bittersweet announcement: cassie's departure from permies - i need to find someone to replace me

Hi everyone,

I have butterflies in my stomach as I write this but I am posting this to let you all know that I will be stepping down from working at permies full time. I spoke to paul about it this morning, and now I am letting you, the amazing community I've been a part of for the last year and a half, know too.

Just a little note: my departure has nothing to do with paul or anything to do with permies, I have just been given an AMAZING opportunity that I need to gulp up and zero in on right now. I can't give all the dirty details just yet, but it's in its final stages of launch planning so I need to focus the bulk of my attention on that project right now.

I am obviously not just completely jumping ship, I will be around full time for the next two weeks and will continue to help out semi part time after that, but I will be spending the large majority of my time on my new project.

But I do want to stay around and try to be involved with this permies community as much as possible!

Anyway, this is very bittersweet for me because I love working with all of you and doing everything I can to move permies forward, but the new project is a huge career and life opportunity for me that I am extremely excited about! (it's very permaculture heavy, that's all I'll say )

I am SOOOO thankful for everything Paul and all of you permies have taught me in the past year and a half and I am sincerely grateful for being able to partake in this wild experience.



_________


So yeah, the next step is to find someone to replace me to help paul with, well everything.

I have been thinking about how to describe this position to people and it is super hard because it is SO different every day. Working with paul is like riding a roller coaster that is seriously scary sometimes but thrilling and exciting all at the same time!

In another thread I described my position as "i'm cassie, aka the smiley one, aka blondie mcgee, aka permaculture elf, aka dailyish email writer, aka paul's assistant, aka permies marketer, aka wheaton empire builder, aka development coordinator, aka amateur web tinkerer, aka permaculture cheer-inducer extraordinaire"

I think that does a pretty darn good job of summing up the main priorities of this position. But there are so many other little things that you end up doing as well.

I think this position would be best suited for someone who is very tough minded, independent, and hard working. Paul is very productive person and so whoever takes it over has to be aware of that and be able to keep up with him. That is VERY hard, I will personally say.

But for someone genuinely invested in moving the world of permaculture forward, it's amazing.

Paul told me to mention something about how it's important to know you'll be working for an overbearing tyrannical ruler, that being him, so there's that.

But the amount of freedom you have to be creative is HUGE.

Important details:

- Your BIGGEST Priority for this position: GROW THE EMPIRE EXPONENTIALLY (FINANCIALLY AND GENERALLY)

- The title of this position is: Whatever The Heck You Want It To Be

- The starting pay for this position is: Shitty Pay (paul's words)

- This position has a LOT of opportunity for financial growth though. (It worked that way with me, I can vouch for that.) Paul can give you more details about how that would work. Or he can post on this thread and tell me to spell it out.

- You can do this job from anywhere in the world that has internet.

If you are interested, send a resume and a little (paragraph or two) cover letter to cassie AT richsoil DOT com AND paul AT richsoil DOT com. Please don't send separate emails, just send one to both of our email addresses.

Probably worth noting that Cassie worked for me for more than a year and a half and she more than doubled her pay by working hard to improve income streams for the Empire.

Good for you! Best to both of you!

Congratulations, Cassie! Can't wait to hear more about what you're up to next! You'll be missed...

Paul I don't think she could be replaced.
Cassie good luck with your journey.
you will be missed by us all.

Congratulations Cassie and a huge thank you for all you have done for permies and promoting the movement. Best of luck with your new venture, may it be everything you ever wished for and much more!

Happy moves Cassie, thanks for your great welcome to the forum a year back as a rookie author

Thank you all so much for the incredibly kind words.

I think my new project is something you all can be involved in and follow so you will definitely be hearing from me.

We've had about 4 people send in resumes this morning, so that makes me hopeful that we will find someone great to take my place in a formal way though.

Cassie, I wish you the best with your new activities.
Of course nobody can replace you
I hope there's someone who can learn to do what you did for permies

All the best with your new venture Cassie. I've very much enjoyed the humour and light you brought to the dailyish email.

Hi y'all! I would love to take up this challenge. Sill in limbo over here but at ANY MOMENT I might just move to another location. I've always been in love with Montana, and still haven't visited there... yet. But I love the whole permies thing, and would like to give it a go in an area where people speak ENGLISH (I live in French Quebec). Land is cheap here, people tailgate you on the road and no one speaks to each other because we are always unsure if they are English or French! So the English crowd competes for the few available English contracts with local folk, while the French do the same, provincially. So its like a pocket of resentment within a bigger pocket of resentment, within an evn bigger one (the US, and the rest of the world)! Can you feel the tension?

