Speaker 1: 0:18

Welcome to episode 94 of High Spirits. I'm your co-host, anna Rae Grabstein, and it's Thursday, june 26th 2025. Today we are sharing an episode of the Practical Politics podcast hosted by my friend, sabrina Noah, that I recently recorded with her while we were both in Denver. We talk about my origin story in cannabis and a whole lot more. I hope you enjoy it Without further ado. Here's Practical Politics. We have to have our eyes on things that are truly ambitious, purpose-oriented and visionary, and just drive towards the ambitious while we push the levers of what's still achievable.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Welcome to Practical Politics, the podcast that takes you inside the room where decisions actually happen. I'm Sabrina Noah, the lobbyist. Takes you inside the room where decisions actually happen. I'm Sabrina Noah, the lobbyist lady bringing you conversations with the people who live and breathe the politics and policymaking process. We're here at the International Cannabis Bar Association meeting and I'm so excited to be joined by Anna Rae Gravstein. Anna Rae is currently a strategic advisor in the industry and we are so excited that she's here. Anna Rae and I have been friends now since oh my gosh 2013 or 16, when you came back into the industry Longtime leader, huge binder nerd like myself in regulations and just we're really excited to have her here to talk about her new business, a strategic advisory firm.

Speaker 1: 1:39

I'm the founder and CEO of Wolfmeyer and we are a strategic advisory firm. I work with cannabis operators and ancillary businesses who are working across the cannabis supply chain in various ways. We solve big problems and create growth to help companies accelerate from where they are and also to do transformation work, to fix big problems, to be driving towards profitability. And my origin story in cannabis is really it goes deep.

Speaker 1: 2:10

I grew up in San Francisco.

Speaker 1: 2:12

I got my first job at a coffee shop at the corner of 18th and Castro when I was 15 years old, and that was 1996. And 1996 was the year that Prop 215 was on the ballot yeah, and Prop 215 really was burst out of of the gay AIDS crisis that was centered in the Castro, and that was where I happened to be working center and while I wasn't old enough to vote. This was long before social media and when people were organizing, they were organizing on the streets and coffee shops were the center of all of that, and so I was working behind the espresso machine, but I was witness to an incredible social movement, one that was at my fingertips, and so I wouldn't say that I became an activist. I was really more a witness, but it planted a seed that I didn't even realize was a seed that was in me. That really became activated many years later, in 2004, when I finished up at UC Santa Cruz and was trying to figure out what my next thing that I was going to do after college was, and a friend invited me to come and participate in harvest in Mendocino at a Prop 215 farm, and I met friends that fall that became my chosen family, like my community truly Can you describe what a Prop 215 farm and a harvest looks like?

Speaker 2: 3:39

Just for totally question.

Speaker 1: 3:42

So Willits, california, small rural community in Mendocino County. The 101 is the freeway that goes through town, but it's really just a one-lane road in both directions and Dirt Road deep deep into the hills up on top of a ridge because that's where cannabis grows best facing the southern sun, and the property was probably about 80 acres, but the farm was not the farm you know, just probably took up, I don't know, maybe two acres up at the top of the ridge and so a lot of rugged terrain. You'd get there. You'd need to leave your car sort of at a clearing at the entrance to the property and you drive up to where the farm and all the activities were in a four wheeler and there were a few structures but there wasn't a house, there wasn't traditional running water, it was all totally off the grid.

Speaker 1: 4:41

And we're camping this entire time. You camped the whole time and there were about 40 people that were there for harvest and most of them were trimmers and there was probably about three to four people that had worked on the farm and whose farm it was, that had been there throughout the whole growing cycle. But come October, when it's time to harvest all the plants, they'd bring all of these trimmers up and all the trimmers would have a tent and they would set up a camp and nobody would leave the mountain and everyone would spend all day trimming and the trimmers were getting paid $200 a pound cash and you could probably trim. If you were a really bad trimmer, you could trim a pound a day, but the good trimmers could trim up to four pounds a day. So it was pretty sweet, you know, tax free cash.

