6. Your So-Called Team
(Don’t try this at home- Ed Sherman, Zack Weston, & Christian Lacambra, 2016, Quincy, WA.)
If you hire people because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat and tears.
Depending on the type of business you’re starting, you may need to source many different types of employees, partners, and professionals to assist you in implementing and executing your vision. It’s important to bring together the right mix of talent with complementary, but not overlapping skill sets.
For example, it would make no sense to have a startup team of five founders, all technology experts, who don’t understand anything about sales or finance.
People tend to have a perverse, narcissistic attraction to other people that remind them of themselves. This can become a major problem when you consider how many people hate themselves to begin with!
Ideally, you want to team up with people that will fill in the gaps where your skills and experience leave off.
One of the keys to building a successful team is having objective self-awareness about your personal and collective strengths and weaknesses. While self-delusion can be a great tool to make it through another day if you are not brutally honest with yourself then you are putting a lot of time and energy into setting yourself up for future therapy sessions.
Ask yourself if you really think you can nail down within a few months, what may have taken others years or even decades to master? It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about cultivation, lab chemistry, or legal work. No matter how smart, experienced, or capable you are, you need to have a team that can share in the workload and break it down into different specialties.
An important rule that Bob lives by in his new start-up is, “if two people are responsible for something, then no one is responsible.”
Even though I had been in the industry for a number of years, I’ld never grown a single plant before. We’re not talking just about cannabis; I had never even grown a single houseplant before my first legal pot garden, which was over 2000 large outdoor cannabis plants!
How did that turn out?
My company grew the most cannabis in Washington that year!
Was I able to accomplish this because I’m some great genius and learned everything there is to know about growing cannabis?
Of course not! Not even close.
It turned out that way because I was able to successfully identify, through self-reflection, that I knew absolutely nothing about growing cannabis!
This self-awareness enabled me to recognize that I would need to hire a really good cultivation consultant to help me overcome my complete ignorance.
At this point, I consider myself somewhat of an expert on cannabis regulations, but if I was opening a new business in a new cannabis market, I would still consult with a local attorney, if I didn’t already have one on my startup team.
On the other hand, you can often find supplemental assistance rather than bringing on a full team member. Even then you may be able to save money by using outside professionals sparingly, as needed.
For instance, you can do a lot of legal research yourself. Get as many of your documents as you can from LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer and save critical work for a professional attorney.
You can also save on background legal work by searching online to become familiar with the regulations in your area, as well as Federal cannabis policy. The less your attorney has to bring you up to speed, the cheaper it will be when you’re being billed by the hour.
You can also look up the instructions online for forming an LLC or filing your Articles of Incorporation on your own with your Secretary of State.
When I want to learn something about cannabis or other legal matters that I feel is over my head, I’ll schedule a consultation with a great attorney. Rather than committing to a $10,000 retainer, we can pay $200-$400 for an hour or two or their time to answer our questions. Others will go to Google Scholar… looking at you, Troy.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from self-awareness about recognizing your limitations, are the times and ways, when you absolutely will want and need to take your fate into your own hands and…
DIY
Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands.
Now that you’re aware of your limitations, and have started penciling in your team members, you need to identify the things you can accomplish yourself. Additionally, make a list of action items you’re unfamiliar with, but which you think you could figure out if push came to shove.
With the democratization of information in the digital age, you can find a DIY tutorial or instructions to achieve nearly any task online. Even complicated software can be broken down into approachable pieces with a series of YouTubevideos.
Going into business in Washington, I had a lined up compliance expert, Mark, to handle the complex and intimidating application and licensing processes for my new company.
We had worked together at TetraLabs, where Mark had helped us set up an innovative new online platform for onboarding and verifying new patient-members, with a new approach to and functionality for online ordering that was compliant with the restrictive regulations at the time.
Mark is a rockstar in his field, who co-created MJ Freeway, the first cannabis traceability software which has been adopted widely across many different cannabis markets.
I was very fortunate. With Mark’s help, I’d be a shoo-in for a license from the State!
This would be easy… hah!
Alas, not all things unfold as intended.
Mark and his wife/business partner in MJ Freeway suddenly got divorced. Mark’s new ex-wife managed to kick him out of the business because of ‘loop-hole’ language and legalese buried in an old operating agreement that Mark had signed but not read.
All of a sudden Mark was alone, exiled from his own life and business. He lost his condo, and worse yet, his wife tried to saddle him with the business’s debt while not giving him any compensation for his equity!
