Live, work, and travel as a professional permaculture designer and teacher.
Designing land that heals. Teaching on your own terms. Traveling to projects that need you, building an income and a life around work that actually matters. That life is closer than you think — and this is the shortcut to it.
This page is a training, not a pitch. Read it and you’ll understand what actually separates a paid designer from a hobbyist — whether or not you ever work with us.
Maybe you already know how to build. You can walk a piece of land and see what it wants — where the water should go, where the trees belong, how it could all fit together. You’ve got it in your head. You’re just still stuck in a job that has nothing to do with any of it.
Or maybe you’re not there yet, but you can feel it pulling you.
Either way, here’s what usually happens next. People try to teach themselves the whole thing. They spend years reading, experimenting, failing, second-guessing, cobbling together software they half-understand, wondering if anyone would ever pay them. Some get there. Most burn out first. I know, because I did it the long way, and it nearly broke me.
This is the short way.
When you design in a community of other designers, with a proven tech stack, with formats that already work, and with a team checking your decisions — you skip the decade of trial and error. What would take you ten years alone, you can do in a fraction of the time.
That’s the whole offer. Not information — a massive shortcut to the life you can already picture: designing land that heals, teaching what you know, and getting paid to travel to the projects that need you.
For someone with the right foundation, joining is enough to do all of it. And if there are parts you want to go deeper on in person, that door’s open too.
How ordinary people are building real design careers from regenerated land — and how you can too.
Tell someone you want to design regenerative land for a living and you’ll hear one of two things.
Nobody actually pays for that. Or, sure, you can teach a course I guess.
Both are wrong, and the second one is the trap that keeps good designers broke. Because most people who try to earn from this work assume teaching is the whole business. So they build a course, sell a few seats, and wonder why it doesn’t add up to a living.
Here’s what’s actually true. Regenerative design is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world right now. The demand is real and it’s climbing — landowners who want their property to produce, communities rebuilding their food systems, degraded farms that need a plan and a hand to carry it out. People need this work. They will pay for it.
But you don’t get paid the way you think. You get paid by building a proper ladder of services — from small entry offers up to full design and implementation — with a real strategy for attracting the right clients. Courses and events aren’t the business. They’re the top of the funnel. They’re how people find you. And while you run them, you’re transforming real land, which becomes the proof that brings the next client.
That’s the part nobody teaches. Everyone teaches you to design. A few teach you to teach. Almost no one shows you the actual machine — the services, the ladder, the client strategy — that turns the skill into a life you can live on. That’s what this page is about.
You can already picture it.
Land coming back to life. Work that means something. Out of the rat race, off someone else’s clock, building things that outlast you.
You can see what it should look like. That’s not your problem. Your problem is the gap between seeing it and doing it — and it’s usually made of four things:
- How do I actually turn this into a career that pays?
- How do I quit the rat race without going back to school for years first?
- I can picture the design, but I don’t know how to use the software.
- And honestly — who am I to charge people for this? I don’t have the confidence yet.
Every one of those is real, and every one of them is solvable. Not with more theory — with a system that takes you from where you are to your first paid, professional-grade design, and then keeps going until you’ve built something of your own. Here’s how it works.
What separates someone who earns a living from someone who doesn’t
There’s a myth that the paid designers are just the ones who know the most. It isn’t true, and believing it will keep you studying forever instead of earning. Four things separate them. Only one is about design.
They can produce a real design, not a poster.
A hobbyist makes a pretty concept sketch. A designer produces a masterplan a client can build from — sequenced correctly, costed, phased, with the water figured out before the trees. That’s a craft with a method, and it’s learnable.
They have proof.
A client hires you because they can see what you’ve done. The hobbyist’s problem is circular and it’s the single biggest thing stopping you: no clients without a portfolio, no portfolio without clients. Break that loop and you’re working. Stay stuck in it and you never start.
They have a ladder of services, not one price.
This is the piece almost nobody understands. You don’t sell “a design” for one number and hope. You build a range — a paid site assessment, a consultation, a full masterplan, implementation support, ongoing coaching. Small offers bring people in. Big offers are where the income is. A single price is a wall; a ladder is a doorway people walk through at their own pace.
They know how to attract clients.
Here’s the part that surprises people: your courses and your events are not a separate teaching business. They’re your client-attraction engine. You run a workshop, people meet you, they see how you think, and some become design clients. You transform real land as you go, and that becomes the proof that fills the top of the ladder. Teaching and designing aren’t two careers — they’re one machine, feeding itself.
Notice what’s not on that list: being an expert in everything. You need to design to a professional standard, have something to show, price it as a ladder, and know how to bring people in. Everything else you learn on the job — the same way every working designer did.
