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 host group experiences.
A women’s reset in Costa Rica, a writing week in Michigan, twelve people going to the Indy 500 — underneath, it’s one job. A fixed number of seats, a fixed date, and a deadline that doesn’t move.
The Guild is where that job gets taught, year round, by three people who fill things for a living.
Empty seats are what close these businesses. Not bad experiences.
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 one week a year when everyone is in the same building.
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. 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
Every piece of teaching we have on marketing and operations, including Anna’s full Profitable Retreat Method. Open the day you join.
A commission-free listing
Publish what you’re hosting on our public page and keep every cent of every booking. No percentage, no tracking redirect, no exceptions.
$19 a month for the room. $99 for the room plus everything we teach.
One part of the Guild
Once a year, the Guild meets in person for five days.
The Residency at Lakemore — January 14–18, 2027, in Traverse City, Michigan. Thursday to Monday over the MLK weekend, so it costs most people two days of vacation. Eight seats, one lakehouse, laptops open. We take two of Lakemore’s houses; we’re opening one, and the second opens only if the first fills. 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 Guild’s Practice tier included.
The lakehouse — eight seats
The second house opens only if this one fills. We’d rather run one full house than two half-empty ones.
- 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.
Anna VanAgtmael
Running the room
What happens when they arrive. More than twenty-five retreats with Wandering Roots since 2018, across several countries.
Stacy Earl
Filling the seats
An audience becomes bookings. Twenty years of it, including the marketing lead at #11 on the 2024 Inc. 500.
Robert Earl
Getting found
Strangers find you. Sixteen years building sites that search engines — and now AI — actually cite.
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. Keep all of it.
Every marketplace that fills your trip takes a cut of it. Guild members publish on our public page and pay a commission of exactly nothing — because we’re not in the booking business, we’re in the teaching business.
0%
Commission on member listings
$19
To get in the door