Other than that, though, the landscape, water, trees and animals are just wonderful. If any of you are around in the east come on up for a drive, its beautiful here in the summer time! The winter is cold as fuck, though. Alas, some folk really love winter.

Ciao!

I've been getting emails asking about more details about what all Cassie does.

I think there is a 20 page list of stuff for her to do. And I think that I could probably come up with 200 more pages of stuff.

Right now I think she spends about a third of each day responding to emails. I think most of those emails are pretty simple. People are asking questions and need to be directed to re-ask their question in the forum.

Some questions require a little bit more thought. I guess that's quite a few of them. They really can't be categorized well. Mostly it's about helping people individually.

Next we have big projects that are going to take months to complete and we have to chip away at them day by day.


Then there is the most important part: try to figure out how to improve our income streams to pay for all of the expenses for this site + projects at the lab. Find ways to sell DVDs and/or our digital content or the cards. Find ways to sell the things for which we get a big affiliate fee. Usually this is tied to another thing that we try to do which is develop good relationships with related websites.

Then there's the dailyish email and all of the social media stuff and trying to grow all of those as well as grow traffic to permies in general.

Cassie also arranges for speaking gigs with different entities. Or answering questions from the press, or trying to push information to the press. I think this is her favorite part because she gets to talk to a lot of superheroes in the permaculture world. I think this is the reason why she is leaving us. She has made so many excellent connections to the permaculture Biggs that an amazing opportunity has presented itself and drawing her away from here.

I think this is just the beginning of the list of the stuff that Cassie does. I guess that a quarter of her time is spend on wacky things that cannot be categorized.

All of these things add up to infecting more brains with permaculture and building the Empire.


Creative grammar and spelling brought to you by voice recognition software.

I think some good questions for the candidates would include:

How many podcasts have they listen to?

How many apples do they have?

How many posts have they written on the forums?

I bring this up because I do things in a much different way from other permaculture people. When working with other people and they're not familiar with those things there can be a fair amount of ramp time.



We have now received quite a few resumes, which is excellent!

I am toying with the idea of hiring more than one person to replace Cassie. And the first task would be to improve our income streams enough to cover their own pay.

paul wheaton wrote:Then there is the most important part: try to figure out how to improve our income streams to pay for all of the expenses for this site + projects at the lab. Find ways to sell DVDs and/or our digital content or the cards. Find ways to sell the things for which we get a big affiliate fee. Usually this is tied to another thing that we try to do which is develop good relationships with related websites.

I just want to reiterate that the cool thing about the ads, the DVDs, digital content, cards, affiliate things - anything we "sell," is that all of them are:

paul wheaton wrote:....infecting more brains with permaculture ...

Because the ads are from/for things permies would want to know about any way. And the other items are bricks to build a better world. Seriously epic stuff.

congratulations on the new project, Cassie! hope it leads to many great things. looking forward to hearing more about it!
and thanks for all your hard work!

It sounds like Cassie and Adrien will be going through all of the resumes tonight.

Sad to see you go Cassie, you're such a warm presence on the forums. Good luck on your new project!!

I emailed in my resume, hope it's not too late! Good luck to who ever gets the job.

Also on a side note, funny that this is happening around the same time - but I'm going to be visiting the lab very soon. I'll be buying my plane ticket and paying my gapper fee with my next paycheck. Not sure how long I'll stay for this visit but I'm thinking at least a week, maybe three. Maybe I could use some advice on how long I should stay? Anyway, I'll be emailing again for this once I pay the gapper fee.

Edit: OMG Burra gave me pie!! I am so genuinely stoked on that.

Is it really an "infection/ing" of brains, though?

Or is it more like a... grafting of minds, or a pruning; fertilizing, maybe?

Composting, watering, seeding, sprouting, mulching, etc.

Infecting sounds effective, true. But it also makes me think of puss. Fun, right?

Just being thorough.

Later dudes!

Just wanted to announce that we have officially hired two people to take on this position as of right now! We are super happy to announce Josh and Destiny will be joining the permies team.

We might be bringing on more people in the future, but for now these two are going to be taking over my position!

Welcommmeeee! (they are already long-time permies members, but welcome them anyways!)

Thanks Cassie!