Today this company is now part of a much larger entity and is traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Suffice it to say that with all of this going on, Mark had to take a leave of absence, and go find himself. Mark did succeed in finding himself, however the place where he found himself was in a mental hospital.
Meanwhile, my plan for Washington hadn’t really been baked in yet, nor had any real money been committed to or spent on the project at the time.
None of my other partners wanted to take the lead on any of it. They would support me financially by helping to fund the project but wouldn’t be able to assist much with the application, planning, development, build-out; and basically, weren’t willing to do any of the work. I would be on my own.
Now, finding myself at the start of the application window without an application writer, I had a couple of options.
I could try to find someone new to manage the application but it was extremely last minute, and experts with real-world experience in this field were few and far between. Plus, it would be obscenely expensive to boot.
Throwing in the towel on the project was one option he seriously considered.
After all, there would be other opportunities down the road, and I hadn’t taken a vacation in years. I knew that I was signing myself up for some hard work. I could enjoy a better quality of life if I waited it out… but…
I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to help make history.
My only other option was…
I did the research, consulted with an attorney, and forged ahead, confident in my ability to pull it off with enough hard work. Or at least that’s what I told myself to make the formidable tasks seem at least slightly less terrifying.
At first, the project seemed totally unapproachable. I felt out of my element and in over my head, like a blind crossing guard or a skeleton in a break-dancing competition.
To combat my anxiety though, I did what I always do when I start something in life. I made a list. In this case, it was a rolling punch list, which means that it tracked all of my moving project goals, action items, assignments, and due dates.
I made another whiteboard list of the pieces of the puzzle and identified what I could personally tackle if I pushed myself. On that list, I put items like the business plan, traceability, waste management, security, and transportation plans.
I realized that if I thought of this as a writing project it became more relatable. From there, and with that mentality, I was able to supplement each item I didn’t know about with a simple Google search and turn it into a write-up for any section of the application.
I made a separate list for the items he knew that he couldn’t possibly learn how to accomplish in time. At the start of this exercise, I had thought that this second list would end up containing most of the required sections of the application. But, at the end of the exercise, I only had one item on my second list. I only needed help with CAD drawings!
Rather than paying my attorneys a fortune to write the application for me, I did most of the legwork and provided my attorneys with a majority of the content. They put on the finishing touches and submitted it on our behalf at a fraction of the price.
Without an ‘application guy’ not only was I able to quickly and successfully obtain multiple licenses by pushing myself outside of his comfort zone, but I gained invaluable experience to the extent that now when we start new projects, I’m considered the ‘application guy’!
Finding and Training Your Insubordinates
(Quincy WA, Harvest Crew, 2015.)
If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.
When you’re trying to staff your cannabis business, it’s important to find employees that actually want to show up for work. I know what you’re thinking, but this is actually like a real thing. Some people do in fact like their jobs… even in the marijuana industry.
Attitude is everything. If your staff has a bad one, then so will your customers. While experience is great in almost every position, in some cases too much experience could be a problem. For instance, there are many great home growers out there that might not be able to adjust to a commercial scale, but they might also be more resistant to following instructions, or adhering to your process.
In a lot of ways someone who is a clean slate might be easier to work with and mold to your system, though there are just some jobs that you can’t teach people to do in a short amount of time. For instance, it might take many years of experience for someone to be able to learn how to quickly and accurately read the health of a plant with just a quick assessment.
Troy’s found that it’s great to have some experienced people that can adapt to a program with a mix of fresh, hungry talent with no experience but who are eager to learn.
In a lot of states though that are just opening up new cannabis markets, the only possible commercial cannabis experience that can be tapped for your crew, would have to be imported from out of state.
How Do I Find the Nugget in the Rough?
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
I like to start with some basic cookie cutter questions to screen out the lowest common denominators first, i.e.- The very biggest morons.
I once had someone interview for a job and I asked him, “what’s your biggest weakness.”
This applicant responded, “well… I am like, really, really lazy.”
While I genuinely appreciated his candor and honesty, there was no chance in hell that I was ever going to hire a self-proclaimed lazy person. I mean come on; that was supposed to be a real softball!
Troy always prefers face-to-face interviews, and even insisted on it (with proper spacing of course) during the pandemic. He just feels like there’s something lost, in being able to get a read on someone through Zoom. And that way, you don’t have to worry about whether or not the job applicant is secretly masturbating off-screen, while you’re walking them through your company’s HR policies.
