[Video] How to build a business that values people, planet and profit

How can you use permaculture thinking to create a sustainable and financially stable for-purpose business; one that doesn’t run you as the business owner into the ground?

I recently sat down with Honey Atkinson — a brilliant, heart-led Aussie photographer and vidoegrapher — to share my thoughts and learnings on this topic, as part of her ‘ethical women in business’ YouTube series.

In this interview, we discuss:

• The basics of permaculture and how this can be applied to business.
• How you can shift an existing business to a more permaculture mindset while still remaining profitable.
• From a marketing perspective, the one to two key things that I reckon can really move the needle to help you gain more clients or customers.
• How I’m able to do many things — permaculture gardening, writing for big publications, running a marketing business, helping in the community — without burning out.

I’m so grateful to Honey for having me on her series. Experiences like these prompt much deep introspection on my part, which is really useful for honing my approach and finding more clarity.

Have a listen or, if reading is more your thing, you can take a gander at the full transcript below.

YouTube interview transcript

Honey’s introduction

Hi there. Today I’m here to chat with Koren, a writer and digital marketing strategist who’s built an urban permaculture paradise in South Australia. And she often writes on topics of her own lived experience on creating simple strategies on how to live a more sustainable life.

I first heard about Koren through my web designer Alana, who happens to be her sister, a very talented family. Koren has helped me create copy for my website and has been really instrumental in building a better system for my online phone photography course.

And I think I love working with her so much because she’s got the incredible marketing skills and is very great at writing. But I also love that the way she operates her business as being mindful and thinking about people on the planet means that when she writes for me or creates content for me, it feels like I feel really held and secure. Yeah, so that’s why I’ve got her on today to have a chat about how to run a thriving business and life while still staying aligned with your values. So thanks for joining us today, Koren.

The interview

Koren: Oh, thanks for having me, Honey. What an intro. That was beautiful. Thank you for those kind words.

Honey: Oh, it’s very true. It’s been a pleasure working with you over the last, I think, year and a half now.

Koren: Yeah, likewise, legend.

Honey: I’d love to know a brief overview of how you got to where you are now, because I guess from the outsider, when you read your Instagram buyer or your website, you look like you’re living a very aligned lifestyle. So yeah. Can you tell us how you got to where you are right now?

Koren: Well, I started my career as a journalist. I did this old-school cadetship at this tiny little newspaper here in South Australia almost 20 years ago now, which is kind of frightening. And then I went full-time into journalism. So I wound up writing for a Metropolitan daily newspaper in Brisbane. At the time, it had a circulation of 3.4 million people, so it was one of those big roles. I covered state politics for a few years and it was really fun and fast paced and quite rough and tumble and long hours and all of that. And I really loved it. It was enjoyable, but it also felt unaligned with my greater personal values and desires. So in 2013, I packed it all in and I moved to Spain. I just upped and moved to the other side of the world, and that’s when I started my own business originally as a journalist.

So I started writing as a freelancer and was a contributor to places like Frankie Magazine and Peppermint Magazine for many years. But I also started gradually retraining in digital marketing and picking up those digital marketing skills and discovered I really, really enjoyed it. And then a few years later, I stumbled across permaculture and it was kind of like something clicked into gear. Like all of these values that already had around sustainable living suddenly had this really solid and practical framework to hang from. So I studied permaculture formally in 2017. I did my permaculture design certificate at The Food Forest here in South Australia. And that training coincided with moving back here to Tarntanya / Adelaide into this little house just a few kilometres from the city centre, this tiny little garden. And I guess all of that combined to catapult me into this interest in applying permaculture at an urban level, a city level here in the city rather than out in the country.

We can’t all live out in the country, and it isn’t just about gardening. I was interested in applying permaculture across my whole life, like my work and my hobbies and friendships and anything else. So yeah, I guess that’s where I’ve ended up here.

