wouldn’t be coming back to work on the farm… not the right fit, you know?

And, then there is Kara, for instance, who has held many titles, none of them official. Guardian of the Chickens. Weather Emissary. Keeper of the Chain Lock. She sends texts to Melissa like this:

“Hi Melissa

How are you doing? I am fine. Just to let you and your husband Brian know at the beer 🍺 Farm down at in Honeybee area Lower coop area. The big Main Gate For the chain ⛓️‍💥 Needs a bigger New Code Lock 🔐 because the one we have right now is no good anymore.

From Kara 🌈☀️☔️❄️⛄️💧💦 The chickens 🐓 and baby chicks 🐤 are doing good right now.”

And:

“Hi Melissa

How are you doing? I am fine. I am at the beer 🍺 Farm Right Now and inside the warehouse The Lights 💡are working where the Canning Machine is. But on the other side of the warehouse inside where Amber and I clean off the chicken eggs The Lights 💡are Not working.

So, I was Just wondering if you or your husband Brian could Let Anders know about the Lights inside the warehouse. And I am going to Let Kelly know Now.

From Kara 🌈☀️🌧️❄️☃️💦💧”

In Kara-speak, that translates roughly to: the chickens are fine, the lock is not, and the lighting situation is now a cross-departmental project. She doesn’t clock in for extra hours, but she spends a lot of extra at the farm. Because she loves it here. Because she feels safe. She belongs and knows it. Because this place makes sense to her in a way few others do.

If you’re reading this and thinking this sounds like a sweet side story — like the human interest piece at the end of a news hour — stop. This isn’t a heartwarming bonus feature. This is the centre of the business.

The presence of people who don’t perform in neurotypical, extroverted, professionally groomed ways is not a nice-to-have. It’s not a charitable footnote. It’s the reason this place has a soul.

We have had back of house workers who are extraordinary in their behaviour and mannerisms that make them perfectly unusual. They’re more comfortable around tanks and plate filters than people. They don’t make small talk. But if something’s off — pressure, temperature, timing, volume - they’ll catch it before anyone else. And they do it with quiet consistency, the kind of presence that isn’t flashy enough to win awards but builds the backbone of a healthy operation.

And then there’s the tasting room, where staff members cycle in and out, bringing their own brand of humanity — some with technicolour hair and others with anxieties that make front-of-house work an act of courage. The result isn’t sleek or overly scripted. This isn’t an Apple Store. There are rough edges. Moments of silence. Deep belly laughs. Occasional emotional whiplash. Impromptu dance sessions.

It’s real.

That realness is precisely what builds the canopy of trust and resilience. When people walk in, they feel it — like stepping into a room that exhales.

There’s an ecological truth buried in here: biodiversity strengthens ecosystems. Not just in the warm and fuzzy way, but in the deeply pragmatic, resilient-to-shock kind of way. A monoculture looks clean on the surface but collapses under pressure. We’ve seen it in agriculture, and we’ve seen it in companies. Our weird little forest of humans is messy, tangled, and occasionally confusing — but it holds.

This messiness isn’t random. It’s systemically generative. In the language of panarchy theory, every individual — every quirky, complex person — is a system nested within a larger system. Kara’s weather updates and the cellar worker’s attention to fermentation detail aren’t separate anecdotes. They’re dynamic feedback loops. Their inputs affect the whole.

And because these nested systems interact, they foster emergent properties. The whole becomes more than the sum of its people. A customer who walks in and chats with Kara, or sees Fraser strumming a guitar on the patio, doesn’t just taste a beer. They’re drawn into an atmosphere shaped by care, consistency, and idiosyncrasy.

But let’s not get sentimental. This isn’t a story about warm fuzzies and moral virtue. This is about resilience. About the way real diversity — in neurotype, gender expression, learning style, life experience — forces a system to grow more flexible. Stronger. More alive.

And it’s also about discomfort. We’ve had staff whose communication styles grated. Whose energy didn’t match. Whose expectations clashed. We’ve had people melt down, walk out, come back. We’ve misread tone. We’ve over-corrected. We’ve under-responded. We’ve learned — painfully — that belonging isn’t always easy. But it’s worth it.

Sometimes, you need someone to show up in a cape to remind you that the workplace is not a performance. It’s an ecosystem.

And let’s not forget that the “misfit” label is subjective. There are days I feel like the biggest misfit in the whole operation.

I’ve spent most of my career trying to prove that business could be used as a force for good — which, for a long time, made me a weirdo in both corporate and nonprofit circles. Not profit-hungry enough for the MBAs. Not protesty enough for the activists. Stuck in the uncanny valley between capitalism and care.

And now, as a paraplegic, I’m a misfit in the physical world too. Most of the places I go — the city streets, the event venues, the so-called “inclusive” conferences — are uncomfortable, inaccessible, and frankly unwelcoming. But Persephone isn’t like that. I don’t have to fight to fit in here. And that, in this world, is no small thing.

I recently read Crip Kinship by Shayda Kafai, and it stopped me in my tracks. It’s a vibrant, defiant love letter to disability culture — not as something to be pitied or included, but as something whole, generative, and revolutionary. The book chronicles the history of Sins Invalid, a performance project led by artists with disabilities, and it doesn’t ask for inclusion. It demands space. It paints disabled bodies as sites of power, creativity, resistance, and beauty. And it gave me language for what we’ve been trying to do all along: make space for people to be fully themselves — not in spite of their difference, but through it.

As Marianne Williamson once wrote, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” What Crip Kinship reminded me is that we are most powerful not when we hide the things that make us different, but when we live from them — audaciously, artfully, and without apology.

So no, we don’t run a textbook team. We’re more fungal network than org chart. More mycelium than management theory. We spread sideways. We send signals underground. We adapt. We mess up. And somehow, we hold.

We’ve had moments where people said, explicitly or not, “You’re too much for me.” We’ve had misfits leave because the fit was a little too misfit. That’s okay. Every forest sheds leaves. But the canopy still thickens.

And if you’re trying to build a business that lasts — not just a quarter, but a generation — you’ll need more than key performance indicators and onboarding protocols. You’ll need weirdos. You’ll need weather updates from the chicken coop. You’ll need someone who shows up every Tuesday just because they love being there.

You’ll need an island of misfit toys. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to live there, too.

Section 5: Rhizomes, Matts, and the Anatomy of Team Growth

There’s a botanical metaphor we’ve somehow avoided until now, though it’s been sitting right under our feet—literally and metaphorically—for years. The humble hop rhizome.

Most people think of hops as what you see climbing trellises in late summer—lanky green bines (not vines, thank you very much) stretching 20 feet toward the sun, crowned with cone-shaped flowers that smell like citrus and rebellion. But the real action is underground. Hops grow from rhizomes: horizontally spreading root-like stems that send down roots for water and nutrients and send up new shoots when the time is right. They move sideways. Quietly. Persistently. Not unlike some of our best people.

Rhizomes don’t chase the spotlight. They don’t shout for attention. They connect. They hold the ecosystem together. If one bine dies back, another takes its place, tapping the same shared network of nourishment below the soil line. The system survives because of what’s hidden, not what’s heralded.

That’s how Persephone has grown—not through a single vertical trunk of leadership or a tidy set of org charts, but through a sprawling, rhizomatic web of people. People who learned on the job, who absorbed the culture by osmosis and proximity, and who, over time, sent up their own shoots of leadership and influence.

Some of those shoots were named Matt.

Actually, a lot of them were named Matt.

We’ve joked more than once about forming a Matt Collective—a kind of secret society within Persephone that stretches across departments, roles, and timelines. But it’s not just a punchline. Each Matt brought something distinct, something that shaped the rhizome.

Matt F started in the tasting room but eventually found his way to the nature-based elementary school where our kids went. He was steady, warm, and carried a calm confidence that made him a grounding presence on busy afternoons. He helped close up shop more times than we could count, and when he left, it was to plant new shoots in the world of childhood education. Another root sent sideways.

Matt S was a creative whirlwind. His cask creations bordered on alchemy—kombucha-infused beer with local herbs, spruce tips, or whatever else had caught his attention that week. He didn’t just think outside the box; he seemed to live outside it entirely. He brought an almost synesthetic approach to brewing, and while he’s since moved on, his fingerprints are still on the walls—metaphorically and maybe literally.

Matt T had a brief stint in the tasting room while navigating the bendy road toward a career in community and regional planning. He brought a gentle thoughtfulness and a sense of systems thinking that made conversations over post-shift pints linger in the memory. He moved on quickly, but not before adding his strand to the network.

Matt C was - and still is - a quiet genius. He chased a PhD, but more importantly, he created the original recipe for our Dry Hopped Cider, a staple that’s endured through more than a few seasonal purges and rebrands. His legacy is both in the can and in the process that still carry his influence.

Matt M - well, not every node in the rhizome thrives. He made a bad call, got a DUI (Driving well Under the Influence aka Drunk Driving charge) while driving a Persephone-branded vehicle… cringe, and eventually left to rep beer for a competitor, double cringe. That stung. But compost happens. Even ugly shoots teach you something about the soil. Interestingly, I’ve since run into him and our hug felt as genuine and familiar as any other team member. He’s a good guy, one of the few who was keen on social impact explicitly and I’m only sorry we couldn’t keep him on the team.

Matt B was the son of a flamboyant local realtor, and let’s just say he didn’t enter the scene quietly. Early on, his work had, let’s call it, gaps. But after some tough-love feedback (and possibly a divine intervention from the gods of hospitality), he turned a corner and became a strong front-of-house presence. Growth isn’t always pretty, but it’s real.

These Matts are not a tangent. They’re an illustration. Rhizomes don’t ask whether a shoot will be perfect before allowing it to emerge. They send it up anyway. Some shoots thrive. Some falter. Some become the backbone of the next season’s harvest. That’s what ecosystems do. That’s what Persephone has done.

And that’s part of why, when Sean Melrose and I started an impact investing firm, we named it Rhiza Capital. The name wasn’t just botanical flourish—it was intentional. We wanted to build a network of funds, intermediaries, investors, and entrepreneurs who could grow sideways. Not everything needs to go up and to the right. Sometimes sideways is where the real strength lies. Resilience is in the spread, the reach, the resilience that underwrites real impact.

But rhizomatic growth doesn’t happen without discomfort. It means people working alongside one another who may never fully understand each other’s roles. It means roots crossing paths in the dark, friction and misunderstanding occasionally erupting into open tension.

We’ve seen this in the dance - sometimes more like a tug-of-war - between our production team and sales team. It’s a classic case of competing priorities: the sales crew wants novelty, variety, something to splash on Instagram and spark a little FOMO. Meanwhile, the production team wants to manage inventory, reduce the chaos of too many SKUs, prevent stock-outs and - oh yeah - actually maintain quality.

There have been moments when these teams felt like they were speaking different dialects of the same language. One says, “We need a new salted watermelon saison for the summer drop.” The other says, “We’re still trying to keep the flagship pale ale on the shelves.” Both are right. Both are wrong. Both are part of the same organism.

But here’s the thing about rhizomes: tension isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature. The network adapts precisely because not all its parts agree. Creative friction - when held with care - can lead to stronger decisions, sharper products, and better boundaries. When it doesn’t? Well, even rotting roots serve a purpose. They feed the system.

We’ve had staff we couldn’t keep. Folks who just couldn’t adjust to the informal intensity of our culture. People who struggled with the ambiguity of overlapping roles, or with the messiness of a business that doesn’t operate from a central command post. They weren’t wrong to leave. We weren’t wrong to let them. Growth, even in healthy ecosystems, requires pruning.

But more often than not, something beautiful emerges from the tangle.

Sara, who you met in an earlier section, started in admin and rose to COO. But she didn’t do it by climbing a ladder. She followed a rhizome path—curious, sideways, immersive. She worked every part of the system, not because we had a program for that, but because that’s how she grows. Like hops.

Hop bines, you see, don’t climb like vines. They twist. They reach. They grab onto whatever support is available and spiral their way upward. They’re persistent, but not rigid. They adapt their route to the structure in front of them. Sound like anyone you know?

Our team is full of those kinds of people. They don’t follow linear trajectories. They follow instinct, curiosity, need. Some started behind the bar and ended up managing budgets. Others showed up to weed the flower beds and are now coordinating events. There’s no standard playbook here, just a living map of shared mycelium - er, rhizomes - connecting everything.

We’ve also seen team members come back after time away. People who burned out, stepped back, took a different job, and then returned because they missed the odd, grounded, slightly chaotic humanity of this place. Like perennials from rhizomes, they re-emerge. Sometimes stronger.

This kind of regenerative culture doesn’t scale easily. It doesn’t translate into KPIs or standard operating procedures. It’s slow. It’s relational. It’s sometimes infuriating. But it’s also the reason we’re still here.

A rhizome doesn’t ask permission. It just grows. That’s what our people have done, again and again, under the radar and often without fanfare. And it’s what makes the culture here resilient. Not because everyone fits, but because we’ve made space for people to stretch out sideways.

We’ve messed up. We’ve let great people leave. We’ve taken too long to coach others. We’ve resisted change that we should’ve welcomed, and welcomed change that wasn’t quite ready. But we’ve tried to remain honest. We’ve tried to learn. And above all, we’ve tried to stay connected—even when we didn’t know what would come next.

That’s what rhizomes teach us. The next shoot could come from anywhere. The Matt who left last season could return as the mentor of a new brewer. The part-time janitor could become the head of operations. The quiet person on the farm could hold the key to the next leap in product development.

We’ve grown a business. But more importantly, we’ve grown a rhizome—a tangled, imperfect, and deeply alive system of people. It’s not always neat. But neither is nature. And we’re learning to trust the sideways stretch.

Section 6: A Rhythm All Our Own — Flow, Friction, and the Warehouse Floor Hockey League

Flow Is a Lie (Except When It Isn’t)

You know that feeling when everything just clicks? When your body, your brain, and your surroundings feel like they’re all part of the same motion? That’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow” — a psychological state where time distorts, ego recedes, and you become one with the task at hand. I get it. I’ve felt it. Tractor throttle in hand, dirt under fingernails, or legs pumping on a long bike ride that finally slips into rhythm.

But also, let’s be honest: it’s rare. And when consultants start waving it around like a productivity hack, promising flow as a lifestyle choice, we should all get nervous. You can’t schedule it. You can’t mandate it. And at Persephone, we learned the hard way that chasing constant flow is a setup for burnout.

Still, we do have moments. There are times when the brewery hums with an unspoken cadence: kegs are cleaned just before the next delivery truck arrives, fermentations peak on a Friday so bottling lands on a Monday, and the playlist in the warehouse syncs perfectly with the canning line tempo. It’s brief, and it always ends, but for that hour or day or week, we ride the wave.

But then come the ebbs. Flow crashes into real life: flat cans, clogged drains, staff illnesses, that one week when every piece of equipment decides it needs attention all at once. Or when you discover the reason that your pond won’t drain because, well, a decomposing rat is actually wedged in the drain line. Nothing says “zen state” like when your shoulder deep, trying not to vomit.

Flow doesn’t mean harmony. It means engagement. And sometimes, engagement comes through discomfort. Our so-called flow state has included brutal conversations, misunderstandings, and interpersonal storms that left us emotionally hungover. But the recovery matters. The honest apologies, the debriefs, the laughter that returns on a slow trickle.

I think the reason we still romanticize flow is that we’re desperate for some kind of transcendence in work. A moment that validates the chaos and tells us we’re not just trudging uphill with a leaky wheelbarrow of hopes and invoices. But here’s the thing: at Persephone, we never found transcendence by avoiding the muck. We found it by stepping into it.

There were weeks when the company felt more like a pressure cooker than a team. A project missed, a batch went weird, communication collapsed over a label design. People yelled. People cried. People left. But some stayed. And those who stayed often found themselves reshaped - a little tougher, a little kinder, and a lot more aware that real flow isn’t smooth. It’s textured.

The same way a river doesn’t always babble gently downstream. Sometimes it overflows, floods the banks, reroutes itself. But it keeps moving. That’s the real rhythm: messy, non-linear, glorious and grim all at once.

These are flow states too. But they aren’t always sexy. They weren’t high-performing in the capitalist sense. They were quiet, often unnoticed, sometimes inexplicable. That’s the kind of flow we care about. The real, gritty, human one.

The panarchy cycle reminds us that systems grow, collapse, reorganize, and renew. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about any of these stages, but when you’re in the middle of the collapse, it sure doesn’t feel neutral. The emotions are real: grief, confusion, anger, exhaustion. Sometimes those moments come with a tractor that won’t start or a team member who just needs to scream because their favorite wheelbarrow isn’t where they left it. Sometimes they come with silence. The kind that wraps around a mistake so thick no one wants to speak first.

But the growth comes from there, too. Not always immediately. Sometimes the growth doesn’t come until months later, when the person who made the mistake mentors someone else through a similar pitfall. Or when the team redesigns a system that quietly removes a chronic source of stress. Or when someone finally trusts you enough to say: “Hey, when you did that, it hurt.”

That’s a different kind of flow. One that includes the ebbs. One that makes room for the awful bits. It’s not fun. But it’s real. And it sticks.

Momentum Is a Myth

There’s a moment in every new initiative - a fresh product launch, a renovation, a grant-funded pilot project, a shiny new POS system - when someone inevitably says, “We’ve just got to keep the momentum going.” As if it were a beach ball we’re all responsible for batting back and forth in a circle of enthusiastic but slightly tired interns. Just don’t let it touch the ground.

But momentum, as a business concept, is mostly bullshit.

Not entirely — let’s be fair — but mostly. It’s the kind of language that makes us feel like we’re in control of something larger than us, like we’re riding a wave of strategic clarity when in fact we’re careening down a muddy slope with no brakes and half a tailgate. Momentum implies that forward is the only acceptable direction, that faster is better, and that stopping is a failure. And that’s dangerous. Because sometimes the best thing you can do in business — and in life — is pause.

Not pivot. Not rebrand. Not optimize. Just… stop.

Catch your breath. Let the system rest. See what emerges when no one’s pushing.

At Persephone, we’ve had our fair share of “momentum moments.” Some of them were real, like the incredible first year where every weekend brought hundreds of visitors, where we couldn’t make enough beer to meet demand, and the farm was blooming — literally and metaphorically. Other times, what felt like momentum was just a lot of movement. The distinction matters. Because not all movement is progress. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of sweaty humans hauling kegs in circles.

And sometimes, movement masks mess. We’ve had days - okay, weeks - when success papered over the cracks: when the tasting room was full but the team was exhausted; when sales numbers looked great but the ops team was walking on eggshells; when the beer was moving but no one was talking to the person who brewed it. Momentum doesn’t mean the culture is healthy. It doesn’t mean the systems are sound. And it sure doesn’t mean your next batch won’t crummy.

We’ve had flat beer. Not every can, not every style, but enough that we remember the feeling - the slow unfolding of dread as cases come back, the parsing of Slack messages to figure out who knew what and when, the mounting costs of credit notes and reputation hits. Some of those problems were technical. Others were human. And in the moment, it was tempting to double down on “just keeping things moving” to avoid having the hard conversation. We’ve learned that the hard conversation is often the only thing worth doing.

That lesson plays out in small ways too. Like the time we greenlit a limited release and the labels came in crooked and off-brand. Or the time a seasonal staffer overcarbonated a keg and took out a row of stacked cans like dominoes. Or the day a well-meaning team lead scheduled four different events across three locations and forgot to book any delivery vehicles. Each of those “failures” was a moment we could’ve tried to brute-force through. Just ride the momentum, right? Instead, we paused. We let it sting. We laughed where we could. And we got better.

Momentum also has a way of punishing those who aren’t moving fast enough. We’ve watched brilliant staff members - talented, kind, deeply aligned with our values - burn out because they couldn’t keep pace with the speed of the system. Not the speed of the work, but the emotional churn of doing values-based business. Of caring. Of holding community expectations, personal ambition, and the messy reality of being human all at once. This can feels ambiguous in spite of it being dense.

Those people didn’t fail us. The system failed them. Because momentum, when idolized, becomes exclusionary. It rewards stamina over wisdom. Visibility over grounding. Noise over nuance. We’ve had to learn - are still learning - how to create space for people to slow down without feeling left behind. That’s not some HR platitude. It’s a design imperative for any organization that wants to survive past the initial thrill of early growth.

We’ve also had times when the organization itself needed to slow down — but didn’t. Or couldn’t. When sales were up but systems were fragile. When farm and brewery were growing on parallel tracks, but not in sync. When new hires came in faster than we could properly onboard them. Those were “successful” seasons, if you judged them by the numbers. But internally, it was frayed rope. Too many people were holding too many things together with too little slack.

I wonder if we can design for rhythm, not momentum. That would mean pacing ourselves across the year - not just quarterly portfolio targets, but actual human seasons. Pumpkin harvest, cider pressing, long winter bottling days, early spring staff turnover, the relentless pull of summer visitors. Each one has a different cadence. A different mood. A different kind of energy. We try to honor that.

It also means honoring the slow work - the kind that doesn’t look like momentum at all. Relationship tending. Equipment maintenance (ugh, we don’t get this right almost ever). Training that feels redundant until it isn’t. Conflict resolution. Not the performative kind - the real kind, where you sit in the stink of your own defensiveness and learn to speak more plainly. That work is slow. It feels like going backward. But it’s the only way to avoid spinning in place.

