Do you have to know someone to get into the industry?
It is and it isn't. So it always has been in the sense that if you know somebody and if you have connections with the people that are running the industry from the government side, you do have an upper hand. It's inevitable. It's anything in government and politics. If you know someone and you have a lobbyist, it obviously plays to your advantage. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're, you have to have it. It's just going to give you that extra leg up on everybody else. What they really want is experience. So have you had experience or you can show experience or you partner up with someone experienced that weighs very heavily. Actually that's even more than political connections unless like your brother, other governors or something like that.
That's obviously a little bit different. But yeah, so political connections or having any type of connections in the industry of the Health Department or whoever is actually issuing the licenses, it definitely helps. One of our clients, they're applying down in Missouri right now and the way that they're reviewing applications is through a blind wait scoring process. So what they're doing is all the information you turn in has to be redacted, meaning you can't have any actual names on the application or within any of the answers just to be like initials or placement of some kind or a substitute for the name. And then it's someone that's not tied to the application approval board that is weighing these scores. So this way they're trying to say they're trying to keep it as fair as possible so that this way, you know, they can't say, oh well you knew it was so-and-so's friend or their family or person or whatever, and that's why you gave it to them. Because realistically the government goes two ways, right? So the government is all governments are corrupt to a point, but they're also accountable and they're being held accountable by the feds. So yes, if you have connections that helps you, but at the same token they're also trying to prevent any type of influence because the people that are awarding the these applications don't want to get busted and hauled off to federal prison for meddling in the application process, which has happened many, many times and I know of people, very directly, that have gone to prison for saying, "Hey, if you pay me 10 grand, I'll hook you up and get you your license." Like mayors and governors and ex-governors and things like that. I was actually approached myself by an ex-governor when I was applying for a license and he said if I paid him a certain amount of money every month, he would guarantee me a license and I didn't do it because I wasn't looking for the short term.
I wasn't looking just to get approved. I was looking for five, six years from now. I was like, "Hey, if all of a sudden shit hits the fan, I want to make sure I'm 100% clean," so no one can come after me for anything. And sure enough, look what's going on in Puerto Rico right now, all these government officials are getting hauled away by the feds like crazy. They still don't have a governor as far as I know. Three people have been governor and like the last two weeks because they keep getting busted for corruption or just being forced to quit or leaving the island because they're too afraid for all the other dumb shit they've done over the years. So I'm happy as hell that I did everything 100% by the book because now if someone comes to me or that guy that approached me saying, "Hey, I can hook you up," gets busted, I am not going to get tied with them.
One of my clients was working with a certain lobbyist in Puerto Rico and that lobbyist and his company is now under federal investigation. And my buddy just got a call from the Department of Justice to come in to give a statement. So it absolutely will come back to you. It's just a matter of time. So my personal recommendation is just to stay clean. If you can do it cleanly, obviously political benefits are in your favor, but don't do anything stupid because it will come back to you and it's the feds that come after you, not the local government. It's federal shit and you don't want that on you.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO
rootAffects / Caribbean Green