Speaker 1: 5:27

Yeah, I actually was invited to be what they called the trim mom because I grew up in the hospitality industry. My family owned a restaurant and all through college I was always really into cooking and so my friend who invited me to the farm said you were really great at cooking. This farm I'm going to go be a trimmer at is looking for someone to cook for the trimmers and to be the supply person. That is the only one that leaves the mountain. Yeah, and um wow, and they'll give you ten thousand dollars of cash at six weeks camping, and I was fresh out of college and didn't have a job yet and thought that sounds fun summer camp for weed trimmers?

Speaker 1: 6:00

yeah, like why not? Um? And I didn't really realize that it would change the trajectory of my life and my career, but it seemed like a great thing to do while I tried to figure out the rest of my life. Yeah, and so I went up there and I did all the cooking for all the trimmers and I was the one that left the mountain and went to get supplies.

Speaker 2: 6:22

You grew up in San Francisco. You see the movement at the beginning from the Castro district. You have this really organic, almost summer camp experience. How do you turn that into an MBA and be a fabulous businesswoman?

Speaker 1: 6:34

Yeah Well, so I grew up with a mom who was a bookkeeper and she had an innate sense of just business all the time, of, like, creating form and function within chaos. That was her role in her, with her clients, and I think that she gave that to me in terms of the way that she raised me. And so when I started to get exposed to cannabis, I started paying attention of, like, what is going on. There's a lot of cash, seems like everyone is doing so well, but nobody seems to be paying attention to anything. Nobody's bills are getting paid, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I realized that there was this massive opportunity. The entrepreneur in me was like, wow, people are doing really well, but nobody seems to know what the heck is going on.

Speaker 1: 7:20

And I was very early in my own development. Like I said, I was fresh out of college trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and so I ended up leaving the mountain and I got a job in workforce development, working for a nonprofit, and I very quickly realized that nonprofits weren't for me. And at the same time, I had this new, established community of cannabis cultivation and people that were cultivating all over the Bay Area. From my experience in Mendocino and I was just saying, loosely engaged with those friends, and through all of that I was like, wow, there is something happening here, there is more business happening in cannabis, and I really wanted to explore that some more. And so I decided that I wanted to go to grad school for business and I wanted to be able to bring business acumen to cannabis, and so I went on this little journey of trying to figure out what that would look like, and while I was doing that, I was trying to talk to people that were doing more than grow within the cannabis space, and that landed me. I moved to Oakland because I decided I was going to go to grad school in San Francisco and just was doing all the networking that I could within the cannabis advocacy community.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Within the businesses that existed At that time, the growers were deep, deep in the shadows, so it wasn't like there were brands like there are now, but the businesses that were out of the shadows were the dispensaries, and it was still very clandestine in terms of the structure of which they all operated in, because there wasn't a regulatory framework. It was this very loose Prop 215. Yeah, time, yeah, I just made sure that I understood what was happening in that space and through that I met the two guys who became my co founders at steep hill lab, and they had the idea already and they also had come out of the cannabis cultivation community. One of them had been a long time cultivator, the other was really just a broker hustler who'd been moving cannabis throughout the state for a long time and and everybody had friends that thought they had the best cannabis. Everybody and, um, and nobody really had any information by which to tell you whose cannabis was actually the best.

Speaker 2: 9:28

It was all anecdotal. It would just be like one person would smoke it and have an opinion. There was no analytics, there wasn't potency, there were no labels 100%.

Speaker 1: 9:36

And so these guys had come up with the idea of we need to start the first cannabis lab. And I met them and I was in the process of applying to business school I hadn't even gotten in yet but they immediately identified in me that I was. I was the business mind of the three of us. One of them was the science guy, the other one was more the sales guy and all of a sudden they found me and I was the business mind. Yeah, and within a few days of meeting them they said come be the CEO. We need to start this business.

Speaker 1: 10:05

That's pretty cool and I thought I'm not ready to be a CEO. What the heck, I can't be a CEO. I've never been a CEO. And I went home and I slept on it and I talked to who was at the time my boyfriend, who's now my husband, and my baby daddy and I thought you know when in your life do you get an opportunity like this to do something that nobody has ever done before? At that time, the only labs that were doing any type of cannabis testing in the world were law enforcement labs that were in existence to confirm that, when someone was arrested, that what they were actually arrested for was actually cannabis, and so a lab needed to certify that it wasn't oregano, that it was in fact a controlled substance that they were now a criminal for, and there was no data available.

