Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Welcome to the Feminist Founders audio series event. This is a bonus for paid subscribers of the Feminist Founders newsletter. So if you're here, thank you so much for your support. I'm excited to bring you this series, featuring incredible thought leaders who will share insights about doing business differently in a way that honors equity and social justice. I hope you learn a lot from this. Let's dig in.
Becky Mollenkamp: Hello, my guest today is Helen Tremethick. She is a business strategist for well-established yet weary entrepreneurs—I think we can all relate to that. She and I work with similar clients, but we work in different ways, and I love the way that Helen shows up in the world. Our values are definitely aligned, and we're going to talk today about regenerative businesses and how that's different from sustainable businesses. I love everything that she has to share, and I want to make sure you also know that you can go to her website, HelenTremethick.com, which I will link to in the show notes, and grab her free Beyond Sustainability Blueprint. I think it's something that will probably help everyone—if you're listening to this, I don't know why you wouldn't be someone who's trying to do business in a way that rejects all of those nasty toxic capitalist norms. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, and thank you again for being a paid subscriber to Feminist Founders—you rock.
Becky Mollenkamp: Helen, thank you so much for chatting with me about regenerative businesses. When you and I met, we talked about this, and you mentioned regenerative farming and how you bring that to business. It really stuck with me since we first talked about it, and it has come up in other ways for me too. I feel like the universe just does that, and it has me really interested to learn more. I think the first place to start is just what do we mean by regenerative business and regenerative farming, but what does this concept of "regenerative" in nature mean? For me, it stirs up something that can continue to recreate on its own, maybe, but I'm curious what regenerative means to you.
Helen Tremethick: Hey, Becky, thank you so much for inviting me to do this with you. I'm super excited. I love that we started with a language agreement because I think it's so important for us to be on the same page when we're using words, rather than assuming that the other person knows what we mean. The word "regenerative"—I love that this idea is coming up for you over and over again. I think this is often how it happens—once you hear it, you can't unhear it. For me, although regenerative in a sense also definitively means the ability to improve upon a place or a system.
Now, the way that I look at regenerative farming, for example, is that we're not just thinking about inputs and yields. We're not just thinking about how many seeds we planted versus how many sprouted versus how many tomatoes we got out of those seeds or tomato plants. This is a very conventional way of thinking about farming: we have these inputs, we have these yields. When we extend that out to include the entire ecosystem, we're also thinking about pests—not just whether we kill them off conventionally, but what kinds of beneficial bugs there are. What's the soil quality? Is the planting happening in a place that makes sense based on the soil that's there?
There are a lot of different factors—how much wind, how much sun, how much rain—but also how many pollutants are coming in from other places. Are there predators? For example, in the case of growing vegetables, do we need to consider rabbits or deer? Now, using this idea of a land-based ecosystem, I want us to take that concept and build it out to talk about other ecosystems.
When we think about an ecosystem, we can think about our bodies as an ecosystem, our families as an ecosystem, or our communities as an ecosystem, but we can also think about our businesses as an ecosystem. So it's not just what we put in and what we get out—how many hours versus how much money—that's a very conventional way of thinking about business. What I want us to really consider, and where I really jam, is not just about how much money we're making. Yes, we live in a capitalist system, and we need money in order to survive, aka cost of living, which is such a weird statement in and of itself—the cost of living, the cost to live. But that’s a tangent.
What I want us to consider is what else is there? What other factors do we need to build out inside our ecosystem that is our business? Time—we live in a very time-deficient society. Time is one factor I talk to my clients about a lot, but also our well-being. Do we have the opportunity to really care for these bodies, these vessels that show up every day for our businesses? What about our families? Our families are part of our business ecosystem, as are our clients, as are our clients' families, as are our mutual communities, and so on.
Think of that as a ripple effect. Now, this is very long-winded, but coming back to the idea of regenerative business—what that means for you is going to differ from what that means for me. If someone has three children under three at home, their business by necessity is going to look different than mine, with my kid who is now in grade 6 and can go off to school every day and give me some time and space to work. But I also have land-based responsibilities, so my business will look different from someone who doesn't have any dependents at home and also doesn't have those land-based responsibilities. So, really focusing on what our own business ecosystem looks like—what are our current responsibilities? What can be delegated? What can't be? How much time and capacity do we actually have for our billable hours, for administration time? When we start building out those pieces, then we can really start designing a business that improves upon itself.
So, coming back to that regenerative piece—it's not just sustainable, which is a whole other soapbox I could get on. It's not just sustainable, but it's regenerative—it improves upon itself with care, with consideration, and with our intentional input.