And that city application of permaculture particularly is quite important to me because our city population is just going to soar in coming years. So there’s this United Nations statistic that says seven in 10 people will live in urban areas by 2050, which is doubling the population size. I find that pretty frightening when I consider how we currently live, but I love exploring how permaculture can provide a solution at that urban level, especially both the business level and the city level. It feels like a lot of positive change can come from those two areas.

Honey: Definitely. So for people who have heard of the word permaculture, but are a little bit unclear about what it means, could you give me a simple definition in layman’s terms?

Koren: To me, it really just simply is a practical framework for sustainable ways of living. It’s not just about gardening either. It’s a design system for life, which can be applied to literally any context. So often there is a focus on growing even just a little bit of your own food because the globalised food system is highly problematic, highly unsustainable has some pretty problematic impacts on our planet, but the movements, three ethics and 12 principles can be applied to literally any part of your life, including your job or your career or the way you market your business. So that’s kind of what I’m really interested in playing with in my own business right now is how to infuse permaculture thinking across all areas of my business from what I do on a day-to-day basis, to broader decision-making and financial planning and that kind of thing.

Honey: Wow, that’s awesome. I think that a lot of people have the idea that it’s just for some hippies with no shoes on, living in the middle of nowhere. But the more reading that I’ve done about it, I think it’s introducing and making it more popular now. But I think a lot of people are still unsure about what it means and how it applies that you don’t have to openly look like an alternative person to actually be living as principles yourself and how important they are to implement into your life if we going to keep living on this planet that we’re living on.

Koren: Yeah, that’s so true. And you don’t need land. You don’t even need to care about gardening. I think a lot of people think, oh, this is a way of gardening, and it is. There are really great tools for gardening within permaculture, but all of those frameworks can be applied to other areas of life too, and that’s where it gets really interesting, I reckon.

Honey: Yes, definitely. So I’d love some advice on how you shift an existing business model into more of a permaculture mindset, while also remaining profitable. I think that’s the hard things that people feel like and I do as well. Sometimes the things that you do, how do you run a business that still feels like you are being good to the people you work with and the planet and to yourself and to your family, but also that you make enough money to survive on?

Koren: Yeah, that profitability point really is important. I think of a permaculture-infused business as one that prioritises that triple bottom line. So people, planet, and profit. And that profitability is so important because it’s really difficult to feel stable and resilient and able to help in the world if you are under extreme financial pressure or you’re not making any money. So choosing this way of business doesn’t have to mean making no money or being unprofitable. It’s definitely one of the key considerations, but you’re also giving equal consideration to those other two elements as well, those people and planet elements.

I always like to start with the quick wins because then you get some runs on the board and you get that momentum and that dopamine hit. So that’s where if I was shifting a business model, that’s where I’d start. I’d have a look at my processes and my outputs and look at anything I could easily action without too much drama or too much financial impact. So that might be swapping your business and personal finances over to a bank that doesn’t in invest in fossil fuels. That’s pretty easy to do and it doesn’t really cost anything. Or maybe swapping your website hosting provider to a more green provider or something like that. These are sort of simple little things that can kind get some runs on the board.

And then from there, I’d probably start to do some of the deeper work around your values, getting clear on what values define your business, what they mean to you, and how all of that aligns with that triple bottom line, the people planet profit piece. And I really think permaculture is a great tool for this because you can take those 12 permaculture principles and work through them and think of ways to apply them in your business to spark ideas for ways to make change. And if you have a bit of a look online, there are a few really good blog articles around applying permaculture principles in business that can give you some ideas.

Personally, I’ve really loved the framework of Holistic Decision Making as well, particularly the model developed by the late Dan Palmer, who still has a website that’s alive and full of heaps of really incredible useful resources. And that work essentially gives you this framework for decision-making so that aligned choices are easier in your business. Maybe you are faced with a decision and if you’re not clear on your values, it can sometimes feel unclear which path to take. But if you can get clear on all of those values and have a framework for decision-making around that, a lot of that becomes easier and it brings in the profit piece as well. So that’s never left outside of the conversation.

