Nearly every retreat is co-hosted. Ask any teacher who runs their own week and they will name two, three, four people they build things with: someone who does sound, someone who cooks, someone who teaches the afternoons, someone who handles the money because they are better at it.
Almost none of them had a conversation about the money before the deposit was paid. They had it afterwards, in a kitchen, at the end of a week when everyone was tired and one person had done more than the other.
That is how good working friendships end. Not over greed. Over two people who each assumed something reasonable and different.
The conversation people have instead
It goes like this, usually in a voice note, usually in January.
"We should do a retreat together." "Yes! Let's do it." "I love that place in the mountains." "Amazing, I'll ask about dates."
Everything after that is logistics, and logistics feel like progress, so nobody stops to ask the awkward questions. By the time it is obvious the questions were never asked, one of you has paid a deposit from a personal account and the answers have already been decided by default, in your favor or against you.
The conversation takes forty minutes. Have it before anybody sends money.
Who fronts the money
Somebody's card pays the venue deposit. Somebody's bank account collects the guest payments. Very often that is one person, and very often that person quietly becomes the bank, the bookkeeper and the one who cannot sleep in March.
Decide three things out loud.
Who pays the deposit, and from what. If it is one of you personally, say plainly that it is a loan to the retreat and it comes back off the top before anything is split, ahead of anyone's fee.
Whose account collects bookings, and what the other person can see. Not because anyone is dishonest. Because the person who cannot see the account will invent numbers in their head, and the person who can see it will get tired of being asked.
What happens if costs run over. If the cook wants more, or the transfers double, does that come out of contingency, out of both fees equally, or out of the person who agreed to it without checking. Answer it now, while it is hypothetical and cheap.
The three ways people split it, and what each one really means
A flat fee. One person hosts, the other is paid a fixed amount to teach part of the week. Clean, and the right answer far more often than people admit. The person taking the fee gets paid whether it fills or not. The person hosting carries the risk and keeps the upside. Nobody has to pretend it is a partnership when it is not.
A split of what is left. Costs come off, then the remainder is divided, usually fifty-fifty. Fair in principle, and it only works if you have both written down what counts as a cost. Does the host's flight count? The two nights they arrive early? The hours spent answering emails? If you have not agreed on the list, you have not agreed on the split.
Equal partners. Both put money in, both do the work, both take the same out and both eat the same loss. The only honest version of a fifty-fifty, and much rarer than the number of retreats described as fifty-fifty.
Say which one you are doing, in words, to each other's face.
"I would rather pay you a fee than split it, because I am the one signing the venue and I do not want you carrying that risk. Two thousand for the four days you teach, paid whether we fill or not. If we fill well I would like to add something on top, but I am not promising that now."
That is a good sentence. It is generous, it is clear, and it does not pretend.
Splitting the work, in writing, before it starts
Money arguments are almost never about money. They are about one person believing they did most of it.
So make a list of the actual jobs, and put a name against every single one before you begin. It takes ten minutes and it is the highest-value ten minutes in the project.
- The venue: contract, deposit, the fifty emails about towels and shala floors
- Money in: the booking page, the payment links, chasing the two people who have not paid
- Guests: questions, dietary requirements, the person who wants to arrive a day early, the person who is anxious about flying
- What people see: writing the page, the photos, the messages, the answering
- Programming: who teaches what, when, and who writes the schedule
- On the ground: transfers, shopping, the timetable, the thing that goes wrong on Wednesday
- Afterwards: photos out, thank yous, the accounts, the refunds
Two things usually fall out of that list. One is that the work is not remotely fifty-fifty in the way both people assumed. The other is that three jobs have nobody's name on them, and those three are exactly the ones that will cause the argument.
If one of you ends up doing more anyway
They will. Someone always does, and it is not usually deliberate.
The fix is not a running tally. It is a fifteen-minute call once a month with one item on the agenda: is the split of work still roughly what we agreed. Whoever is doing more says so early, calmly, when the correction is still easy, and the correction is usually a job moving across rather than money moving.
The version that destroys the friendship is the one where nobody says anything for five months and then it all comes out at the airport.
Who owns the guest list afterwards
This is the question nobody asks and everybody later wishes they had.
Twelve people just spent a week with both of you. They gave their email to one booking form. Next January, one of you wants to run something and the other has not been told.
Agree it now. The usual fair answer is that both of you get the list, both of you may write to those people, and each of you tells the other before announcing anything they would obviously have wanted to be part of. Write that sentence down. It is two lines and it prevents a genuinely bitter conversation.
If one of you is a paid teacher on someone else's retreat rather than a partner in it, then it is the host's list. That is fine too. It just has to be said before the retreat, not discovered after it.
What happens if it does not fill
Decide this in the first conversation, while you still both think it will fill.
What is the minimum headcount at which you run it. What is the date by which you decide. Who makes the call if you disagree. And, the hard one, who eats the deposit if you cancel: the person whose card paid it, or both of you equally.
"If we are not at eight by the fifteenth of March, we move it. If we lose the deposit, we split that loss the same way we were going to split the money, so it is on both of us."
Say that in February and it is an agreement between friends. Say it in April and it is a negotiation between two frightened people.
If you have never actually worked together
Teaching next to someone at a festival is not the same as running a business with them, and liking someone is very poor evidence about how they behave when a venue is chasing a balance.
If you have never worked with this person on anything with money in it, do something small together first. A one-day workshop, a weekend intensive, a series of four evenings. Something with a room to pay for, a price to agree, and bookings to chase.
You will learn everything you need in a fortnight. Whether they reply to messages. Whether they do the unglamorous half. Whether they turn up early. Whether, when eleven people book instead of twenty, they get practical or they go quiet.
A retreat is a very expensive place to find out that someone lovely is not someone you can plan with.
The one page to write
None of this needs a lawyer. It needs one page in a shared doc with eight headings: who fronts what, who collects, how we split, who does which jobs, minimum headcount, decision date, who eats a cancellation, who owns the list.
Send it after the conversation, not instead of it.
"Writing down what we agreed so neither of us has to remember it in April. Tell me if I got anything wrong."
Nobody has ever regretted that message. Plenty of people have regretted its absence.