If you’re still reading, you’re holding at least one of these
“There’s no money in it, unless you teach.”
The field is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and the people earning nothing aren’t earning nothing because the work has no value. They’re earning nothing because they never built a ladder of services or a way to attract clients — they made one course and called it a business. The demand is real and climbing. What’s scarce isn’t the work. It’s designers who know how to package and sell it.
“I’m not experienced enough.”
Nobody is, at the start. Mike Barnhart had no design experience at all when he began — he’s now chief designer on a major regenerative project in Mexico with a full client pipeline. Gabriel joined with no background and has bought, designed and funded his own farm. Experience isn’t the entry requirement. It’s the output.
“It only works in places like Guatemala.”
We’ve designed and taught across Ireland, Texas, West Virginia, India, South Africa and Jamaica. The design method doesn’t change with the climate. The species and the water strategy do — and reading those correctly for a new site is exactly the professional skill you’re here to build.
I came up through NGO work — food sovereignty, community projects, coffee and cacao and cattle across Guatemala.
Then I went independent. Designer and project manager, on everything from sugarcane-land restoration to eco-community masterplans. I built the farm, the restaurant, the guesthouse, the design practice. From the outside it looked like exactly the career you’re trying to build.
Then I fell apart. Not because I didn’t understand ecology — I understood it fine. Because I never learned to run it. I couldn’t say no, I never built an accounting system, I never wrote a real budget. I was a good designer and a terrible manager of my own business, and the second one nearly cost me the first.
I rebuilt with different systems. And I realised the thing that stops people making a living from this work is almost never the design. It’s everything around the design that nobody teaches.
So that’s what we teach. The craft to a professional standard, and the business that lets you actually live from it. Both. Because one without the other is how you end up like I did.
How you go from zero to paid
So what does the shortcut actually look like? Here’s the whole path, laid out. Not the theory — the real sequence that turns what you know into a living. Each step earns the next, and none of it is guesswork, because we’ve walked hundreds of people down it. This is the decade of trial and error, compressed into a route you can follow.
Your first professional design, in three months. Peer-reviewed.
You’ll produce a real, professional-grade design within three months of starting. And here’s the part that dissolves the confidence problem: every design you deliver is peer-reviewed by our team. Your clients know that every decision you make has been checked by CreaSol. You’re not selling them your inexperience — you’re selling them a design backed by ours, built since 2008. That’s how you charge with a straight face on day one.
Offer services that blow clients away.
Now you have things to sell. Site analysis and mapping — you show up and read their land in a way they’ve never seen. Reports that make their jaw drop. Then the peer-reviewed masterplan itself. This is a ladder of services, from a small paid entry offer up to the full design, so a client can start small and climb. You’re giving them an easy first yes.
Transform the land with a course. (This is the secret sauce.)
The move nobody else teaches. Instead of hiring labour to implement the design, you run it as a course — your own Tony Robbins event, on your client’s land. It’s a lead magnet that fills your pipeline with future clients. It brings the whole community together. And it solves the landowner’s single biggest problem — labour — by turning implementation into a paid teaching event. One move that markets you, funds you, and gets the work done at the same time.
Build your team and your lead engine.
Once the work is flowing, you stop doing everything yourself. We teach you social-media lead generation and how to automate it, how to organise and promote events that fill your calendar, and how to build your ecosystem — a designer, a teacher, a hub space, a project manager. You go from freelancer to something that runs.
Build your own eco-community, funded by the work.
The biggest secret of all: a real eco-community can be built anywhere — you don’t need to buy hundreds of hectares first. You design one place for someone with the means to transform it. You host an educational event there, teaching them and their circle how to install it. You fill your book with clients, make content as you go, structure the deals properly — and you get paid, from early on, to build toward your own eco-community. On your clients’ sites you become the living proof of what’s possible.
And if you need more hands-on training along the way — you can come and live with us for a stretch during your studies, step into a team-leader role in our volunteer program, and see exactly how we run every part of this up close. For a lot of designers, it’s where it all clicks.
Recommended level: Designer — the tier built around doing the work, not just watching it.
All of that rests on real skill
A full Permaculture Design Certificate, self-paced, as your foundation. Our complete professional workflow — the same six-step process we use on paid client projects: vision, analysis, sectors, zones, masterplan, patch designs. GIS-level mapping and AI-assisted design methodology — exactly where “I don’t know the software” gets solved, because we teach you the tools, with you, not leave you to figure them out. And peer review on every design, so your standard is our standard from your very first project.