I guess the other thing I’d say to that is there’s a permaculture principle, ‘use small and slow solutions’, and I’d really encourage that approach with shifting to a more permaculture-infused business. I think a lot of the time in business we’re told: ‘move fast, break things’. And that’s cool, that works for some people, but it definitely doesn’t work for me. And I think there’s lots of people that it doesn’t work for, and that feels really scary and overwhelming and exhausting. So I definitely prefer that sort of move slowly, change something, have a look at what happens, have a look at what impact that has on your business and how people respond, accept that feedback and then iterate. So yeah, it doesn’t have to be something that happens overnight. You can do this work slowly and iteratively.

Honey: That’s great. That’s really interesting about this moving slowly and then waiting. I feel like it’s the sort of opposite advice that you get from so many people as far as how to run your business is to constantly be moving all the time and never have a break, keep going, push, push, push, hustle. And it’s a very different mindset, but I feel like maybe it’s just proximity bias, but I feel like that there is definitely a shift in general marketing terms about creating businesses and marketing strategies and the way you run it at a slightly slower pace, and ones that kind of suit most people’s nervous systems. I think people are more open now about, okay, this actually makes me feel really yuck. I feel really tired and I’m burnt out and I’ve got, there’s all these kind of health issues that arise from working in this way that our body’s telling us that it’s not okay to work like that.

Koren: Definitely. And I think a lot of people see through that older style of marketing. We all know, oh, if I sign up for this freebie, I’m going to get slammed with sales emails from here on in. I’m not willing to do that. I don’t want my inbox slammed like that, I guess. So yeah, one of the ways of moving more slowly in your business is really building up that profile as someone who has depth, someone who can be trusted, someone who really means what they say and does what they say. And that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a sale maybe within the first two days of someone meeting you, but you might end up getting a sale at the one year point of them knowing you. But that might become a customer who never leaves you after that because they trust you so deeply. And that just feels so much more human to me.

Honey: Absolutely does. Yeah. I think that’s when I observe my own buying patterns, I’m the same because I don’t often give my email address away for free things and sign up because I know exactly what people are going to do. And it’s that being really clear about, I guess what you want from things. And when you talked about moving slowly, it’s like, okay, that time and energy that you might put in having a genuine conversation with someone a few times in person, maybe online, and then maybe in a year’s time they might buy from you. And so it’s like that really slow approach to making those moves. And then because you’re already acting out of your own way of operating in the world and not out of a way of how to get something from somebody, then it feels like you can live your true self. And then the bonuses that by being that person, then people are attracted to you for that reason.

Koren: Yeah, totally. And you’re more likely to attract people who work the way you work too. My way of working isn’t for everyone. There’s some people who love going really fast and trying all the things all at once, and that’s really not me. So that kind of client wouldn’t be a good fit for working with me. So yeah, kind of going more slowly and talking about that process means that the clients that are better suited to me, that I can do better work for, are more likely to knock on my door. So that’s a win-win.

Honey: Totally. Yes. They’re already worked out and sifted through. So with your marketing hat on and you’re running a business to help people market, what are one or two things, I guess currently right now that you’d recommend to gain more clients and customers, using permaculture mindset as well?

Koren: Well, this dovetails perfectly into what we were just talking about because the biggest thing I see is business owners kind of pushing themselves to be everywhere because they’ve been told they have to, or they think they have to, and then they spread themselves too thin and kind of don’t do anything really well. Or they start really strong and just peter out. Newsletters are a great example of this. ‘I’m going to write a fortnightly newsletter’, and after the third edition, it just disappears, never to be heard of again. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation that we all do it.

So one thing I always encourage my clients to do is start by thinking about their energy budget. How much time and energy do you actually have to dedicate to marketing? And I’m talking a finite thing. How many hours a week can you legitimately dedicate to this without affecting all the other things you have to do in your business to ensure your profitability? And also, what do you like doing? Do you love writing long form or do you love making video or do you enjoy taking photos? What kinds of things do actually come naturally to you that you like? Then focus your energy on the place where those two answers intersect, where you have something that you enjoy doing and you have enough time to do it.