When hiring a crew in Washington State, Troy and I liked to sandbag our prospective new hires and attempt to flummox them and see how they reacted to crazy, out of the blue questions.
For instance, one of my favorite questions was, “If I asked you to get me Angelina Jolie’s private phone number in two hours, what would you do?”
I never expected that anyone would actually come through with AJ’s digits. What I was interested in though, was to find out about everyone’s analytical approach to solving an impossible problem, without having time to prepare an answer in advance.
Aside from growing, other key positions where it’s best to find someone with experience include processing engineers and chemists, managers, and especially retail store buyers.
Your budtenders don’t necessarily have to have retail experience, but they should be fairly knowledgeable about cannabis products. Moreover, Troy’s experience in the retail space has shown him to value personable, but not overly talkative, people..
The last thing you want is to have your budtender yakking away with some customer at the point of sale while a line of 20 people is building up behind him. In this scenario if you might have built good will with 1 customer, but at the expense of losing the good will of possibly 10 or more.
Also make sure your budtenders actually know what they’re talking about when they’re answering questions for customers, and that they’re not just making stuff up as they go along. This happens more than you would think.
What About Packaging for People?
If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.
Ok I know I should get a budtender that is knowledgeable, and friendly but… should they all have big boobs? While there has long been a statistically proven relationship between sex and sales, will a skin deep strategy actually work for your business in the cannabis industry?
If you only employed a bunch of big breasted women, depending on your market, this could backfire and lead to a social justice protest movement outside of your store. On the other hand, if you have a dispensary in Vegas, you most likely will need some attractive people on your staff just to keep up with your competitors.
In most metro markets, if you’re going to play the eye candy game, make sure to stock up on some studs, and gay men as well.On the other hand, many customers in less evil places than Las Vegas, will appreciate your employees much more for their great personalities than for the great size of their brassieres.
At the end of the day the best strategy for most facets of your business is to do your homework and learn everything there is to know about the market, and the customers where you want to operate.
What Do I Need a Procurement Manager for?
All's fair in love and purchasing.
There’s no shortage of candidates for this position who might claim to be experts at smoking pot. That being said, if you have a retail store, then getting the right buying manager is going to be your most important hire.
If you are new to the industry then you might even want to overpay to lure a highly qualified candidate away from another company or hire a pricey consultant to train someone over time.
Your buying manager is basically your customer’s representative out in the wholesale market. The experience your customers have shopping at your store, will sink or swim based on the buying manager’s decisions. Trust me, this isn’t something that you want to hire your pothead cousin for.
An expert buying manager should be able to look at unmarked samples of products you give them and tell you a lot about them. If you give them the names of strains, they should be able to describe those characteristics and genetics in detail.
If you don’t nail this, and you end up with overpriced bad products on your shelves then your customers will go elsewhere, and you might never recover from the reputational damage. A professional buyer will know the proper quality markers of everything from drying and curing flowers to the right color and consistency of a hash or extract.
We will be covering budtenders, procurement managers, and other retail positions in more depth later on in this guide.
What Do You Mean Pot Doesn’t Actually Sell Itself???
(Falcanna, an amazing brand in Washington, uping the game in 2018 with a live Falcon at an expo in Tacoma.)
Number one: Sales cures all. There has never been a company in the history of companies that has ever succeeded without sales. Anybody who has ever told you, 'Don't worry about sales you can grow it and worry about sales later,' they are lying to you.
People ask Bob all the time, when is the best time to call a customer. “Is it in the morning, or evening, they ask me,” Bob recounted, “is it best to call when they’re busy at work or try and bother them on the weekend?”
“The answer”, Bob continued, “is… all of them!”
As a rule of thumb, Bob teaches his team that they’ll probably need to call a prospect 50 times before that potential customer might be willing to actually buy something.
As an entrepreneur, Bob hasn’t waited around for his team to get results and has driven sales himself all the while. Bob says that at any given time, he personally accounts for between 80-98% percent of the sales for his entire company!
What does he even need a sales team for, Bob is a sales machine!
Bob thinks that one of the biggest pitfalls of many companies is thinking that anything is important besides sales.
“Sales is everything,” says Bob, “If you don’t have sales, you have nothing. You could have the cure for cancer in your product, and it wouldn’t matter if you’re not selling it.”