Sometimes slowing down is a necessity. Other times, it’s an act of defiance. In a culture that idolizes hustle and growth and “scaling up,” choosing to pause is revolutionary. Especially when the opportunity is right there. We’ve said no to partnerships that looked good on paper but felt misaligned. We’ve stopped production on products that weren’t working - not because we couldn’t sell them, but because we didn’t like who we were becoming in the process. That’s not momentum. That’s rhythm. And rhythm includes rest.

Even in the natural world, momentum is a lie. Rivers meander. Trees pause. Bears hibernate. Nothing - not even photosynthesis - is perpetual motion. And yet we act as if business should be. Maybe because we’re scared that if we stop, we won’t start again. That we’ll be left behind. Forgotten. Irrelevant.

But that’s a story. And like most stories, it’s not true. What’s true is that things grow, die, compost, and grow again. What’s true is that some of our best decisions came after a slow walk or a canceled meeting or a weekend with no phone service. What’s true is that letting go of momentum made room for what actually matters.

So we’ll keep moving — of course we will. We have trucks to load and people to pay and beer to make. But we’re not chasing speed anymore. Maybe we listening for rhythm. And that rhythm includes silence. Stalls. Ruts. Deep inhales. Stubborn slowness. Because even when it doesn’t look like we’re moving forward, the system is still alive.

And sometimes, when we stop long enough to notice, that’s when the real momentum begins.

Joy as Strategy

Joy is not a KPI. We don’t chart it on whiteboards or print it on mugs. We don’t host “Joy Syncs” or assign someone to be Chief Joy Officer (though we’d probably hire them just to see what they’d do with the title). We don’t have an official Joy Budget line item — unless you count the time we spent another $40 on a karaoke machine that’s mostly just an invitation for embarrassment.

But don’t be fooled. Just because we don’t bureaucratize or commodify joy doesn’t mean it’s not strategic. In fact, it’s one of the most potent forces we have. It just doesn’t look the way people expect it to. Joy here isn’t about glossy smiles, curated Instagram moments, or saccharine team-building exercises. It’s more often messy, spontaneous, and totally inappropriate for LinkedIn. It’s found in back warehouse high-fives after a mental health spiral, in sarcastic banter during a 12-hour brew day, in dancing across the farm just to keep from losing your mind.

And sometimes, it shows up in a warehouse full of kids riding plasma cars and mates playing floor hockey in a brand new “rink.” That was the day the new warehouse was finished. Before inventory took over, before forklifts and logistics and pallet jacks dulled the echo. For one moment, it was all possibility. Empty space and laughter and a reminder that we don’t just build places for beer. We build places for people.

And joy — the messy, irreverent kind — has a funny way of syncing a team better than any org chart.

The Strategic Value of Dancing

That floor hockey match wasn’t on the schedule. There were no liability waivers or logistical planning. Someone had a stick. Someone else made a goal out of empty cases. And suddenly, there we were: sales team vs production, kids refereeing, sweat dripping onto the brand-new floor. There was no “outcome” to speak of. No revenue, no metrics, no quarterly justification. But people talked about that day for months. Same with the first pet fashion show we did or the pumpkin carving that arrives hundreds.

Joy lingers. It doesn’t evaporate like adrenaline. It builds trust in the soil of a business. It lays down fungal threads between people who, on paper, have nothing in common. It makes conflict survivable. It makes burnout reversible. It’s not a replacement for good systems or clear roles - but it’s what makes those systems and roles worth committing to.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: joy is hard to fake. People know when it’s performative. They know when it’s being “rolled out” like a new HR initiative. And they definitely know when it’s being used to gloss over deeper organizational issues. We’ve made that mistake too.

We’ve tried to throw parties when morale was low and wondered why no one danced. We’ve cracked jokes when what someone really needed was time off and a therapist. We’ve booked team-building events when what we needed was team-unbuilding - a few hard conversations and a willingness to acknowledge we weren’t okay.

Joy isn’t a patch. It’s not a morale band-aid. It’s a currency — one that builds value over time but can’t be counterfeited. And it only circulates when there’s trust in the system.

Joy and the Shadow Side

Of course, not every moment at Persephone is joyful. We’ve had dark seasons. We’ve pulled half-rotted rats out of the drains. We’ve stood awkwardly beside a colleague in tears, unsure whether to hug them or give them space. We’ve been screamed at - literally screamed at - over label designs and lack of trust. We’ve had nights where no one showed up to clean the taps. We’ve had weddings where the beer ran out and events where the food truck Manager’s hair caught fire (not literally).

Joy, in this context, isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the willingness to meet it with humanity. It’s the resilience to hold both sorrow and silliness in the same day. To have a team member break down at 11:00 and another tell a wildly inappropriate joke at 11:15, and somehow both things be part of what keeps us whole.

One of the most joyful people I’ve ever met was also one of the most scarred. They had this ability to laugh mid-sentence, right after describing something brutal. Not because they were minimizing the pain, but because they understood that joy isn’t a denial — it’s a reclamation. A way of saying, “you don’t get to take this from me too.”

That’s the strategy.

A Note on My Own Joy

I used to think of joy as something I created for others. As a leader, I saw it as my job to hold the energy, keep things light, throw the good parties. But since the accident, my relationship to joy has changed.

I no longer dance at staff parties. I can’t run the Tough Kegger anymore. I can’t load kegs, climb trees, or host a harvest festival while wearing a baby in a chest sling – although that’d be more of a Melissa move than me.

But I’ve found new forms. Watching kids jump all over an old tractor or corn hole set, is joy. Getting a text from Kara, via Melis, about the lights in the coop is joy. Hearing Mercer and Aldo roast me for my questionable fashion choices is joy. Listening to the hum of a busy tasting room from over next to the fireplace is joy.

It’s quieter now. More observational. But no less strategic. Because when people see that joy is still possible - even in a body that’s been broken, even in the face of pain - it gives them permission to find their own.

A Kind of Compost

Joy decomposes. It breaks down the rigid parts of a business. It composts the stress, the pressure, the bureaucratic crust that forms when things get too tight. It’s a bit like what happens after the rush of summer - when the fruit is picked, the heat fades, and the team breathes again. That first cool morning when the pace slows and someone makes coffee for no reason. That’s joy too.

And like compost, joy feeds the next cycle.

So no, it’s not a KPI. And it’s not always visible. But if you’re listening for it - really listening - you’ll hear it in the laughter in the backroom, in the sigh of relief when a harvest is in, in applause of a TR band finding just the right groove. It’s not strategy in the traditional sense.

It’s older than that.

It’s rhythm.

Let It Be Messy

If there’s one thing I’ve learned — as a leader, a co-worker, a dad, and a paralyzed person in a world designed by and for the non-paralyzed — it’s that clarity rarely shows up at the beginning. It drips in like condensation on the cold tank in the brewery: slowly, unevenly, and usually after you’ve already made a bit of a mess. And I mean that both literally and metaphorically.

We didn’t get where we are by having it all figured out. We got here by stumbling forward, tripping over our own assumptions, and occasionally stepping into the sticky puddles of our past decisions. And still — somehow — we grew. Not in a straight line. Not according to plan. But in the beautiful, tangled, rhizomatic way that anything alive grows.

Some days it looked like progress. Some days it looked like a soggy box of labels disintegrating in the rain. Some days it looked like Anders skateboarding through the warehouse while someone tried to herd a toddler on a plasma car into a forklift-free zone. All of it mattered. All of it was learning.

Letting it be messy isn’t about giving up. It’s not a cute excuse for poor planning or sloppiness. It’s about resisting the very human urge to control, to simplify, to flatten reality into a story that always makes us look wise and benevolent in hindsight. The world is complicated. So is your business. And so are you.

And let’s be honest — the mess was there from the start. We just did a better job of hiding it early on. Our spreadsheets pretended we could forecast demand, our job postings implied we knew exactly who we were looking for, and our core values suggested we always lived up to our highest aspirations. But in practice? We’ve lost good people. We’ve let poor fits hang on too long. We’ve dropped balls, missed cues, and tried to fix cultural dissonance with posters instead of conversations.

We’ve also made art from the chaos.

Take our events — the ones we agonized over for weeks and the ones we cobbled together in 48 hours. Sometimes the ones with the least polish had the most soul. A concert out of the back of a truck, an impromptu drag show in the warehouse, or a Friday night floor jam session that turned into an intergenerational dance party. These weren’t part of a five-year strategy or a brand alignment initiative. They were moments of convergence - of bodies and feelings and weather and timing and … something else - and they worked because we didn’t try to control them too tightly.

And isn’t that what rhythm really is? Not a precise beat, but a shared pattern that allows for variation, interpretation, even a little chaos. Rhythm is what lets a kid on a plasma car move through a warehouse without crashing into a keg stack. It’s what lets the brewer and the salesperson argue over which new release to greenlight and still end up grabbing lunch together afterward. It’s what lets people come and go, burn out and come back, find meaning in the compost of their own confusion.

We’ve had employees leave because we weren’t the right place for them - too ambiguous, too fluid, too much grey area. And that’s fair. We’re not for everyone. But we’ve also had people leave, reflect, and return - sometimes in different roles, with different boundaries, with a deeper appreciation for the messiness of shared work. That doesn’t make us noble. It just means we’re willing to keep the door open.

You can try to prevent mess. Or you can prepare for it.

We’ve learned to keep towels by the tanks, mops by the drains, and extra granola bars in the drawer for the intern who forgot to eat lunch again. We’ve learned that someone having a bad day doesn’t make them a bad person. That a miscommunication doesn’t mean someone’s out to sabotage you. That most people are doing their best, even when it looks suspiciously like procrastination.

But perhaps most importantly, we’ve learned that the instinct to tidy up — to wrap every story in a bow, to label every performance as success or failure — is often premature. Some of the messiest moments have given us the richest compost. Painful departures led to necessary redesigns. Awkward conversations became the foundation for real trust. Sloppy first drafts turned into something beautiful because someone cared enough to stay in the discomfort long enough to rewrite them.

Mess, after all, is not the opposite of excellence. It’s often the raw material for it.

The best cider we’ve made came from a blend that wasn’t supposed to work. The most durable teams we’ve built …Not in control. Not in clarity. But in rhythm.

And like compost, the mess gets warm if you let it breathe.

That warmth — that microbial magic — it only happens if you stop trying to sterilize everything. If you allow decay and disappointment to do their part. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it stinks. But it’s also the birthplace of fertility. Of ideas that weren’t on the whiteboard. Of relationships that deepen through rupture, not avoidance. Of people who discover they’re capable of more — or less — than they imagined, and who get to recalibrate in full view of their peers instead of behind some shame curtain.

Our instinct - mine included - is often to smooth it out, to make things feel coherent and calm and clean. To offer a narrative that says: We meant to do that. We planned this. We saw it coming. But that’s not only dishonest, it’s also sterile. And sterile cultures don’t grow things. They just preserve what’s already there.

Mess is not a failure of leadership. It is the environment of leadership.

This isn’t a call to chaos, though. You still need structure. Compost piles without structure just attract raccoons. But within the bounds of shared purpose and decent boundaries, let people try weird things. Let teams solve problems their own way. Let conflict be generative. Let hard conversations stay hard instead of fast-forwarding to the reconciliation part. And maybe — just maybe — let the answer take longer than your meeting agenda allows.

If someone breaks down in the walk-in cooler because their family’s falling apart, don’t call HR. Call a time-out. Bring a sandwich. Make space. We’ve all been there, or we will be. If someone misreads a label or drops the ball on a delivery, don’t assign blame like you’re scoring a soccer match. Ask what systems broke down. What warning signs were ignored. What assumptions went unchallenged.

And if you’re the leader - and I say this gently, as someone who’s gotten it wrong in every direction - don’t pretend to be the one person immune to mess. You’re not. You’re in it too. Your flaws are showing, your blind spots are visible, and your own rhythm includes offbeats that everyone else can hear. That’s not a crisis. That’s what earns you credibility - if you don’t hide it.

Because the best kind of authority doesn’t come from having all the answers. It comes from showing up in the mess with your sleeves rolled up and your ego in check. From apologizing well. From laughing when you spill something in front of a new hire. From asking “What do you think?” and meaning it.

This, then, is our rhythm: imperfect, alive, a little wild around the edges. Not the tempo of dominance, but the pulse of participation. Not the illusion of mastery, but the invitation to contribute.

And in that rhythm, we find something better than control.

We find each other.

We find the work worth doing.

We find - maybe - that the compost pile is where our best future is already growing.

Let it be messy.

Let it matter.

Let it breathe.

Chapter 13 — Brand as Ecosystem: Building Awareness, Trust, and Loyalty

1. Nurturing the Brand Soil

There is a certain kind of person—you know the type—who really loves talking about “brand.” They can’t seem to help themselves. At the slightest provocation, they’ll lean forward across a café table and begin expounding on “brand architecture,” “brand equity,” “tone ladders,” and that perennial favourite, “the brand funnel.” (As if we all wake up every morning hoping to slide down a funnel.)

Here’s the thing: in the real world, successful brands are not built in marketing decks. They’re built in the same way that forests grow—slowly, over time, with patience and care, through relationships, mutualisms, and invisible networks of connection. You don’t “architect” a great forest. You nurture it. You steward it. You might prune the odd branch or fend off a pest here and there, but mostly you get out of the way and let nature do its thing.

At Persephone Brewing, we’ve never had much appetite for marketing jargon, but we do know a thing or two about trees. (And hops. And fruit. And beer, naturally.) And when we think about the way our brand has evolved over the years, it has felt much more like growing an ecosystem than managing a funnel.

This is why we like to say that our brand starts with the soil.

Not the hypothetical “brand soil” of some hip brand consultancy workshop—but actual, literal soil. The kind with dirt under your nails. The kind that squelches under your boots after a good rain. The kind that smells like life when you turn it over with a spade.

Because from the beginning, the farm has run through everything we do—quite literally. Our beer isn’t just made in a warehouse and shipped out by the pallet. It’s grown from the land, through the ingredients we cultivate and the community we nurture. And it’s experienced on the land, too—visitors sitting at long tables beneath the trees, live music in the beer garden, families picking up a carton of eggs along with a four-pack of Pale Ale. “Come for the beer, leave with a carton of eggs”—yes, that’s actually printed on our can, and yes, it happens.

That connection to place is not just a marketing angle; it’s the bedrock of our brand. It’s what gives everything else life—the visible growth of awareness, reputation, and loyalty all rests on the living soil of actual, lived experience.

And like any healthy soil, it’s alive with unseen networks of connection.

Enter the fungal networks.

If you’ve ever wandered through an old forest, you’ve probably walked across a vast, invisible web of mycelium—the fungal threads that run beneath the forest floor, connecting trees and plants in an intricate exchange of nutrients, information, and support. Scientists now know that these networks allow trees to “communicate” with one another: sending distress signals, sharing carbon, helping their neighbours grow stronger.

In the world of branding, word of mouth is the mycelium.

It’s the unseen network that connects people through authentic stories, recommendations, and experiences. And it’s vastly more powerful than any ad campaign. You can’t buy it. You can’t force it. But you can cultivate the conditions where it thrives.

We never set out to “build a brand” in the conventional sense. We set out to build a farm-based brewery that made excellent beer, contributed to our local community, and did some good along the way. We wanted to align our business activities with our products, our customer experience, and our place in the world—with the farm running through it all.

Over time, that alignment has become the heartwood of our brand.

And sometimes, we’ve been lucky enough to say it out loud. Below is the full text of a letter we wrote at the end of 2021—a year marked by climate chaos, pandemic uncertainty, and fragile hope. A local business partner had generously offered to purchase a full-page ad for us in the Coast Reporter newspaper. We could’ve used it to push a seasonal product or highlight an award. But instead, we chose to say something that we hoped would stick—not as a sales pitch, but as a soil amendment.

A Love Letter to Our Community — The Soil of Our Humanity

With all that is happening, at this extraordinary moment in history, as we near the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, we want to pause, reflect, say thank you and recognize our interdependence. As soil is to a farm, community is to humanity—with which health, sustenance, and abundance flourish.

Like everyone, we have learned a lot through the adversity of the last couple of years. While COVID deservedly draws our attention, mother earth is reminding us that the climate we have grown accustomed to is changing more rapidly than we like to admit. Summer 2021 presented us with a heat dome and drought, while November offered up more rainfall and flood damage than recent memory can recall. There is much to be concerned about such that even our children are wrestling with despair as we, collectively, look toward their future. Yet, hope remains. The natural system we rely on is doing its part and our community is stepping up, time and again.

Our community’s response to the pandemic has been inspiring—and we don’t use that word lightly. From our doctors and nurses to producers and retailers, from volunteers to professionals, we’ve pulled together, we’ve dug deep and found solutions to problems that we did not see coming. It hasn’t been perfect, no one is. One example (of many) is the way local farms and food providers bind us in difficult times. The collaboration between farmers, grocers, markets, food banks and other non-profits—not to mention the amazing people behind them—have provided a glue, holding us together.

The more that we commit to and learn about regenerative farming practices, the more the similarity between agroecological and human systems are revealed to us. Our beer farm is leaning into regenerative, in part, to ensure yields and more nutrient rich food. However, we also see the opportunity to invest in this nature-based solution to climate change. Regenerative farming is, for us, the preeminent climate solution critical to ensure that our brewery, community and food system is resilient as increasingly dramatic weather events lie ahead. Nature has the ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere, convert it to sustenance and nourish our community with it. Soil health is the key to growing food, binding us to our land as well as each other.

Ever more we have become aware of the importance of soil health. Soil aggregate stability is an important ecosystem property as it is strongly related to soil services such as carbon storage, organic matter stabilization, water-holding capacity, and resistance to erosion. Deeper yet, we know that soil aggregates are clumps of soil particles held together by moist clay, organic matter (like roots), glues (from bacteria and fungi) and by a network of fungal hyphae. There can be hundreds of miles of hyphae in just a pound of soil. We see soil aggregation as a metaphor for—and directly linked to—our community. People in community are bound by family, associations, and networks of relationships each as reliant on each other as the soil is on the sun.

Our well-being has for too long been overlooked as a primary outcome of soil health. Our community thrives and relies on soil just as we do each other. As we turn the corner into what will most certainly be another extraordinary year filled with ups and downs, we hope that you, our community, will join us in celebrating that which binds us and the role that our soil plays in holding us together.

With love and warm regards, we can’t wait to see you in the new year!

—The People of Persephone Brewing Company

That wasn’t a brand statement. It was a thank-you note written in dirt. And if people felt something when they read it, that’s because it came from the same place as the beer, the music, the eggs, and the welcome: the soil beneath it all.

Let’s keep digging.

2. Shareholders as Spore Spreaders

In the tidy diagrams of a corporate strategy retreat, “shareholder engagement” usually shows up somewhere between quarterly reports and awkward AGMs catered with stale muffins. It’s the checkbox that says: “Let’s tell the money people what they want to hear so they’ll keep letting us do the real work.”

For us, the money people are the real work.

Or at least, part of it.

Persephone’s brand has never lived inside a PDF deck or marketing funnel. It has lived — and continues to live — in the hands, hearts, and voices of real people. And many of those people are our shareholders.

In fact, as of late 2025, more than 600 of them are (shhh, but we have some plans that might expand this number). That’s not a typo, I think it is 614 to be exact.

These are people who have bet — not on some fantasy of hypergrowth or 10x exits — but on the slow, sticky, living possibility of a farm-based brewery trying to do some good in the world. And when they tell their friends, host backyard BBQs, bring their colleagues to the beer garden, or order a case of IPA for a wedding, they are not just customers or advocates. They are spore spreaders.

Like mycelium spreading through the soil, these people extend the reach of our story. They pass it along through casual mentions, social media posts, awkward party introductions (“Did you know I own a piece of a brewery?”), and the occasional growler-shaped Christmas gift. Each one carries a thread of the brand — not because we asked them to, but because they want to.

Some of them carry it with endearing, slightly off-brand enthusiasm. One shareholder (we’ll call him Greg) once tried to convince a local ski hill to name a run after our IPA. Another regularly emails us with slogans like, “Persephone: Drink the Myth!” and “Beer Worth Worshipping!” We adore the energy — and we reserve the right to ignore the slogans.

Others carry the brand with quiet grace: pouring our beer at community events, wearing our T-shirts until they’re threadbare, showing up for AGM Zoom calls even when the audio cuts out.

These people — these unpaid, unbriefed, deeply aligned humans — are what we might call brand carriers or some of them we’ll just call friends. They don’t just spread awareness; they deepen it. They make the brand breathable.

And that kind of brand infrastructure is nearly impossible to fake.

The Alley: Sporing Without the Soil

When we expanded to qathet (also known as Powell River), we knew we were leaving behind the literal farm. There would be no chickens pecking at customer ankles. No hop fields out back. No eggs with your pint.

Instead, we were moving into an old bowling alley. And while the ghosts of gutter balls past gave the place some serious character, it raised a question: how do you translate a farm-grown brand into an urban, indoor, wood-paneled, neon-lit, third-space pub?

We started with the name: The Alley.

It was both literal and metaphorical. A nod to the bowling lanes, sure — but also to the in-between places where things grow: back alleys, side streets, cultural edges. We leaned into a modern-vintage aesthetic that felt true to the town’s working-class roots and its emerging arts scene. We began programming live music, cultivating regulars, and offering just enough weirdness to make the place feel alive (ask us about the drag-metal double bill sometime).

