Energetic Accounting after 4 Months at Casa Tilo

Pros & cons of running a community venue

It’s been 4 months since we arrived at Casa Tilo. Time to give an account of the story so far. I need to get this onto the page, at least for my own mental digestion, and hopefully this documentation will be useful for other community organisers too.

First, a quick recap: in 2024 we rented El Almendrillo, a villa in the south of Spain. Hosted workshops and community events there for 3 months. Had a blast, turned a profit. It went unexpectedly well.

Then in April 2025 we got a new place, Casa Tilo. It’s bigger: 28 person capacity, 600 square meters. It’s more accessible, 15 min drive to the train station and an easy ride to Barcelona city or the airport. The rent is twice as expensive. We raised €50k from our friends to bootstrap the project. We got a long-term rental contract here. Ideally we prove the viability for this events/co-living business, then in a couple years we purchase a property to be the central hub for a new neighbourhood of friends living in proximity.

Almendrillo was an overnight success. In retrospect, it was kind of a fluke. Everything magically went according to plan. It gave me unrealistic expectations about how easy it would be to operate a community venue. Tilo is teaching me how hard it really is.

So! Let’s look at the pros and cons, 4 months in:

Positives

A Developmental Container

The best thing about this place: it is one of those precious social contexts where development happens spontaneously.

If you want to become a better person, there is one developmental assignment that comes before all others: you need to be in a social context where you are reminded every day that you are good. Not “good” in some vague philosophical way, I mean practically, concretely: you are of benefit to other people. Your opinions count. Your jokes are funny. You have talents. Your contribution matters.

If you want to develop, you require encouragement from external sources. That’s how it works for us mammals. It is extremely gratifying to watch this process unfolding for our guests at Casa Tilo.

A week of co-living with trustworthy people in a harmonious group can have an incredible impact. People have major breakthroughs here. I see them reclaim their voice, shake off trauma, renew their sense of purpose, reconnect with their creativity & optimism. It’s inspiring to witness new friendships and new projects sparking off all around me.

Beauty Eats Anxiety

Since we moved here, the most obvious difference for me personally: my vision has changed. I mean that literally, my visual sense is more vivid. The ripples on the pool saturate my attention, totally fascinated by these luminous contour lines oscillating across the liquid terrain.

I learned a new superpower: beauty eats anxiety. When I’m stressed out, I can just look up, observe 16 million different kinds of green in this forest, and my anxiety washes away like a sandcastle at high tide. Just by looking! Noticing beauty, feeling gratitude, feeling cradled in the loving arms of an ideal human habitat.

Yesterday I picked up my friend from the local train station. As we drove up the valley, trees on either side of the road arching up to a closed canopy overhead, a deer stepped out of the forest, unhurried, observing us as we, slowed to a crawl, looked back at her. The sense of blessing is really profound. I feel like I’m engaged to be married to this land.

A Generosity Engine

In June we had a small group stay for a week, 9 people. They arrived as strangers. Over the course of a few days we forged an incredibly resilient wholesome collective of mutual support and care. At the end of the week, 2 of them independently decided to gift us $5000 each to support the mission. I can’t tell you how validating that is!

We welcome people here with an intense dose of generosity, and when it really “clicks”, when it really makes an impact on their sense of self, then they’re naturally motivated to reciprocate the gift.

This engine of generosity is not fully self-sustaining yet, but it is spluttering to life. It is beautiful to imagine that pretty soon it could be humming along on its own momentum, a beaming hot source of goodness.

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Negatives

So that is all very good and lovely,,,, now here’s a list of some of the things that keep me up at night.

Team Dynamics

I’ll cut to the chase: we’re breaking up with our co-founders. I won’t say too much about it, out of respect for privacy. Small differences are magnified by living in a shared space. And then they’re magnified again by the financial stress of launching a new startup business.

The arrangement of 2 couples living in one house is probably never going to work for me. I think it is essential that every couple has their own private domain that is not shared, sovereign territory where we’re not answerable to anyone else.

The breakup is going okay, we’re all being very grown up about it, but it is really sad. And the process to get to this point has taken a lot of energy.

Hospitality and Limits

One of the core dynamics to manage here is the balance between private and public. This is our private home, and most of the year it is shared with other people.

I kinda knew this would happen. I’ve been too generous, too liberal with my boundaries, and found the limits of my hospitality.

We had two weeks in July with new guests showing up every single day. Each individual person is wonderful, but in aggregate, that’s way too much.

