Marijuana Business Magazine

regulators and drafting the 40,000 pages of our New York state medical cannabis license application. We’d already built our two Illinois cultivation sites by the time we found the right partners, but they were able to make a “second pass” on some of the design decisions we’d made and really refine and improve things. Going forward, we are bringing them in from the beginning on other projects. Lesson 2: Be Honest About What You Don’t Know In starting up our operations, we were very conscious about keeping things on time and on budget. We were probably less conscientious about staying “on knowledge.” We didn’t think about things like service contracts. In fact, we didn’t have any in place. We pretty much said, “Just leave us the three-ring binder and we’ll do it all ourselves.” Too often, that led to operational problems, lost time and, in the end, additional expense. For example, when you buy a state-of-the-art environ- mental control system to operate a 25,000-square-foot greenhouse, make sure you spend the money to purchase the installation and maintenance plan. We’ve learned that we have to be brutally honest about our own skill sets and, when we don’t know how to do something, we’re probably going to have to spend time and money to address that gap. There’s only so much learning on the fly we can do. In the cannabis space, time and band- width is by far the most valuable asset there is. Investing in resources to do things right the first time will pay divi- dends down the road. Lesson 3: Watch the Calendar and the Clock In Illinois and New York – where we expanded in the summer of 2015 – we were given six months after getting our licenses to become operational. That’s a pattern we see repeated all over: States agonize over the laws and the regulations and then, having eaten up all that time, press a breakneck pace onto the businesses because there’s pent-up pressure from the public for these programs to get rolling. People have been waiting and waiting. We learned that operationalizing our business was like standing up a three-legged stool comprised of cost, quality and time. You do what you can to balance them appropriately, but when the state saws the “time” leg off, then the stool isn’t always easy to stand on. We knew the numbers we had to manage on costs. And, for quality, we understood that we were going to Above: PharmaCann's greenhouse complex under construction in Illinois. Below: Main greenhouse corridor at PharmaCann's facility in Orange County, New York. Photos courtesy of PharmaCann LLC 160 • Marijuana Business Magazine • November / December 2017