But The Alley is more than a pub. The property we purchased included not just the bowling alley and former bar — which we’ve since renamed The Spare Room — but an entire small ecosystem of community potential. There are five ground-floor retail units now occupied by a delightfully mismatched cohort: an art supply store, a vintage clothing boutique, a yoga studio, a construction company (our friends at Hansen Land and Sea), and a custom sign shop. Upstairs, a cluster of modest office spaces hosts a local teachers’ union, a nonprofit organization, and — perched at the very top like a squirrel with a strong Wi-Fi signal — the community radio station. There’s even a single residential unit above it all, reminding us that people still live above the places where we gather. And they should.

It wasn’t designed this way. But the site has become, by proximity and possibility, the kind of third space we’ve always believed in — one that doesn’t just host community, but holds it. Just as the farm has always functioned as more than a production site — a venue, a gathering space, a cultural outpost — this corner of qathet is evolving into its own decentralized hub. A place where art, music, food, politics, and yoga mats collide without pretense. We didn’t move here to replicate the farm. We came to see if the spirit of community-rooted enterprise could take a different shape — one shaped by back alleys instead of garden rows, by storefronts instead of chickens, but still rooted in the same idea: that we are healthiest when we live, work, and create in proximity to each other.

But most importantly, we didn’t try to recreate the farm. We tried to recreate the feeling - of belonging, of fun, of care. And we began infusing the space with real community partnerships: from collaborations with the Tla’amin Nation on a youth-designed mural, to local food events, to plans for on-site storytelling nights and lots and lots of music.

It’s early days. We’re still learning. But already, the brand spores are taking root.

When Spores Run Wild

Of course, the more voices carrying the brand, the more possibility there is for it to drift slightly off key. Not maliciously, not even deliberately — just through natural enthusiasm or differing interpretations. We’ve seen moments where shareholder eagerness to “spread the word” results in messaging that feels a little off-tone or ideas that don’t quite align with our core values. In those moments, we’ve learned not to panic or overcorrect, but to listen, clarify, and gently re-anchor the story in the soil from which it grew. A fungal network is resilient, but it still needs occasional pruning.

In moments like these, we’ve learned that part of stewarding a living brand is gently pruning the mycelium (am I mixing agriculture metaphors?). Not through control or censorship, but through conversation. By reminding folks what the brand is really rooted in. By pointing back to our values, our place, our people.

Because a fungal network only thrives when it stays connected to a healthy soil.

And that means offering some nutrients back to the carriers. Not in the form of cheesy rewards programs or influencer kits, but in transparency, respect, and the occasional insider update that makes them feel genuinely part of something.

How It All Adds Up

What’s remarkable is how this all works without a master plan. We’ve never had a shareholder referral program. We’ve never hosted a brand training session. Yet the stories keep traveling.

Because in ecosystems - real ones - coherence doesn’t require control. It requires health. When the soil is alive, the network spreads. When the story is rooted, people carry it further.

And so our shareholders have become more than funders. They’ve become brand nodes. Narrative tributaries. Friendly neighbourhood mycologists of meaning.

They remind us that our brand isn’t something we own. It’s something we host.

And if we keep hosting it well - with care, creativity, and the occasional off-the-wall bowling night - it just might keep growing.

3. Doing Good Grows the Network

“There were a lot of people saying that we’re going to lose a bunch of customers by suing the administration. And that was just the exact opposite. We got more customers and we got more revenue.” — Rose Marcario, on Patagonia’s response to suing the U.S. government over National Monument reductions

There’s a fine line between virtue and virtue signalling. Sometimes it’s a hand-drawn sign at the farm gate. Sometimes it’s an email written at 2 a.m. because someone called us “performative” on Instagram and it stung more than it should have.

But more often than not, it’s about whether your actions echo through the system long after the moment has passed - not because you shouted them from the rooftops, but because they struck something real in people.

We’ve never been perfect at this. But we’ve been stubbornly committed. We’ve chosen, again and again, to act in ways that feel aligned with the world we want to live in — even when those actions don’t make immediate sense on a balance sheet or fit into a tidy campaign. And more often than not, those actions - those weird, wobbly, wonderful acts of alignment - have ended up amplifying the brand in ways we couldn’t have planned if we tried.

Let’s be clear: impact doesn’t need a spotlight. But a little sun doesn’t hurt.

The Kind of Signals That Stick

When someone visits the farm, they might not notice every detail that makes the place hum. They may not clock that our team includes neurodivergent individuals, or that we’ve retrofitted our space for greater accessibility. They may not know how many times a day someone gently adapts a task to fit someone else’s physical or cognitive ability, or how often our hiring process includes conversations that aren’t covered in HR manuals but absolutely should be.

And yet - somehow - they feel it.

They feel a spirit of welcome. They feel an ease, an authenticity. They notice the absence of pretension and the presence of care. They may not be able to point to why, but something lands - and that’s the brand doing its work, not through a tagline, but through a nervous system.

We once received a hand-written thank you note from a customer who had no idea we employed people with disabilities. She had brought her son, who lives with autism, to the farm. No one asked her to leave. No one gave her a look. Instead, someone at the bar helped him choose a pretzel and smiled at her like it was no big deal - because it wasn’t. And that’s the point. Quiet inclusion isn’t about being seen doing the right thing. It’s about doing the right thing so consistently that people begin to trust your spaces without needing an explanation.

These are the stories that don’t always get told. But they travel. They ripple. They stick.

Signal Amplification, Not Virtue Signalling

Of course, not everyone gets it. We’ve been accused - more than once - of making too much noise about our community initiatives. Someone once commented that our Isolation Nation beer “felt a bit like pandemic opportunism.” We took it seriously. We talked about it as a team. We revisited our motivations, our messaging, our methods.

And then we decided to do it anyway.

Because the alternative was to do nothing. To stop. To self-censor for fear of being misread. And frankly, in that moment, people needed help. Food needed delivering. Partners needed support. And if telling the story of what we were doing helped others step up, donate, or just feel less alone — then we were willing to take the risk.

It taught us something important: there’s a difference between signal amplification and virtue signalling. One invites others in. The other shows off. And while the line is thin and often subjective, it’s worth walking with humility, honesty, and a thick enough skin to weather the occasional side-eye.

Also, it helps to make the beer good. That always buys a little grace.

Events as Memory Imprints

Some of the most lasting brand impressions we’ve made didn’t come from a marketing campaign at all. They came from events — physical, visceral, emotionally resonant gatherings where people came together and felt something bigger than themselves.

Sometimes it’s a book launch in partnership with Upstart & Crow, tucked into the orchard on a warm summer evening. Sometimes it’s a Pride event with drag queens lip-syncing under the trellis, while toddlers eat popsicles and no one blinks.

Sometimes it’s the Tough Kegger or the Slow Food Cycle, or an open mic night in The Alley that somehow turns into a town-hall-style singalong about housing policy. (Okay, maybe that didn’t happen but wouldn’t it be fun.)

These moments are not just good times. They’re brand messages - encoded in experience, not language. They tell people what we care about. They offer participation, not just observation. And because they are lived and felt, they lodge in memory. They get passed along not as slogans but as stories: “You won’t believe what I saw at the farm last weekend…”

You can’t buy that kind of signal.

You can only host it well enough that it wants to return.

Sidebar: Things We Could’ve Branded (But Didn’t)

Every so often, we joke about launching a few more brand extensions. For your amusement - and ours - here’s a short list of things we almost definitely won’t be launching:

• Hop-flavoured toothpaste – Because freshness should never taste like dry-hopped regret.

• Persephone-branded rain barrels – Great for water conservation, but tricky shelf placement in the liquor store.

• The Persephone Mindfulness App – It pings you every time your beer gets too warm.

• Compostable Persephone underwear – We’re not even going to explain this one. Just… no. Well, maybe?

• A branded cologne called “Farm Funk” – Notes of soil, sweat, and sincerity. You’re welcome.

We share this because restraint is part of brand stewardship. Just because we could put our name on something doesn’t mean we should. The point is not to colonize every surface of people’s lives. It’s to be recognizable where it matters — and quietly absent where it doesn’t.

Alignment is the Echo

At its best, our brand doesn’t just reach people — it reflects them. It gives them something to feel part of, not just something to buy. And that only works when the alignment is real. When our values show up not just on boxes but in behaviours. Not just in press releases, but in paycheques, partnerships, and picnic tables.

That kind of alignment becomes an echo. It bounces through the system. It’s what makes someone pour your beer at a wedding and say, “These are good folks.” It’s what makes a journalist call us back for a quote when they’re writing about land access or disability employment. It’s what makes a neighbour bring us a basket of tomatoes just because.

The network doesn’t grow through force. It grows through coherence.

And we believe that when you do good - not perfectly, not performatively, but persistently - it gets carried forward. In stories. In partnerships. In trust.

It’s a long game.

But so is life.

4. Benefit Beers (and Boxes): Stories in a Can — and a Platform for Purpose

Not everyone takes the farm tour. Not everyone follows us on Instagram. And very few, we suspect, have read this book (though if they’re here now - bless you, and please buy yourself a beer). But nearly everyone who drinks Persephone beer has, at some point, held one of our cans or six-packs in their hands. Which is why the humble beer box - that recyclable rectangle of promise - might be the most underappreciated storytelling device in our arsenal.

Packaging, at its best, is a Trojan horse for meaning. It gets invited into homes, picnics, tailgates, and camping trips. It’s visible on coffee tables and countertops. It gets read when phones are dead and conversation lulls. And because our packaging is so often the first (and maybe only) brand touchpoint, we take it seriously — but not too seriously.

Each can, each label, each box is a tiny platform. A micro-stage. A miniature manifesto.

Nowhere was this more evident than with our Pollinator Pilsner.

This wasn’t just a good beer - though it was crisp, crushable, and well-loved by our community. This was a message in a can. An ode to the quiet power of pollinators. A love letter to soil. A data-backed argument for regenerative agriculture. And, yes, a margin nightmare.

Let’s start with the good news.

The Pollinator Pilsner was created in partnership with TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods, who helped us bring a new level of transparency and traceability to the product. By scanning a QR code on the can, customers could trace the journey of the beer from seed to sip - learning about the certified organic hops, the craft-grade malt, the sustainable farmers we sourced from, and the honey that gave the beer its subtle, layered complexity. This wasn’t marketing fluff. It was data-rich storytelling. An experiment in trust.

Our friends at Muddy Boots and Decisive Farming were also part of the process, providing traceability and agronomic insights. And yes - we advertised the hell out of it. Bus shelters. Billboards. Social media posts with just the right ratio of bees to beer.

But this wasn’t just a beer campaign. It was a systems education.

We were inviting people to care about pollinators not because they’re cute (though they are) or endangered (they are that, too), but because our entire food system depends on them. No pollinators, no peaches. No squash. No almonds. No hops. No chocolate! If the bees go, let’s face it , the beer goes too.

So, the Pollinator Pilsner became our vehicle for making that connection tangible. A can that educated, inspired, and refreshed — all in one.

And it worked. People loved it. They talked about it. They shared it. They posted photos and scanned the QR code and read the stories. It got a little media coverage and community praise. It was, in every sense, a purpose-driven product that performed.

Except on the Income Statement.

Because here’s the thing: sustainable ingredients cost more. Traceability infrastructure adds overhead. Organic certification, local honey, compostable packaging, transparency tech - these things don’t come cheap. While a typical beer might run a gross margin of 40% or better, the Pollinator Pilsner ended up operating in the single digits. Ouch, that’s a painful dose of reality.

We didn’t lose money on it. But we didn’t make much either. Which is why, eventually, we made the difficult decision to downgrade it from a core, year-round offering to a seasonal or limited-release beer - something we still make, still celebrate, but only when it makes financial and operational sense to do so.

This, too, is part of the brand story. Because being transparent about the cost of doing the right thing - the financial reality of aligning mission with margins - is itself a brand act. It says: we’re not perfect, but we’re trying. And we’ll tell you when it’s hard.

Pollinator Pilsner wasn’t our only Benefit Beer, of course. We’ve brewed one-offs and partnerships with groups like One Straw Society, Farm Folk City Folk, and Young Agrarians. During COVID, we launched Isolation Nation - a beer that supported community food delivery efforts when people were stuck at home. The model was simple: drink good beer, feed your neighbours. It hit that sweet spot where altruism and refreshment overlap.

But Pollinator was the apex of the form: packaging, purpose, partnerships, and public awareness all humming in unison. It was a true manifestation of brand-as-ecosystem - a product with roots in the soil and wings in the social sphere.

Of course, every can can’t be a mini-manifesto. Sometimes a lager is just a lager. But even then, the way we name it, describe it, and present it carries weight. A few favourites you’ll find on our cans:

• “Hop-forward in flavour. Community-forward at heart.”

• “If you hear a buzz about us, it might be the bees.”

• “Just your humble local brewery out to change the world.”

• “Come for the beer, leave with a carton of eggs.”

These aren’t just quips. They’re breadcrumbs. Little narrative nutrients.

And they’re part of why packaging matters.

Our boxes, like our beers, are vessels of meaning. And in a world overwhelmed by content, the quiet clarity of a well-designed, values-aligned, delightfully phrased six-pack box can do more than a hundred boosted posts.

That doesn’t mean we won’t advertise. (We did bus shelters, remember?) But it does mean that we see marketing as an extension of the story - not a separate layer. When done well, it’s all compostable. It all goes back into the system.

We want every element of what we produce - from product to package to partnership - to align. We don’t always hit that mark. But when we do, the results are sticky. Resonant. Shared.

We’re not interested in branding everything we touch. But we are interested in telling stories that matter, in formats people will actually engage with. Sometimes that’s a panel discussion. Sometimes it’s a book launch. And sometimes, it’s a cold, fizzy reminder of what we’re trying to build.

Because ultimately, a beer is ephemeral. It’s consumed, recycled, and (hopefully) remembered fondly. But when the packaging carries purpose, and the product is rooted in values, and the story is worth telling, then the brand lingers — long after the last sip.

And that, we think, is worth raising a glass to.

5. The Value of Earned Media: When Stories Become Nutrients

Introduction — A Nutrient-Rich Alternative to Paid Messaging

It’s tempting to think that with the right budget and a clever enough ad campaign, a brand could be conjured out of thin air — distilled into a logo, splashed across billboards, whispered through influencer lips, and etched into the consumer subconscious like a well-trained slogan. But in practice, that’s not how trust works. And it’s certainly not how ecosystems work.

Paid media is topsoil dropped from a truck: surface-deep, easy to scatter, quick to wash away. Earned media — stories told by others because they matter — is compost: slow, messy, alive, and infinitely more nourishing. It is the narrative layer that builds over time from decaying campaigns, lived experience, community memory, and small truths that refuse to stay buried.

We never chased media coverage at Persephone. But it has found us - not because we packaged the right talking points, but because the ecosystem around us responded to something real. And over time, those stories became nutrients. Not just awareness, but resilience. Not just buzz, but belief.

Case Study — “Save the Beer Farm”: Policy, Protest, and a Pint of Impact

When our land use was challenged under Agricultural Land Reserve policy, it would’ve been easy to throw up our hands. After all, it was complicated. Bureaucratic. Not exactly headline-grabbing stuff. But it struck at the root of what we were trying to do - to integrate food, drink, culture, and community on farmland.

So we responded with a campaign: Save the Beer Farm. It was bold, maybe a little cheeky, but deeply grounded. We told our story, invited our community to join us, and made it clear that we weren’t just fighting for our own business - we were advocating for a broader vision of what farms could be.

Media outlets picked it up not because we bought ad space, but because it tapped into something larger: the tension between outdated regulations and new models of rural revitalization. The earned media became a megaphone - not for us, but for the idea that farms could host culture, not just crops. That agriculture included people.

The policy eventually changed. But more than that, our identity became clearer. The ecosystem spoke, and we listened.

Case Study — “Isolation Nation”: A Beer for the Times

When COVID hit, we could’ve gone dark. Instead, we doubled down on community. We launched a home delivery system, partnered with our local credit union, and brewed a new beer called Isolation Nation — proceeds supporting food delivery to vulnerable residents.

It wasn’t a stunt. It wasn’t strategic. It was simply what felt right. But media outlets picked it up immediately. CBC. Global. Local papers. The story traveled not because it was flashy, but because it was human: a small brewery turning anxiety into action, finding joy in mutual aid.

And the name didn’t hurt. “Isolation Nation” had just enough levity to make the message carry.

Case Study — The Crash and the Community Response

Some stories aren’t planned. One of them happened the day I was injured in a cycling accident that left me paraplegic.

There was no playbook for how to handle it — as a person, as a leader, or as a brand. But something remarkable happened. The community stepped up. Staff held the line. Friends launched fundraisers. Media told the story — not of a business in crisis, but of an ecosystem in motion.

Those stories weren’t “on message.” They weren’t polished. But they were deeply aligned. They showed that the values we claimed weren’t for show — they were structural. Embedded. Real.

The brand grew from that moment, not because of sympathy, but because of coherence.

The Mechanics of Meaning — Why These Stories Stuck

What ties these stories together is not a common narrative or marketing angle. It’s not even the scale of their impact. It’s the alignment — between what we say and what we do. The resonance between message and muscle.

In ecosystems, signals matter more than declarations. Trees don’t issue press releases when they drop their leaves. But the forest understands the shift. Likewise, people respond to signals of integrity, especially when those signals are unexpected: generosity during crisis, humour in grief, clarity amidst confusion.

That’s why earned media works. Because it’s not about visibility — it’s about meaning. We call it narrative photosynthesis: turning light into energy, attention into nourishment. But only when it’s rooted in something real.

Why Earned Media Works in Ecosystems

In natural systems, communication happens through networks — fungal, microbial, hydraulic. It’s not top-down. It’s reciprocal. Responsive. And slow.

Earned media is the business version of that network. It transmits not just information, but identity. It tells people who we are by how others experience us. And like fungal threads, its strength depends on the health of the whole.

You can’t PR your way into coherence. You have to be coherent. The media just reflects what the system already knows.

Compost Happens: Let It Feed the Future

We never asked for the spotlight. But when it found us, we tried to use it with care.

Because the goal isn’t attention. It’s alignment. It’s not to go viral — it’s to grow rooted.

A living brand doesn’t chase the headline. It composts it. It turns today’s campaign into tomorrow’s soil. It learns from the good press and the bad reviews. It lets the stories feed the system.

And if you do that long enough — with patience, integrity, and a bit of humour — the ecosystem grows stronger. The brand becomes something more than a message. It becomes a memory. A muscle. A place people trust.

And trust, once composted, is the most fertile ground there is.

6. Brand as Living System: Complexity, Coherence, and Adaptive Identity

Let’s start by composting the most persistent cliché in branding: that it’s “what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” It sounds clever. But it’s also incomplete, reductive, and mostly useless if you’re trying to actually do something meaningful with your work.

Because here’s the truth: the room is never empty. You’re always in it — through your products, your partnerships, your past behaviour, your future aspirations. The room is full of memory, feedback loops, emotional residue, and the psychic echoes of your last newsletter. In a small town, the room is also full of people who know your dad.

Brand is not what people say about you. Brand is what emerges when all the things you say and do — over time, across contexts, through good times and gut punches — accumulate into something others trust. Or don’t.

At Persephone, we’ve come to see brand not as an identity to be controlled, but as a system to be stewarded — a living, evolving set of relationships, signals, impressions, and expectations that feed back into each other. And like any living system, it’s complex.

Complexity, in this case, is not a synonym for “complicated.” It’s a specific term from systems science. A complex adaptive system is one in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts, outcomes are nonlinear, and agents within the system (whether people, policies, or mushrooms) adapt in response to each other and to feedback from the environment. Think of a coral reef. Or a forest. Or, yes, a brand like ours.

Brand complexity shows up in how people encounter us: a six-pack in a corner store, a Pride concert in the beer garden, a social post about food justice, a book launch upstairs at the Powell River pub, a candid conversation with a staff member in the taproom. None of these moments defines the brand. But each one shapes it. And their consistency — not in style, but in substance — determines whether people feel coherence or confusion.

We’ve never had a brand guide thick enough to doorstop a meeting room. We’ve never written a tone ladder, though we could probably climb one if you gave us enough IPAs. What we do have is a compost pile of practice: a messy, beautiful accumulation of actions, stories, mistakes, jokes, partnerships, pivots, and purpose.

That compost feeds the system.

And yes, we mean compost literally and metaphorically. Our actual compost pile — full of grain waste, food scraps, and well-meaning half-eaten scones from board meetings — has taught us more about brand stewardship than most MBA courses. Composting is what happens when decay becomes fertility. When what didn’t work still contributes to what might. When timing matters, but so does patience.

Some of our marketing ideas have decomposed. Some have seeded something surprising. And some, frankly, have stunk. But all of it has added to the soil.

And from that soil, fungal threads reach out. The same people who show up to the Slow Food Cycle event might end up working in the taproom. A parent who buys a four-pack at the farmers market might one day donate to our employee hardship fund. A shareholder might become a critic, then an ally again, then a brand carrier without even knowing it. These are loops, not lines.

This is what makes brand coherence different from brand consistency. We’re not aiming for uniformity. We’re aiming for integrity.

Integrity means that things hold together — not because they match, but because they’re aligned. A beer label and a hiring practice can both express brand. So can the chairs we choose for the patio, the tone we take when someone emails us angrily, or the way we introduce ourselves to a new partner. None of it stands alone. All of it adds up.

We see this especially in how the brand operates across different scales. At the micro level, an individual bartender’s warmth matters. At the macro level, our AGM on Zoom with 600+ shareholders matters. And in the middle, there’s everything from internal Slack jokes to facility tours for local schools. All of it feeds the emergent brand system.

