The people
Other hosts who are mid-launch right now, in the Hall — not an archive of people who finished years ago. This is the part a course can’t give you.
The Hosting Guild
For the people who have to fill the seats.
One of us gets you discovered. One of us gets you booked. One of us delivers the week.
A women’s reset in Costa Rica, a writing week in Michigan, twelve people going to the Indy 500, a lakehouse with dates to fill — underneath, it’s one job. A fixed number of seats, a fixed date, and a deadline that doesn’t move.
If somebody has to fill those seats, and that somebody is you, this is for you — whether the room is one you booked or one you own.
A retreat business and a group travel business are the same business underneath: you build the trip, you own the audience, and nobody else is going to fill it.
The Guild is where that craft gets taught, year round, by three people who fill retreats, trips, and workshops for a living.
You were taught to run the week. Nobody taught you to run the company.
We teach you to run a business, not just a retreat. The bookkeeping that survives a tax year. A P&L that holds up at half capacity. What to get in writing before the venue falls through. Where your unpaid hours actually go, and how to price them in.
Because empty seats are what close these businesses — not bad experiences. Maybe you already know how to run a beautiful week. It’s everything before it that breaks you: being found, being believed, being booked, usually at the kitchen table at eleven at night with a deposit already spent.
That’s the part we teach. And in January, it’s the part we sit down and do with you.
The word was deliberate
Why a guild, and not a course.
A guild was a group of people doing the same difficult craft in the same town. They set the standard, they trained whoever came up next, and they carried each other through the bad years. Nobody graduated from a guild. You belonged to one, and you got better inside it.
That is the shape this work actually has. Filling a room is not a thing you learn once and then know. Every experience you host is a new date, a new audience, a new deadline that will not move — and the fix for the thing that went wrong last time only shows up when you try again.
Courses end at the part where the work starts. Communities are pleasant and mostly do nothing. We wanted the third thing — a room with actual craft in it, where whoever answers you on Thursday has sold the exact thing you’re trying to sell, and has the scars to prove the first few didn’t go well either.
So: a guild. A hall you can walk into year round, a standard we hold ourselves to in public, and the weeks when everyone is in the same building.
A course is one pass through the loop. The Guild is the loop, running.
You don’t graduate. You belong.
What you join
Four things, from the day you walk in.
Nothing is drip-fed and nothing is locked behind a longer subscription. All four come with The Community at $99 a month, and the whole library opens on day one.
Weekly office hours
Every week, live, with Anna, Stacy or Robert. Bring the thing you’re stuck on. Someone who has sold the same thing tells you what’s wrong with it.
The Library — 135 resources
Thirteen shelves of it, and more added constantly — plus the video courses, the first of them Anna’s full Profitable Retreat Method, a $899 course included in your membership, and we’re adding new ones continuously. All of it opens the day you join. Nothing drips.
A listing on our members’ trips page
Publish what you’re hosting where travelers can find it. Guests book with you directly, on your own page, with no tracking redirect in between.
$99 a month for the community plus everything we teach.
Founding rate: $49 a month, locked for as long as you stay. Lock it in before 31 December 2026.
Want an hour a week that’s only about your retreat? Book weekly retreat host coaching with Anna, Robert or Stacy. New: guides on how to plan and run a retreat, retreat marketing, starting a retreat business, group trips, experiences and workshops and retreat host mastery.
One part of the Guild
The Guild meets in person for five days at the Residency.
The first is at Lakemore, January 14 to 18, 2027, in Traverse City, Michigan. Thursday to Monday over the MLK weekend, so it costs most people two days of vacation. Sixteen seats, laptops open. Meals and sessions happen next door, in the house the team stays in. You arrive with something you’ve been meaning to launch and go home with it built: your founder’s video, your brand video, your headshot, your budget, and the marketing plan that fills it.
Everyone who comes gets a year of The Community, the Guild’s $99 a month membership, included.
Each lakehouse, the same layout
Sixteen seats across two lakehouses on Arbutus Lake. This is how each one sleeps.
- K
- Q
- Q
- Q
- T
- T
- S
- S
- Private room, king bed · $7,000
- Private room, queen bed · $6,500
- Private room, twin bed · $6,000
- Shared room, two beds · $5,000
From Anna VanAgtmael’s Traverse City retreats, 2021–2023.
Who runs it
Three people. Three jobs.
Robert Earl
Being discovered
Strangers arrive, and that is what fills the seats. Search, the answer engines, the podcast’s reach, and the ads that put you in front of people who have never heard of you. Twenty-five years building sites that search engines, and now AI, actually cite.
Stacy Earl
Getting booked
The stranger who arrived decides you’re the one. The founder video, the words in your guest’s own language, the page that converts, the offer, and the emails after the deposit that keep them warm until they land. Twenty years of it, including the marketing lead at #11 on the 2024 Inc. 500. A page is a conversion rate, not a mood board.
Anna VanAgtmael
Delivering the week
What it costs, what you charge, and everything after they’ve paid: getting them ready, getting them there, delivering the week. More than twenty-five retreats with Wandering Roots since 2018, and the scars from the first few.
Two of the three of us are marketers, and that’s on purpose.
— from the Guild’s welcome post
The part nobody else offers
List what you’re hosting.
Members publish their retreats, trips and workshops on our members’ trips page, and guests book with them directly, on the host’s own page. We’re in the teaching business; the listing puts your week in front of more people.
$49
A month at the founding rate, before 31 December 2026
Newsletter
Learn more about The Hosting Guild
Want to know more before you decide anything? Start here.