4. Your Pipe-Dreams
(I officially commemorated the launch of my new company in 2019 in Seattle WA, by getting a sports coat embroidered with the new Cannaballers logo.)
Burn the ships… we will either return home in Persian ships, or we will die here."
When I was starting Cannaballers, I knew that I would have to do something in order to create a better platform of access to celebrities in order to help CBD brands create avenues of differentiation, and fuel marketing campaigns with star power.
While I had built a great network in the cannabis industry over the years I didn’t know anyone in pro sports, which was the industry that I wanted to approach first.
I was quite self-aware, that I didn’t have any of these connections. I realized that an ideal partner for me would be a professional sports agent because that person would be connected to everyone in the world of sports and furthermore would know their way around the industry.
I didn’t know any professional sports agents so I decided I would have to go somewhere in which I might have a good chance of meeting one.
I also didn’t know hardly anything about sports and didn’t have enough time to learn. Luckily, I did know someone however, who was an expert on the subject.
I called up my buddy and former business partner, Bob Johnson, and asked him to come out of retirement. Bob had (temporarily) decided to get out of the industry for an indefinite amount of time, after we had sold out of our business interests in California, shortly after recreational cannabis was legalized there.
Getting pro agents and celebrities to work with you, when you don’t know them, and aren’t offering them any money up front to help you, seemed like a heavy lift, but I was determined to figure out a way to cut through the barriers for entry that kept regular people out of elite circles, whether it was in sports, business, or government, to cut to the front of the line, past seniority, past connections, and past access controls, in order to kick the doors of opportunity wide open so that I could walk inside and then hold the doors open for others behind me to follow.
In order to realize this plan, I registered for a Sports Management conference in Las Vegas that was being held during the NBA’s annual summer league. Summer League is an event where the teams test and train new players and rookies, both signed and unsigned, and it is always swarming with agents that are looking to prospect young players. The agents are looking to stake their claim early in the next big hit, in essence, to bag a unicorn.
I was convinced that if I was able to put myself out there, then those NBA agents would be able to see clearly that I was the unicorn that they’d been waiting for. The unicorn was Cannaballers.
I had custom polos with the Cannaballers logo embroidered on and Bob and I wore the merch to a summer league game to watch one of the exhibition matches between the pro teams fielding rookies.
About halfway through the game, I started getting restless. I knew I was onto something with my value proposition of connecting the worlds of CBD with other networks of synergistic industries, including and especially sports. At the same time, I realized that if I didn’t do something to put myself out there, to get noticed, then I’d have no chance of breaking through.
No one was going to come up to us and say, “cool, polos, do you want access to celebrity ballers?”
Of course not. Nothing happens unless you make it happen.
Everyone has good ideas, but that has little value if they sit around languishing in the ethers of your head, clinging onto a quasi-existence in a land of theory that’s never followed by action.
Ideas are worth a dime a dozen, but just one idea, if executed on correctly, can be worth billions of dollars!
I pointed out to Bob that there was very lax security at the game. I thought that since we were wearing classy-looking, matching polos, we could just walk down courtside and act like we belong and that no one would stop us.
Bob wasn’t all that impressed with my idea.
“That’s your plan to meet an agent? Well… let me know how it goes when you get down there.”
I decided that the one thing I refused to do in life and business was- NOTHING. I would not accept myself thinking back to this moment years later and wondering, “what could have happened if I did something?”
With that thought in mind, I got up and walked down the stadium steps until I was approaching the security guard for the courtside seating area.
At this moment as I walked past the security guard, I felt like I truly belonged in the courtside section, and should have access to players. Moreover, I felt like that should and would be obvious to everyone else. I felt like my outer environment was ultimately nothing more than a reflection of my worldview on the inside. Only I could stop myself with the wrong attitude or the wrong approach to achieving my goals, or worse yet, the ultimate death knell in life and business- NO APPROACH!
The security guard took exactly zero notice of me, as I easily walked past him and found a vacant seat right behind the chairs where the players were sitting! As cool as this might sound, it soon became very boring and I grew restless once more, wanting to go deeper. I wasn’t going to meet an agent by sitting around watching a game.
I thought it would be easier to get further with Bob’s help because I thought the matching polos would multiply their credibility. Also, I knew nothing about basketball or sports in general so if I got anywhere, I could find myself in deep water, unable to converse in the native tongue.
After a few minutes I sent Bob a text, “You should come down here now, the coast is clear. You won’t have any problem, just act like you belong!”
Five minutes later, as Bob was sitting next to me courtside, I proposed escalating things. This proposal began with us walking to where the coaches and a bunch of other people were standing behind one of the baskets.
“Let’s go back there,” I said pointing. “That security guard looks asleep at the wheel. Once you’ve made it through the screens into our section, you basically have unlimited access.” Following this philosophy, we moved from courtside to the ‘behind the basket area’, and finally finessed our way into the locker room.
There, we met NBA legends Mark Jackson and Tom Thibodeau. Bob even got to take a picture with a hero of his, Jerry West, the guy from the NBA logo!