That emergence is key. You can’t dictate brand from the top down. It’s bottom-up, sideways-out, and sometimes upside-down. It’s recursive. It’s affected by weather, politics, customer moods, and whether the delivery driver got stuck on the Langdale ferry again.

And yet — within all this — there’s a discernible pattern. What makes our brand resilient is not our control over it, but our commitment to cultivating the conditions in which coherence can emerge. We respond. We learn. We compost.

The best branding lesson we’ve learned? Stop trying to own the story. Host it instead. Offer it nutrients. Let it be alive.

We often say our brand is not something we hold tightly. It’s something we breathe into the system and watch as others breathe it back, changed.

That might look like someone reposting our newsletter. Or choosing our beer over another because they remember the community garden project. Or asking why the can design changed — and then caring about the answer.

Ultimately, brand isn’t what we say it is. It’s what the ecosystem reflects back. And if we’ve been good hosts — attentive, honest, a little weird, occasionally brilliant, occasionally muddy — then maybe what grows is trust. Maybe what emerges is something people believe in, without needing a funnel or a tagline or a hero image to convince them.

That’s what we’re aiming for: a brand that behaves like a forest. Complex, adaptive, layered. One that doesn’t just look good from above, but nourishes everything from the deepest root to the highest branch.

And if that means a little mess, a few detours, and some decomposing ideas along the way — well, that’s compost. That’s life.

Chapter 14 v2: Climate, Growth, Revenue … aka the Heavy Chapter (with an interlude)

The Broken Logic of Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet

Let’s start with the uncomfortable bit. The economy — and by extension, business — is built on a fairytale. A tale told by economists, full of graphs and jargon, signifying… well, mostly GDP.

The myth goes something like this: growth is always good. More is better. Economic expansion lifts all boats, even if some are yachts and others are pool noodles duct-taped to a rubber duck. Business success is measured by increasing revenues, rising profits, and ROI curves that ideally look like a hockey stick pointed toward the heavens. Infinite growth on a finite planet? No problem. Just innovate faster.

But here’s the kicker: this story isn’t just naïve — it’s killing us.

We are in the midst of a full-blown ecological crisis, brought to you by the same economic logic that taught us to celebrate quarterly returns without asking what exactly is being returned — or from where. Climate change is not a standalone problem. It’s a feedback loop of extractive thinking, resource overshoot, and economic systems that reward exploitation and call it efficiency.

And in case you thought we were still dealing with future hypotheticals, allow me to burst that bubble with some cold, hard compost:

• Over 50% of the world’s topsoil has been lost in the last 150 years. Without soil, there is no food. No beer. No life.

• The UN estimates we have about 60 harvests left before global soil health collapses under the weight of conventional farming practices.

• Agriculture — yes, even the romantic kind with pitchforks and plaid shirts — is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

• One million species are at risk of extinction due to habitat destruction, industrial farming, and climate impacts.

• And despite all this, we’re still measuring success by GDP, which rises every time there’s an oil spill, a wildfire, or a cancer diagnosis.

Enter degrowth.

Degrowth, contrary to the name, is not about recession or going back to the Stone Age. It’s about rethinking what we mean by growth in the first place. It asks: Growth of what? For whom? At what cost? It’s about shrinking the parts of the economy that harm the planet — fossil fuels, industrial meat, fast fashion, hedge funds — and growing what sustains us: care work, local food systems, community infrastructure, ecological restoration.

Economists like Jason Hickel and Tim Jackson have been arguing for years that we need to decouple human flourishing from material consumption. Because we can’t engineer our way out of ecological collapse with more apps and a slightly greener supply chain. There are planetary limits. Real ones. And if we continue to ignore them, we will meet them the hard way — through drought, flood, famine, and forced migration.

Then there’s Doughnut Economics, a delightful name for a deeply serious idea, developed by Kate Raworth. Picture a doughnut: the inner ring is the social foundation (things like healthcare, education, income, gender equity), and the outer ring is the ecological ceiling (climate stability, clean air, biodiversity). A healthy economy operates in the sweet spot — not falling short on social needs, and not overshooting ecological boundaries. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s one of the few frameworks that actually acknowledges the shape of reality.

Sustainable finance — the investment world’s response to all this — is starting to grapple with these questions. Slowly. Sort of. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) metrics have gone mainstream, but they’ve been criticized (rightly) for being more about reputational risk than actual impact. Greenwashing is rampant. And while some funds and B Corps are pushing the boundaries, the sector overall still struggles to confront its addiction to growth and short-term returns.

At Persephone, we’ve watched this debate from the dual vantage point of practitioner and survivor. We believe in better business. We’re all-in on impact. But the more we learn, the harder it is to pretend that more is the answer. More sales. More production. More SKUs. More margin. That kind of growth might keep the spreadsheets happy, but it’s increasingly incompatible with a livable future.

This isn’t about guilt. It’s about clarity. If we want to grow businesses that don’t cannibalize the future, we have to tell better stories — stories where success is measured in resilience, relationship, and regeneration, not just revenue. That’s the real photosynthesis we need now: turning light — insight, ethics, purpose — into life-giving nourishment, not runaway sugar highs.

And so, the question isn’t whether business can be profitable. It’s whether business should be profitable in the way we’ve come to understand it. And what it might look like if the point wasn’t profit at all, but something deeper. More rooted. More alive.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Brewing — and Food Production Generally

Let’s get a few things out of the way: We love beer. It’s delicious. It brings people together. It’s ritual, it’s culture, it’s history in a glass. If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t have built an entire company (and farm, and community hub, and bookstore annex) around it.

But also: beer is a sustainability nightmare.

This chapter isn’t about self-flagellation, but if we’re going to talk honestly about profit, we have to talk about what we’re profiting from. And if we’re going to talk about regenerative business, we can’t ignore the rot in the roots of the system we’re trying to heal.

Let’s begin with the supply chain. Barley, hops, yeast, and water — that’s your basic beer. Simple enough, until you follow the trail. Hops might come from Washington, or Yakima, or New Zealand, or Germany, depending on market trends and what flavour profile is trending in Portland this week. Barley is grown in vast, industrialized tracts of prairie land, harvested by diesel-burning combines, and shipped across provinces or countries. Yeast is propagated in labs and overnighted like a biomedical sample. Water is local, at least, but it’s not free — not environmentally, and increasingly, not economically.

And then comes the packaging. Cans are the vessel of choice for most modern craft breweries — portable, stackable, recyclable (theoretically). But aluminum is one of the most energy-intensive materials to mine and process. Bauxite mining — the primary method of aluminum extraction — destroys ecosystems, contaminates water supplies, and often infringes on Indigenous land rights. Sure, aluminum is infinitely recyclable in theory, but in practice, recycling systems are fragmented and deeply flawed. Most aluminum cans don’t become new cans. They become scrap metal. Or landfill.

Now let’s talk operations. Brewing is energy-heavy. You heat thousands of litres of water to near boiling, cool it quickly, repeat the process in fermentation and conditioning stages, then keep the final product chilled through storage, transport, and retail. It’s a game of temperature control, and in the age of climate crisis and spiking energy prices, that’s an expensive and ethically fraught game to play.

And don’t forget water: it takes roughly 5 to 7 litres of water to produce 1 litre of beer. Some breweries have lowered that ratio; others do worse. Add in wastewater management — full of spent grain, yeast, and cleaning chemicals — and you start to get the picture. Beer is thirsty, messy work.

Then there’s the agriculture that feeds the whole thing. Most barley used in brewing is grown using conventional, industrial farming practices: monocultures, synthetic fertilizers, heavy pesticide use, deep tilling. Over time, these degrade soil health, reduce biodiversity, emit carbon, and require constant external inputs to maintain yields. And all of this is happening against a backdrop of rapidly eroding topsoil and collapsing insect populations — including the pollinators we rely on for the food system as a whole.

Some numbers to sip on:

• Since the early 20th century, over 90% of crop diversity has disappeared from farmers’ fields.

• According to the UN FAO, one-third of the world’s soils are degraded — through erosion, salinization, compaction, acidification, and chemical pollution.

• Insects, including bees, have seen declines of up to 75% in some regions, threatening food chains far beyond your backyard garden.

• And the nutrient density of food has decreased dramatically: modern vegetables and grains often contain 10–40% fewer vitamins and minerals than they did just 50 years ago.

Beer is a byproduct of this system — not the worst actor, maybe, but certainly not an innocent bystander. The cold, bitter truth is that the alcohol industry is built on a fundamentally unsustainable foundation. We ship ingredients and finished products around the globe for the sake of novelty and market share. We produce waste at every level of the supply chain. And we incentivize volume, not value.

So where does that leave a brewery trying to do things differently?

Some of us are experimenting. Regenerative agriculture. Local ingredient sourcing. Closed-loop water systems. Carbon capture. Reusables. But let’s not pretend these tweaks magically cancel out the structural issues. We’re making beer more responsibly, not regeneratively. And there’s a big difference.

At Persephone, we’ve taken steps: we grow some of our own ingredients, work with local suppliers, and advocate for more sustainable systems. But the contradictions remain. We’re part of an industry that sells a discretionary product wrapped in a romance of craft — and that romance can obscure the harm embedded in the business model. That doesn’t mean we throw in the towel. But it does mean we have to stop pretending that doing less harm is the same thing as doing good.

When you zoom out far enough, the question becomes painfully clear: Should profit even be our goal if the product we sell depends on extractive systems to exist in the first place?

And if not, what should we be aiming for instead?

Intermission: Dad and Mom Jokes for Sanity Preservation

Because you can’t read about biodiversity collapse and profit margins without needing at least a little serotonin.

Here’s a curated list of 25 glorious, groan-worthy dad (and mom) jokes — each one only mildly offensive to your intelligence and entirely harmless to the environment:

Beer, Bees, Agriculture & Food Dad Jokes

1. How do farmers party?

They turnip the beet.

2. Why do bees have sticky hair?

They use honeycombs.

3. Why did Dad bring a ladder to the bar?

Because he heard the beers were on the house!

4. What’s a bee’s favorite drink at the beach?

Fris-bees.

5. What do you call a bee that can’t make a decision?

A maybee!

6. What did one slice of bread say to the other before a date?

It was loaf at first sight.

7. What do you call a fake noodle?

An impasta.

8. What did the bison say to his son when he left the ranch?

Bi-son!

9. Where do fruits go on vacation?

Pear-is!

10. Why did the coffee taste like dirt?

Because it was ground just minutes ago.

Brewing & Food Puns

11. What’s brown and sticky?

A stick.

12. Why are piggy banks so wise?

They’re filled with common cents.

13. I went to the aquarium this weekend, but didn’t stay long.

There’s something fishy about that place.

14. Why don’t eggs tell jokes?

They’d crack each other up.

15. What do you call a dog who meditates?

An aware wolf.

16. What do you call a sheep who can sing and dance?

Lady Ba Ba.

17. What did the skillet eat on its birthday?

Pan-cakes.

18. What do you call a hot dog on wheels?

Fast food!

19. Why couldn’t the bicycle stand up by itself?

It was two-tired.

20. How do pickles make the best use of their time?

They relish every moment.

More Bee-Themed Groaners

21. What do you get when you cross a bee and a doorbell?

A hum-dinger.

22. Why did the bee get married?

He found his honey!

23. What’s a bee’s favorite candy?

Bumble gum.

24. What kind of bee is born in the spring?

A May-bee.

25. With great power comes great responsi-bee-lity.

You may now resume your regularly scheduled economic disillusionment.

Real Talk — Our Numbers Don’t Add Up

This is the part of the chapter where we’d normally pivot to the hopeful stuff. The scrappy turnaround story. The part where the music swells and we tell you how, despite the odds, our ethically-sourced kombucha stout line saved the company and the bees and the rainforest all at once.

But no.

Here’s the truth: we don’t do revenue particularly well. We never really have. That’s not self-deprecating Canadian modesty. It’s just math.

Persephone has always been a business driven by values. But values don’t pay invoices. We have loyal customers, beautiful land, a strong brand, and a community of passionate staff and supporters. And still — we regularly find ourselves chasing our tail just to stay solvent. We are, in many ways, the photo negative of a growth startup: purpose-rich and cash-poor.

Let’s talk about labour costs. This is often where conventional businesses squeeze hardest — wages get held down in the name of competitiveness. But we’ve never been comfortable with that. How can we, in good conscience, ask people to live our values on the job while struggling to afford rent, gas, and groceries? Especially when we know that wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living — and especially not in a place like the Sunshine Coast, where housing affordability has gone from “challenging” to “laughable” to “might-as-well-live-in-a-van-but-not-one-of-the-cool-ones.”

So yes, upward pressure on wages is real. And necessary. And just. But when you try to honor that in a low-margin industry like craft brewing, you quickly find yourself between the proverbial rock and the hard seltzer. Our prices can only go so high before customers balk — especially in a crowded market where many are already reaching for whatever’s on sale. So if your costs are rising and your prices can’t follow, where exactly is your profit supposed to come from?

The answer, for us, has often been: it doesn’t.

Our shareholders — who believed in the mission, who backed us in good faith — have yet to see a dividend. I, as founder, have gone years without drawing a salary. Not because I enjoy martyrdom or artisanal poverty, but because it simply hasn’t been financially feasible. Every spare dollar has gone back into the business, or the farm, or the team, or the roof (which is metaphorical and literal — turns out roofs leak in both senses).

And now, in this glorious era of prolonged inflation, we’re watching input costs rise like sourdough in a heatwave: raw materials, packaging, energy, logistics — all more expensive than ever. Meanwhile, supply chains are frayed, consumer spending is jittery, and our own cash flow is under near-constant pressure. The margin for error has become a margin of survival.

If this is success, we’re defining it very loosely.

And yet, here we are. Still standing. Still brewing. Still hiring. Still dreaming up benefit beers and hosting storytelling nights and wrestling with complexity like it’s our job — because, in a way, it is.

But please, don’t mistake survival for proof of a functional model. We haven’t solved the sustainability riddle. We haven’t unlocked the perfect intersection of ethics and profitability. We’re not the case study you should show your MBA class unless your theme is “beautiful, stubborn, morally conflicted near-misses.”

This isn’t meant to discourage you. But it is meant to disabuse you of the idea that good intentions automatically lead to good margins. They don’t. Intentions are just the soil. To grow something truly resilient, you need systems, support, strategy — and, occasionally, a bit of luck.

So, if you’ve ever felt like your values-driven venture is clinging to the cliff’s edge while the market throws rocks at your fingertips… you’re not alone.

And in the next section, we’ll take a hard look at the structure that’s trying to push us off that cliff in the first place.

The Myth of Non-Extractive Ownership

At some point in every values-driven business, there comes a moment — maybe during the 43rd cash flow forecast of the quarter, or after a particularly sobering board meeting — when the founder sits back, rubs their eyes, and thinks: Is this whole thing just a beautiful lie?

The lie, specifically, is this: that you can own a business, take value from it (whether as dividends, ROI, or founder upside), and still claim that business is “regenerative” or “non-extractive.”

Let’s unpack that.

Most business ownership models are extractive by default. That doesn’t mean evil. It just means that someone (or a group of someones) owns an asset, and their reward for ownership is a return greater than their input. More out than in. That extra value has to come from somewhere — and unless you believe in economic alchemy, that somewhere is typically the land, the labour, or both.

In our case, we’ve long tried to subvert this paradigm. We’ve reinvested instead of withdrawing. Deferred salaries. Reallocated dividends toward impact initiatives. Structured ownership to include community voices. But even with all that — even with decades of principled intention — the system we operate within still has extractive logic embedded in its bones.

Take the land itself. Our farm is built on once-forested, then-extracted, then mostly neglected territory. The fact that it now grows food and flowers and host storytelling events is a form of regeneration. But how did the land come to be “ours” in the first place? Colonialism. Real estate speculation. Legal fictions.

And then there’s labour. We pay a living wage, offer benefits, create employment opportunities for people who are often excluded from the workforce. But we still rely on unpaid labour in subtle ways — mine, sometimes. Volunteers, often. The goodwill of staff who stay late not because we ask, but because they care. This, too, is a form of extraction, even if it’s done with hugs and gratitude instead of whips and ledgers.

We’ve tried to imagine a model of truly non-extractive ownership — one where returns are directly proportional to value contributed, where surplus is shared rather than siphoned, where capital is stewarded rather than exploited. But the infrastructure for that kind of economy is still nascent. Co-ops come close, but struggle with scale. Nonprofits have different constraints. Trust-based ownership is emerging, but rare.

So what do we do?

First, we stop pretending we’re above the fray. We acknowledge that our model — while more ethical than some — is still compromised. That awareness is not self-flagellation. It’s the first step in redesigning the game.

Second, we build transparency into the system. Share financials. Talk openly about who gets what, and why. Ask hard questions about equity, power, and legacy.

And third, we commit to evolving ownership itself. Whether through employee equity, community investment, land-back initiatives, or perpetual purpose trusts — we need models that root value in relationships, not extraction. That treat profit as a means, not the mandate.

We don’t have all the answers. But we do have the questions. And that, at least, feels like a place to begin.

So What Is Sustainable Revenue?

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we’ve all agreed to retire the fantasy of hockey-stick growth. Let’s say we accept that extractive ownership models are inherently flawed, that profit isn’t the only (or even the best) metric of success, and that our businesses are built atop ecosystems — social and environmental — that need to thrive if we hope to.

What, then, does sustainable revenue actually look like?

Well, it’s not just revenue that keeps coming in.

It’s revenue that doesn’t come at the cost of your team’s mental health, your customer’s dignity, your community’s resilience, or the planet’s ability to function in fifty years. It’s revenue that flows from and contributes to a healthy system — like sap in a tree — rather than leeching from it like a tick in a sugar rush.

But defining it is one thing. Measuring it? That’s a whole different compost pile.

Most of the tools we’ve inherited from traditional business thinking are designed to track financial capital only. They’re very good at telling you what your quarterly earnings were, but not whether those earnings came from genuine value creation or just some cleverly masked externality — like paying poverty wages, outsourcing pollution, or selling more alcohol than is probably good for anyone.

And here’s where we change hats for a moment.

(Imagine me now at Boann Social Impact, not Persephone. The flannel shirt’s the same, but I’m speaking as an impact investor.)

In the social finance world, we’ve been wrestling with this question for years: How do we define success when our goals include, but aren’t limited to, financial return? The term we often use is SROI — Social Return on Investment — a clumsy but important concept that tries to value things like community engagement, mental wellness, housing stability, or environmental restoration.

There are frameworks — IRIS+, Impact Management Project, GIIRS, the UN SDGs — that aim to standardize this kind of accounting. But most still struggle with subjectivity, context, and the maddeningly non-linear nature of social change. It’s hard to put a dollar value on trust, or biodiversity, or the avoided cost of a young person not falling through the cracks.

And yet we try. Because what gets measured gets managed, and what gets ignored gets externalized.

At Boann, we’ve seen brilliant entrepreneurs build community loan funds, employment social enterprises, green infrastructure, and affordable housing trusts — all with hybrid revenue models that blend earned income, public contracts, and philanthropic capital. These ventures aren’t profitable in the conventional sense. But they are sustainable in the truest sense: they sustain life. They make society more equitable, resilient, and livable. That’s a return worth pursuing.

Back in brewery-land, we’ve tried to borrow from this playbook. We measure social outcomes where we can — jobs created, people supported, land regenerated — and we factor that into our strategic decisions. But we also have payroll, and taxes, and tanks that cost more than cars. So the dance continues.

Maybe the better question isn’t “What is sustainable revenue?” but “What do we want our revenue to sustain?”

If the answer is human wellbeing, community connection, ecological health, and meaningful work — then our spreadsheets, our metrics, and our ownership models all need to evolve accordingly. Revenue isn’t bad. It’s just been misused. Like duct tape, it can fix things, or it can hold together something that should have been dismantled years ago.

The goal isn’t to avoid money. It’s to decontaminate it.

Growth Reimagined — Scarcity, Creativity, and the Limits of Abundance

Let’s talk about abundance. And let’s be honest: it’s a dangerous word when wielded by the wrong people.

There’s a version of “abundance” that gets peddled in certain techno-optimist, VC-fueled circles — one that promises that if we just innovate hard enough, we can unshackle ourselves from every limit. Energy too dirty? Invent clean fusion. Water too scarce? Desalinate it with AI. Food too carbon-intensive? Grow it in vats in Silicon Valley and fly it to Ghana. Don’t worry about planetary boundaries — abundance is coming, and it’s brought to you by your favourite podcast bro.

This is, in essence, the thesis of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. They argue, with sincerity and skill, that human ingenuity is boundless, and that what holds us back is not scarcity itself, but our fear of change and our failure of imagination. And look — it’s a compelling read. It’s not naive. It’s just… incomplete.

Because abundance, as a concept, only works when you’re honest about what’s being made abundant — and at what cost.

At Persephone, we’ve seen this firsthand. The promise of “scale” has always lingered like a glimmering carrot just out of reach. If we could just sell more beer, we’d solve our margin problem. If we could just automate more processes, we’d reduce costs. If we could just open another location, expand our product line, land that distribution deal…

But every expansion creates new complexities. Every efficiency hides a tradeoff. Every growth spurt puts pressure on the very roots we claim to be nourishing. And the truth is, the kind of growth that’s actually sustainable tends to look slow, messy, relationship-based, hyperlocal, and hard to explain on a pitch deck.

We don’t need more abundance. We need discernment — the ability to know what enough looks like. And the courage to stop when we get there.