So as a practical example, in my own business, I have decided that I only have the time and energy budget for Instagram and a little bit of blogging. I don’t really do anything else despite there being one-million-and-one things I would love to do. There’s literally so many shiny objects that I would love to get my teeth into, but I really only have the time budget to do one post a week on Instagram, and that’s not even really quite enough for Instagram.

So I’ve just been honest with myself about that capacity and gone, alright, I’m going to be on that one platform and try and do it really well. And I can see the positive influence that has on my business. I often get clients who know me through Instagram, it’s like that pre-vets me. It’s not an account about marketing, it’s about urban permaculture. But I think like you were saying before, it really helps to show my values and who I am and what I stand for. So I think that’s worked really well as opposed to having Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and Pinterest and YouTube and podcasts and all the things, but sort of sporadically being on them and not having the space to respond mindfully on any of them.

There are sort of some combinations that work really well. So I thought I’d just give them as examples. For example, you could focus really heavily on website search engine optimisation and then supplement that with Google ads. They’re a really good pairing. Or you might decide, I love social media, I really want to be on social media. So you could make social media your main strategy and then pair that with some paid social media, some Meta Ads. So you can do some retargeting there. Or you might say, I really love blogging or podcasting and pair that with email marketing and doing a newsletter so people see your new episodes. So you can kind of, I guess, look at the smorgasbord of marketing things that are out there and pick things that you enjoy doing that are most likely to move the needle. But you don’t need to do everything.

The second thing I would say is if you have DIY’d to your website, and that’s totally awesome if you have, but if you’ve done that and you’re seeing your business start to gain traction, that would be the point where I’d say get some help with your messaging and possibly also your design. Pay someone to help you. I see so many people with really great products or services, these really heart-driven businesses, but all of that story and that opportunity for connection is lost on this poorly written, clunky website with unclear offers and a pipeline to buy that’s 16 clicks deep or something.

I think the beauty of doing your website first if you’re looking at paying for marketing is that you end up with a whole heap of key messaging that you can use elsewhere. You can grab whole sentences and repurpose them on social media or email marketing or whatever. So it does give you really a lot of bang for your buck, and if you work with the right person, you’ll get the benefits of search engine optimisation. So you’ll start to get that traction of people just Googling and finding you, because that’s another thing I see a lot of clients who have DIY’d their websites, just getting very little traffic from search engines and just missing out on that free advertising piece of the pie. So yeah, that would be my 2 cents. If you’ve got a bit of money, pop it into your website.

Honey: Yeah, that’s really good advice. Thank you. And I definitely would put my hand up for being all the shiny things. Look at that. Look at that.

Koren: Yeah, it can be hard to say no.

Honey: It can be. But I like the alignment piece where if you are into doing podcasts or videos and maybe having an email list so that it sends those out. I like those two matches and how they work together. I think it’s really good advice.

Koren: And if you’re picking something that you like doing, you’re way more likely to keep going with it than if it’s something really tedious. A lot of people say to me: ‘I hate social media. I hate the concept. I don’t want to be on there.’ It’s like, well, great, don’t be. There are lots of other options. You don’t have to force yourself. We can find something else that will work for you. So yeah, I guess that’s another counterculture approach. That’s not the sort of thing you’re told as a business owner, but I guess if we’re looking at it from a permaculture perspective and that sort of sustainability aspect, it’s sustainability for yourself as well, as the person in the business. So all of these sorts of things start to come into consideration.

Honey: Absolutely. I think when you’re driven by your own interest and excitement, it gets you so much more mileage. And then the energy and that juice that you get from that following something that really genuinely interests you, as opposed to a marketing formula that just doesn’t match at all.

I’ve got a few things on the go at the moment, like this YouTube series, and I keep looking at Substack, and every time I go on there, I know that in my body, it’s definitely a yes. I’ve been observing it for maybe about 10 months now, and I can feel the excitement, but I’m just trying to figure out what that means. And so it’s sitting with that as well. It’s like, I know, yes, this is a space that I want to be in, but it’s okay. It will present itself on how to make that work. Yeah, I love sitting with it.