Sales is something that Bob thinks you’ve got to do every single day. Even on weekends. Not once a week or until you get a few big hits every month, you need to keep plugging away. You can stop when you sell the company or retire. That’s it.
Bob reaches out to all of his current customers at least once or twice a month and to new prospects anywhere from 10-50 times a day every day!
Just because Bob takes his work seriously though, doesn’t mean he takes himself seriously.
It helps to have a good sense of humor, Bob said, everyone feels more comfortable with someone that can break the ice and make them laugh.
Aside from being a winning formula, Bob finds that engaging with customers through humor makes the job fun and worthwhile for him to want to do it in the first place.
When Bob and I were managing a sales team together, my philosophy was that “good salespeople don’t sell products, they provide solutions.”
It’s a totally different outlook and approach.
Bob’s golden rule for sales is, “If I say something, I do it, that’s gotten me a long way.”
One of the keys to providing good customer service is being trustworthy. In a fly-by-night industry like cannabis/CBD, not being a huge flake in and of itself can be an important differentiator.
One of the things that Bob is most proud of is the fact that he gets a large percentage of his business through referrals from satisfied customers.
Sales Reps- Those Deeply Disturbed People that You Need for Your Team
I design, manufacture, distribute, and sell elevator buttons. I specialize in the fourth floor. And I don’t mean to brag, but I’m such a good salesman that I could sell one of my fourth-floor elevator buttons to the owner of a three-story building. I’m also into Jazz. I make elevator music in my free time. My motto in life: You can’t push my buttons if you don’t buy them.
To find quality sales reps you need to fill your funnel and cast a wide net that’s likely to come up with a lot of garbage- a flat tire, a toilet bowl seat, human foot, etc., and you’re going to have to clear that all out and a lot of seaweed before you can see your way to the juicy fish you were looking for.
At the end of the day though, after traumatizing yourself with prolonged exposure to the dregs of human society, your job is to sort through all of that refuse to find trustworthy people.
The problem with sales reps is that their job is to convince people to do things that they don’t want to do that will cost them money. Your sales rep won’t think twice about using their powers of bullshit against you to buy themselves an endless series of chances with an infinite variety of colorful and plausible anecdote-based excuses that will leave you in stitches slapping them on the wrist.
Don’t assume that you’ll be immune from their sales charms. They may also have hired a wizard and be using magic.
Either way, your best bet in this situation is to create a culture and a system based around accountability.
After Bob Johnson started his new CBD company, he wanted to create a stable structure of accountability for his team that wouldn’t be contingent on someone’s personality, or how funny, likable, or convincing they were, as a metric for their contributions to the team.
At the end of the day, you can be Prince or Princess Charming but if you’re not doing the work, putting in the time, making calls, or hitting the streets, then no amount of charisma will change the numbers that reflect your progress or lack thereof.
Bob decided to implement a new reporting system for his team that would make it transparent who was doing their job and who wasn’t. When Bob was planning for this, he naively thought that everyone on his team would appreciate a system of accountability. Bob never envisioned that moving towards a platform built on fairness and individual and collective responsibility would lead to him losing 40% of his initial staff.
The employees that stayed on were happy for the new system in which everyone on the team had a voice and was accountable to each other. Bob learned though that when you try to hold your employees accountable, you’ll quickly find out that a lot of people aren’t a good fit for your organization.
While it was a temporary setback to lose that many people, over time Bob was able to replace them with people who were a better fit for the company culture.
One way in which Bob can tell if his sales reps have been active is whether or not they have stories to share from the field.
In some cases though, throughout Bob’s career as a sales manager in the cannabis industry, there were many people who ‘weeded’ themselves out, before a culture of accountability could even get a hold of them.
In one such example when Bob was managing TetraLabs’ wholesale to retail operations in California, he had just hired a promising-looking candidate with a professional resume he had sourced from LinkedIn.
He asked the candidate Corey to drive down from San Francisco where he was located, to Los Angeles where Bob and his team would be exhibiting at a cannabis conference. Bob thought this would be a great training opportunity.
Corey shows up looking scruffy and disheveled, and like many a Tinder date gone wrong, he didn’t look anything like his picture. Corey nevertheless had a lot of natural sales talent, and he still did a pretty good job despite missing one of the events he was supposed to attend without properly communicating to the team about it.
