How Did You Find Your Growers? Do They Need to be Licensed?
How did you get lucky finding your awesome grower? Did you burn through a couple of people before you found her? How do you find the right people?
I'm lucky because we found great people, but it wasn't lucky in the sense where I just happened to find these people. I started my company a year and a half before any cannabis licenses were ever awarded. In that year and a half, I built up my brand. I was looking for growers, for my managers and my dispensaries. I was looking for my dispensary locations, for the warehouse locations, I was acquiring all my lights. I was buying all this stuff slowly over time, preparing a year and a half before we even got the license.
More than just spending all the time and money to prepare, my partner and I had experience growing ourselves, my partner way more than myself. I shouldn't even say at that point in time I had experience, that's so much of an overstatement, but I had grown, just not to the level my partner did.
We went out and we vetted people. We went out and said show us your grow. Show us what you're doing, prove to us you know what you're doing. And so, we'd see how clean they were, how organized they were. We’d see the quality of plants they were growing. We would ask them questions that we knew the right answers to. Your average lawyer isn't going to have the faintest idea what to ask somebody to understand if they're a valid master grower, right? We know all this information through experience. That's the only way you can learn this industry, it really is.
No matter how much education we give, how much we teach people, you cannot teach someone experience in this industry. The gestation cycle is so long, when considering a learning curve. In reality, the gestation cycle for cannabis is actually really short, three months is insane. However, the fact that you have to wait three months before you can even tweak something, you're talking years to learn what works and doesn't work. So it's all of that experience added up, then talking to people and weeding out the right and wrong people. That's how we found our good crew.
Do growers have to be certified in any way to handle the bud and gain access to certain rooms in the grow? Most states do require some type of a license to work in the cannabis industry. It's not like a cannabis license, or a cultivation license or anything like that. You just have to apply. Sometimes you have to take a course, there's certain approved educators within each state to give lessons so you'd know the basics to getting started. But as long as you meet the check marks and you get the license, then you can work in the industry.
Most of those check marks mean taking some type of a class that says you know what you're doing, then you fill out the application form, and you pay the fee, which is anywhere between $50-$400 depending on the state. You have to pass a federal background check with fingerprinting, so if you have any felonies on your record, you're never going to work in this industry. I don't want to say never because actually there's some states that are doing some crazy stuff. Florida and I think New York now too is doing something where they're issuing new licenses to people that have been busted for weed charges in the past as a sort of reparations. They’re not issuing many by any means, but it’s their way of making things right for people of color or people that have been busted for weed charges in the past.
But seriously 99% of getting into the cannabis industry, you have to have a clean record. You can't have any felonies on your record at all. You can't have anything that looks suspicious to them. If there's something on your record they don't like, they're not going to give you a license to work or an actual license to own.
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Cheers!
.: Adam