Speaker 1: 10:52

No, and they weren't quantifying anything. They were just saying, yes, thc, yeah, yeah, yes, weed, and. And so I said you know what? Yes, let's do this. And I had also, at the same time, just gotten accepted to the business school program that I had been planning to go full time to, and I called them up and I said, hey, any way that I can go part time for year one, I need to start a business. Yeah, and they said, sure, no problem, really, and that's pretty cool. There was already a part time MBA program, but I just hadn't applied for that one, I had applied for the full time program. And they said you're in cannabis, right?

Speaker 2: 11:28

Yeah, go from being coffee shop to trim to. Ceo.

Speaker 1: 11:32

Part time grad student yes, and so I I took that first year of really incubating the business yeah, and utilizing all the tools that were at my disposal while I was in grad school and I had my mom, who was this incredible career bookkeeper who showed me how to set up QuickBooks and taught me how to be a bookkeeper so that I could set up the first books for the business and learn how to do payroll and all of the basic things that you do, and we had access to zero capital. I mean, we raised $84,000 to start the business all from friends and family, and that is an incredible feat to start an analytical lab with.

Speaker 2: 12:12

What did you spend that money on? Do you remember?

Speaker 1: 12:14

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it was to secure the lease on the space, to put the down payment on the scientific equipment that we also leased, and that's basically it.

Speaker 2: 12:24

Yeah, that's all you need.

Speaker 1: 12:26

And right, she figured out just straight up sweat and hustle to open our first accounts, and you know the space that we rented to start steep hill was right across the street the street from Harborside Health Center and very quickly we formed a partnership with Harborside and with Steve D'Angelo to test every single product that was coming through Harborside, which was an incredibly important on-ramp for us to have enough variety and diversity of cannabis to actually create valid scientific methods.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Because, even if we knew a lot of people, we needed tons of different cannabis to be able to make sure that the scientific methodology was correct. And so Harborside had more cannabis coming through its doors and more growers than really anywhere in the world. If you ever went to the buyer's waiting room at Harborside in those years around 2009, at any given day, you'd probably have 50 different growers with duffel bags coming through that room to show their cannabis to the buyers, and at that time, all of the cannabis that was coming to dispensaries coming in turkey bags. It wasn't in final form product, it was deli style, right? Yeah, and so they would bring cannabis in and then they would hold it and give us a sample of it. Yeah, and we would test it, give them the test results, and then they would put it out onto the dispensary floor, the original quarantine hold for testing and to set the stage.

Speaker 2: 13:52

Harborside legacy. Other than the Berkeley patient group, I'm not aware of a more historic and important dispensary retail operator. I agree with that. You know, continuously operating Steve D'Angelo father. You know of California, cannabis legalization and advocacy right, but that's really cool. I mean the image you gave there of you know prior to this regulated model, and talking about how far we've come. Right, got these guys coming in with duffel bags. You're putting it in like, I'm assuming, a locked cage, taking a sample. Then they take that duffel bag, put it out on the floor and tell, I mean, talk about compared to where we are today. Oh yeah, astronomically, what a great um that's. I can imagine. How does it feel to walk into dispensaries these days? Honestly, yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:37

You know, I, I, I give us a lot of credit for being the early movers that introduced potency testing for the first time, and that was hugely momentous, and I've said it before, I said it on stage yesterday like we absolutely changed the trajectory of the industry and changed the world. It was still a really hard business and I also am very sad of what a currency THC has become at this point and how focused consumers are on potency as a way to create value for products, and I wish that we could have a more robust methodology for consumers to create value for products than just looking at THC. Yeah, that said, we created the first THC testing. We identified the first CVC strains in the market. We I, we created the first ways to do microbiological and pesticide testing. Um, was it perfect? Is it perfect? No, um, but I am really proud to see of all of the labs that came after us and and the entire sector that we created.

Speaker 2: 15:48

Yeah, so an entire sector? Yeah, spanned, I mean it's. It's really impressive. Um, on practical politics, we really do like to focus on some of those like origin stories and those key characteristics. Right, we like to think, as you've identified, you as a person, started a sector, an industry. Right, lab testing within this cannabis space. You've talked about growing up with a mom who was a bookkeeper. You talked about your early activism in the Castro District in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS movement in 1996. Talked about starting the first cannabis testing lab. And now you know you obviously have your strategic advisory firm. If you look at the continuum, like what are the values or skills, like what are the things you think that you utilize every day that have helped you in that journey?