I'm super excited to come on board to work for Paul's Empire. I have been following his work for years now. I will be making a post in the introductions forum later tonight with more information about myself and all that jazz.

Even though I've been around permies for a while there's still some stuff for me to learn so any help you guys can give is greatly appreciated to bring me up to speed as fast as possible.

Thank you so much Cassie, I could not be more excited to be moving into this role! Little bit of background on me then I suppose - currently (and soon to be formerly as we complete this transition), I work as a writer and content developer/marketer for a cyber security website. I've learned a lot about that industry on the fly as I've worked, but permaculture and sustainability is 100% where my heart is. I'm so thrilled to finally be making an income in a field that I'm truly passionate about.

As a kid I was always really troubled by the problems that plagued the world - I was still young and naive of course, but I did all kinds of volunteer work and activism, started clubs, did anything I could to make a difference. As an adult, the more I look at these problems, the more I see that we have to change ourselves if we're ever going to truly change anything. I honestly feel like permaculture and this entire movement is one of the best ways to make the world a better place. About 5 years ago, I had an epiphany - I didn't want to spend my whole life paying a mortgage on a house I hated. I didn't want to be dependent on grocery stores for food that was flown in from across the country. I didn't WANT to work until I was too old to stand, and then spend my retirement in an old folk's home because I was too old to finally enjoy myself. We stumbled across The Survival Podcast, and that led us to Permies, where we truly began pursuing a new way of life.

We were living in a terrible part of town in suburban southern Indiana, and after getting married, spent our honeymoon selling most of what we owned and moving across the country. Currently I live just a few hours east of Wheaton Labs, in the Little Belt Mountains of Central Montana. I rent a super old house in a super tiny town with my husband (who is responsible for me finding the Permies empire in the first place) and our boisterous one year old boy. We raise chickens and garden, but are pretty limited by the fact that we're renting as to what we can really do. Ultimately, our goal is to purchase our own parcel of land in this area and build our own off the grid Wofadi - we want to be as independent of 'the system' as possible. I hunt, fish, hike, snowboard, snowshoe - most of which while babywearing.

We've been out to the Lab twice - once for the hugelkultur workshop, and we stayed again for 3 days of the natural building workshop, where we made some great friends, built the composting water heater, and peeled a LOT of logs (apparently while I was 6 weeks pregnant - I attribute my vigorous permies exercise to the start of my healthy pregnancy). I still have a lot to learn about this topic, but I feel like I have a lot to give - I want to grow Paul's empire here and make this organization as successful as possible. The way I see it, the more successful and lucrative this site is, the further we can spread our message, and the wider our ripples will spread.

I'm here to innovate, market, and grow what you all have created here, and I could not be more honored to be a part of that process. I look forward to getting to know all of you, and helping to expand the incredible movement of change that is permaculture!

A big 'ol happy WELCOME to Josh and Destiny!!

And HUGE, grateful appreciation to Cassie for ALL that she has done and for hanging in there these last weeks to help with this transition!

Virtual pies to you all!

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:A big 'ol happy WELCOME to Josh and Destiny!!

And HUGE, grateful appreciation to Cassie for ALL that she has done and for hanging in there these last weeks to help with this transition!

Virtual pies to you all!

Thank you so much Joselyn! I can't wait until I can really start pumping up the streams for the empire. So excited!

Hi Everyone!!

I am the newest edition to the team and I couldn't be more excited!

My family (husband + 3 kids) live in Central Indiana . Our oldest 2 graduate high school this year and we plan on making some big moves - literally! It's been my dream to have my own farm since I was a little girl playing on my great grandparents' farm about 15 minutes from where we currently live. I completed my PDC with Geoff Lawton last spring and I have been reading/absorbing/learning as much as a can on my own.

We currently rent our house and are very limited on what we are allowed to do, but I have my own custom chicken coop and chicken rental business. It's a great way for me to introduce individuals and families to permaculture principles. I am also working with local big wigs to start a community garden to help get fresh fruits and veggies into our food pantries, provide access to healthy food choices and teach others how to grow their own food with permaculture principles.

It looks like we have a phenomenal team in place to spread the permaculture word and grow the Empire! I can't wait to get to know everyone better.

- Christina

Another big happy WELCOME to Christina!!

At our community dinner, we saved some hand-crank, homemade peach ice cream for you!

Enjoy!

Nom nom! I can almost taste it!

*I bet it would be delish with peach pie!