How engagements work

Most engagements start the same way: read the land clearly, then decide what is worth doing. From there, there are two honest ways to work with me. This page explains both, plainly, before any paperwork. The specific numbers for your engagement are set in a short written agreement we both sign at the start of work.

1. Per engagement

You pay a flat fee for a defined leg of work — a Desk Read, a Land Read, or a Full Thesis. Each leg has its own deliverable, listed on the homepage, and its own price. You buy only the leg you need. When it is delivered, you decide whether the next step is worth taking. Nothing is automatic.

Travel and lodging are never folded into the fee. Where a leg requires me on the ground, travel is reimbursed at cost, against receipts, with your approval first.

2. Fractional Steward

When the land needs someone holding the thread over time, you retain me by the month. I coordinate the architects, ecologists, hospitality operators, legal teams, and the surrounding community; I keep the regenerative thesis intact as conditions change; I stay the single point of accountability for execution.

"Fractional" means a fraction of a full-time steward's cost — not a share of the land or the project. No equity, no ownership, and no profit share changes hands. This is a service. Fractional engagements run on a minimum term, billed monthly in advance, with travel at cost when an on-site visit is called for.

3. From a read into stewardship

These two are one road, not two. A reading often becomes the opening of a stewardship. Where it does, the fee you already paid for the read is credited back to you across your first months — never pulling the monthly below my floor — so you pay once for the reading, and it carries you into the work. The exact credit and the window for it are set in your written agreement.

4. Your documents are yours

Everything I deliver during an engagement is licensed to you for use in your project, indefinitely. You may share it with your team, partners, investors, and counsel as needed.

5. What you tell me stays between us

All information shared during an engagement is held in strict confidence. I do not name clients, properties, or project details publicly without your explicit written permission.

6. Specialists at cost

The judgment and the hours on the ground are mine. When a project calls for an ecologist, a hydrologist, an architect, or counsel, I bring them in from a network at cost, with your approval first. There is no agency layer.

7. Leaving is clean

For a defined leg of work, refunds are proportional to work not yet undertaken, as described in the Refund Policy. For Fractional Steward, after the minimum term either of us may close the engagement with written notice set in the agreement. Where travel has already been booked, those costs are not refundable.

8. The paperwork

Engagements are set out in a short, plain-language agreement we both sign before work begins. It names the leg of work, the fee, how travel is handled, and — where relevant — the monthly terms of stewardship. It sits alongside the Terms of Service and the Refund Policy, and never contradicts them. Questions before then: connect@dearwise.earth.