Specifically it is the arrival day that feels energetically expensive. When someone new arrives, they need to be oriented to the practical operation of the house. I want to give them the time of day, be curious about their stories, where they’ve been, what they’ve come for.

I could have predicted this, but for some reason I need to learn things the hard way: from now on we’re going to be much more diligent about clustering new arrivals to all land on the same day. And we’ll have more blocks of time where the house is closed.

Pricing Pressure

The financial snapshot right now is unflattering:

In the first 4 months we’ve had 558 guest nights, spread across 4 events, bringing €26,500 revenue. Rent for this period is €16,500. We spent €9,000 on food, €7,000 on ops & utilities, €18,000 on setup costs. So that puts our running balance at –€24,000.

In the next 6 months we’ve got 9 events booked and selling, so the accounting will look a lot healthier in the new year. The setup costs won’t be repeated. The promo we’re doing now will pay off later. More than half of that loss has been offset by donations. But any way you cut it, minus 24,000 is a big number! The business model is going to take some work before this place will be sustainable.

I’ve set our prices super low for this opening phase. Partly that’s a marketing tactic, but it also reflects my intention to make this place accessible to people who don’t have a lot of disposable income. I’ve been surprised that we’re getting complaints and pushback, even at €50/night for room and board. So I’m taking a lesson here: I can’t let the complaints set the price point. The math will set the price.

Bandwagon Effect

So far, the events business has a bit of the feast-and-famine dynamic. Some events sell out effortlessly. Other events take a big push to get anyone to sign up at all.

The determining factor is not the attractiveness of the venue, or the quality of the event design, or the price, or the promotion. The thing that makes the difference is “are some popular people coming”. A good fraction of our customers will only decide to join an event if they know there’s going to be cool people there.

This is pretty annoying! I think the quality of an event is determined by the event design, not by the guests. But I understand that we are herd animals and people want to go where the popular people are going.

So we’re going to have to be more intentional about including “influencers” in our event promotion strategy (gagging, crying, throwing up as I write this).

Short Term Loans

It was a mistake to bootstrap this venture with short-term loans. I should have either raised long-term loans, or given investors a profit-sharing stake, or done it all out of donations. I’ve learned that lesson now, but we’ll be dealing with the consequences for the next 6-18 months.

I already wrote about this in my last update so I won’t labour the point.

Narrative Rupture

There’s another aspect of the business that is more difficult than last time we tried this.

We’ve always done some high-paid consulting work to offset the low-paid community work. But recently our consulting work has taken a hit.

In 2018 when we started our consulting company The Hum, we were immediately overloaded with demand for our services. We had a clear role to play in an emerging movement of self-managing organisations.

In the past couple of years, I’ve felt that narrative has lost momentum. Organisations have made earnest efforts and found lackluster results. I think this new paradigm of organising is waiting on a cultural evolution that hasn’t really happened yet.

And it’s not just our little self-management niche. It feels like we’re living through a moment of narrative rupture at large. The progressive movement is in shambles. Budgets have been shredded across nearly every industry. The singularity is knocking on the public consciousness. Leaders are looking at AI and asking, is this going to be 10 times bigger than Covid, or 10 trillion times bigger? Priorities are confused. People don’t know what they should be focussed on.

The good news is, something new is coming. The bad news is, we don’t know what it is yet! Golden age? or apocalypse? So it is a tough economic climate to be selling into.

One thing that’s obvious to me: the skills of working well together are always going to be valuable. I think high quality team culture is always going to be a competitive advantage for any organisation. So I can see Casa Tilo has an important role to play in the next chapter. But we don’t know how that story is going to play out yet.

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Conclusions

So that’s where we’re at. Looking back on my lists, I see there are more “cons” than “pros”. That feels like an honest appraisal of where we’re at right now. The financial accounting is in the red; the meaning-and-purpose account is overflowing.

I feel confident about our outlook. Everyone told us the first two years will be intense. I’ve got plenty more fuel in the tank, and we have an incredible network of support around us.

If you want to help:

• Make a donation

• Come to one of our upcoming events. I’m especially excited about Unfolding Together (purposeful community of practice, Oct 15-19) and Finding Flow (focussed co-working week Nov 14-22)

• Talk to me about hosting your team retreat here.

• Or book me for advice or coaching on any topics related to community or organisations.

If you have questions about how we’re operating, please drop them below. I won’t promise to follow up with all of them one by one, but I will at least factor them into my next update.