Becky Mollenkamp: Ok, don’t rush to all the good stuff already. I want to slow us down a little, and thank you for that. I loved everything you shared, and I can't wait to dig into some of those ideas a bit deeper. But first, I want to know about your experience of getting to this place. So tell us a little bit about how you got into regenerative farming to begin with, and then how, during that process, you said, "Hmm, this seems like it could apply to business." What made you start to draw those connections between the regenerative farming you were doing and how that might apply to business? Because I think it went that way and not the other way around. I feel like you started with the farming, and then that led to these aha moments around business, if I’m not mistaken.
Helen Tremethick: Yeah, this is a great question, and I obviously love to dive into the deep end of everything, so I am here for this conversation. How did I get into it? You know, if you've been a business owner for any amount of time, as you and I have, you know that our work is ever-deepening, ever-expanding, and ever-growing. We often think about our businesses as these stagnant entities, but they aren't. A lot of entrepreneurs are like, "Oh, I'm going through a pivot," but it's not really a pivot. Oftentimes, I mean sometimes it is, sometimes you think, "Oh, OK, actually I really need to do something different." But more often than not, our work is deepening, and that's what happened for me.
Thirteen years ago was when I became an entrepreneur in a formal sort of way. At first, I was really interested in the way people were communicating online. This showed up in the very beginning as an editor, but I quickly realized that I don't give a shit about people's semicolons. What I do give a shit about is consistency and connection. So that very quickly turned into writing blog posts, writing website copy. And that's where I really made a name for myself as a website copywriter. I started talking about brand voices and brand voice strategy because I was really interested in what was behind how people were communicating.
So this is a deepening—from the words to the reason behind the words—and then a deepening still into the persona of a brand. And where does that persona come from? It's often an extension of our values, especially as solo business owners or very small business owners. Our businesses are often an extension of our own values. So this deepening, this growth, was the direction my business was heading even before my partner and I bought this property, even before we set up the permaculture farm here. I have a history with medicinal plants and working with plants and working on farms. It's one of the reasons why my partner and I came together in the way that we did.
So, when we got this place and my partner started teaching permaculture to students, it really connected a lot of dots for me. I was asking myself about values, values inside a business, and not just how does that show up, like are we environmentally friendly, and therefore, we buy 100% post-consumer recycled paper—not just that, but what are the reasons why we make the decisions we do? Permaculture really opened my eyes to the connections between various aspects of ecosystems that we don't talk about, that we don't really reflect on, and sometimes take for granted.
With permaculture, we often talk about it as a land-based approach, but something that is really key and important to me, important to Michael, my partner, and I think important to permaculture as a whole, is that social piece—how are we interacting with each other? So, the TLDR of that is that social permaculture is really where I started thinking about the idea of regenerative businesses and business design based not only on our values but on all of these aspects of our ecosystem—our personal ecosystem as well as our business ecosystem.
Something that I really like to consider—and this may be getting to the good stuff first, but hey, we all love dessert—is our capacity and how we can show up for our businesses. Not just how much time we have, although that is very important, as I was just saying, but also how much of ourselves we can give. So I now combine these pieces of permaculture and regenerative business design along with somatic experiencing because we hold a lot of trauma, a lot of stories, and a lot of mental and emotional weight inside our bodies that also affect our business. That was the process—there were already plants, plant medicine, plant studies, and farming in my background, then partnering with a permaculture teacher, and really becoming interested in business models and business decisions and how we show up for ourselves and our business. And so all of that kind of coalesced into "regenerative business designer," and that was really the process.
Becky Mollenkamp: I love that. What's different, then, with business planning and business models when you think of it through this lens? I know you can't get into everything, but just sort of the high points—what are the things that really shift and are different when you're thinking of it in this regenerative, ever-changing way?
Helen Tremethick: What’s different is essentially the number of variables we take into consideration. I don't mean a number like it's a quantifiable number, but specific to you as a business owner, we consider your capacity. How many hours do you actually have to give? We consider external responsibilities, your own personal physical, emotional, and mental well-being as well as that of your family. A very conventional way of looking at building a business—and often the way that new entrepreneurs look at building a business—is we think about, OK, what skills do I have that people will pay for? Then we come up with some services for a particular amount of dollars, and then we solicit clients for that, not necessarily taking into consideration whether that style of service or that particular service is going to work well for us beyond the dollar value. And even then, many entrepreneurs don't even consider what that dollar value really means.
When we consider regenerative business design, we want to sit down and really think about your whole life, not just what skills you have and for how much money you can sell them for and to whom. We want to look even deeper than that. Beyond even how much are you charging and are you charging enough? This is something that's also very conventional when we talk about business design. We want to go beyond that to what you need to do to show up for your family in a whole way. What do your clients need from you that goes beyond the exchange of services? What I mean by this is not that you shouldn't be compensated—you should be compensated for it. But when we're thinking about what your clients need, sometimes when we're thinking about, say, website copy, you could write website copy and exchange that for dollars, but oftentimes clients may need a special thing that you bring, like a little bit of brand strategy or maybe examples of how they can continue that brand voice forward. These pieces will then really nourish your clients in ways that help you build your business, help you build it out stronger, as well as really vitalize your client's businesses and, in doing so, their families and so on. So we really want to consider this as a much larger picture when we're thinking regeneratively.