At the end of the training period, Corey revealed to Bob that his dad had loaned him $500 to rent a car to drive down to LA for the training. Corey had nothing to his name. He was super motivated, he said, this opportunity was everything to him. He would make this work.
Bob believed in Corey and wanted to give him a chance. He gave Corey $500 out of his own wallet.
“I’m investing in you,” Bob told him.
A week later Bob got an urgent call from me. One of their most important and longest-standing customers in the Northern California market had called me to complain about Corey.
Corey had gone to a Halloween party with one of the budtenders from the store. He ended up getting into a big fight with her, a public verbal shouting match with her and all her coworkers, and then proceeded to steal some weed before leaving the party.
The worst part was that in Corey’s terrible, terrible judgment he had not only done what he was accused of but had been caught red-handed. I received a screenshot of the budtender’s phone from the manager of the store, in which Corey had confessed to a crime against one of my all-time best customers!
“Yeah I stole your trees,” Corey admitted via text to the budtender, “Cause you were being a bi**h!
It was clear that Bob was going to have to fire Corey, though he was concerned that Corey was still holding onto about $10,000 in inventory.
To deal with this Bob had his right-hand man, Brendan fly up to San Francisco to supervise Corey for his next scheduled in-store demo in the Bay Area. After the event, they loaded up all of the inventory in the trunk of Brendan’s rental car, and Brenden took Corey to the subway to drop him off. Brenden then told Corey that he was going to hold onto the inventory and that he needed to call Bob.
Having safely recovered the inventory Brendan pulled away, and Corey called Bob.
After having fired hundreds of people by now, I advised Bob to avoid directly addressing the incident.
“Try to focus on something positive” was the feedback I gave Bob. “When you’re letting someone go, and telling them that they’re fired, it makes little sense to throw gasoline on the fire by going off on them about how much they suck and how terrible they are.”
“Hi, Corey,” Bob said, “First of all I just wanted to say that I think you’re a talented guy with a lot of potential and that you could have a bright future in this industry.”
“Thank you,” Corey replied.
“Um… yeah… that being,” Bob continued, “the company is going to move in a different direction.”
“F*** you, Bob!”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” Corey repeated slowly and for emphasis, “I said f*** you, bitch!”
At this point, Bob knew he had lost control of the conversation, but the one thing that he couldn’t lose control of was his reaction. It seems as if almost nothing in this world is under our control. We don’t control the weather, we don’t control traffic, we don’t control our employees, co-workers, bosses, significant others, children, or pets. At the end of the day, the only thing we are truly in control of is our own reaction to different situations.
Bob knew he had to pivot to something positive to turn this conversation around.
“Well… “Bob said, “we’ve been in this industry a long time and I’m not planning on going anywhere. This industry is a small world, and if you plan to be in it, we’re going to see each other again, so it would behoove both of us to have a good relationship. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“F*** you, motherf***er!”
Bob didn’t give up though. He kept pointing out to Corey how much potential he had to succeed in the industry moving forward if he viewed this as an opportunity instead of a setback. By the end of the call, Corey actually thanked Bob for his time and told him that he really appreciated him!
Bob had somehow managed to turn a terrible situation on its head and transform a “f*** you” into a “thank you”.
How is that for closing a big sale?
Looking for help bringing your brand to market? Or are you a retailer or distributor looking to understand and navigate industry?
Consultants
(Co-editor and contributor, Troy Bertolino, provides expert build-out, management, and process development & optimization consulting services for start-ups and existing businesses in emerging cannabis markets- https://hybee.net/)
Learning new systems and processes is not mandatory…but neither is staying in business.
While they can cost a pretty penny, consultants typically are experienced and well-connected industry professionals. They can help guide you in setting up your business and avoiding industry pitfalls.
Besides hitting the google machine, a good place to find a consultant is at an expo or networking event in the market you’re interested in entering so that you can meet them in person. Make sure you research their credentials and reviews because for every genuinely helpful consultant there are at least twice as many sham artists, frauds, and hucksters, whose only pertinent experience lies in separating suckers from their money.
Key Chapter Takeaways
The Do’s and Don’ts of the Dope Industry
- Do– Create a culture of accountability
- Do– Hold your nose and hire a sales team
- Do– Get creative by filling some tasks with part-time consultants
- Don’t– Forget to conduct a thorough background check of each perspective employee
- Don’t– Take for granted that your employee will understand even the most simple of tasks without training and SOPs.
- Don’t– Ever punch down or let your employee make you lose your head.