Sacred Growth Pt. 2: The 3 Types of Forest-Style Business Systems

Every food forest falls into one of three types — and so does every business. In part two of Sacred Growth, Sam walks through the Oak Savanna, the Recovering Forest, and the Mature Forest: three distinct ecosystem models, each with a completely different rhythm, workload, and marketing strategy.

Using your answers from part one's quiz, you'll figure out which type actually matches your goals, your energy, and the kind of business you want to be running three years from now — not the one that looks best from the outside.

Missed part one? Go back and take the quiz first — you'll need it for this episode. Want the whole series right now instead of waiting? Get instant access to all four videos, the workbook, quiz, and transcripts, completely free: https://thedirtyalchemy.com/forest

Open until July 29 at 11:59pm! The Regenerative Business Ecosystem is my membership for values-led entrepreneurs building businesses that regenerate people, planet, and profit. Learn more & enroll while you can here: https://learn.thedirtyalchemy.com/ecosystem-2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Okay, welcome back to this special Sacred Growth series on the Regenerative Business Podcast. This is the Food Force Framework for Online Business Success. We're doing this four-part series here, and this is episode two of four. And here we get into the three types of business ecosystems, and you'll find out which one is actually yours. If you did not do the quiz from the last episode, please go and do that, or else this will not make sense to you. This episode is not gonna make sense. I personally think the best way to find that is going to thedirtyalchemy.com/slash forest and opting in for the full sacred growth video series that gives you the full workbook, the quiz, the transcripts. Everything is waiting for you there. It is completely free. And with that, let's get into it. In the world of online business, through an industrial revolution lens, you set your business up like a factory, and put money into the Facebook ads machine and it spits out views or purchases. Input people into your funnel and it spits out buyers. You see your business as a machine, which makes it so you and your team are cogs in the machine. There are right and wrong ways to do business in this factory model. So you follow a formula given to you and make everything as efficient as possible. Let's compare this with nature systems. Ecosystems. Look around the world and there are 431 different ecosystems that are responsive to the other ecosystems that are around them. There is no one right way because the rightness of one system depends on the climate, the geography, the species that wander in and out. If we drill in a bit and focus on the forest-like systems that are highly abundant and self-reliant, you find three types. The oak savanna, the recovering forest, and the mature forest. The key piece in all of these is what? Trees. Mature trees that create stability for the long term. Along with trees are other perennial plants. A perennial plant is a plant that continues growing year after year versus an annual plant which needs to be replanted by you year after year. An example of a perennial plant, what we eat includes artichoke and asparagus. These vegetables can be planted once and year after year they bloom and grow food themselves. Trees obviously fall into this category too: apple trees, hazelnut trees. Once you plant the tree and it grows a few years to maturity, it will produce a ridiculous amount of fruit every single year. Compare this with what we consider standard food crops. Annual plants like lettuce and carrots. With annual plants, you harvest the plant. You pick the head of lettuce or the carrot and the plant dies. You wait through the fall and winter, and in spring you have to work again to prepare the soil and plant seeds to grow the plants again. When you center a system around perennial plants, you do less work. Not only do you not have to plant again each year, but perennial plants fertilize the land for you. All those leaves that a tree drops in the fall, when you don't wastefully rake it up and set it out on the curb, it protects the ground and decomposes to create more fertility. With this shedding of leaves, with this death, comes life. In our forest-like systems, we center around trees and perennial plants, the plants that do most of the work for us once they're established. And from there, we can plant as many annual plants as we like. I mean, carrots are my favorite vegetable. But we do so with the full awareness that those plants require human work. They don't take care of themselves. So, back to our three types of food forests: the oak savannah, the recovering forest, and the mature forest. So let's start with the oak savanna. With the oak savanna, there are trees, but there's quite a bit of open land between the mature trees. There's a lot of grassland with trees and shrubs interspersed within. The open tracts of land allow for lots of herbaceous crops, ground cover, annual plants, all because the sun reaches down to the ground in abundance. I'm going to go through each of these three before bringing them back to your business. So one second, please. The Oak Savannah provides the most variety of crops because it's open canopy. But it also requires the most maintenance because it is the least centered around our big trees. With this system, you will need to be in there on a weekly, if not daily, basis to maintain it and tend to it. It produces a ton of crops and variety, but requires the most human intervention. So, on to our second one, the recovering forest. In the recovering forest, there are clusters of larger trees that provide a partial canopy with the sun reaching to the ground. In those spaces, shrubs and some annual