Koren: That’s awesome. Finding that internal ‘yes’, but then not rushing into just doing anything, but waiting to figure out the right way forward. Oh, that’s so cool.

Honey: It’s only taken me a million years to figure that out, that my body actually knows. I feel like if I had known this in my 20s, life would’ve been so much easier.

So from the outside Koren, I look at what you’re doing and you look at your bio and you’ve got this amazing lifestyle in your backyard. It looks incredible. You’ve changed a lot of your house to make it more sustainable. You write, you do marketing for businesses, and you seem to contribute in the community. How do you do all those things when so many of us have trouble saying no and feeling overwhelmed? I feel like you seem to do a very good job of balancing your life. How do you build those parameters?

Koren: Well, thank you. That was really lovely of you to say. And yeah, I definitely do have a multi-branched business where I do a lot of different things. That’s sort of by design, because I’ve realised that I really enjoy that. I love the diversity. That’s part of my personality and my brain type that I really like that. And also part of it is resilience, not having all your eggs in one basket kind of thing. Having a few different income streams. Like, I’m a solo mortgage owner and a solo business owner, so having a bit of resilience built in helps me to feel safe as I move forward.

But I do have two really serious feedback loops in my life. One is my health. I have a chronic back injury that leads to daily pain, and sometimes that can flare up and get pretty bad. And I also have a neurotype that’s pretty prone to sensory overload and burnout. So I think it’s really only been in the past few years that I’ve gotten really serious about my capacity in the past. I’ve definitely overworked and sacrificed my health and my personal life to get the work done, and I’ve had some fairly serious health outcomes as a result of all of that. So now it’s interesting that you talk about learning to say no because that’s become a really key part of being able to do it all. Yes, it’s learning to say no a little bit more often, which definitely is uncomfortable. I would love to do it all, but I just can’t. My health and energy levels won’t allow me to.

The way that I kind of figure it all out is that I use a couple of systems in my business to help me work out my capacity. One is time blocking, where I literally put everything that I need to do into my calendar. So that’s everything from working with clients to volunteering, writing stories for the ABC or The Guardian, preparing for this kind of interview, going to meditation, hanging out with friends. All of that goes into the calendar, colour blocked, and then I can see at a quick glance at a week view how hectic or hopefully otherwise my week is looking.

I also have built in what I call quarterly rest weeks into my business. So every season or every three months, I just take a whole week off and often I’ll do really nothing in that week. Occasionally I’ll go visit a friend interstate or something like that, but I really try to keep that as a total rest week, a week to farsel around in the garden and read five books or something like that. And then since January, I’ve also embraced a four-day work week. So I’m having every Friday off and again, trying to leave that completely unscheduled and just let it be whatever it needs to be.

The combination of the time blocking and then these fixed rest spaces means I’m much more aware of my capacity. When I look at my calendar, I’m like, okay, I can fit that in. Or it just unfortunately can’t fit in or something else needs to drop off. I found I’m not very good at just saying no off the bat, but if I’ve got all this reasoning behind me, there’s clear data, this color-coded data sheet that I can’t argue with, then it does become a bit easier to say no to.

I guess what we’re talking about there is learning to live within your means and your capacity. I think as a society that’s something we’ve broadly forgotten how to do on all fronts, even financially. Look at how many people live beyond their financial means. So I guess I like talking about this aspect of my business as just one kind of alternate approach. My structure might not work for everyone, but I think the point is, especially when you own your own business, you can really lean into your own nervous system and your values and your energetic levels, and then choose a way of working that’s best for you. And for me, it means that, yeah, I can do what looks like lots of different things, but I’m kind of just doing a little bit of everything and I’m very mindful of, okay, this is currently what’s manageable, but I probably can’t take on much more than this.