Speaker 1: 16:32

Yeah, it's. It's about problem solving and leadership and how, how we lead through challenge and hard times and how we identify what the opportunities and the levers are, the options that are in front of us. I really look at making sure that I'm accepting the reality of the market and the environment, be it the legislative environment, the regulatory environment, the market environment, getting out of denial about what the hopes and dreams are, of what we aspire to be, and figuring out how to make things manageable right right in front, while still walking this line between ambitious and achievable. Um, like just just just setting our sights on things that are achievable isn't good enough. Like we have to have our eyes on things that are achievable isn't good enough. Like we have to have our eyes on things that are truly ambitious, right Purpose oriented and visionary, and just drive towards the ambitious while we push the levers of what's still achievable, yeah, every day.

Speaker 1: 17:39

And what I learned at Steep Hill the biggest lessons for myself there was that I didn't know how to be a CEO yet, yeah, and I didn't have a mentor that showed me the way, and I hadn't worked under a leader that had given me the tools that I could take and model when I became a leader myself Because I was willing to raise my hand and do something that nobody had ever done before and enter a space that was brand new. I put myself in a leadership position before I was really ready to be a leader, and that meant that when I decided to move on from that role, that was my number one priority was to figure out how to bolster my own leadership, to find a CEO that could mentor me and show me how how to fill in the holes that I found myself facing when I was in a leadership role. And that actually took me out of cannabis for a couple years, yeah, but I ultimately came back to the space, thankful yeah, in 2016. And a lot of that had to do with another realization that I had at steep hill early on. That, I think, is relevant, especially within the political realm that we're dealing with today, which was in 2010,. There was an early legalization measure in California that failed Prop 19. Yeah, and we started Steep Hill at the end of 2008, beginning of 2009. And we were selling self-regulation. We were going to dispensaries and trying to convince them to do testing, because we were showing them that they could show the world that they were trying to be the best possible player in an unregulated environment, and that was great, and some people raised their hand and said, hey, we want to be the best possible provider of medicine and we want to do testing. But the truth is is that, as soon as things get tough, people cut the expenses that are not necessary, that are the nice to have Not required, and they looked at testing as a nice to have not a requirement, and we see that today.

Speaker 1: 19:48

Now, fast forward all of this time, you've got the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bill that opened up a new sector for hemp-derived cannabinoids, and there is not a lot of regulation yet in most markets where hemp is commercialized. More and more, we're starting to see state-level kind of patchwork of certain types of regulations, but, largely, looking at the federal landscape, no regulations specifically for hemp, and the hemp industry is doing its best to try to create a narrative about how they're great players and how they deserve to be there for better or for worse, like kind of wherever you fall on that. And there is this underlying narrative about self-regulation and I appreciate it. I appreciate that they're saying, hey, we're creating this manifesto of if you are a good operator, these are the things that you do, and if you join this certain trade association, you are pledging that you're going to be doing all of these things. And this is self-regulation at work. See, it works. Look how great we are. And I totally get why they're doing it, and I also have a healthy level of skepticism from real life experience. We've been there before. That's saying that, actually, when things are getting tough and they're tough right now look at what's happening in Texas Companies who are at fear for their livelihood because they might be shut down due to new prohibitions, I'm sure, are saying well, is that last COE good enough for us just to use again?

Speaker 1: 21:17

Right, because I don't know if I really want to spend $1,200 on a test right now. Right, when all this inventory might get embargoed because of a potential legislative change that's going to shut down this whole state opportunity? Yeah, that is when self-regulation starts to crumble and it's the reason why regulation is so important, right? So, anyway, that's kind of the fast forward of like the lesson from then to the lesson from now. In between, there's lots of other lessons that have been learned, for sure, but this is definitely a lens that I wear and it's interesting. Over the years I've had a lot of people talk to me about lab testing and even like private equity has been really interested in lab testing because it is something that private equity understands. There should be stable, should be.