The professional work you learn to produce — from your very first project.
You will design real land, for real people, inside the program.
That’s not a bonus. It’s the whole point.
Half of every cohort are landowners who came to design their own property. The other half — you — are training to do this professionally, and you need real sites to work on.
So you get them. Real ground, real owners, real constraints, real budgets, under our supervision. That is the portfolio that ends the “no clients without experience, no experience without clients” trap that keeps everyone else stuck.
No other permaculture training can offer this, because no other program has both halves of the room. It’s the reason this works.
Don’t apply if…
- You want a certificate to hang on the wall. You’ll earn one, but if that’s the goal there are courses at a tenth of the price. Take one.
- You want to design as a hobby, for your own land only. That’s our other program — Design Your Land — and it’s a better fit and often costs less.
- You believe charging for regenerative work is somehow impure. I understand the instinct and I’ve watched it bankrupt good people. If you can’t get past it, this isn’t the program.
- You want guaranteed income by a certain date. Nobody can honestly promise that. What we can promise is that you’ll have the skill, the portfolio, and the business tools. What you do with them is yours.
Here’s the honest arithmetic on the investment.
A single professional design project bills anywhere from a few thousand dollars to well over ten. Designers who’ve built a practice charge by the day, and those day rates climb into four figures once you have work to show.
You don’t need many projects a year for this to be the best money you ever spent on your own earning power. And unlike a certificate, which sits on a wall, a real skill and a real portfolio keep paying you for the rest of your working life, on every piece of land you ever touch.
That’s the difference between buying a course and buying a career. One is an expense. The other is the thing that generates income for as long as you choose to work.
Everyone gets the same core program: the full PDC, our complete professional workflow, the AI-assisted mapping, the business and marketing playbooks, weekly group coaching, and the community. The only thing that changes between levels is how much personal support — and how much of our team — you get alongside it.
Designer
$3,000 paid in full
For the motivated person who’s excited to learn by doing. You produce your own professional-level masterplan and implementation strategy, with the full workflow training and weekly group coaching behind you.
This is the level most career designers start at.
Landowner
$5,400 paid in full
Everything in Designer, plus personal support while you design a real project. Professional GIS-level mapping and site analysis, five one-to-one mentorship sessions, a personalised masterplan review, and priority support from our design team through implementation planning.
Built for someone with ground of their own, or a larger project that wants our eyes on it.
Project
For someone building something extraordinary — a flagship farm, a community hub, a regenerative school. This isn’t a package, it’s a partnership. We come to your land, design it with you and your team on site, return through the life of the project, make content about the build, and plan and produce your launch event with you. You finish not just with the land designed, but known for it.
Every project is different, so we build the scope, and the price, with you.
Payment plans and partial scholarships are available at every level. If you’re serious and the money’s the only obstacle, tell us on the call. We’ll find a way.
This isn’t a checkout.
Tell us where you’re coming from and what you want to build, we’ll get on a call, and we’ll tell you honestly whether this is the right fit. Sometimes it isn’t, and we’ll say so.
Programs start at $3,000, with three levels of support depending on how much of our team you want alongside you (the levels are above). Partial scholarships and payment plans are available. If you’re serious, we’ll find a way to make it work.
If it’s genuinely out of reach right now — start with our community and our YouTube channel. We share a huge amount for free. Learn there, come back when you’re ready.
Our promise: not satisfied at the end of four months? Full refund. Do the work, and if it wasn’t what you expected, you get your money back.
Start your application
Tell us about you and your project. We’ll be in touch to schedule your call.
No experience in. A career out.
Five people, the full range: from no experience to professional, and an established pro who was still transformed.
“Since joining the program I’ve relocated to Mexico, where I’m chief designer on a major regenerative design and farm-to-table restaurant. I’ve already got a pipeline full of clients and I’m genuinely excited for what’s next. I had no design experience before I started.”
An established professional who took the course, visited us in Guatemala, and has since completely reinvented his approach and his business.
Joined with no previous experience. Has now bought, designed, and secured funding for his own regenerative farm.
Built her own program teaching permaculture to kids in schools — the courses-as-client-engine idea in action.
Former student, now a CreaSol partner. Took Neal’s PDC, then brought him to Austin to implement syntropic agroforestry systems.
“Before working with Neal, we spent years spinning our wheels without a clear direction. Neal helped us define our vision, create a practical roadmap, and move from ideas into implementation. His experience and guidance accelerated our progress dramatically. We would not be where we are today without him.”
Everyone teaches you to design. We teach you to live from it.
Neal · CreaSol Permaculture · Lake Atitlán, Guatemala