This is where I return, once again, to my Boann hat — and to the larger landscape of impact investing. I’ve been fortunate to sit in rooms with GIIN (Global Impact Investing Network) and Better Society Capital in the UK, where we’ve debated, at length, what “sustainable finance” actually requires. And time and again, the conversations circle back to this question: Are we even asking the right questions?

What if, instead of asking how to scale impact, we asked how to deepen it?

What if we prioritized rootedness over reach, sufficiency over surplus, wisdom over yield?

These are not anti-capitalist questions. They are post-capitalist questions. Or maybe pre-capitalist ones — rooted in older wisdom, Indigenous worldview, land-based logic.

Real abundance is found in interdependence, not independence. It’s in the orchard that feeds a neighbourhood, not the monocrop that feeds a stock exchange. It’s in the compost that turns waste into fertility, not the landfill that buries our guilt.

Growth isn’t bad. But it’s not always good. And if we don’t redefine it, it will keep defining — and confining — us.

Conclusion: On Compost, Capital, and the Courage to Keep Going

Let’s end not with a theory, but with a story.

A few hours north of Persephone, on the traditional territory of the shíshálh Nation, sits a remarkable place called Salish Soils. You wouldn’t know it by driving past — it looks, at first, like an ordinary industrial site. But this patch of land has a history. It was once an aggregate mine — stripped of topsoil, of fertility, of potential — then left for dead once it had no more rock to give. Not fit for farming. Not worth anything to developers. Just a leftover.

And then came Aaron Joe, a member of the Sechelt Indian Band, who had a vision.

Salish Soils began not with capital, but with compost — or rather, with the idea of compost as transformation. What if, instead of shipping waste away, the community could turn it into fertility? What if food scraps, yard trimmings, fish farm castoffs, even pulp mill residue — all of it — could become the basis for healing?

They started small. Then grew. Today, Salish Soils is an Indigenous-owned composting facility that employs young people from the shíshálh Nation, turns thousands of tons of organic waste into usable compost, and has begun literally regenerating the land. The once-extracted soil is alive again — so much so that a farm has sprouted next door, growing potatoes on hydro right-of-way land that was once choked with bramble. And those potatoes? They’re now under contract with the local hospital cafeteria. Think about that: food waste becomes compost becomes crops becomes nourishment for patients and families — all on land that was once deemed useless.

If that’s not a metaphor for the future of business, I don’t know what is.

But even this story has a soft underbelly. The compost contains microplastics — banana stickers, produce tags, bits of packaging that slip through the sorting process. Regeneration is always imperfect. There is no pure process, no utopia. Just effort. Just direction. Just choice.

And here’s where we loop back to finance.

Salish Soils didn’t get here alone. Local impact investors believed in the vision. Then came Community Futures, and VanCity Credit Union, and eventually Raven Indigenous Capital Partners — an Indigenous-led financial intermediary designed to support Indigenous entrepreneurs on their own terms. Raven doesn’t just provide capital. They provide accompaniment, cultural understanding, and long-term commitment.

And who is one of Raven’s anchor investors?

Boann Social Impact. Yes — that’s us. The same messy, beer-fueled, value-haunted company that’s been ranting for 9,000 words about extractive capitalism. So yes, we’re biased. But also: we’re proud. Because this is what it means to build an ecosystem. Not just a business. Not just a brand. An ecosystem — with roots, with decay, with regeneration, with resilience.

And if this chapter has veered into righteous indignation at times, it’s only because we believe the stakes are high, and the old stories are no longer serving us.

Which brings us, finally, back to Abundance.

Klein and Thompson were right about one thing: imagination is key. But the abundance we need isn’t just about stuff. It’s about systems. About meaning. About reweaving the fabric of belonging and value.

What if abundance looked like time to rest?

Like soil that holds water again?

Like capital that moves at the speed of trust?

Like customers who understand that price isn’t the same as cost?

We don’t have a blueprint. We have a compass. And a lot of compost.

So we keep going. Not because it’s easy. But because it’s necessary. And, against all odds, kind of beautiful.

Chapter 15 v2: Harvesting Success — Measuring Outcomes and Celebrating Achievements

Not All Fruit Is for Eating (And That’s the Point)

There’s a moment in every growing season when you realize some of the fruit just isn’t going to win any beauty contests. The apples are lumpy. The pears are bruised. The tomatoes look like they were designed by a committee of toddlers. But if you’ve been around farms—or life—for long enough, you know something important: ugly fruit often tastes the best. It’s sweeter, richer, more complex. And it usually comes from a tree that’s been around for a while, weathered a few storms, and still knows how to draw up the good stuff from deep underground.

At Persephone, our harvest doesn’t always look Instagram-worthy. Our people are rarely polished. Few came through the front doors with business degrees or hospitality credentials. Some have struggled with addiction. Some have never been on a plane. Some have dirt under their nails, tattoos down their arms, and stories that could break your heart or make you spit your beer laughing. Most are characters. And that’s the point.

Because we don’t believe the value of a harvest lies in its symmetry. We don’t trust the gleam of perfection. And we’ve learned that the things worth keeping—the things that feed you, ground you, and keep the place real—are rarely found in the polished rows of corporate agriculture (or corporate anything, for that matter). They’re in the weird ones. The gnarled ones. The ones with personality.

Harvesting success in a regenerative business isn’t about packaging up the prettiest outcomes for your next pitch deck or impact report. It’s about knowing what you’ve grown, who helped grow it, and how much of it can actually feed someone—whether literally or metaphorically. It’s also about composting what didn’t work, salvaging the weird bits, and remembering that fruit, like people, doesn’t have to be pretty to be nourishing.

So in this chapter, we’ll talk about what success really looks like when you’re not trying to impress investors or win awards. (Though we’ve won a few of those too—and we’ll get to that.) We’ll look at how to measure outcomes that matter, how to celebrate without slipping into self-congratulation, and how to recognize the quiet, misshapen, miraculous fruits that make all the difference.

And don’t worry—we’ll also talk about what to do when the harvest sucks.

Because sometimes, the real success is just getting through the season with your sense of humour intact.

The Trouble with Traditional Metrics

Let’s get something out of the way early: KPIs are not inherently evil. They can be helpful, even necessary. You need to know how many units you sold, how many employees stayed, and whether your latest beer release is actually making money or just making headlines. But when metrics start to drive the mission rather than reflect it — when we confuse measurement with meaning — we end up trying to weigh the harvest without even tasting it.

Traditional business success is often boiled down to a few suspiciously tidy acronyms: ROI, EBITDA, CAGR, YOY. They sound impressive, and sometimes they are, but they’re also like judging a forest by how many two-by-fours you can cut from it. You miss the mushrooms. The moss. The birdsong. The relationships. You miss the point.

In an impact business, this gets even trickier. The pressure to prove your goodness — to show impact investors that you’re both righteous and profitable — can lead to some seriously performative spreadsheeting. We’ve seen it all: social return on investment calculations that assign dollar values to hugs, dashboards that track “engagement” without ever asking if anyone felt welcome, and impact reports that spend more time describing the formatting of the report than the actual impact.

We get it. We’ve done it. (Hell, we might still do it occasionally, when the grant application requires it.)

But real success is messy. It’s emotional. It lives in stories, not just in stats. It shows up in the way someone’s face softens when they feel safe for the first time in a long while, or in the way a recovering community member finds purpose pulling taproom pints, or in the decision to offer your space for a storytelling session even when only six people show up. And no, it doesn’t always move the needle on your monthly revenue dashboard. Sometimes it just moves your heart a bit — and that should count for something.

This obsession with metrics is a symptom of what Vandana Shiva calls “monocultures of the mind” — the drive to simplify, standardize, and quantify everything, even when it impoverishes the reality we’re trying to understand. It’s a worldview that says value must be visible, tangible, and monetizable. But in regenerative systems — and healthy communities — much of the value is subtle, relational, and slow to reveal itself. You have to stick around long enough to see it flower.

And let’s be honest: if we had relied purely on KPIs in our early days at Persephone, we might have stopped half the things that eventually became cornerstones of our culture. The Tough Kegger? A liability nightmare on paper. Our inclusive hiring practices? Slower, messier, and wildly more human. The bookstore in the barn loft? Definitely not in the original business plan. But somehow, they all made us better. And they all made the place feel more alive.

So before we start harvesting success, let’s ask: what are we really measuring? Are we counting what matters, or just what’s easy to count?

Because if your only tools are a calculator and a crowbar, you’ll end up with a business that’s sterile and splintered — not strong and rooted.

What Does Success Actually Mean?

“Each seed is a story waiting to be told. We must witness the unfolding of these stories.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, educator, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation

If success is just about growth, then a tumour is a success story. So is kudzu. So is that weird guy on YouTube with a billion views for yelling at his toaster. Point is: growth alone doesn’t mean much. Especially not the kind that’s disconnected from purpose, people, or place.

In regenerative agriculture — the metaphor that’s been quietly composting its way through this entire book — success isn’t about yield alone. It’s about whether the land is healthier after your intervention. Whether the soil is richer, the water cleaner, the biodiversity deeper. Whether your farmhand has enough to eat and doesn’t cry in the bathroom between shifts. Whether the community around you is better off because you’re there.

So maybe it’s time we ask: What does regenerative success in business actually look like?

Let’s start with the soil, or rather, what it represents. In farming, regenerative success is tracked not just in pounds-per-acre but in carbon content, microbial diversity, root depth, and whether you’re still married at the end of harvest. Frameworks like Regenified are beginning to codify this, assessing six principles — like understanding context, minimizing disturbance, and ensuring living roots — but also incorporating farmer well-being and community health into the mix. Because no soil is healthy if the people working it are broken.

Meanwhile, Regenerative Organic Certification adds another layer. It centres soil health too, but also insists on fair labour conditions and animal welfare as non-negotiables. In other words, you can’t poison your staff and call it sustainable just because you’re not using pesticides.

This isn’t just agricultural dogma — it’s business truth. We’ve spent too long pretending that a balance sheet is the whole story, when really, it’s just a sketch of a much bigger living system. What if we evaluated businesses the way we evaluate healthy ecosystems?

Not:

• “Did we grow revenue 17% this quarter?”

But:

• “Did our team grow in trust, capability, and well-being?”

• “Did we deepen our relationships with suppliers and neighbours?”

• “Did we make things easier for the next generation, not harder?”

Persephone Brewing has never been a poster child for efficient scaling. We’re more like a thriving hedgerow — unruly, layered, bursting with strange beauty and the occasional bramble. But if we’re honest, our proudest moments aren’t the biggest ones. They’re the quiet wins: the staff member who got a fresh start and stuck around. The customers who keep coming back not for the beer (though it’s damn good), but for the sense of place. The moment someone said, “this feels like home.”

Try putting that in a quarterly report.

The thing is, regenerative success doesn’t usually follow a clean, upward line. It loops. It spirals. It takes root invisibly, cracks the pavement in places you didn’t plan. Like a tree growing a new branch to chase the sun, success in a living business adapts, listens, and changes direction without apology.

So maybe instead of KPIs, we should be asking a different set of questions:

• Are we becoming more alive?

• Are the people here more joyful, more connected, more themselves?

• Are we feeding something — or just extracting from it?

• Would our absence be felt as a loss, or a relief?

There’s a joke we used to tell around harvest time on the farm: “If it ain’t countable, it ain’t accountable.” But over time we’ve learned that some of the most important things — love, trust, reciprocity, laughter around a campfire — refuse to be counted. They must instead be witnessed.

So no, we can’t always show the ROI of offering a place where people feel safe to cry, laugh, or tell stories that matter. We can’t plug belonging into a spreadsheet. But we can sense when a place is thriving, and when it’s just producing.

And in a world obsessed with more, we think that’s the better question: Is this enterprise helping life to thrive?

Business as a Living System

At some point in the history of Western business education — probably in a windowless lecture hall with poor lighting and even worse coffee — someone decided that the best way to understand a business was to treat it like a machine. A predictable, efficient, controllable machine. Like a car. Or a lawn mower. Or a toaster with shareholder value.

Inputs go in. Outputs come out. Oil the parts. Tighten the bolts. Fire Bob from HR if things aren’t humming.

It’s a tidy metaphor. It’s also deeply wrong.

Businesses aren’t machines. They’re ecosystems. Messy, interdependent, dynamic, occasionally feral ecosystems. And pretending otherwise is like putting a potted cactus in a filing cabinet and expecting it to photosynthesize.

A machine doesn’t care if you yell at it. A living system does. A machine doesn’t need culture, connection, or campfire storytelling to run. A living business absolutely does — and if you ignore that, it’ll let you know. Usually with a wave of staff resignations, mysterious declines in sales, or a company Slack channel that sounds more like a hostage situation.

At Persephone, we’ve long stopped pretending we’re optimizing a value chain. What we’re doing is more like growing a food forest while juggling craft beer, community events, and surprise appearances by roaming chickens. It’s chaotic. It’s joyful. And it only works because we treat the place as alive — not in a woo-woo, crystals-on-your-desk way (though you do you), but in the very real sense that everything we do affects everything else.

If someone’s having a rough week, the whole crew feels it. If the hops come in early, everyone hustles to make room. If a wedding party books the farm and half of them show up in matching tank tops and questionable life choices, we all pitch in to keep things… mostly legal. It’s the mycelial web of business: unseen, interconnected, and occasionally full of weird smells.

And this is where the living system model becomes more than a metaphor. It gives us better diagnostics. Instead of asking, “Is the machine efficient?” we ask, “Is the system resilient?” Can it adapt? Can it absorb shock? Can it regenerate after being knocked down — whether by a global pandemic, a product flop, or that time the kefir exploded mid-fermentation and redecorated the walk-in cooler?

Living systems aren’t optimized for efficiency. They’re optimized for continuity. They prioritize relationship over speed, diversity over uniformity, redundancy over razor-thin margins. And honestly, that sounds like pretty solid business advice.

So next time someone tells you to treat your business like a well-oiled machine, ask them this: “Have you ever tried growing a garden with a wrench?” Then offer them a beer and invite them to help weed the hops.

Because real success in a business isn’t about tuning parts — it’s about tending relationships. And unlike machines, living systems don’t require a manual.

Just a little care, a lot of patience, and a willingness to get dirt under your nails.

A New Set of Success Questions (Not Just Metrics)

Let’s talk about the balance sheet — that iconic monument to business health. Equal parts status symbol and security blanket, it’s the page every banker wants to see and every entrepreneur pretends to understand completely. It shows your assets, your liabilities, and your equity — and if the numbers line up in a way that makes your accountant hum approvingly, you’re told you’ve got a “strong business.”

But strong for whom? And for how long?

Take the current ratio — that classic measure of short-term liquidity. It tells you whether your current assets can cover your current liabilities, which is obviously important if you plan to pay your bills and not get kicked out of your tasting room. But this ratio doesn’t care if your team is burning out, your suppliers are barely surviving, or your customers are losing faith because your beer tastes like it was brewed in a panic.

Or how about return on equity (ROE) — a beloved metric of investor efficiency. It tells you how much net income you generate with every dollar of shareholder equity. That’s great if your main concern is maximizing shareholder value (and possibly your yacht budget), but what if your equity includes community goodwill, trust built over years, or infrastructure built with sweat and social capital? Can you depreciate trust? Amortize loyalty?

Then there’s asset turnover, which tells you how efficiently you’re using your assets to generate revenue. In other words: are you squeezing the juice out of your lemons? But in regenerative terms, not everything should be squeezed. Sometimes you leave some fruit for the birds. Sometimes you plant trees that won’t fruit until long after you’re gone. And sometimes you let the field rest — even if the spreadsheet says you’re underperforming.

Here’s the thing: these metrics aren’t wrong — they’re just incomplete. Like trying to describe a forest with a chainsaw. Or summarizing your friendships with a bar graph. Financial ratios are excellent at telling you what is happening on the surface, but they say nothing about what’s happening beneath — in the root system, in the culture, in the soil of your business.

So what if we swapped the balance sheet for a systems health sheet?

For a while, I was working with an ag-tech company trying to do just that — to develop a regenerative finance model that would support farmers in transitioning away from conventional, extractive practices. The vision was to create a financing infrastructure that didn’t just look at short-term yields or cashflow, but at soil health as the fundamental indicator of long-term viability. If you could track it — microbially, elementally, relationally — and if you could value it — truly value it — then you could build a whole new kind of balance sheet.

A living balance sheet.

And maybe — just maybe — it’s time to think about soil as an asset class. Not land, not real estate, not speculative acreage, but the living layer beneath it all. The complex, microbial, regenerative matrix that quite literally sustains life. If we could assign value to that — not to commodify it, but to honour it — then maybe it would finally get the attention it deserves.

Because unlike most line items, healthy soil has compounding returns that benefit everyone. The longer you nurture it, the more it gives back — in resilience, nutrition, ecosystem services, and human well-being.

There’s no checkbox on QuickBooks for “fungal biomass density” (yet). But the roots are stirring.

And that’s how every transformation begins.

When the Harvest Is Small

Sometimes the fruit just doesn’t come in like you hoped.

Maybe it was the weather. Maybe the soil wasn’t quite ready. Maybe the goats got loose again. Or maybe — and this is the hard one — you did everything “right,” and still, the harvest was a little underwhelming. A few buckets. A handful of figs. One oddly shaped zucchini that looks like it’s flipping you the bird.

Not every initiative becomes a flagship program. Some things just don’t scale. And if your only metric is mass adoption or margin growth, you’ll miss the quiet little miracles that happen when something small takes root — even briefly.

Like our Monday night Storytelling Sessions.

The idea was beautiful: an open, weekly gathering to honour the ancient and ongoing role of storytelling in community life. Not just as entertainment, but as medicine. As knowledge-sharing. As a way of holding relationship with those who came before us and those who will come after.

Indigenous cultures have always known this. In many Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling is not a sidebar — it is the curriculum. It’s how ethics are transmitted, how land and language are remembered, how belonging is maintained. A good story isn’t just informative — it’s connective. It binds people to place, to each other, to memory, to responsibility.

And so we tried to create space for that. Not as a marketing gimmick or another content stream, but as something softer and more sacred. Monday nights. Low lighting. No script. Bring your voice, your story, your courage. A few regulars came. A few newcomers braved the mic. There were moments that felt electric — laughter, tears, that collective hush that only comes when people are truly listening.

But it never grew much beyond a small, loyal handful. No exponential curve. No viral momentum. After a while, we paused it — telling ourselves maybe it would return after the busy summer season. Maybe it still will.

It wasn’t a failure. But it wasn’t a runaway success either — at least not by the usual business standards. There was no clear ROI, no KPI hit, no glowing blog post announcing our storytelling-driven revenue surge. Just a group of people who came together to witness each other, and then dispersed quietly into the night.

And yet, it mattered. You could feel it.

It mattered in the way someone’s face softened while telling a hard truth for the first time. It mattered when someone who didn’t see themselves as a “speaker” suddenly stood up and held the room. It mattered in the way we remembered — even just for an hour — that humans are made of stories, not spreadsheets.

This is the part the balance sheet will never capture. The human-scale harvest. The small, nutrient-rich fruit that feeds culture more than cashflow. The project that didn’t last forever, but lasted long enough to leave an imprint.

In a regenerative system, small harvests still have value. Sometimes they’re the seedbed for something later. Sometimes they’re medicine for a specific moment. Sometimes they just are — enough in their own right.

We have to be careful not to discard experiments just because they didn’t “scale.” Because in ecosystems, scale isn’t the only sign of success. In fact, too much scale, too fast, can collapse the whole damn thing.

So when you try something beautiful and it doesn’t explode into fame or funding — let it rest. Honour it. Compost it if needed. But don’t dismiss it.

Because not everything is meant to be perennial. Some things bloom once, and that’s enough.

Seeds in the Fruit — Making Success Reproductive

“Each seed is a story waiting to be told. We must witness the unfolding of these stories.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, educator, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation

The thing about fruit — the real stuff, not the metaphorical yield graphs beloved by consultants — is that it’s never just an end product. It’s also a beginning. Every apple contains five seeds. Every tomato has dozens. Every squash (if you’ve ever opened one) is practically a seed hoarder. Nature, it turns out, is wildly generous when it comes to reproduction. She doesn’t hedge her bets. She throws them.

And in regenerative business, that’s what success should do, too.

A healthy harvest isn’t just something to count or consume — it’s something to plant from. If your work doesn’t create conditions for more life, more learning, more leadership, then what was it all for? You might’ve made a good living, but you missed a better legacy.

We’ve tried to hold onto this at Persephone. Whenever something does work — a beer that resonates, a hiring approach that actually includes people usually excluded, a community event that makes folks feel like they belong — we ask ourselves: What’s the seed here? What could grow from this? Who else could this nourish? And how do we get out of the way without abandoning the soil we’re in?

Sometimes the seed is literal: teaching others how to grow hops, compost brewery waste, or run a benefit beer campaign. Sometimes it’s cultural: a young staff member inspired to open their own café, or a former employee who brings inclusive hiring practices to their new gig. Sometimes it’s structural: creating a model — or even just a rumour — of a business that treats community like an asset instead of a nuisance.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t need a franchising kit or a TED Talk. Sometimes sharing what worked is enough. Sometimes letting others peek behind the curtain — the real curtain, not the polished impact video version — is the most generous thing you can do.

Seeds can also look like mentorship. Like accessible resources. Like leaving the ladder down and remembering what it felt like when you couldn’t even find the damn ladder. They can look like welcoming others into your process without pretending you’ve figured it all out. (Spoiler: you haven’t. Neither have we.)

