Not a corporation. Not a brand. Two people who built things with their hands and walked through their own storms.
We live on seven acres on the Hamakua Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. We built our home with our own hands. We have been building things together for over twenty years: houses, farms, boats, businesses, and now this.
Susanne is an NLP Master Trainer with four decades of experience in human transformation. She trained at the source: permanent staff at Werner Erhard's World Headquarters, where she produced roughly forty Six Day Advanced Courses per year and served 140 to 180 people daily. She is not repeating someone else's work. She is carrying a lineage forward in her own voice.
Tim is a master builder, diesel mechanic, pro se litigant, and the quietest kind of genius. After high school he built a boat and sailed the South Pacific for seven years. He brings exacting precision to everything he touches: AutoCAD, electrical, plumbing, welding, woodworking, boat building. He is Susanne's equal partner in everything, always.
"Tim and I are the Lighthouse, and we light the way until your Light is back, at least a small flame. Then, you become the candle lighting the candle of others."
Susanne Friend
After nineteen years of marriage, Susanne told Tim she had lost respect for him because he had never kept his promise to build a boat. She offered to do all the grunt work. He heard her. They built.
Not one boat. Three. A 24-foot experimental Pacific proa. An 18-footer. And then a 38-foot ocean-crossing proa during the pandemic, one of the most ambitious small-craft builds in the Pacific in a generation. Full documentation lives at OceanPeople.org.
That conversation, the one where she told the truth after nineteen years, is the StopChangeStart methodology lived. She stopped a nineteen-year pattern. The honest conversation changed the dynamic. They started building.
For eleven years, Susanne and Tim ran Friendly Aquaponics, the first commercially licensed aquaponics operation in the United States. First USDA organic certification. First food safety certification. A Costco account. They trained thousands of people from around the world on their farm in Hawaii.
Three hundred people wrote letters to a judge on Susanne's behalf. She finds that overwhelming rather than obvious.
The personal development industry is teaching a photocopy of a photocopy. Susanne trained at the original. She is standing on the shoulders of her teachers and singing her own song. The words are often the same. This is not imitation. It is lineage carried forward in a new voice, for a new moment.
StopChangeStart exists because Susanne desperately missed creating Source: the organizing principle, the container in which transformation happens at full power. When all four sons moved out within six months, the love that had operated at full power in her children needed a new container. This is that container.
It is not primarily a business. It is a new way for the love to operate.
Full documentation and photos of three Pacific proa builds, including the 38-footer.
Eleven years of commercial aquaponics. First USDA organic certified operation in the US.
Five minutes on the farm. Real people, real testimonials, 146,000 views.
Follow the build of an unsinkable Pacific proa. Over 100 videos of the journey.