Sacred Growth Pt. 3: The 7 Layers Every Regenerative Business Needs

A real food forest isn't one plant — it's seven layers, all working together. In part three of Sacred Growth, Sam maps those same seven layers onto your business: from your core offers (the tall trees) all the way down to your team (the vines that touch everything).

You'll learn what each layer's job actually is — which ones are built for stability, which are built for novelty, and why trying to make one layer do another layer's work is usually where things start to feel off. By the end, you'll have a clear picture of what's thriving in your business ecosystem, and what's missing.

Grab the companion workbook to fill in your own seven layers as you listen. Want the entire series right now? 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

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Welcome back to this four-part series called Sacred Growth: The Food Forest Framework for Online Business Success here on the Regenerative Business Podcast. This is episode three out of the four, where I walk you through the seven layers every regenerative business needs from your core offers all the way to your team and how that fits into the natural framework. If you missed episode one and two, or you want the full workbook and quiz that goes with this, everything is waiting for you at thedirtyalchemy.com slash forest. It is completely free. Okay, let's dive in. When you look at a forest, it's easy to see a wall of green, but as you spend more time with it, your eyes start to recognize the different layers, different species, different shades. Whether you decided on an oak savannah, recovering forest, or mature forest from the last video, each of these have seven layers in them that work together and play their part in the fertility of the overall system. Fertility here I'm using as the aliveness and regeneration of the whole. Your creativity, abundance, impact. If you read my book, Regenerative Business, then you may remember that one of nature's principles is biodiversity. Biodiversity creates a strong, resilient system, and homogeneity causes weakness. A forest isn't just a monocrop of one type of tree and nothing else, it is a diverse network of many plants, trees, species that are collaborating. In a traditional food forest, there are seven layers that are all working together. And by layers, I meant talking actual physical layers that are taking up 3D space. So instead of acres and acres of corn taking up only one grassland layer, there are seven stacking layers that are cohabitating in one space. So first, we have the tall tree or canopy layer. This layer provides large quantities of food and shade. These are your large fruit and nut trees as well as support trees that help improve your soil, such as nitrogen fixers like alders. The second layer is the subcannopy or large shrub layer. This is commonly fruit trees like apples. Our third layer is the shrub layer. Here we have shrubs like raspberries, blueberries, and also medicinal plants. This layer provides a lot of nutrition and healing. It also provides nesting space for wildlife and increases biodiversity. Our fourth layer is the herbaceous layer. This is when we start adding in more traditional food crops like vegetables and flowers for beneficial insects. This layer dies back in winter if you have a cold winter and brings a ton of variety and where you can lay on things you love and novelty. If you remember from the last video, our oak savanna is for those who want more of this layer. This playful novelty that requires a repeated energy investment, for example, doing a one-off mini workshop just because you want to. Our fifth layer is our ground cover layer. The purpose here is to cover the ground and hold the soil in place so it doesn't wash or blow away in a storm. It also holds moisture in the ground so that you don't have to water as much. Think strawberries for eating, clover for teas, and also being able to be stepped on and acting like a living mulch to protect the soil below. The sixth layer is the root crops layer, which gives us grounding staples, potatoes, garlic, bulbs, onions, sunchokes. Our seventh layer is our final layer, and we have vining. Vines climb the woody plants and trees, and you can think of this layer as a ladder that connects all the other layers. Vining plants can grow all the way from the ground layer to the tops of the tree canopies. For each of these layers, we have an operational side and marketing side when we're doing the business side of this, kind of like plant growth versus plant pollinating and fruiting. For our tall trees, which are the piece we design around, we have our core offers, funnels, launches. I know that the words funnel and launch can give people hives, but it's the most straightforward way to describe them since people know what I'm talking about when I say them, so I'm leaving them in here. Please sub in Evergreen Ecosystem for Funnel and Sacred Attraction Formula for Launch if that feels better for you. There's this concept in regenerative agriculture called companion planting, where one plant takes certain nutrients from the soil while the other provides shade or a thick trunk for a viny plant to grow up. So they work together like companions. You can think of our food forest funnel like this, where you're intentionally planting offers and systems to work together harmoniously without your human intervention. Our tall trees give us a clear way to deliver epic transformation and to deepen the relationship with our core people. In a mature forest, that means your entire business is focused on this. Next, our sub canopy adds in another layer of promotions and offers that reinforces our main canopy. Maybe that looks like doing a flash sale on your birthday. The shrub layer is the all-important community element of business. Communities come in so many shapes and sizes. You can create community through a blog or on your social media or in a free Facebook group, a paid membership, or your podcast. This is a place where people want to visit and return to to be seen. With the herbaceous layer, we have all the novelty that my oak savannah people crave. You do all the things, courses, workshops, physical products, more courses, webinars, whatever. And you have to tend to it and replant it and feed it. You work the land for your harvests. With our ground cover layer, we are holding moisture and fertility in the soil. On a personal level, this is our magical practices and our mindset. On a business systems level, that is client-attracting things like ads and SEO, right? We're holding moisture in. Our root layer works below the surface. It's the systems and operations we have in place that when done right, we plant once and it continues to feed us for years. And finally, our vines. Touching every layer of our business is the people that support the business's mission. The team. Our vines, our team, maximize production within the area of planting. They help us make the most of the space and time within the system we have created. If you've been on the regenerative business sales page, then you know that there are more things at play than just the food forest layers, other species and elements. For example, we have to acknowledge the flowers that each of these layers put out. This echoes how our branding and messaging is woven into each layer of our business. Within a mature forest, we have super consistent branding and marketing since we're centralized around one or a few core offers, versus our oak savannah that has all sorts of crops and plants and flowers. So we get to play and develop different messaging and branding across the business. There are also important elements like sun and water that our forest needs. These are the people or the visibility needed for your ecosystem to thrive. Because if you don't have people interacting with your business, it shrivels up and die. As you, the gardener, keep pouring your energy into it. It needs that sun and water. So head on over to the info page if you want to play with our interactive forest image with hot spots explaining the different pieces at play in your business ecosystem. So now you have your quiz results, you have chosen your food forest type and the seven layers to fill. So take out your journal or download this video's workbook to fill in your seven layers and identify what may be lacking in your business now. Make sure you comment below with what you're filling into each of these layers so you can share your great ideas with all of us to glean from. And then after that, head to the next video to address arguably the most important part of your ecosystem, which is the climate and soil quality, aka what energy and programming you're seeding your forest with. Okay, that's it for episode three of Sacred Growth. Pull up your workbook and fill in what's in each of your seven layers right now. Even a rough pass helps. You can grab your own workbook at thedirtyalchemy.com slash forest, along with all the videos, all the transcripts. You can also jump right into video four of this series and not have to wait a few more days before the next episode drops. And then I will see you in a few days for episode four, where we go into the energetic side of building a business, your mindset, your subconscious, and yes, a little magic.