plants can grow. In earthly ecosystems, these often exist after wildfires and eventually become a mature forest. A recovering forest provides an abundance of perennial crops and also some annual crops, but it has less variety than the oak savanna, but requires less work. It does still require work, but you don't have to be in the thick of it every day. The mature forest is the most obvious. With the mature forest, when you step into it, it is dark with life. A full canopy of trees shade the ground, preventing sunlight from hitting the soil. The mature forest takes time to establish. And the focus here is really on those big trees, with some shade tolerant plants growing below. It's excellent for growing fruits and nuts and even lumber and specific shade-tolerant understory plants like currants. But it doesn't have the variety that the oak savannah does. The trade-off, of course, is that it is low maintenance. Once it's established, it is pretty much taking care of itself, except during harvest time. Okay, so what the heck does this mean for your business? If you remember our quiz from the last video, you know that you have your own preferences and inclinations, and your mission and vision of the business impacts its future. The size of the organism that you are creating and the amount of energy that you want to put into your business on a weekly or monthly basis leads to different business designs or food forest types. With the Oak Savannah, you have variety. You get to show up with your full creativity and flow with your desires for your business. Maybe that's working with people one-on-one and completely customizing your work for them. It's not super replicable. It's bespoke. Or maybe you pump out new workshops and trainings and courses every year. You get to follow your excitement, but that also means you have to create new marketing, operations, messaging, all the things for each new thing that you put out. With the Oak Savannah, you're the center of your business. So you have to be present in your business every week to guide the vision. In terms of marketing, you rely on lean platforms like Instagram that you can easily pivot on. On the other side of this, with the mature forest, you have externalized most of your expertise and genius to be housed in your business. They are growing like large canopy trees. Your business stores all of that power so that it is self-regulating and self-reliant. You have one or maybe a few established offers that have created a name for themselves and that can take your people on a set journey versus being customized. Your branding is recognizable and consistent over the years. You're niche down so that your messaging is consistent and focused. You establish long-term marketing channels that work for you, like search engine optimization, paid ads, content marketing. You know exactly how people find you. You have a channel for them to come into your ecosystem and then go deeper with you. In between those two, we have our recovering forest. There is some play between the two. You will have a few established offerings that allow you to serve your people one to many that you have ran a few times and maybe even have them selling Evergreen. Your business has a clear mission and a clear group of people or purpose you serve, but you still flow with your excitement around it, maybe offering different workshops from time to time, creating courses on a whim from divine inspiration, and maybe you still like the creative control of going on social media to share and connect. If you answered mostly A's in the quiz yesterday or in the last video, you most likely will thrive setting up your business like an Oak Savannah style system. If you answered mainly B's, recovering forest, if you answered mainly C's, then you'd most likely love having your business set up mature forest style. I will put the quiz again below if you forgot to do it, or if a friend forwarded this to you and you want the transcripts, workbooks, and all the things, head on over to thedirtyalchemy.com slash forest to opt in to this whole series. So obviously, quizzes are oversimplifications. So if you don't fit into a certain box or you're like, I know I want a mature forest or an oak savanna, even if my quiz results say otherwise, please run with it. Remember that uh my podcast from last week, we had three phases of building a regenerative system. The first one being the setup or installation stage. No matter how hands-off you want your business to be, it will require your hands-on in the business in the beginning. Or increase human intervention in any stage in which you're trying to expand. That doesn't mean you're screwed or that it's not working or that you'll be stuck grinding forever. It's simply a part of the process and a phase that will pass, assuming you're intentionally designing a regenerative business system. So, how exciting is this? You now have a clear type of food forest style system to install in your business. Make sure you comment below which one you are so we can see and celebrate you. And in the next video, we will dive into the seven layers of every food forest that you want to establish in your business. So head to the next video now or schedule some time tomorrow or this weekend to do that.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Okay, that is a wrap for episode two of Sacred Growth. Make sure you comment or journal which type you actually landed on, whether you are Oak Savannah or Recovering Forest or Mature Forest. I really love to hear about this. And our next episode, episode three of Sacred Growth, will come out in a few days. But you do not have to wait. The entire series, plus the workbook transcripts, videos are all ready for you at thedirtyalchemy.comslash forest. And I will see you in episode three for the seven layers every regenerative business needs.