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About Ayahuasca Growth Partners
We help retreat centers own the way guests find them. We are not a generalist agency that does a little of everything. We do one thing: fill ceremony seats for plant medicine retreat centers, through the channels that stay open to this industry. One center per destination market, and we turn away your competitors.
Why we exist
Somebody is getting rich off your guests, and it is not you
The directory sells your seat beside forty competitors on one screen, takes a commission on a guest you will screen, host, feed and integrate, keeps the email address, and disappears the day you stop paying.
The reason Ayahuasca Growth Partners existsOur founder Michael Vale spent years inside one of the largest lead generation platforms in North America. He watched it raise prices every year while the businesses listed on it stayed completely dependent, never owning a single customer relationship they had paid for.
Retreat centers are in a harder version of the same trap. Every other industry can at least fall back on advertising when a platform squeezes them. You cannot. Google Ads and Meta will not run your campaigns at all, which means the directory knows you have nowhere else to go.
So a center ends up renting its entire supply of guests from someone who has no stake in whether the week goes well. We built Ayahuasca Growth Partners to give that back to the people running the ceremonies.
What we believe
Own the way guests find you. Do not rent it.
Rented
- Your listing sits beside forty competitors, and the guest compares you on price
- A commission is taken on a guest you screen, host, feed and integrate
- The directory keeps the email address, so the returning guest is theirs, not yours
- The moment you stop paying, the enquiries stop that week
- Google Ads and Meta are closed to you entirely, so there is no fallback
- You are one policy change away from losing your main source of guests
Owned
- A first page position on your destination query belongs to you alone
- An AI assistant naming your center by name, at no cost per mention
- Your own email list, your own alumni, your own referral relationships
- Once ranked, the enquiries keep arriving whether or not we are still working together
- Everything we build is yours to keep, including the documents and the strategy
- Nobody reviews it at two in the morning and switches it off
The niche
We only work with retreat centers. No exceptions.
No dentists. No lawyers. No ecommerce. Not even wellness in general. The generalist agency down the street learns your business on your money. We already know it.
- We know the exact queries somebody types in the weeks before they book a ceremony, and how far apart the first search and the paid deposit usually sit.
- We know why a facilitator leaving in March changes your whole calendar, and what a shoulder season does to a center that priced for a full year.
- We know that Google Ads and Meta are closed to you, so we never build a plan that quietly depends on them.
- We know that the wrong guest costs more than an empty seat, so we write to filter rather than to flatter.
- One center per destination market. We lock your market and turn away your competitors.
The founder
Built by Michael Vale
Michael helps businesses stop renting their customers and start owning them.
He spent years inside Angi, one of the largest lead generation platforms in North America, and watched it raise prices every year while the businesses listed on it stayed dependent on a drip feed of enquiries they never owned. It is the same shape as a retreat directory, at a larger scale.
Then he ran a traditional agency and concluded that the retainer model is broken in its own way. It rewards moving slowly, reporting vaguely, and keeping the client paying indefinitely.
In 2023 the arithmetic of search work changed. Building on AI infrastructure meant the research, structure and publishing volume that used to take a hundred hours could be done in a fraction of that, without the quality drop that usually comes with volume. He built his agency on that basis: no retainers that bleed a client dry, just search infrastructure the client owns outright.
Ayahuasca Growth Partners points that method at an industry where it matters more than most. Retreat centers cannot advertise, cannot make claims, and cannot afford to be invisible at the moment somebody finally works up the courage to search. Michael reviews every client’s strategy personally and is available for one to one calls throughout.
Most agencies want to sell you services forever. I want to teach you how the system works, build you the infrastructure, and give you the tools to maintain it. Your business should belong to you.
Michael Vale, founderThe team
Small team. One focus.
You will know everyone working on your account by name, and you will not be handed to an account manager who has never read your intake form.
Michael Vale
Founder
Years ranking businesses at the top of Google before founding AGP. Reviews every client’s strategy personally and takes the first call himself.
Gson Tayone
SEO specialist
Four years of SEO experience and a tech first eye for the changes that keep rankings ahead rather than catching up.
Allyssa Krisha Lagera
SEO specialist
Works on ranking improvements across client sites. Spends her time outside work with her pets and outdoors.
Bryan Jadie
Web designer and SEO
Builds the fast, clean sites search engines reward, and keeps every page tuned to rank in its market.
Jed Jadie
SEO specialist
Brings an engineering background to research. Tested, precise strategies rather than tactics that were fashionable last quarter.
Bryan Joseph Despi
SEO specialist
Writes the long form content and on page structure that turns a search into a ranking and a ranking into an enquiry.
Charnette Ira Prado
SEO specialist
Writes content that reads naturally and still ranks, weaving on page and off page work together.
Katlyn Degamo
SEO specialist
Builds the off page signals and citations that strengthen a site’s authority in its market.
How we work
Four phases, and you can stop after any of them
No twelve month lock in. Month to month once the audit is done. The first phase is fixed fee, short, and produces a document you could hand to another agency if you decided to.
Audit and channel map
Search visibility, AI answer visibility, site health, enquiry response times, directory dependency, and the real economics of a full week against a half full one.
Weeks 1 to 2
Foundations
Site structure, schema, destination pages, the enquiry path, and the brand assets a guest checks before trusting you with their nervous system.
Weeks 3 to 8
Authority
Publishing at a real cadence, press and practitioner placement, review and citation building across the sources language models actually read.
Month 3 onward
Compounding
Email, alumni referral, returning guest programs and calendar planning. The phase where marketing spend stops being the reason seats fill.
Month 6 onward
What we will not do
The lines we hold, in writing
These are clauses in the agreement, not values on a wall. They are also the reason this work survives a search update and an AI answer engine.
- No medical or healing claimsNothing we publish will say ayahuasca treats depression, addiction, PTSD or anything else. It is a regulatory exposure and a red flag to the guest who is genuinely deciding.
- No fabricated reviews or testimonialsEvery quote comes from a real guest who agreed to it. Where a story is anonymised we say so on the page.
- No urgency theatreNo countdown timers, no invented scarcity, no last two seats when there are nine.
- No competing clientsOne center per destination market. If yours is taken you will hear it on the first call, not after you have signed.
- No hiding the screeningIf your intake refuses guests on SSRIs or cardiac history, we put that in front of enquirers rather than behind them. Refusal is a conversion asset.
- No borrowed lineageWe will not describe your facilitators as Shipibo, curanderos or maestros unless the tradition and the training are real and verifiable.
One center per market
Your competitor is reading this too. Only one of you gets the market.
Book forty minutes. We will pull up your destination live, show you where you rank today, and ask an AI assistant to recommend centers in your country while you watch. If we are not the right people, we will say so.