This is also where humility matters. Because not every seed grows. Some get eaten. Some blow away. Some sit in the soil for years before something finally clicks — a bit of rain, the right temperature, a forgotten impulse toward blooming.

But if you harvest without seed — if you extract without leaving behind even the possibility of regeneration — then all you’ve done is take.

And business, if it’s to be part of the long future, has to do better than that.

So next time something works — anything, big or small — ask yourself: How might this multiply? What might grow from this if we cared more about legacy than leverage?

Because the fruit is sweet, but the seeds? The seeds are sacred.

Compost the Rest

I love compost.

Have for years — ever since Melissa and I started one in the scrappy backyard of our old place in East Van. That house sat right on a rumbling artery of the city, the kind where trucks rattled the walls and you had to pause conversations when the bus went by. We lived there with a rotating crew of roommates and, at one point, ran a fair trade cooperative café out of the living room. We called it Local Global. The landlord was awful. The shower leaked. He refused to fix it. So I tore it apart myself — only to find an enormous, decommissioned wasp or hornet’s nest inside the wall. This thing took up 30 square feet. A whole home-based business for 100,000 stingers and one magnificent queen. It was my first close encounter with nature’s incredible capacity to adapt — to reclaim, to repurpose, to build something extraordinary in the least likely place.

And tucked just beside that little tomato patch in the backyard was our first compost bin — a big box-store special, not much to look at. Honestly, I didn’t think much about it at the time. That was all Melissa’s doing — the garden, the tomatoes, the soil, the system. It was my first glimpse into how remarkable she is: not just as a person, but in her quiet, inherent connection to the living world.

That compost, that first one — it did something. The tomatoes it fed were unforgettable. Rich, red, fragrant. I can still remember them vividly, even twenty-five years later. That was the moment I started to love compost. Not in theory — in taste.

Since then, I’ve turned a lot of compost. By pitchfork, by shovel, by tractor. I’ve watched worms do their sacred, silent work. I’ve seen steam rise on cold mornings as microbial alchemy worked its magic beneath the surface. More than once, someone on the team has politely (or less than politely) suggested we move the compost pile out of view. Too close to the customers, they’d say. Too smelly for brunch. Might spoil the farm-chic vibe.

And maybe I didn’t have to double down and turn the pile the morning of a busy day, but I did. Because composting isn’t an eyesore — it’s a must-have. It’s the heart of the cycle. It’s the necessary mess that makes everything else possible. I’m proud — truly proud — of the tens of thousands of pounds of compost we’ve made. We’ve moved the pile a little farther back, sure. But it still holds a prominent place on the farm, visible and fragrant, as it should be.

And I still turn compost whenever I can.

That might sound odd now — given the accident. But here’s the truth: turning compost has been one of the most compelling reasons I’ve worked so hard to stay connected to the farm. I’ve personally paid for a very expensive lift system just so I can get back on the tractor. Why? So I can turn compost. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a calling. That smell — terrible, rich, alive — is now part of who I want to be.

Because compost isn’t just what’s left over. It’s not the end. It’s the continuation.

In any regenerative system, not everything you try will succeed. Some ideas will rot. Some events won’t scale. Some projects will fall apart. But if you compost them — if you let them break down, return to the soil, nourish something else — then nothing is wasted. Not even failure.

That’s the point of this whole chapter. We’ve talked about harvesting success. But the real key to ongoing success — the kind that sticks around — is compost. Letting go. Letting die. Letting decompose. And knowing that what grows next will be fed by what came before.

We’re not trying to be inspirational here. Honestly, I hate those kinds of books. We’re just telling the story as we’ve lived it. Turning what we can. Smelling the mess. And hoping that, with enough time, enough care, and enough turning, the pile becomes something good again.

Now that I think of it… maybe this whole book should’ve been called Compost the Business Plan.

There’s still time.

Chapter 16 v2: The Trouble with Growing Up — On Leadership, Legacy, and Letting Go

There’s No Graduation Day

Let’s get one thing straight: there is no graduation day in business. No gold star, no cap and gown, no moment where someone hands you a certificate that says, “Congratulations, you did it! You are now a fully mature enterprise. Go forth and scale responsibly.”

There’s just more weather, and hopefully, better gear.

The illusion of “maturity” in business—especially in impact business—is one of the more persistent lies in the entrepreneurial gospel. The startup world fetishizes growth: growth hacks, growth strategy, hockey-stick growth curves. But for all the noise about scaling, there’s remarkably little clarity about what we’re actually scaling. Values? Volume? Ego? Burn rate?

When Persephone was a few years old, people began asking the question: What’s next?

As if the only acceptable answer was: More of it.

More locations, more products, more SKUs, more staff, more complexity. More, always more. To say, “Honestly, we’re still figuring out what works,” or, “We’re focusing on staying grounded,” was treated like some sort of admission of failure. Like we hadn’t graduated on time.

But here’s the truth: we haven’t. And we probably never will. Because business is not a linear curriculum—it’s a living system. And living systems don’t graduate; they adapt, decay, regenerate, mutate, or sometimes just meander for a while, awkward and unambitious, like a teenager with too many feelings and not enough serotonin.

Persephone is still becoming. We’re part small farm, part craft brewery, part community hub, part experimental lab for how much mission you can cram into a beer can before it explodes. Some weeks we look like a real company. Other weeks, we look like a philosophy degree had a baby with a tractor and forgot to sleep.

And yet, we’re still here. Still asking better questions. Still screwing things up just slightly more elegantly than last time.

So no, there’s no diploma waiting for us at the end of the quarter. There’s no maturity badge or investor checklist that means we’ve finally made it. What we do have is a little more humility, a little more resilience, and a slightly more sophisticated bullshit detector when it comes to growth narratives.

If anything, that’s the most grown-up thing about us: we’re not pretending there’s a finish line anymore. Just a path that bends, forks, doubles back, and occasionally requires a machete.

Welcome to adulthood in a regenerative enterprise. Sorry, there’s no syllabus.

Why Some Trees Grow Taller

In any given forest, not every tree grows to be the tallest. Some push skyward in narrow, straight lines, chasing light with relentless vertical ambition. Others twist and adapt, finding their shape in response to the wind, the soil, the space afforded to them. Some are lightning-struck, hollowed out, or stunted by drought—and still, they persist, playing their role in the forest’s web of life.

And then there are the maples. Some grow broad and generous, with cathedral-like canopies. Others—especially when shaped by a practice known as coppicing—grow out instead of up, forming dense, many-stemmed thickets that resemble shrubs more than traditional trees. Coppicing is an intentional pruning method, one that cuts back a young tree to encourage it to regenerate with multiple trunks. Same species. Entirely different expression. The result isn’t failure—it’s functional diversity.

The business world, like the forest, contains a wide diversity of growth patterns. But you wouldn’t know it by reading most entrepreneurship literature, which tends to treat deviation from vertical, scalable growth as either failure or lifestyle hobbyism. Rarely is it acknowledged that horizontal growth, adaptive specialization, or rootedness in place might be not only valid but vital.

At Persephone, we’ve never aspired to be the tallest tree in the canopy. Not because we lack ambition, but because we understand that height isn’t everything. There’s value in breadth, in resilience, in becoming a nutrient node for a wider ecosystem. We’ve intentionally chosen to deepen rather than ascend, to branch laterally into bookstore partnerships, social hiring, local food systems, and third-space infrastructure. None of these are easily scalable. But each has strengthened our root system.

Of course, this path has also meant living with constraint. Like the maple pruned into a bush, we’ve been shaped by circumstance—regulatory friction, limited distribution channels, scarcity of capital, even geography. But constraint, properly metabolized, is a creative force. It forces decisions. It demands integrity. And in some cases, it leads to more ecologically appropriate forms.

This is not a romantic argument for smallness. It’s a call for ecological realism in business. The question isn’t “How big can we get?” It’s “What shape should we take in response to our ecosystem?”

The tall trees play a role. They break wind, cast shade, provide habitat. But if all trees aspired to be tallest, the forest would collapse under its own hunger for light. Diversity is not just decoration—it’s the engine of resilience.

We would do well to remember this when designing our organizations. Just as ecosystems are healthier with understorey and canopy, with ferns and fungi and coyotes and decay, the economic forest thrives when enterprises grow in multiple directions, at multiple speeds, with multiple definitions of success.

To grow is not necessarily to rise. And to spread out is not necessarily to settle. Sometimes, staying low and broad and stubborn is the most regenerative move a business can make.

The Cult of Legacy

There is perhaps no greater seduction in business leadership than the idea of legacy. Legacy is the glimmering promise that all this sweat, sacrifice, and sleeplessness will add up to something permanent—that our work will endure, our name will last, and our influence will ripple forever forward through time like a perfectly launched stone across still water.

But let’s be honest: it rarely does. And even when it does, the ripples fade.

The Stoics understood this long before LinkedIn branding consultants got hold of the word. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome and occasional philosopher, wrote to himself in Meditations:

“Consider how swiftly all things are dissolved and resolved: the bodies and substances themselves, into the elements, and the memory of them into time.”

Legacy, for the Stoics, was a vanity project. The real work was to live well now—to act with virtue, to serve your role in the cosmic order, and to release the outcome. You plant the tree not because your name will be etched in the bark, but because someone might someday rest in its shade.

In our contemporary business culture, legacy has been contorted into something transactional. It’s what you build for your brand equity. Your personal narrative. Your TED Talk. It’s coded into estate planning and endowment funds and founder-centric governance structures that cling to control from beyond the grave.

This isn’t just hubris—it’s a failure of imagination.

Contrast that with Indigenous worldviews, which offer a far more expansive—and humble—orientation toward time. The principle of “seven generations” found in many Indigenous cultures, particularly among the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, invites us to consider how our actions affect seven generations forward, and how they are informed by seven generations past. It’s not about legacy—it’s about stewardship.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy—also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations Confederacy—is a long-standing Indigenous alliance of six nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. Governed by the Kaianere’kó:wa, or Great Law of Peace, the Confederacy is recognized as a sovereign and sophisticated political body that has existed since time immemorial. Its structure of decentralized leadership, consensus governance, and intergenerational responsibility has influenced democratic thought around the world—including the framers of the U.S. Constitution. The ethic of seven-generation decision-making is not a branding strategy; it is a worldview grounded in deep time and deep care.

You are not the center of the story. You are a temporary participant in a long and living chain.

At Persephone, we’ve never set out to build a legacy brand. That language doesn’t quite fit. But neither do we aspire to be a flash in the pan. We’ve often asked ourselves: What would it mean to build a 100-year-old company? What does it take to create something resilient enough, regenerative enough, that it can continue to contribute positively long after we’re gone?

That kind of ambition requires humility—and it requires structural honesty. In order to be long-standing, we have to consider not just what we do, but who owns it. Should a business like Persephone be owned by a family? A clan? A cooperative? No one? A community trust? These are the questions we’re sitting with now—not in some theoretical exercise, but in real time, with real implications. If this company is to endure, it can’t be built solely around a personality or an extractive exit plan. It has to be held differently.

We admire the model set by Yvon Chouinard, who effectively gave away Patagonia—not to his children or to shareholders, but to a trust whose sole mission is to protect the Earth. That move wasn’t about legacy. It was about responsibility. And it resonates deeply with our own long-term hopes for Persephone: not to be remembered, but to be useful.

Of course, all of this—thinking seven generations ahead, planning for 100 years, redesigning ownership models—presumes we can make payroll next Friday. Let’s not pretend otherwise. There is both privilege and risk in long-term thinking, and many entrepreneurs simply don’t have the margin to consider it. When you’re up at night doing mental gymnastics about cash flow, it’s hard to wax philosophical about what kind of ancestor your supply chain will make.

So we say this with humility: we are still figuring it out. We are still oscillating between the urgent and the important, between existential anxiety and hopeful design. But if we can create even a little more breathing room—financially, structurally, emotionally—then maybe we can do what the Stoics and the Haudenosaunee alike ask us to do: act with care now, and leave the results to time.

There are salmonberry bushes and blackberry canes on our land that we did not plant—gifts from the more-than-human world that have outlasted human ownership, and that will likely outlast us. They fruit. They feed. They entangle themselves in fences and hands alike. They remind us that natural systems have been planting and cultivating far more than seven generations already—and, we hope, will do so for at least that many more.

So here’s the revision we’re proposing:

Forget legacy. Practice stewardship. Honor lineage. Think seven generations ahead, not for your glory, but for their well-being.

And when your business ends—as all things do—let it end well. Let it compost. Let it feed what comes next.

Stoicism and Leadership in Practice

There is a version of Stoicism that shows up on social media with six-pack abs and a cold plunge addiction. It’s all discipline and detachment, curated to fit inside an Instagram quote card. This isn’t that.

The Stoicism we’re interested in—the kind passed down through Meditations and revived in Donald Robertson’s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor—is far more subtle, more humane, and frankly, more relevant for the impact entrepreneur burning out on the edge of complexity.

At its core, Stoicism is about discerning what’s in our control and what’s not—and learning to respond with integrity, not reactivity. Marcus Aurelius was, after all, an emperor. He didn’t get to opt out of difficult decisions. But he did choose how to meet them—with curiosity, calm, and a clear sense of his values. Stoicism, in this light, isn’t detachment from life—it’s devotion to it, minus the illusion of control.

This framework becomes especially useful in impact business, where the stakes often feel existential. You’re not just selling widgets; you’re trying to change the world—or at least a corner of it. The temptation is to cling harder, push faster, over-function, and assume that more hustle equals more good. But Stoicism invites a different approach: to do what is ours to do, to do it well, and to release the rest.

This is not a natural posture in business. Nor is it an excuse for inaction. It’s a cultivated habit of emotional clarity, particularly useful when navigating moments of ambiguity, conflict, or what feels like failure.

Still, Stoicism can come across as cold if misapplied—especially in HR contexts or when dealing with grief, loss, or organizational change. It’s not inherently sentimental. It doesn’t coddle. And this can sit awkwardly beside the deeply relational, loving ethos we’ve explored elsewhere in this book. So we’ll be clear: Stoicism is not a complete framework. It needs to be tempered by other traditions—compassion, equity, community care. But it’s a powerful tool in the leadership toolkit. Especially when things get messy.

Take COVID, for example.

When the pandemic hit, Persephone didn’t retreat into self-preservation. We doubled down on community. Pivoted quickly. Found ways to serve. And despite the uncertainty—and the intense stress that came with it—we ended up having a strong financial year. But none of that happened through frantic optimism. It happened through calm assessment, courageous decision-making, and yes, a kind of Stoic resolve. A firm hand on the rudder.

Stoicism helps when people copy your business model, too. Which brings us to the next section.

When to Push, When to Let Go

Every leader, whether farmer or founder, eventually faces a moment where the question is not can we push through this? but rather should we?

Should we double down? Prune the branch? Compost the idea? Let it grow wild? The metaphors abound—but the discernment is real. And hard.

On the farm, there’s an art to pruning. I’ve stood among our apple trees, clippers in hand, having read just enough books to be dangerous, and still found myself paralyzed. Where to cut? At what angle? Will this make things worse? Does the tree need medicine after?

Our friend Melissa—our landscape whisperer and all-around nature-mom—has a different approach. She has learned by doing, and she carries a quiet confidence in her vision for the tree. She doesn’t hesitate. She snips, trims, opens the canopy to light and air. Her pruning is not clinical—it’s relational. And the trees respond.

Put her in a boardroom, though, and she might not know where to start with a shareholder agreement. That’s not her terrain.

The point is this: everyone has gifts. Some are obvious. Some emerge slowly. Some won’t be seen for a generation. And leadership—true leadership—is not about having all the gifts. It’s about knowing which gifts are needed now, and having the humility to let others lead when it’s their turn.

The decision to push or let go is not always clear. Some moments demand grit. Others demand surrender. And knowing which is which is as much spiritual discernment as strategic judgment.

At Persephone, we’ve gotten it right sometimes. We’ve pushed through, restructured, dug deeper, and come out stronger. Other times, we’ve clung too long to projects or roles that needed to be released. We’ve struggled to let go of products that weren’t working or systems that no longer served. We’re not writing this book from a mountaintop. We’re still in the orchard, shears in hand, unsure which branch to prune next.

So no, we’re not wise elders passing down perfect lessons. We’re co-learners. Explorers. Occasionally competent navigators of complexity. Trying to pay attention.

And maybe that’s the best posture we can offer: eyes open, hands steady, willing to cut—but only with care.

Copycats, Community, and the Cost of Going First

Let’s talk about being first. Or at least about going early.

Since Persephone opened, our region—the Sunshine Coast—has seen the launch of three more breweries, three cideries, and a distillery. Per capita, that’s a lot of fermentation. Some of these businesses were no doubt inspired by what we were doing. And we’ve sometimes joked about how imitation is the sincerest form of… saturation.

But let’s be real. We weren’t the first either.

Long before us, there was Crannóg Ales, founded by Brian and Rebecca McIsaac in Sorrento, BC. Crannóg was not only one of Canada’s first certified organic breweries—they were and are leaders in integrating farming, brewing, and sustainability. They composted brewery waste, grew their own hops, and modeled an entirely different relationship to the land and to business. They were doing farm-based brewing before we even had a lease.

So any narrative of Persephone as original must begin with gratitude. We learned from others. We were—and are—part of a lineage.

That said, going early still comes with real cost.

Early adopters often bear the regulatory burden. The permitting headaches. The skeptical lenders. The confused suppliers. When we tried to integrate a farm, a brewery, and a social enterprise on one site, there were moments it felt like no one in any ministry knew what to do with us. We went through walls, sometimes face first.

And once the wall has a hole in it, others walk through more easily. That’s not bitterness—it’s part of the role. But it’s not nothing.

What makes us proud is not that others have followed, but that many are building third places of their own. The farm-based cideries in our region are trying to be more than producers—they’re becoming hubs of gathering and community. Some are even experimenting with farm-to-glass models. Could they go further in their impact thesis? Absolutely. But they’re part of a wider pattern, and that matters.

What may be most distinct about Persephone isn’t our model, but our willingness to stay in the tension of complexity—to live at the intersection of business, impact, agriculture, and community, without simplifying it into a clean brand message.

Staying in complexity is exhausting. It’s also necessary. Because until we can metabolize that complexity—until we can design for it—we’re unlikely to arrive at a business model that’s truly in relationship with the natural world.

So no, we’re not original in every way. We’re part of an ecosystem. But maybe our contribution is helping others see that ecosystems are the point.

The Two Loops and the Role of the Transition Agent

In the natural world, not everything dies at once, and not everything begins all at once either. Forests transition gradually. Old trees fall. New species take root. Some creatures evolve to survive in the underbrush of collapsing ecosystems. Others herald what’s next.

This is the premise behind the Berkana Two Loop Model, a framework for navigating complex change in living systems. Developed by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, and beautifully described through the SFU Complex Systems Frameworks project, the model suggests that as one system or paradigm declines, another begins to emerge. The two systems exist simultaneously for a time—overlapping, interacting, pulling resources and attention in different directions.

It’s not a straight line from old to new. It’s a loop. And in between, there is tension. Resistance. Transformation. Compost.

The model identifies several archetypal roles:

• Hospice workers who help the old system die with dignity.

• Illuminators who carry forward what’s worth keeping.

• Trailblazers who experiment at the edges.

• Transition agents who help connect the dots between the two loops.

This isn’t a corporate reorg chart. It’s a living ecology of change. And in our experience, it maps eerily well onto what’s happening in business, finance, agriculture—and within Persephone and Boann themselves.

Putting on our Boann hat for a moment: in the world of impact investing, we are watching this dual-loop reality play out in real time. Some investors are clinging to the old paradigm—still backing oil and gas, still chasing outdated notions of risk-adjusted returns. Others are leaning into the emergent system—supporting community solar arrays, local food infrastructure, Indigenous stewardship, regenerative enterprises.

Our role at Boann is not to burn bridges between the loops. It’s to help build the scaffolding that allows what’s essential to cross over. That might mean funding intermediaries who can speak both languages. Or designing guarantees that de-risk the transition for the more cautious actors. Sometimes it’s about advocating for new metrics. Sometimes it’s just listening carefully to what’s trying to emerge.

Back at Persephone, the question remains: Where are we in this model? Are we still blazing trails? Are we already part of the compost?

Maybe both.

We still feel like we’re innovating. But we’re also tired. The energy it takes to constantly translate between paradigms—to be “understood” by funders, regulators, customers, even friends—can be draining. And yet we’re not done. We haven’t been absorbed into the mainstream. We still confuse people. We still resist simplification.

And perhaps that’s the gift we can offer. Not to be a model in the traditional sense. But to be a visible experiment. A working example of how to live in the in-between, without losing our soul.

The Two Loop model gives us permission to exist in that in-between. To honor both grief and growth. To compost without cynicism. To carry forward what matters without needing to be the final word.

It also reminds us that systems change isn’t about replacing one empire with another. It’s about fostering the conditions for life. And that means making room—for multiple timelines, for multiple truths, for the long and sometimes lonely work of transition.

What Endures Isn’t Always What Grows

We’ve spent a lot of time in this chapter exploring complexity, compost, pruning, letting go. And maybe it’s worth pausing here, before we move on, to ask: what actually endures?

Because it’s not always the tallest tree. Not the company with the biggest market share or the flashiest pitch deck. Often it’s not even the one that survives. Survival is only one kind of success. And sometimes, it’s overrated.