Speaker 1: 22:05

Yeah like they invest in pharmaceutical labs or in blood testing labs and they're like, oh, maybe this is a safe way for us to get into cannabis. So I've done some discovery calls with private equity over the years and in the end, there was a really good reason for me, early on, to be excited about lab testing. Ultimately, is that an area that I think is still very interesting? Absolutely not. I think it's very transactional. It was really sexy back in the day. We were doing something that nobody had ever done before. We were building accountability, yeah, and we were creating new knowledge that nobody had. Now it's a marketing tactic, yeah, and now it's a transaction.

Speaker 1: 22:48

There isn't a lot of differentiation between labs and there's a lot of challenges, ultimately because of this misplaced value on high potency products, and so brands have this terrible incentive to be working with labs that will inflate results and it's just. It's a very, it's a very unfortunate where the lab testing world has gone, which is ultimately why I didn't. When I came back to cannabis, that wasn't an area that I wanted to stick in and and I knew that if I when I came back to cannabis, that what I wanted to do was build and operate an actual cannabis company, and so that's what I did in 2016.

Speaker 2: 23:25

So here we are and obviously you've got this tremendous experience You've now cultivated. I love a good week and I'm sorry you've cultivated this leadership experience. You have your MBA. How have you transitioned your early ownership skills, operator skills, and where are you at now?

Speaker 1: 23:40

Yeah, so, when I left NorCal Cannabis at the end of 2021, I was really excited about all of the different states that were emerging with new label programs and I explored actually moving to New York State and starting a company there, because I was excited about the MRTA and what had happened, but at the time it wasn't really clear how it was going to be commercialized and what the licensing process was. There was no regulatory rollout at that point and I was just sort of waiting, and so during that waiting period, as I was thinking about if I wanted to pick up my family and move to the East Coast, I just leaned into this tremendous network of cannabis leaders and businesses that I have accumulated over all these years in the space and just were people in my network that asked me to help them with different strategic issues or challenges that they were having inside their company, but also outside, and my experience is really both. I worked on a lot of both external affairs and corporate development stuff, but I also built and scaled the infrastructure of a company from nothing to 1200 people and then went through like a major downsizing activity as well, and so I just know about all the pains. I know about building a company, figuring out how to structure teams, and I also know about like sitting at the table with investors how to figure out how to mutually align everybody's incentives together, because I've been through it all. I've been through very unmutually aligned processes and fixing those things, and sometimes the biggest mistakes that we've made are the biggest lessons. The things that I can raise my hand at and say were the biggest wins aren't the things that I use every day in my work, but it's the mistakes that I made along the way.

Speaker 1: 25:34

And so I just started helping people in my network and then I thought, wow, I really love this and I love the relationship that I'm getting to have with CEOs and boards from the outside of being a mirror, holding up an honest truth, an honest truth back to them.

Speaker 1: 25:49

Yeah, because what happens inside of companies often is that there's a lot of yes people that surround executive teams and certainly CEOs, because they're looking out for themselves or they bought into the CEO's vision. I mean, sometimes it's truly authentic that they are really yes people because they've come up with a vision together and they believe in it and they're driving towards it. But it gets vacuous and I realized pretty quickly that I felt really comfortable being truly honest about what I was seeing in the marketplace and all the other cannabis companies that I was seeing the ones that I had worked in, the others in the market or is it the same? Or how are they looking at their own internal business systems compared to what I thought maybe they could do instead and just being a truth teller, really driving forward, being a person that was willing to say the things to a CEO that their team wouldn't?

Speaker 2: 26:55

Sounds like you were trying to find feel what you needed when you were a CEO.

