Marijuana Business Magazine April 2020

Marijuana Business Magazine | April 2020 56 Some recruiters say C-suite and managerial positions have become prime cost-cutting targets. “A lot of these companies had a really bad habit of going very top-heavy in the C-suite and VPs. So, we saw a lot of layoffs at the executive level because they had just hired on a lot of upper management, and those people weren’t rolling up their sleeves and helping out,” said Kara Bradford, CEO of Viridian Staffing in Seattle. Janine Bush, president of the Cannabis Staffing Group in Massachusetts, agreed that C-suite executives face extra scrutiny today. “CEOs are being held accountable,” she said. “They are seeing the highest turnover.” Meanwhile, Liesl Bernard, founder and CEO of CannabizTeam, an executive search firm headquar- tered in San Diego, sees greater demand for certain C-suite positions as companies go public and/or get bigger and expand into other states, thereby increasing reporting and compliance demands. “A lot of the companies that are expanding are seeing the value of having a strong financial executive in place and more companies are investing in solid talent at the CFO level,” Bernard said. “Before, you maybe got away with having a less sophisticated controller in place.” Hamann fromWürk agreed, arguing that there is a greater demand for managers—not necessarily more of them—but experienced ones. Too many cannabis companies find themselves promoting entry-level employees such as budtenders to managerial positions when they don’t have managerial experience, and there are no experienced managers to train them. “You see this vicious cycle where companies hire entry-level people and then promote them to managers because they don’t have enough management—but they also don’t have enough time to train those managers because leadership in most cannabis companies is spread really thin,” Hamann said. Würk surveyed customers about what they wished they had more time to do, and managerial training was the No. 1 answer for most respondents. “When you have managers that are not seasoned or don’t have experience or aren’t being trained to manage, they inherently are poor managers,” Hamann added. “There is a middle-management shortage in the industry. There’s a shortage of seasoned management talent in the industry. There are retail or facilities managers who are seasoned and have expertise, and they’ve done this before. They have pattern recognition for how to manage people. They can see when processes aren’t efficient, and they can solve problems. We don’t have enough of those people.” TOP 15 U.S. METRO AREAS FOR CANNABIS JOB OPENINGS ON GLASDOOR C-SUITE AND MANAGERIAL POSITIONS COMPENSATION CONTEMPLATION Rank Metro Number of Job Openings Percent Share 1 San Francisco 197 13% 2 Los Angeles 181 12% 3 Denver 99 7% 4 New York City 66 4% 5 Seattle 56 4% 6 Boston 44 3% 7 Chicago 40 3% 8 Miami-Fort Lauderdale 38 3% Rank Metro Number of Job Openings Percent Share 9 Riverside, California 37 2% 10 Portland, Oregon 37 2% 11 San Jose , California 34 2% 12 Sacramento, California 30 2% 13 Las Vegas 25 2% 14 San Diego 23 2% 15 SantaBarbara,California 22 1% Other 583 39% Source: GlassDoor Copyright 2020 Marijuana Business Daily , a division of Anne Holland Ventures Inc. Seven of the top 15 hottest markets for cannabis jobs are in California.