Cannabis Culture Clash

The REAL problem(s) with the Cannabis Industry:

I’ve been saying this for over a decade, and I only see it getting worse lately.  The culture and the business of cannabis are at odds with each other.  

The attitude expressed from institutional folks is that cannabis businesses are primarily struggling due to poor executive leadership, and it fails to recognize the fact that many of the worst cannabis companies have traditional leadership.  Equally unfair is the assumption that every person in a suit is incapable of representing the cannabis culture.  I hear it all the time in my comments (shameless plug: if you aren’t following me on TikTok, you’re missing out),“Big business is taking over the industry” and I often wonder how anyone thinks it would become a full-fledged industry without evolving into “Big Business”?  

Nothing in cannabis is normal, so why do we keep expecting it to function like a normal industry?  You can’t advertise in any meaningful way, banking is a nightmare, and the list of regulatory complications is so complex, they'll change before we have a meaningful conversation about them. Yet day in and day out I meet traditional business leaders who come into the space and tell us how this “should" be done. And that’s when I realize yet again, they don’t get it. Not because I know it all, but because I know enough about each phase to confirm that there isn’t a set script that leads to success in this space.

Allow me to share the common clichés I hear over and over again, generalized down to these 4 issues:

1.    Growers: They are all full of shit. I have earned my stripes in the garden, so I include myself in this group. We all exaggerate and we most certainly “grow the best.” The balance of being around cannabis long enough to know it well, without developing an ego is hard to find. Folks with a background in Horticulture and Botany usually ride in on a high horse and don’t last long. From a technical standpoint I’ve certainly been humbled by the professional horticulturists “knowledge,” but I haven’t found many of them who enjoyed their experience in cannabis.

2.    The Money Guy/Gal: They almost never have the money. And most folks with it don’t have the elasticity required to let it ride long enough to succeed.  

3.    MBA Grads: These folks are sharp, but there is a rigidity to their approach that clashes with the cannabis culture more than any other group. The playbook in most schools of business is similar to Broadway, everyone is working together and following a script. So long as the plan is executed it has a high degree of likelihood it will work, but cannabis is more akin to football. Every play starts with a plan, but as soon as you get started, things change very fast. You MUST adjust quickly and it’s usually done in ways that tend to clash with this group.

4.    Stoners: This group seems to think they can wing it and lean on their knowledge of the culture and experience with cannabis, but the problem is most of the old ways simply won’t cut it in the modern era of this industry.

So now that I’ve pissed off every corner of the cannabis industry, allow me to get to my point. As long as these four groups continue to clash with each other, the industry as a whole will struggle.  Right now, the money has to bet on suits and corporate mergers, but we are seeing what these groups do when they don’t have the pulse of the culture. 

They appear to just buy into every pitch deck that crosses their desk and often make products that are woefully boring. Canada was basically a 3-year demonstration of the challenges we face, yet I get emails from shareholders every day saying “look what XXX did up in Canada, why aren’t we doing something similar?”  My answer is always the same, most of these deals are not going to pan out and some are losing millions per day while shutting ventures down as fast as they can buy the next one.  

We have a big challenge ahead of us. The industry is growing so fast we never had the time to build a proper foundation, which means we have to do it while we grow at an alarming pace. So next time you take a meeting or pitch your product, consider the other persons view and how it might add to your experience. We need to merge the values of the suits and tie-dye crowd, because the sooner we do so, the sooner we can focus our efforts on growing into one of the largest industries in the world.