The 2021 GROW Executive Summit concluded with a live GROW Conversations discussion featuring four leading growers from across the controlled-environment industry. Each of them was asked about their biggest takeaways from the event, and the lessons they were looking to take home and apply to their own operations. Here’s what they had to say.
“My biggest takeaway is to keep reinforcing our strategic plan to our team, not let it sit on a shelf and review it once a year. If you want your team to be engaged in your operation, why not give them the tools to be strategists themselves?”
“I have a friend who’s also a businessman, and we’ll ask each other if we’re running the business to ultimately sell it. The answer is always yes, and so our business decisions have to based on what the business might look like to a potential buyer.”
“One thing COVID-19 did for us to help us communicate better, and break down the barriers between management and staff. We were all on the same playing field with the pandemic, and the messages we provided to our team were important regardless of their position.”
“It's all about your attitude and your perspective. The things that we're dealing with today, while they may seem more challenging, have been around for a very long time. And the one thing I know about this industry is we are very resilient. We can solve these problems.”
“Getting your team on board to strategize as a company was a big takeaway for me. We set up an executive council at Metrolina that’s made up of people from all different areas of the company, from growing to marketing to sales. This group helps set our plan for 2030, and the goals we have to hit to get there. One thing I emphasize to them is the past is for learning, and the future is for doing.”
“The discussion on vendor relationships [from Craig Reynolds at Hoffman Nursery] really hit home. You need to proactive with your vendors, but you also can’t beat them up on price every time or else they’ll stop coming back to you. We also make sure we don’t have all our eggs in one basket, and have good relationships with as many vendors as we can.”
“The idea of running your business every day like you’re trying to sell it is a good one, but it doesn’t always mean selling to a buyer. You also need to be selling it to your customers every day, as well as your employees. It should be your goal as an owner to make your company better every day.”
“We need to help fight the perception that this industry is a hard place to work. We need to talk about how great it is, and how many opportunities there are. Use your best employees for this; sometimes your greatest personalities can be your greatest champions.”
“When I go to meetings like this, I want to identify at least one idea I can take home and practically apply to my operation. In this case, it’s maintaining win-win relationships with our vendors my sitting down with them and learning more about what we can both get out of the partnership.”
“This conference really solidified our company’s approach to making every decision through the lens of how it impacts our customers. If a decision we make will not positively impact the customer, we don’t do it.” “I think the same things that make your company sellable also make it profitable. If you manage the company well, and everyone is aligned to the same strategic plan, that will make you profitable.”
“We are never going back to where we were pre-COVID, so we need to take the lessons that we learned, apply them to what we’re doing now, and get rid of the things we shouldn’t do.” Editor’s note: The Chef’s Garden, which sells direct to restaurants and foodservice companies, lost 90% of its revenue at the beginning of the pandemic. It had to change gears quickly. Learn more here.
“We put a Venn diagram in our HR office. Organizational need is one of the circles, candidate skill set is a second circle, and the third circle is candidate passion. And where those circles overlap is where magic happens. The question is how you identify these people. It may take you a couple years to figure it out, but one thing you can do is take young people and move them around in the organization, and let them discover their passion.”
“My biggest takeaway was around succession planning and the eventual sale of your business. Since we got into the cannabis business by starting SunMed about five years ago, we’ve been approached many times. We’ve resisted, but we’re still focused on building the business to make it profitable enough that it would be appealing to interested buyers.”
“I try not to be owner-centric in our business. We work with our team to set clear expectations, give them the right tools to do their job, and work with them to measure the results.”
“I tell our team to make the best decision for the long term. A lot of the people at our company came from the corporate environment, where they were constantly focused on hitting quarterly numbers. That’s fine, but sometimes we need to retrain them to look more at the long term.”
“In our more traditional plant-based businesses where margins are low, you need to minimize your labor costs. But in cannabis, we need to be 20% to 30% higher in our starting pay than others. We also need to have a different mindset for people who aren’t interested in working the normal 40 hours a week.”