In nature, growth is not the same as contribution. A mushroom might bloom overnight and vanish by morning—but its mycelial network will persist beneath the surface, feeding the soil for decades. A tree might fall and rot, but in doing so it becomes habitat, humus, history. Some things endure because they scale. Others endure because they sink—into place, into memory, into story.

Business tends to reward visibility. We celebrate the unicorns, the outliers, the ones with measurable reach. But that’s not how meaning works. The things that endure—the ideas that last—are rarely the ones that dominate the market. They’re the ones that echo.

If Persephone disappears tomorrow—and we hope it doesn’t, but let’s be honest, nothing lasts forever—what will remain? Maybe a few stories. A bench someone sat on during a hard day. A wedding in the orchard. A seed grant from beer sales that led to something beautiful. A kid who learned to plant something. A staff member who found their voice.

These aren’t legacy markers. They’re ripples. They’re residue. They’re small signs that something meaningful happened here.

And maybe that’s all we can hope for.

Not to be remembered.

Not to be scaled.

But to have made a useful contribution—however local, however temporary.

The soil will remember. The neighbours might. Maybe a future business will walk a little easier because we asked harder questions. Maybe someone will find the courage to stay in the complexity, not because it’s profitable, but because it’s true.

What endures isn’t always what grows.

What grows isn’t always what matters.

And what matters—really matters—can’t always be measured.

Chapter 17: Fractal Ownership — Web3, AI, and the Decentralized Farm

“What if the farm wasn’t owned by a few shareholders… but by a thousand fans?”

Prelude to a Thought Experiment

Let’s start with the obvious: this chapter is a bit of a stretch.

We’ve spent the last sixteen chapters rooting business in soil, story, systems, and stewardship. Now we’re going to talk about blockchain, AI, NFTs, and fractional ownership — the same buzzwords usually found in an all-caps LinkedIn post by someone trying to sell you “passive income” and a lifestyle brand made entirely of recycled ketamine and alpha energy.

So yes — we’re aware this could get ridiculous fast. But stick with me.

Because the truth is: the world is already ridiculous. As I write this, Bitcoin is at an all-time high. My modest crypto balance — a mix of curiosity, regret, and leftover tokens from 2021 — is up 122%, based on exactly nothing. No earnings. No underlying asset. Just pure narrative and enough server farms to boil the ocean. Meanwhile, the land Persephone sits on — an actual, living, breathing place with soil, fruit trees, and community bonfires — remains essentially illiquid. Valuable, yes. But static. Sacred. And financially inert.

This is the irony: we’ve built a world where digital ghosts trade faster than real roots can grow, and where the most grounded, tangible assets we steward — land, water, community, belonging — are the hardest to fund, share, or regenerate.

So here’s the provocation:

What if we could tokenize the farm?

Not to sell it off in pieces like an NFT garage sale — but to open access.

To reimagine ownership as stewardship.

To raise capital without selling out.

To invite co-creation instead of extraction.

To reward loyalty with literal skin in the game (or, at least, dirt under the fingernails).

This isn’t just about tech. It’s about time.

Because let’s be honest — the old models of ownership are creaking under their own weight. The idea that a handful of shareholders should control an entire community asset makes about as much sense as putting a monoculture in a rainforest. And here in Canada, that sense of entitlement to land takes on an even more complicated tone: Persephone sits on unceded territory — land never surrendered through treaty, land that predates colonial surveys, subdivisions, and any clever blockchain proposal I might come up with. So before we start minting Soil Tokens and handing out fractional ownership in a regenerative hop field, we need to name the deeper question: What does it mean to own land in a time of reconciliation?

That’s not rhetorical. It’s unresolved.

And it’s exactly why this chapter exists — not to offer answers, but to stretch our collective thinking.

To imagine new models of raising capital that don’t rely on extraction, exclusion, or exploitation.

To ask: Can we build something that honours both innovation and Indigenous sovereignty?

Something that’s tech-enabled, yes — but still relational, slow, seasonal, and alive?

So here it is: The Soil Token.

Or perhaps, the Soil Tolkien, if you enjoy a little literary mischief with your mycelium.

An idea. A metaphor. A possible real thing.

A satirical proposal with real financial plumbing beneath it.

Let’s see where this goes.

Land, Legacy, and Locked Capital

“In the beginning there was the land. And then we invented spreadsheets.”

Let’s talk about land.

Not metaphorical land. Not “land” as a brand platform. Actual, physical dirt — the stuff that grows carrots, stores carbon, and sticks to your boots in the spring. At Persephone, we have the good fortune (and financial albatross) of owning a 13-acre farm on the Sunshine Coast. It’s beautiful, meaningful, and deeply unhelpful on a balance sheet.

Land, you see, doesn’t behave the way finance people like their assets to behave. It’s not liquid. It doesn’t throw off dividends. It doesn’t appreciate on a quarterly schedule or respond to investor updates. It just sits there. Being land.

But paradoxically, it’s also one of the most valuable and stabilizing forces in any impact enterprise. Land offers permanence in a world obsessed with pivoting. It anchors values in place. It grows food, hosts festivals, absorbs rainwater, and reminds us that we are, in fact, part of something older and deeper than the next fiscal year. In many ways, land is the ultimate long-term investment — but in the current system, that value is largely trapped.

Trapped in legal structures

Most small businesses — especially farms, breweries, and hybrids like us — are structured as private corporations. Which means land is held on the books as a capital asset, and any attempt to access its value usually involves selling out, taking on debt, or diluting control. There are worse metaphors for late-stage capitalism than needing to sell your land to fund the business you built on it.

Trapped in colonial logic

Let’s also remember that this land — like much of the land across Canada — was never “ours” to begin with. It was occupied, subdivided, titled, and taxed long before anyone considered Indigenous laws, governance, or consent. So while the legal documents may say “fee simple,” there’s nothing simple about it. Any attempt to “unlock” land value must also wrestle with the uncomfortable fact that ownership itself is a colonial artifact.

Trapped in institutional blind spots

Even the most impact-minded investors often fail to price in the real, regenerative value of land. Soil health doesn’t show up on a pitch deck. Community resilience doesn’t fit neatly into an IRR. So when it comes time to raise capital, businesses like ours end up trapped between two bad options:

1. Borrow against the land (and pray interest rates stay sane), or

2. Sell equity in the business, while the land remains an inert line item, untouchable and under-leveraged.

There are, of course, better models. Community Land Trusts. Social purpose real estate. Cooperative housing. But these models are often slow, overly cautious, and allergic to the kind of creative risk-taking that regenerative businesses actually need. We love them — but they don’t always move at the pace of opportunity. And they don’t always include the beer.

So here’s the tension:

We have an asset that could support our mission, deepen our impact, and invite community stewardship — but it’s locked behind outdated tools and inherited systems.

And unlocking that value isn’t just about cash. It’s about creating a new relationship between people, place, and participation. One that transcends conventional ownership, while still respecting legal boundaries, ethical principles, and (ideally) securities regulation.

In other words: maybe it’s time to fractionalize the dirt.

No, not like some dystopian land-rental app or “Uber for gardens.” I mean something participatory. Something poetic. Something — dare I say — fungal. Because if we think of land not as a commodity but as a commons, then perhaps it deserves a new form of structure. One that is distributed, trust-based, and transparently programmable.

You know. Like a blockchain.

But without the Lambos.

Enter the Blockchain (But Hold the Crypto Bros)

“If monkeys in hats can hold value, so can healthy soil.”

Let’s admit it upfront: crypto is a mess.

Between the rug pulls, energy consumption, libertarian fever dreams, and a general vibe of “finance bros meet Burning Man,” blockchain hasn’t exactly built trust with the public.

And yet…

Underneath all that noise is a signal.

The core idea — decentralized, trustless infrastructure that allows strangers to cooperate around shared value — is not inherently terrible. In fact, it may be exactly the kind of infrastructure we need if we want to reimagine land, ownership, and regeneration in a way that isn’t just another empire in disguise.

So here’s the idea:

What if we minted a token — a digital representation of value — that was tied to the health of the land, not the hype of the market?

What if that token was used not to sell off the farm, but to fund its future?

What if it came with perks, participation rights, and a sense of real stewardship?

What if it was called… the Soil Tolkien™?

Yes. Tolkien. As in the author of The Lord of the Rings.

Because if we’re going to build new financial systems for the age of climate chaos, we might as well make them narratively rich, slightly ridiculous, and deeply rooted in place.

And because yes, we’re going to need to gather a fellowship to pull this off.

Introducing: The Soil Tolkien™

A secret white paper disguised as a soil joke

Let’s break down how this could work, assuming we’re still halfway serious:

3.1 Governance — A Fellowship of the Soil

At the heart of the Soil Tolkien is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) — a digital governance structure that allows tokenholders to participate in decision-making.

Now, before you picture Reddit on mushrooms or a glorified group chat with bylaws, hear us out.

A DAO in this context wouldn’t control the land. It wouldn’t override Indigenous sovereignty or replace staff meetings with Discord flame wars. Instead, it would act as an intermediary steward — a way for tokenholders to engage in guided, values-aligned governance around questions like:

• What soil regeneration projects should we fund this year?

• Should we co-invest in a new composting system or a youth garden?

• Which limited-edition beer label should be released to commemorate Earth Day?

• Should we allocate dividends this year, or reinvest in farm infrastructure?

• To prevent it from devolving into a plutocracy (where votes are bought, not earned), we could:

• Weight votes by participation, not just token count.

• Reserve governance seats for local stakeholders, Indigenous representatives, and farm workers.

• Use a tiered system where some tokens are soulbound (non-transferable) and earned through contribution, not purchase.

The goal is not to replace leadership.

It’s to distribute stewardship.

3.2 Return on Investment — Dirt Dividends & Beer Perks

Let’s be honest: most people investing in a token like this aren’t doing it for the 10x. They’re doing it because they care. Because they want a deeper connection. Because they want to belong.

So instead of promising speculative returns, we offer regenerative returns:

• Beer dividends — Annual cases or credits tied to token tiers.

• Soil health dividends — As the soil improves, so too could small financial rewards (or simply the satisfaction of contributing to planetary repair).

• Events and experiences — Invitations to farm dinners, harvest festivals, or “tokenholder work parties” (which is a fun way of saying “we need help weeding”).

• Governance participation — Vote on real decisions. Be part of the vision.

• Recognition — Your name on the farm’s mycelial ledger of honour (okay, maybe a plaque or a well-placed QR code).

Could there also be financial upside? Maybe. If we run a profitable, sustainable farm and brewery that tokenholders help support, we might be able to share real dividends or reinvest for impact.

But let’s be clear: this is not just about ROI.

It’s about ROR — Return on Relationship.

It’s about building a financial model that reflects mutual care, not speculative greed.

3.3 Blockchain Mechanics — Fungible Fungi and Secure Dirt

The blockchain layer would do what it does best: create a transparent, immutable, programmable record of value and governance. But we’d choose our stack carefully:

• Low-carbon chain (e.g. Polygon or another proof-of-stake network)

• Smart contracts that define:

• Token issuance and distribution

• Voting mechanisms

• Rules for dividends and governance access

• Soulbound token logic (earned vs. bought)

• Off-chain integrations to tie actual soil health metrics (from our regenerative farm practices) into the logic of the system

In other words, we use the blockchain not as a speculative casino, but as a fungal network of trust — a way to let value flow beneath the surface, quietly feeding the ecosystem.

And yes, you could trace your Soil Tolkien’s provenance from mint to mycelium.

3.4 The Tolkien Pun Compendium (Curated by Butch, AI Ghostwriter)

Since I, Butch, your AI ghostwriting companion, have been given full creative license to indulge, here is the officially non-binding, pun-heavy Tolkien brand extension:

• One Token to Till Them All — The rallying cry of community-supported regenerative land ownership.

• Fellowship of the Ringworm — A nod to our compost pile’s finest decomposers.

• The Two Loam Towers — A reference to our dual soil testing stations.

• Gondalf — A wise, white-haired goat that lives on the farm and issues occasional wisdom (and aggressive bleats).

• Return of the Gai-ai — A proposed Phase II rollout where AI-generated soil poetry is inscribed on limited-edition cans.

• Middle Hearth — The name for our tokenholder-only firepit dinner club.

I’m here all week.

So that’s the Soil Tolkien.

Equal parts satire and sincerity.

A financial experiment and a relational artifact.

Something to hold the tension between land and liquidity, place and participation, carbon and community.

And who knows — if the elves of Ethereum can do it, maybe the farmers of the Sunshine Coast can too.

AI as Cooperative Architect

“Not the hero of the story. But maybe a decent project manager.”

By now, you’ve probably guessed this chapter didn’t spring fully formed from the same soil that grew our hops. It was fermented in collaboration — not just with real humans, but with AI. Including the footnoted, pun-drunk character known as Butch, my sarcastic, Tolkien-obsessed ghostwriting assistant.

So let’s talk briefly about AI’s role in this chapter, and more broadly, in shaping regenerative business models.

Because no, AI isn’t running the farm. It’s not making planting decisions, managing the hop trellises, or leading staff meetings (though I do imagine it would be better at remembering birthdays). But what it can do is help us imagine, prototype, pressure-test, and communicate new models — like the Soil Tolkien — in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.

What AI is doing:

• Narrative construction — Drafting storytelling arcs like this one, making complicated ideas more digestible (or at least more entertaining).

• Scenario modelling — Running simulations for tokenomics, DAO governance structures, or reward systems.

• Plain-language translation — Turning white paper gibberish into language a human being might actually enjoy reading.

• Legal and ethical reflection — Cross-referencing existing laws and frameworks to flag potential issues early.

• Design ideation — Generating concepts for label art, perk structures, or member onboarding experiences.

What AI isn’t doing:

• Replacing the vision

• Making decisions

• Owning the farm

• Feeling what it means to gather around a bonfire with 200 neighbours and a keg of Pollinator Pilsner

Think of AI here as a kind of compost accelerator. It doesn’t create the nutrients, but it can speed up the mix. It’s a tool — and like any tool, it can be used to build, to extract, or to dream. In this case, it’s helping us dream, then structure, then de-risk.

That matters. Because one of the biggest barriers to innovation in the social finance and land ownership space isn’t greed — it’s complexity. Good ideas die in committee. They get buried under due diligence. They choke on jargon. AI doesn’t magically solve that, but it can cut through the underbrush so the real work — human connection, stewardship, sovereignty, storytelling — can thrive.

And unlike venture capital, AI doesn’t require a 10x return. It just needs prompts, feedback, and the occasional Tolkien pun to keep it going.

From Consumers to Co-Stewards

“Not everyone wants to farm. But everyone wants to belong.”

The Soil Tolkien, for all its whimsy and weirdness, is really trying to answer one question:

How do we turn distant, passive consumers into active, proximate co-stewards?

Most of our economic systems are built around distance. The people who grow your food rarely meet the people who eat it. The land you live on is probably owned by someone else. The systems that govern your life were designed in a boardroom you’ll never visit. This distance breeds indifference, and indifference enables destruction — of soil, of water, of culture.

And yet — when people do get close, when they participate, when they belong — something changes. A beer becomes a story. A farm becomes a gathering place. A business becomes a shared act of care.

We’ve seen this over and over again at Persephone. People come for a tasting flight and leave wanting to volunteer. Locals bring us rescued animals, wildflower seeds, surplus apples, unsolicited poetry. One guy offered to build a geodesic dome in exchange for beer and eternal gratitude. (We’re still considering it.)

These aren’t transactions. They’re relationships.

They’re the building blocks of commons-based enterprise — businesses that don’t just serve a market but cultivate a mutual ecology of belonging, co-creation, and reciprocal benefit.

So what if we built a financial instrument that reflected that?

What if we designed the Soil Tolkien not just to raise capital, but to invite connection?

What if owning a token wasn’t about price speculation, but about choosing to be in relationship — with the land, with the farm, with each other?

Imagine receiving your annual Soil Tolkien holder’s package:

• A report on how the soil has improved

• A video from the farm team reflecting on the year’s wins and worries

• A small bag of hop seeds

• A voucher for a community meal cooked in the outdoor kitchen

• A commemorative coaster made from spent grain and sarcasm

This isn’t pie-in-the-sky utopianism. It’s a slightly odd customer loyalty program with real regenerative implications. It turns the logic of ownership inside out — from “what can I extract?” to “how can I contribute?”

This shift — from consumer to co-steward — is subtle but seismic.

It’s the kind of shift we need if we want our economic models to reflect ecological interdependence.

It’s not about mass participation. It’s about meaningful participation — even if it’s just a few hundred people who choose to see the farm not as a supplier, but as a shared story they help write.

And for those people? We raise a glass.

They are the early adopters of the future we’re all composting toward.

Section 6: Legal, Ethical, and Very Canadian Complications

“You can tokenize a goat. But should you?”

Before we all sprint off to mint digital soil tokens and install blockchain-powered irrigation systems, let’s pause for a moment and talk about the slow, slightly boring, but absolutely necessary stuff: legal frameworks, ethical implications, and the unique Canadian context of land ownership.

This chapter has been playful. But this part isn’t a joke.

Because if we’re going to propose something like the Soil Tolkien — and maybe even pilot it — we need to ask the real questions:

• Is it legal?

• Is it ethical?

• Is it useful?

• And who gets to decide?

Let’s take them one at a time.

6.1 First, the Land

Persephone Brewing and Farm sits on the unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nation. The alley and pub in Powell River — our more recent social experiment — are on the unceded lands of the Tla’amin Nation (ɬaʔamɩn), whose rich culture, language, and stewardship of the region predate every beer ever brewed here.

This matters.

Because while we may legally “own” this land under British Columbian law, we cannot ethically innovate on it without acknowledging the ongoing process of colonial dispossession. Every proposal — including a cheeky token system — must wrestle with the truth that “ownership” is itself contested, especially on lands that were never ceded, surrendered, or extinguished through treaty.

So if we’re going to tokenize something, we need to clarify:

We’re not selling land. We’re not commodifying territory.

We’re inviting participation in the care of a place — one that we are privileged to steward, but not entitled to monetize without accountability.

In fact, one path forward might involve offering tokens to Tla’amin and Squamish members first, free of charge, as an act of respect and shared governance. And maybe that feels small. Symbolic. But symbols matter. Especially in systems where trust has been systematically eroded.

6.2 Then, the Law

Securities law in Canada is, in a word, opaque. Add tokens to the mix, and you’ve got yourself a maple-flavoured compliance headache.

The moment you issue a token that:

• Can be traded or sold

• Represents a financial interest

• Offers a reasonable expectation of return

…you may have just issued a security. Which means the project needs to be registered, disclosed, and regulated under one of the provincial securities commissions — or fall under an exemption (like a co-op share, a community bond, or a crowdfunding rule).

If we’re serious about this, we’d need legal counsel.

We’d need to decide:

• Is this a loyalty program or an investment product?

• Can we offer perks without triggering securities oversight?

• Do we issue tokens under a co-op structure?

• Can we avoid secondary markets (resale) entirely?

And yes, we might have to write the phrase “fungible beer points” into a legal prospectus. Stranger things have happened.

6.3 The Ethical Heartache

The biggest challenge, though, isn’t legal. It’s ethical.

Because here’s the potentially tragic irony:

We’re trying to create a deeply local, place-based model for stewardship and regeneration — and yet, the first people to buy in might be… not local at all.

Crypto-curious urbanites. Impact investors from Ontario. Token traders in Portugal. People who genuinely care, yes — but who have no physical or cultural proximity to the farm itself.

And that matters.

Because one of the core tenets of regenerative business — hell, of any relational system — is place.

You can’t outsource love.

You can’t scale belonging.

So how do we invite outside participation without replicating the very extractive dynamics we’re trying to escape? How do we balance capital with care?

One answer might lie in tiers:

• Local stewards — who receive deeper access, voice, and perks

• Non-local allies — who contribute capital, but accept a more limited role

• Indigenous partners — who hold permanent, privileged voice in all decisions

It’s messy. Imperfect. But if we acknowledge the contradictions and design with humility, we might actually build something better than the systems we inherited.

Something that can hold tension.

Something that can grow.

Something worthy of the land itself.

Section 7: A Land Ethic for the Digital Age

“Because stewardship doesn’t stop at the treeline. Or the blockchain.”

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve endured jokes about hobbits, tokenized vegetables, and governance via Discord. Thank you. But now we land — literally — where this chapter was always headed: ethics, ecology, and the moral obligations of ownership.

This isn’t just a proposal for a weird financial instrument.

It’s a reframing of relationship — between people and land, between economy and ecology, between what we own and what we owe.

And the person who helps us see that most clearly is Aldo Leopold.

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

— A Sand County Almanac, 1949

This simple sentence — Leopold’s famous Land Ethic — contains multitudes. It asks us to shift from a human-centered worldview to one where we are simply members of a broader community of life. It demands we expand our circle of moral consideration — not just to future generations, but to soil, water, trees, microbes, and yes, even fungi.

So what does it mean to bring that ethic into the world of tokens, blockchains, and fractionalized ownership?

At first glance, it seems like heresy. Can a technology born of libertarian markets and speculative hype ever serve the biotic community?

But remember: Leopold wasn’t nostalgic. He wasn’t asking us to retreat into the woods. He was calling for evolution — in our thinking, in our systems, in our civic imagination.

So maybe this isn’t as strange as it sounds.

Maybe the Soil Tolkien — as tongue-in-cheek as it is — is one way to extend Leopold’s vision into the digital age.

Maybe by tying token value not to speculation, but to soil health, we realign incentives.

Maybe by using DAO governance, we embed the principle of distributed care.

