When Do You Start Making Money?
If you try to bring somebody on board, how much will they have to spend to walk in the door and when would they see a return for a grow? When will we start making money?
The grow is the hardest because it requires the biggest amount of money up front. I'm talking millions, seriously, because the build outs are so expensive. For a grow, you need large warehouses, lights, construction, it's a lot of money. Then the people involved are highly skilled laborers, it's not a budtender you can pay a minimum wage and they're just excited to sell cannabis.
You need someone that can listen to the plants, talk to them. It sounds weird when I say that, but it's true. The plants will tell you what's wrong. When you're a great grower, you will listen to your plants because they're talking to you everyday about everything that's wrong with them. When you have that highly skilled level of grower, they're expensive. Your master growers go for a quarter million a year just in salary. That’s just one person.
One of my master growers is amazing. The reason I love her is because she loves the plants more than anything else in the world. They're her babies. I remember when I first met her and I knew she was the right person. We were talking, she was taking cuts and doing her job, I'm looking at some plants, and I said “Man, these ones don't look good”. She got so up, and she said to me “You don't look good”. She got so offended that I was making fun of her plants, that she was genuinely insulted to her core.
Those are the people you need at your grow because there's so much volatility in the genetics and things just going wrong at any minute, like infestations, mold, genetic problems and nutrient deficiencies and light going out, or your CO2 dying or the too much CO2 or too much potassium. All kinds of things can go wrong, it's so highly volatile. You have to have very, very, very experienced people, multiple people running your grow.
Your personal expenses are going to be expensive, so the first year you're not going to make money in your grow. It's very expensive. It's a long play. I would say you need to plan on a five year plan for your grow, unless your plan is to sell it. If your goal is just getting your grow up so in three years you can flip it to someone else that wants to get into this, then that's a different story because obviously the license and everything is worth money. That's a different valuation perspective because you're making money in the exit, not on the actual revenues.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO