Mangrove Ventures has been a really interesting and valuable little gem that was born out of a process that seems to create great businesses time and time again… We needed it ourselves
The core of the thinking was born out of the 10 continuous and 15 sporadic years of being in business across Australia and the UK, with all the failures, problems, trauma, court cases, getting ripped off by every race, creed, and religion, having your wife break her ankle on your project and while being investigated instead of supported having your business partner rip you off siphoning money out of the business and somehow putting you in debt to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars to the countries largest organised crime organisation that you didn’t borrow money from in the first place and after paying that back without dying somehow, owing the ATO nearly a million dollars….. whoooosaaaaaa, sorry… I digress… and that was 8 years ago… and may have contributed a little to the alcoholism
From that extensive pool of real life, deep in the trenches, bled for, wisdom…
We then applied the same regenerative development frameworks we use on all the projects as a discovery process that reveals more about your own business to you in 5 minutes than you realised in 5 years (I did it to myself with Smart Green Group first)
After testing on SGG we boiled it down to a few simple, repeatable principles to use this as a handy resource for us and our consortium partners:
Start with the essence of the Founder/Core Team
Wrap a business around that
Structure how it eats
Develop it into a home for the team, from a house
Bring it into our pack or set it free into the world
We then used it on Regen Places Network, and within 5 minutes, we had a new structure around resourcing revenue
We used it on ABCr an initiative in Coalition of Everyone, and it highlighted how it could operate as a business
I think it was a weekend then, and with the extra time, I used the framework on itself just being curious and discovered that it could actually be spun out as a business. This is when I really sat up and took stock… it literally created itself, anyone who knows me knows Im fascinated by these little living idea organisms that seem to want to live, like the flywheel model, they beg to have a chance to express themselves in the world
First iteration of Mangrove that we need to update
From there, I was just looking for an excuse to use it on our consortium partners’ businesses and ideas
At that point, I turned to the consortium as the project and ran that through the early version of Mangrove, which then helped me see the potential of the group, which fed into the ecosystem Miro, which then once mapped, led me to the flywheel for us to generate a repeating stream of revenue through regen projects through time as the ground-up framing of a bioregional regenerative economy… Head Blown, looking back at it now
The last question we had to deal with was literally just resolved a few hours ago after my last post on Ecosystem of Value Reciprocity, which is SGG’s way of valuing work and offers with clients
I told the team how, moving forward, SGG would be a transparent organisation, meaning we share openly how we operate and hide nothing but privacy items on the client side or anything that needs particular respect. The main point is how good it felt to be open and honest, and share this amazing work with everyone without that scarcity lens of what others will take advantage of… Take it, at the risk of you creating a better world and getting the glory I’ll not only take that bet, but slow clap you up to accept the trophy
Hoarding wealth, resources, information, know how, etc etc is not going to get us where we need to be as a species so we want to work towards flipping the narrative and to do that, we have to walk the talk
NOTE: this doesn’t include things like the open-sharing of knowledge/wisdom learning schools that need to train the students in the process to understand the contnet and not bastardise the work.
As an Example, if you want to use the frameworks above they are not only useless without the right training but could lead you in the wrong direction so well worth joining the next TRP cohort from Regenesis Institute to leverage all this. No one gets kickbacks for referals to the scool either we just all know how life changing it is and I personally what more people in the field that talk the same language as us
So with that, the team are not only happy but excited to make that decision to trade openly with the market and update freely on what regenerative business development looks like to us… as we grow in depth, knowledge, and wisdom we will share it openly with the hope it evolves the regen business sector quicker, so we can all ride the feedback loop together on where this civilisation is wanting to grow
Next steps…
Mangrove Ventures will be looking for 3-5 regen startups that would be interested in running through the program, which we will then do case studies on, promote, and iterate the next level of Mangrove that evolves from that Doing/Being
This month will be all about building out the Bioregional Institute, so reach out to put your name down for a 1st of June start if interested
Humble little beginnings Mangrove… The Regen Business Nursury
Show your work - I really believe in this kind of transparency. And agree that initiation remains a core need for facilitating regen work with regen frameworks. Like any good magic, first students learn, wait, observe, wait, then apply. IncubatorNursery works well to support the in between states.
I missed this post about Mangrove. I'm in a startup, I'll do your program - that'd be interesting