Honey: That’s such good advice. I think that’s often something that I fall into the trap of when I look at my calendar. I do have things like shoots booked in and meetings and things, but then I don’t necessarily always account for on the next week when I have to do the digital work for those. Then I’m not blocking out that time. I just think, oh yeah, I’ve got to do it, but I’m only booking client-facing things within the calendar. And there’s a few things as far as business planning that goes in, but I think that’s some advice I’m going to take on from what you’ve said about actually blocking that out. So if I’m going to create that project then the following week, what does that mean? Because then the reality of you being able to say yes to things is very different when, like you said, you’ve got the data to back it up. And I think that would make me feel really comfortable in doing that.

Koren: Love that. Yeah, do it. It’ll change your life.

Honey: And also the last year I’ve been working around my cycle, which has been amazing. So now I’ve been really strict with it and it’s completely changed my life. So I don’t book any client-facing things the week that I’m bleeding and all those other three weeks, especially when I’m in my prime and I’m feeling super pumped, then I normally have quite big shoots booked in or meetings or a gathering with some other business people where it requires a lot of my energetic self. And the other time when I’m feeling a bit ratty, that’s normally when I’m organising things. And then the week that I’m feeling really flat, I just don’t have anything that requires me to be, I guess, creative or requires a lot of myself. And that’s been life-changing, like that’s incredible. Why didn’t I do this 20 years ago? I was forcing myself to push through when you’re just dying and you just don’t feel like your body’s telling you no.

Koren: Ah, thank you. I need to look into that. I’m vaguely aware that that kind of system exists, but it’s not one I’ve researched and looked into, so thanks.

Honey: I can see the difference in how effective I am with the types of work. When physically, I’m lifting cameras and I’m engaging with someone and they require a lot of my energy. I can’t do that when all I want to do is hide in bed under the doona.That’sfaking it too much. And it’s been really life-changing.

Koren: Thank you. That’s a great tip. The other thing that popped into my mind was quarterly planning. So I think this is something that Dani Gardner talks about, and I’ve sort of co-opted her idea, but use this for bigger-picture business stuff. Say, if I want to do a major upgrade of a system or learn a new thing or whatever. So at the start of the year, I just wrote a list of what would I love to get done this year. And then I said to myself, well realistically, you can probably do one, maximum two, of those a quarter. So what are the four to eight things you want to do this year? And then I’ve mapped them out by quarter. And that’s been really refreshing too because it’s helped to feel like I’m continually moving forward in my business, but without all of the overwhelm of there’s 64 million different directions you could go.

And obviously I could change them.I could get further in the year and decide this other thing is now a priority. But I guess what we’re talking about here is a lot of ways to minimise all of the decisions around you that take up so much of your attention to think about and decide on. It’s like you kind of have those decisions already made. I already have my calendar. No, I am bleeding this week. I won’t be able to do it. Or whoops, I’m already overbooked. It’s a no. My priority for this quarter is upgrading my website, so I can’t go learn this AI thing that looks really cool or whatever. You do just get presented with so many opportunities in business. And that’s where some of the churn happens, I think, when you rush to try to learn everything or do everything. And then you lose the strategy and then the profitability falls and it becomes this sort of momentum thing. So I guess staying the course a little bit more because of knowing which direction you want to head in.

Honey: So really with that permaculture mindset, thinking that it’s all organic and free-flowing in a way, it’s actually not. Within nature itself, there’s the seasons and there’s the structure of things. And I think if we’re aiming to follow that in our lives as well and listening to the season and our body, and having things pre-planned so that we know what our values are, like you said, it’s so much easier to say no to something, to all the shiny things that come up in our social media feed and people that you speak to and to be really hitting your own values and what you want, not what everybody else wants from you.

Koren: Yeah, that’s right. And permaculture is a design system. At the core of it is: ‘How do you design something? What is the plan or the structure for this?’ So what falls out of that can be this beautiful, freewheeling kind of organic thing, but it still has some structure beneath it. And that counts for the garden as much as for the way you run your business. So yeah, applying that framework and that structure gives you the scaffolding to then make better decisions from, I’ve found in my business at least.

Honey: It’s fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on today. It’s been amazing. You’ve just covered so many great points and things that I’m going to take away myself.

Koren: Thank you. What a pleasure. It’s so lovely to speak in person.