But even after all of that, we still hadn’t found an agent! As many talented waiters and bartenders will tell you, an agent is hard to find if they’re not looking for you already.
I was not about to let this setback stop me.
The next morning, we were signed up for a seminar at the Sports Management Conference. We were wearing our Cannaballers merch again; Bob wore his polo again, while this time I sported a Cannaballers embroidered sports coat and a Cannaballers baseball cap.
A legendary NBA agent, Tony Dutt, who had negotiated some of the most notorious contracts in league history would be speaking that day.
We patiently waited in the audience as they went through the programming of various panels of insiders from the sports and basketball industry. Finally, Tony Dutt spoke and at the end of the discussion, the floor was opened up for Q&A.
Two lines formed on each side of the ballroom with people lined up to take a turn at one of two microphones to ask their questions. I was near the end of the line on the left side of the room and wasn’t sure I would even reach the cutoff to ask my question before they ran out of time. This was my big chance to get noticed somehow…
After a few minutes of sweating, I got to the microphone and was able to ask my question, which was really no more than just a shameless plug for my business reframed as a question.
“Hi, thank you,” I said, “My friend and I recently started a company that connects the CBD industry with celebrity influencers from sports. I was wondering if you see the NBA looking to allow players to use CBD and do CBD endorsements in the near term? Also is there a prohibition against agents being involved in CBD companies?”
“Those are great questions,” Tony said, “Conversations are going on at the league now as we speak…”
Bob had also been standing in the other line to ask a question, but they ran out of time, and he didn’t get a chance.
After this, there was a break and we went out into the hallway to check our messages and return phone calls.
All of a sudden, someone tapped me on the shoulder. A man introduced himself as John, he was a Jr. Agent that worked for Tony Dutt. Tony wanted to meet us later that evening at the Bellagio!
“We’ve been looking for someone exactly like you!” The agent told us.
Need help bursting through the barriers of access and opportunity?
Contact the team at My Pipe Dreams to help you break through the noise.
I had several productive meetings with Tony and his agency both during the rest of Summer League and continuing for several months afterward.
Unfortunately, though, they were never able to materialize a partnership. Rather than give up though, I turned back to the well of creativity and guerilla marketing. I turned to LinkedIn where I had been making concerted inroads at building my network into different centers of power and access in every major company, industry, and sector of the US economy. I had even started gaining major access to Government, connecting, and building a network with Governors, Senators, Generals, Astronauts, and FDA officials.
I had become determined that I would never let access block me from opportunity again.
Through my LinkedIn campaign to infiltrate the circles of professional sports agents, I was finally able to get two pro-sports agents on his team. Collectively, they represented current and former players in different leagues.
The agents were able to connect Cannaballers to a network of influencers. This culminated into their helping me onboard Metta World Peace as a partner in the business and Vice President of Brand Development!
Through my efforts to connect with celebrities, I also wound up working with a senior executive from the music industry that had helped run national sales in the US and international retail channels for major record labels. The senior music executive helped me put together a team with second-to-none experience, knowledge of, and access to CPG, retail, brokers, supply chain, distribution, and merchandising. This includes my current partners in Cannaballers, Melissa and Chuck Green who was Melissa’s mentor at Ben & Jerry’s and had served as the senior executive leader of Ben & Jerry’s sales and distribution.
After taking initial steps to create access for myself in a few industries, I have now exponentially created and increased my access to people in any number of industries. This groundwork makes it much easier to continue to further build on my network now.
The reality of the ‘rich getting richer’ in life, may be an unpleasant or pleasant truth for you, depending on how rich you are in any given area! The fact is though, you just can’t deny that it’s the case in so many examples in life. From the obvious in finance where the wealthy are rewarded with compound interest on their assets, and low-interest rates on their credit, to the poor that pay the highest possible interest rates as they try and claw their way out of a downward spiral of poverty.
This is even true in health and fitness. If you exercise regularly and you’re in good shape with lean muscle and low body fat then you will be ‘rich getting richer’ in several different ways. With a higher percentage of muscle, your metabolism will be faster and you’ll burn more calories at rest. You also burn more calories after you exercise. The more you exercise, the more stamina and energy you will have to keep on exercising or even increase your frequency of exercising.
This is also the case with networking. Networks are a spider web of connections that are non-linear and can evolve to an exponential and nearly infinite number of possible degrees of separation from other people in the world.
The purpose of including this long-winded and meandering story is to illustrate the following point- F***ing persistence pays off!
Don’t let anyone ever make you feel like you don’t belong, that you’re lesser than, not elite, or inferior. You have every right to a seat at the table, any table. You just have to put yourself out there and stake your claim to a chair. No one will call your name and do it for you, you have to let them know you’re here and that, that’s your chair!
Key Chapter Takeaways
The Do’s and Don’ts of the Dope Industry
- Do– Put yourself out there!
- Do– Set your sights and ambitions high
- Do– Look for the right people to help you along the way
- Don’t– Take no for an answer
- Don’t– Let impossible seeming barriers stop you
- Don’t– Hold me liable if you get arrested because you were inspired by something I said