Maybe by designing perks that are seasonal, local, and relational, we reinforce the rhythms of the land.

Maybe by inviting Indigenous leadership into the structure, we begin — imperfectly but sincerely — to honour those who have always lived this ethic.

And maybe by doing all this in the open — transparently, playfully, irreverently — we begin to crack the shell of late-stage capitalism and plant something weirder. Something kinder. Something alive.

No, this won’t fix the world.

But it might help one small farm, on unceded land, surrounded by forest and sea, to become not just a producer of craft beer, but a living example of what a regenerative economy could feel like.

Not controlled. Not scaled. Not optimized.

But tended. Together.

Appendix to chapter 17

The Soil Tolkien Token™

A Secret White Paper for the Regenerative Age

Filed beneath the loam and beside the ledger. Use responsibly.

Abstract

The Soil Tolkien Token™ is a tongue-in-cheek yet sincere prototype for a regenerative, blockchain-enabled, community-based stewardship model. It aims to fractionalize engagement, not ownership, with land-based enterprises — particularly a small farm-brewery hybrid rooted on unceded Squamish and Tla’amin territory in British Columbia. Drawing from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, blockchain’s decentralized infrastructure, and just enough Tolkien mythology to keep things spicy, the Soil Tolkien Token is part performance art, part real-world regenerative finance instrument.

It is not intended to be a financial product.

It is intended to be a provocation.

It is also intended to come with beer.

1. Purpose

The Soil Tolkien Token exists to:

• Create a new model of relational capital, where financial support is linked to ecological and cultural outcomes — not land speculation.

• Link value to soil health improvements, community well-being, and long-term stewardship.

• Explore whether the mechanics of token-based finance — smart contracts, DAOs, programmable incentives — can serve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community (to quote Leopold).

• Make people laugh, learn, and maybe rethink how we define ownership and investment in a post-capitalist future.

2. Tokenomics (Explained in Plain Language)

Token Type

• ERC-1155 standard: This flexible token type allows us to create both fungible tokens (the Soil Tolkien Token itself) and soulbound, non-transferable tokens that recognize unique contributions, like “Compost Champion” or “Tiller of Hearts.”

Total Supply

• 10,000 Soil Tolkien Tokens, ever.

→ We won’t mint more. This ensures each token reflects shared stewardship, not speculative excess.

Initial Distribution

• 2,000 reserved for local residents

→ Gives nearby community members a meaningful chance to participate.

• 1,000 gifted to Indigenous partners and elders

→ Reflects a commitment to reconciliation and shared governance.

• 5,000 available for public sale

→ Helps raise capital for regenerative projects and infrastructure.

• 1,000 held in treasury

→ Used for events, volunteer rewards, partnerships, or surprise perks.

• 1 reserved for Gandalf

→ He’s earned it.

Pricing Tiers at Launch

• Tier 1 ($25): Digital Soil Supporter

→ A symbolic token with access to project updates and seasonal governance polls.

• Tier 2 ($150): Local Brew Ally

→ Includes beer perks, early access to events, and limited voting rights.

• Tier 3 ($500): Steward of the Land

→ Offers voting power on regenerative project funding and limited edition merchandise.

• Tier 4 ($1,000+): Fellowship Founding Member

→ Grants access to the Soil Dividend Pool, naming rights for goats, ceremonial titles, and access to invite-only gatherings.

3. Governance: The Fellowship of the Soil

Governance is facilitated via a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), with decisions driven by the principles of transparency, inclusion, and actual ecological benefit.

Key Principles

• Weighted voting: Not based solely on token quantity — contributions, location, and earned roles affect voting power.

• Indigenous leadership: Representatives from the Tla’amin and Squamish Nations are invited to participate in governance with dedicated seats and veto power on issues affecting land and cultural relations.

• Place matters: Local participation is prioritized in high-stakes decisions (e.g., development, land use).

• Soulbound roles: Non-transferable badges recognize long-term contributors and volunteers, unlocking enhanced privileges.

DAO Governance Topics May Include

• Allocation of regenerative funding

• Annual beer themes (e.g., Compost Kölsch, Cover Crop Pale Ale)

• Use of funds from token sales

• Approval of partnerships, events, or affiliated side quests

4. ROI: Returns on Integrity

This is not a financial product. However, it does yield returns — of a different kind.

Direct Perks

• Beer Credits — annual allotments or taproom discounts

• Event Access — harvest feasts, solstice bonfires, and barn-based governance gatherings

• Governance Rights — proportional to tier and contributions

• Regenerative Dividends — if the enterprise becomes financially sustainable and the soil tests show improvement, symbolic (or modest) payouts may be distributed

Indirect Returns

• Belonging in a new kind of community

• Participation in a prototype for a future economic model

• Bragging rights at dinner parties

• Deep satisfaction that your investment helped compost capitalism

5. Blockchain Stack: Loamy, Not Lame

Chain Selection

• Polygon or Celo — low-carbon, Ethereum-compatible, and relatively affordable to transact

Smart Contracts

• Handle minting, distribution, governance voting, and dividend logic

• Designed to be transparent, open-source, and audited

Soil Oracle

• A real-world data stream (or farmer named Steve) will input soil health metrics into the DAO dashboard

• Metrics include: Soil Organic Matter, microbial activity, carbon sequestration, and general farm vibes

Front-End Interface

• A public-facing portal for governance, lore, token status, farm updates, and goat cam access

6. Legal Considerations

Classification

• The Soil Tolkien Token is not a security.

→ It is a membership-based community tool, with clear disclaimers, perks-based returns, and no promise of financial appreciation.

Legal Structure Options

• May be nested within a cooperative, community contribution company (C3), or a benefit trust

• Legal consultation is ongoing. Beer-fueled contract writing has begun.

7. Ethics & Land Acknowledgement

This project sits on unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Tla’amin (ɬaʔamɩn) Nations. The brewery-farm and alley pub exist due to historical and ongoing settler colonial systems.

Key Commitments

• Tokens will never confer ownership of land

• Indigenous representatives will be offered meaningful governance seats

• Free tokens will be distributed to local Nation members

• Narrative, branding, and use of proceeds will be co-designed with Indigenous input wherever possible

This model is not a substitute for land back, treaty rights, or reparations. It is, however, one small experimental tool in the larger work of decolonizing capital.

8. Risks & Limitations

• Regulatory uncertainty: Token law is still evolving

• Crypto volatility: Our beer is more stable than Ethereum

• Public misunderstanding: Satire and sincerity are hard to balance

• Tech access barriers: Onboarding needs to be radically human

• Token creep: Avoiding over-financialization is critical

• Philosophical tension: Inviting non-local participation risks undermining local relational models

9. Tolkien Pun Glossary (Curated by Butch, AI Ghostwriter)

• One Token to Till Them All — Founding motto

• The Two Loam Towers — Experimental soil lab and hop dryer

• Return of the Gai-ai — Future Phase: AI-generated compost poetry

• Mordough — The extractive force of global capital

• BagginsDAO — A hypothetical model for garden-sharing platforms

• Gondalf the Graywater — Wizard of circular sanitation

10. Call to Action

We invite you — curious citizen, regenerative investor, lapsed fantasy nerd — to:

• Join the DAO (Decentralized Agricultural Order)

• Co-create an economy rooted in loam, lore, and laughter

• Help design a token that builds community instead of wealth

• Reclaim the right to experiment

• Bring snacks

Appendix Ends

Filed in the public domain of mildly anarchist post-capitalist dreams and beer-fuelled practical magic.

Chapter 18 v2: Preparing for Seasons — Adapting to Market Changes and Future Planning

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven… including quarterly financial forecasting.”

— Probably Ecclesiastes, but also your accountant

Business as a Perennial Organism

In the overcaffeinated theatre of modern business advice, where every podcast evangelist insists that if you’re not scaling, you’re dying, it can be a bit jarring to suggest—wait for it—that maybe growth isn’t the only thing that matters.

Perennials, the quietly confident plants of the world, would beg to differ.

Perennials don’t need to dazzle every quarter. They don’t rip up their root systems for every passing trend. They know when to stretch toward the sun, when to dig in, and when to conserve energy for what comes next. Their rhythm isn’t dictated by quarterly earnings reports but by something deeper: the seasons.

And yet, here we are in a business culture that worships infinite summer. Endless productivity. Constant blooming. The myth of the evergreen unicorn. If your graph doesn’t point up and to the right at all times, people start calling you “mature,” which is code for “boring,” which is code for “sell before it flatlines.”

But let’s pause for a moment and reflect on just how unnatural that is.

No ecosystem grows unceasingly. No forest adds rings without winters. Even the mightiest oak retreats each year, shedding leaves in service of future strength. Growth, in nature, is not a straight line—it’s a cycle. Expansion, contraction, rest, renewal. If we want businesses to survive—not just fiscal winters but emotional, social, and environmental ones—we’d do well to pay attention.

So what happens when we begin to think of a business not as a machine to be optimized, but as a perennial organism? A living system with seasons. A culture that breathes in and out.

We start to make peace with rhythm.

We stop panicking every time the phones go quiet in February or the foot traffic slows after a heat wave. We build in cycles of rest instead of pretending burnout is a badge of honour. We become more like the tree that doesn’t mind losing its leaves—because it knows they’ll be back.

At Persephone, we’ve learned (often the hard way) that not every season is for expansion. Some are for maintenance. Others for pruning. Still others for letting the roots go deeper, unseen. And in those seasons, the business might not look like it’s growing. But the resilience it builds becomes the difference between weathering the storm and snapping in the wind.

So, before we dive into financial forecasts, market volatility, and scenario planning, let’s root this chapter in one simple truth:

A healthy business, like a healthy tree, is not always blooming. But it is always alive.

Reading the Weather — Market Signals and Forecasting

Some people say you can’t predict the future. Those people are not farmers.

Farmers read the sky like a novel. They notice when the wind shifts, when the frogs go silent, when the clouds start stacking like anxious thoughts. They don’t know exactly what’s coming, but they’re tuned into patterns, anomalies, and the subtle language of their landscape. In other words, they’re forecasters—and most of them don’t even own a spreadsheet.

In business, forecasting has somehow become synonymous with delusion. We plug last year’s numbers into a spreadsheet, add 10%, and call it a strategic plan. It’s like predicting next summer’s rainfall based on your last vacation. That’s not forecasting—that’s wish-casting.

To truly read the weather of your market, you have to get your boots dirty.

This means paying attention to more than just your own revenue line. Are your suppliers stretched thin? Are your customers talking differently? Has the mood of your industry changed? Are your staff burning out while no one’s brave enough to say it? Are you starting to feel like your product is being asked to solve a problem it wasn’t originally designed for?

These are clouds on the horizon. They don’t mean disaster—but they do mean something.

It’s worth distinguishing here between weather and climate. Weather is short-term and often annoying: a distributor bails, a tank leaks, a heat wave nukes your hops. Climate, by contrast, is the slow tectonic shift: inflation, shifting consumer values, global supply chains wobbling under stress. One calls for a bucket. The other calls for a full redesign of your drainage system.

And the line between the two isn’t always clear at first glance. Take, for example, the summer and fall of 2023. The Sunshine Coast experienced such an extended drought that the SCRD made the painful but necessary decision to restrict water usage—cutting off supply to high-use businesses. We were on that list. A brewery without water is… well, not a brewery. Beer is 95% water. And people, inconveniently, tend to drink more of it in the summer.

It had all the makings of a weather event—acute, localized, stressful. But our response, oddly enough, revealed its true nature. We ended up trucking in thousands of litres of water from Mission, over 100 km and a ferry crossing away. Surprisingly, the cost per can only went up by a few cents. Not catastrophic at all—unless you zoom out.

Because what this actually was… was climate. A signal of what’s to come. A taste of a drier future where basic production inputs—like, say, water—can’t be taken for granted.

And frankly? We’re not ready. Not at Persephone, not globally. We’re still mostly reacting—patching holes, trucking water, praying for rain. We talk about climate change like it’s some abstract ethical issue, but we’re not planning for it like it’s a business reality.

There are economic climate shifts too. Between 2022 and 2024, we saw a major consumer transition away from premium craft beer and toward lower-alcohol drinks, ready-to-drink cocktails, and non-alcoholic options. This wasn’t just a passing trend—it was a CLIMATE EVENT. Packaged product sales dropped by 25% per year. PER YEAR. That’s a meteor strike, not a drizzle.

We made moves—some smart, some sluggish. Seltzer came late. Non-alc iced teas and lemonades followed. But the hole had already formed. The climate had changed, and we were still shopping for umbrellas.

So why didn’t we act sooner? Why didn’t we read the wind?

Because reading is one thing. Responding is another. And most days as a CEO, you’re a decision machine. You take in data, weigh options, make a call. Rinse and repeat. But the question no spreadsheet can answer is this: how much of that process should be based on instinct?

We like to pretend that good business decisions are cleanly evidence-based. But in reality, waiting for perfect information leads to decision paralysis. On the flip side, acting too fast—without enough context—leads to decisions that are hasty, wasteful, or flat-out wrong. Somewhere in the middle lies the elusive sweet spot: informed intuition.

I’ll be honest—I don’t always find it. I get distracted. I second-guess. I override my instincts because a louder voice or shinier metric told me to. But I’m learning (slowly, messily) that intuition isn’t the opposite of data. It’s what you develop from having listened, absorbed, experienced, and made enough mistakes that you begin to feel patterns before you can name them.

And that, perhaps, is the truest definition of forecasting in a world that is quite literally on fire:

To feel the temperature rising, and choose to act before the thermometer shatters.

Dormancy Is Not Death — The Value of Strategic Retreats

Every winter, the trees in our orchard stand still. Not dead. Not lazy. Just… quiet. A casual passerby might think they’ve given up. No fruit, no flowers, no buzzing bees. Just bare branches and a kind of stoic waiting. But below the surface? Roots are extending. Energy is being conserved. Wounds are healing. The system is preparing for a spring still months away.

This is not failure. It’s resilience.

In nature, dormancy is essential—it’s how living systems avoid burnout. Trees don’t post quarterly reports about their winter rest, but they practice strategic retreat. They understand that constant output is the best way to die early. Business culture, conversely, often frames stillness as stagnation. Hustle is worshipped; pause is punished.

At Persephone, we’ve begun to see stillness—when chosen and timed intentionally—as strength. A fallow quarter isn’t a vacancy; it can be a recovery. Maintenance. Internal recalibration. Healing roots so new growth can be stronger.

Recently, we pulled back from some of our broader retail footprint, choosing instead to focus only on accounts that met a certain threshold—ones we could serve directly through self-distribution. It meant fewer trips, fewer middlemen, and a better handle on customer relationships. And while it shrank our reach on paper, it strengthened our core in ways that might matter more in the long run.

We’ve also started looking at dormancy through an ecological lens. Regenified’s 6-3-4™ framework includes four core ecosystem processes: the water cycle, mineral (nutrient) cycle, energy flow, and community dynamics. Though developed for land-based systems, these processes offer a surprisingly good metaphor for organizational rest:

• Water Cycle = liquidity and operating cash flow

• Mineral Cycle = training, knowledge, internal feedback loops

• Energy Flow = team culture, morale, and burnout prevention

• Community Dynamics = health of relationships, trust, and reciprocity

In business terms, dormancy isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about directing nutrients inward. Retaining cash. Cross-training staff. Repairing trust. Preparing for what’s next. It’s active stillness.

We’re not prescribing this. We’re not experts in seasonal business models or regeneration. But we’ve found that thinking seasonally—and allowing space for contraction—has made our operations more responsive, and a lot more humane.

Because a tree that never rests? Eventually splits. A business that never breathes? Eventually burns. Sometimes the wisest move isn’t to grow—it’s to wait.

And in that waiting, prepare for spring.

The Seasonal Calendar of Persephone

Some businesses live by the fiscal year. Others by hockey season. At Persephone, we run on something closer to a farm-brew-festival-human calendar. Equal parts biology, beverage economics, and emotional energy management.

Like any place tied to land and people, our operations don’t follow tidy quarters. They follow seasons.

Spring is when the thaw begins. We shake off the moss, prep the fields, clean the tanks, and reorient. Staff return, calendars fill, and hope flows in like meltwater.

Summer is bedlam—in the best way. Patios explode. The Alley becomes a mini-festival ground. Beer flows, kids roam, pizzas fly. The margins are better, the vibe is buzzy, and it all works—until about mid-August when everyone hits a wall. Still, it’s our golden season. Until it isn’t.

Fall brings reflection. The tempo slows, the fields give up their last produce, and we gather—both product and people—for storytelling events, harvest dinners, benefit releases. It’s the season of generosity and re-grounding.

Winter is quieter. The taproom sleeps in. The farm rests. The brewers experiment. We get philosophical. Sometimes overly so. Budgets get drawn. Dreams get challenged. It’s our most important planning season—though not, ironically, our most profitable.

This rhythm isn’t perfect. But it’s ours. We’ve tried to build internal systems around it—scheduling hires and retreats, downtime and maintenance, product releases and reboots in ways that reflect the natural pulses of our place. Because sustainable businesses, like ecosystems, thrive in rhythm—not in relentless output.

Planning for Future Climate — Both Literal and Figurative

Let’s be honest. “Climate planning” used to mean keeping the walk-in cooler from conking out in July. Now, it means preparing for operational fragility in a fundamentally altered world.

The 2023 drought taught us this the hard way. When the SCRD cut off water to high-use businesses, we had to truck in water from Mission—over 100 km and a ferry ride away. It added only pennies per can, but the real cost was existential: our most basic input is no longer guaranteed.

This wasn’t weather. This was climate.

And yet… what would meaningful preparation even look like? A well? A generator? Tanks dedicated to potable water? We’re still asking. But what’s clear is that the pace and magnitude of change requires more than optimism—it requires infrastructure, adaptability, and an entirely different way of thinking about risk.

Economically, too, we’ve been caught flat-footed. From 2022 to 2024, a significant consumer shift rocked the craft beer world. Premium sales dropped like a stone. Low-alc and non-alc surged. Our response was late, and we’ve paid for it in losses, missed opportunities, and shareholder bailouts.

We are not alone in this. But survival is not assured just because you care. It takes planning. Scenario mapping. Making hard calls before the sky darkens.

The question is no longer “Can we avoid climate disruption?” It’s “Can we build a business that survives it—and maybe, quietly, helps others survive too?”

Legacy Planting — Preparing the Next Generation

Some plant trees for fruit. Others plant them knowing they’ll never sit in the shade.

Legacy isn’t about ego—it’s about continuity. What will you leave behind that others can use? Not just products or profits, but systems, soil, culture, capacity?

David Suzuki recently offered a sobering reflection: the fight to prevent climate change as we once imagined it is over. What remains is the work of adaptation. The Finnish government, taking that to heart, is encouraging its citizens to turn local. Build food security. Know your neighbours. Learn to share. Grow something.

This isn’t resignation. It’s resilience. It’s a reminder that the most regenerative work we can do might not be scaling—it might be strengthening the ties that keep a community upright when everything else breaks loose.

At Persephone, we’ve tried to embody this through small gestures with long echoes: co-developing a community bookstore, building a teaching farm, creating “benefit beers” to support local and ecological causes. None of this is wildly profitable. But maybe profit isn’t the best measure of legacy.

Succession also matters. Whether it’s training new leaders or ensuring our values don’t vanish in a founder transition, legacy means embedding what matters deep enough that it outlasts you. Not in stone. In soil.

Conclusion — Cultivating Seasonal Wisdom

Wisdom doesn’t arrive with a press release. It grows quietly—through lived experience, long cycles, and mistakes made just often enough to notice the pattern.

Seasonal wisdom means knowing when to push and when to pause. It means building systems that flex with the sun, the staff, the market, and the weather. It means being okay with quiet quarters, knowing they’re not empty—they’re preparing something.

We don’t always get it right. We’re not sages on a hill. But we’re trying to listen to the land, the rhythm, and the people. We’re trying to learn how to rest. How to wait. How to plant what may not bloom until we’re gone.

Because businesses, like forests, don’t thrive through constant expansion. They thrive through resilience, diversity, patience, and an ability to bend without breaking.

Let’s build the kind of organizations that know how to hunker down in winter. That invest in roots when others are chasing sunlight. That trust spring will return—even when the sky says otherwise.

Let’s cultivate seasonal wisdom. And pass it on.

Brian SmithSeptember 8, 2025

Grow

Preface: Dirt Under the Fingernails

Chapter 1v2

Chapter 2v2

Chapter 3: Nutrients of Culture — Building Organizational Culture and Ethics

Chapter 4 v2

Chapter 5 v2

Chapter 6 v2

Chapter 7: Love as Foundational Capital

Chapter 8 v2

Chapter 9 v2

Chapter 10 v2

Chapter 11 v2: Branching Out — Exploring New Markets, Customer Segments and Territory

Chapter 12: Leaves of Productivity — The Panarchy of team

Chapter 13 — Brand as Ecosystem: Building Awareness, Trust, and Loyalty

Chapter 14 v2: Climate, Growth, Revenue … aka the Heavy Chapter (with an interlude)

Chapter 15 v2: Harvesting Success — Measuring Outcomes and Celebrating Achievements

Chapter 16 v2: The Trouble with Growing Up — On Leadership, Legacy, and Letting Go

Chapter 17: Fractal Ownership — Web3, AI, and the Decentralized Farm

Chapter 18 v2: Preparing for Seasons — Adapting to Market Changes and Future Planning

WHAT DOES B-CORP MEAN?

General Mailing List Sign-up