Becky Mollenkamp: That high-level overview of the shifts we make to approach business in a more regenerative way is incredibly helpful, so thank you. Before we wrap up this conversation, I want to go back to something you said at the beginning about regenerative business—those that improve upon themselves—not being the same as sustainable businesses or regeneration not being the same as sustainability. You said you could get on a soapbox, and I don't want you to have to get on a soapbox for a long time—I'm sure you have more to say than we probably have time for here—but if you can give me the Cliff’s Notes version of why those two things are different and why you feel so strongly about that, I think that will be really helpful for me and probably everyone because we hear so much about sustainable business. It's something I talk about a lot, so I’m deeply curious about what you see as the differences.
Helen Tremethick: Oh, Becky, I'm so glad you asked this question. The Cliff’s Notes—or, if you're Canadian, Cole’s Notes—are that sustainability equals net zero. If we break that down, definitively, sustainability means to sustain oneself. So if we take in enough nutrients to sustain ourselves, we're taking in as much as we need to output. The input is the same as the output. That would mean a sustainable business, again, definitively, means the more hours you work, the more revenue you bring in. Of course, we can talk about outsourcing some of those hours so that you can bring in more revenue, but you aren't working as hard.
Regenerative business looks at all of these pieces and says, OK, what are our actual needs? What are our potential yields? What is superfluous? What can we cut out? What can we delegate? Where can we really lean in? A lot of times, sustainable business practices don't necessarily look at capacity—the capacity of a person. They don't look at mental or physical or emotional health challenges or the reality of living through late-stage capitalism. It's really based on a top-down conventional business practice, worked out to be bottom-line people, profit, and planet. Whereas regenerative businesses go even further than that.
When we're talking about regenerative versus sustainable, what I'd like us to think about is going beyond sustainable—beyond sustaining ourselves in not just livelihood but friendlyhood. Now, of course, I could go on, and I do generally go on. I actually have a whole workshop called Sustainability Is Bullshit that I regularly teach to different organizations and communities. The premise of this is that I want people to start thinking beyond just meeting our needs—beyond thinking about, OK, so what is my family thinking? Let's talk about collective liberation. Let's talk about how we can create businesses that also benefit our clients' families, our clients' communities. How can we create businesses that affect our communities that are outside of that business model? How can we build businesses that really allow for future care of ourselves in ways that aren't just financial? So, you know, this is a real thought process, and this is where we get into business design—designing our businesses so that they make sense for us, for our capacity, for our schedules, for our responsibilities, for our health, for our goals, for our values, and then beyond sustainable.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you for that. Language matters, and it excites me to be thinking about this difference between regenerative business and sustainable, so thank you. For those who are hearing you talk about business design in this way, I’d like to end our conversation here by asking for a next step that listeners can take. You said that regenerative business looks different for each person and each business, although I did hear you saying that there are some common factors to consider like time, capacity, well-being, family, community, and that somatic experience piece. So I'm wondering if there's some sort of journaling prompt or a small first step that you can leave listeners with as they begin exploring making this sort of shift for themselves and their businesses.
Helen Tremethick: Oh, yes, absolutely. I want to touch briefly on what you said about how regenerative business design looks different for everybody. This is both a great thing and also a really frustrating thing. So I want to acknowledge that and admit that out loud. It's a great thing because it means that every one of us has the opportunity to design our businesses so that it makes sense for us. That’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. The difficulty, the challenge, is that there's no one formula that will work. These plug-and-play formulas, these plug-and-play methods that are sold all over the place—oftentimes when they don't work for us, we get into a space where we think that we're the problem, that it was us that failed the formula rather than the formula that failed us. The challenge is that there is no easy fix.
However, I also really love that you mentioned somatic experiencing, and this is where I would like to leave us. I'd like to leave us considering that we can deepen our connection with our brains and our bodies. These formulas, these business strategies, all of these are very, very heavy brain work. We try to figure it out. We try to figure out the solution to the problem. I have found that when we step away from this reactive space and into a more somatic space, it becomes much, much easier for us to make decisions as business owners as well as in our personal lives. It makes it much, much easier to know whether something is aligned or not.
So instead of basing our actions on an impulse, we can be more intentional. This is the prompt I would leave you with, and it’s an ongoing exercise to increase communication between our brains and bodies. If you're listening at home or in your office, take a moment to feel your body in the chair, on the floor, or wherever you are. Orient yourself to the room. Notice the air around you, the sounds, the colors. As you move your head, move your eyes. See if you can find something in the room that you feel neutral about—not positive, not negative, just neutral.
OK, now the question is, how do you know? How do you know that it's neutral? How do you know it's not giving off positive or negative energy? Do you feel that neutrality in your body? And if so, where? Where do you feel that neutrality?
The next piece, if you feel interested and want to explore a little bit more, is to come back to your center and look around the room again for something that brings up just a small amount of negativity. Maybe it's a little bit of clutter, maybe it's something that needs to get done, maybe it's a plant that needs watering—just something on the other side of neutral, a little negativity. And ask yourself the same question—how do you know? How do you know it's negative? Where does that show up in your body? Is there tension or tingling? Is there a color, a sensation, an emotion? Where in your body do you feel it?
Then bring yourself back to center again. Let’s not spend too much time in that negative space—just know where it shows up. We'll do this again for something positive. Maybe it's a cat or a dog sleeping on a pillow nearby, maybe it's crystals in the window or the way sunlight glances off some leaves—something that brings a positive sense. And again, ask yourself, how do you know? How do you know that's positive? Where in your body do you feel that?
What we're doing here is tuning into the sensations our bodies provide us when things are good, bad, or neutral. The more we can do that, the more we can connect to the signals our bodies are already giving us. It becomes much easier to make decisions based on alignment, on what is good for us. As we increase that communication, we learn the difference between being nervous because something is new and recognizing when something is not aligned because it’s not good for us. Those nuances can sometimes be hard to tell—that’s why we often see in hindsight that there were red flags we didn't notice in the moment. This is a way to start building out that communication with our bodies so we can make better decisions, more value-aligned, more personally aligned decisions for our businesses.
Of course, we can build top-down, brain-centered strategies. We can start figuring out the signs based on a template of how much time you have, who your people are, how much time they have, what pricing model you need. These are all very important. But if you find yourself running in circles, if you find yourself back in the same spot as before, needing to rejig things, then my recommendation is to come back to yourself and find the answers that you already have in your body.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you for that exercise. I did it as you were walking us through it, and it definitely gave me some really good insights. I’m someone who has not been very in touch with her body—I've been fairly disconnected from my body, which I think many people can relate to, especially those of us who've dealt with trauma related to our bodies. So thank you for that.
Helen Tremethick: Those of us who have trauma are often really disconnected from our bodies. This is one of the ways we've ensured our survival, and it is a beautiful coping mechanism when we need it. However, it can also hinder our access to what feels aligned and what doesn't, and can often put us on paths that aren't as great as they could be if we were in better communication with our deeper selves. This practice is very good for addressing deeper trauma. I'm not a therapist, so I don't take my clients there, although stuff comes up all the time, as you can imagine. But it’s not a replacement for therapy, it’s not even a replacement for counseling. It is, however, a good opportunity to reconnect with ourselves.
The reason I introduced finding a neutral thing to focus on is that negative pieces and positive pieces can both be quite triggering. We all know that negative things can be triggering, but positive things can be as well. Having a neutral is a really good marker for those of us who get a bit sprung by joy, excitement, or pleasure. In that way, we can start increasing our communication with our bodies in a way that isn't so triggering. I just wanted to give you a little bit of backstory there, and in terms of work going forward for yourself, if you find yourself getting a bit sprung or triggered by any of this work, remember to come back to that neutral place. Look around, and if you can, engage your neck to look around, because that also gets us out of a fight, flight, freeze response.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you again for your time and for sharing so generously. Is there anything else you want to share with people about your offers, your current work—anything else you want people to know about what you're doing in your business?
Helen Tremethick: Thank you so much for inviting me, Becky. Absolutely. I mentioned earlier the Love and Badassery Motorcycle Club. We meet every other week for hot seat sessions, and there’s a 24/7 HQ you can access with all sorts of courses and prompts to help you figure out who your ideal client is or how to find your brand voice. We also have guidelines and templates for copywriting your website. The hot seat sessions are a place where you can bring everything—your business owner stuff, but also your personal life stuff. We also do quarterly planning and have guest experts in the summer. It's a really beautiful space to hang out during the adventure that is your entrepreneurial life.
So, that’s the Love and Badassery Motorcycle Club, and you can find all the details at HelenTremethick.com/club. You can also reach out to me anytime. We can hop on a call—you can do that on Instagram or Facebook, or just use the contact form on my website. Again, Helen Tremethick everywhere. Otherwise, thank you, Becky, for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
Becky Mollenkamp: And again, that was Helen Tremethick—HelenTremethick.com. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Please go and subscribe to her newsletter, follow her on all the socials, check out her website, and thank you again for listening to this audio series. Our next episode will drop in your private podcast feed tomorrow.