Speaker 1: 27:00

Yeah, absolutely Like I realized that I needed mentorship when I was in leadership roles and it's not always easy to find it and when I started working with different clients, I realized that what they were doing was asking me to be that person. Yeah, and it's a hard thing to explain of what that relationship is like. Yeah, oh, it's kind of like a fractional chief strategy officer and a business coach for the CEO. Yeah, and it changes depending on the person and and what it is that they're looking for and what the company needs. Yeah, but quickly it evolved from just being someone that could give the CEO advice to actually building on and developing the frameworks that I see as my approach towards solving big problems and what my strategy process is for helping companies to figure out what their purpose is at the highest level, but then also what their execution focused objectives and goals are that can then tailor down to helping every single person in a company understand what winning is, and I know from my own experience that it can be really challenging to win when only the executive team knows what winning is and that downstream in the company, people are just so caught up in the hamster wheel of their micro actions that they don't understand the bigger picture. So I've really taken an approach that's sort of this three-pillared approach to strategy that starts with encouraging and facilitating and helping leadership teams which I see as both the board but also the executive management team, which is different structures and different companies depending on where they are in their progression of startup to more fully developed to identifying what their foundational brand pillars are what is their purpose, their mission, their values, right, and then from that that's kind of step one. That's your foundation. Then you can build the building right on top. The structure is the objectives, that's who you want to be in the market, what are the things that you're really going to go and tackle in the next 12 to 24 months and actually do, and what are the numbers that you can put behind them in terms of the quantitative goals that you're going to reach. Interesting, and if you can get to this place of three to six quantitative goals that mean the company is actualizing its objectives in the market, then you can take those goals and you can start building structures of what is the third step of strategy, which is the downstream goals and KPIs that are much more focused on individual business units, be it the cultivation, or the brand activities, the sales activities and also the other more internal activities, be it HR, hiring and accounting and and all those things. And so I can I help facilitate that whole process and all of those things. And so I can I help facilitate that whole process and I can run behind the companies and actually help them execute it, depending on what their internal resources are.

Speaker 1: 30:02

Sometimes it's about coaching their directors and managers about how to decide what those KPIs are with their teams, or sometimes it's actually facilitating those processes together and then often those high level goals. The output is that they want to do something big and expansive that they've never done before. Like I have a client right now that, through that facilitated strategic process, has decided that they want to become an employee owned company and they want to become an ESOC team, and it's really exciting and so. So now I'm working on assembling kind of what that team might be like and trying to put a plan together, because they don't have anyone on their team that is equipped to do that and I can assemble that action. Or similarly, I've got another client that is working on trying to move their whole company towards profitability, and so we are figuring out how to align compensation incentives across their whole company to profitability, starting with how they look at wholesale compensation.

Speaker 1: 31:03

What is commission now? Well, it's top line, and so salespeople are making sales that are negative margin, but they're still getting commission on them. That doesn't make sense. How do we create a new structure? And sometimes that needs to be done more from the outside. I can be this person that's like hey, I want to help empower you, but I also want to just be honest with you that I'm seeing that this isn't necessarily an action that's serving you right now, and let's think about how else we can get there and be that outside voice in the room that's willing to be a truth teller and also willing to help push forward decision making, and that's willing to be a truth teller and also willing to help push forward decision making, and I think if you were to give a couple of quick pieces of advice for our listeners.

Speaker 2: 31:41

how do you coach CEOs to give bad news? That's a hard thing to do.

Speaker 1: 31:53

Yeah, I think that, as leaders, people often think of themselves as having a certain archetype. Maybe they're a visionary leader, maybe they're a very directive leader. But as a CEO especially as you're facing having to give bad news, sometimes like we need to downsize or we have to close a market or things just aren't going the way that we want there's this framework that I love.

Speaker 1: 32:10

Daniel Goleman is a wonderful writer who writes about leadership and he talks about the six different types of leaders and the idea is that as leaders, we can switch and flow to meet the moment, and it's really important to meet the moment.

Speaker 1: 32:25

And if you're going to tell people something that is really challenging and really hard, you need to think about who they need you to be as a leader to hear that information. And that might mean that you have to put on a different hat of go outside of your regular repertoire, which might be highly collaborative. But if you are highly collaborative but yet have made a decision that you're going to shut down a market or downsize a company 20% and you need to deliver that news, you need to be firm, clear and directive, showing that there has been a tremendous amount of thought and that the decision is made and that there's no going back. And yeah, that is the advice that I give CEOs is to figure out how to meet the moment and and to be there for the people the way that they, the way that they need to be met.

Speaker 2: 33:20

And I love how you talk about winning right, I don't. You have to wait. You have to celebrate every win in any space, especially in emerging markets, where we're building the plane as we're flying it. Any tips on how to celebrate a win?

Speaker 1: 33:31

Loudly and all the time, like creating space for it. You know, I I talk a lot about creating a rhythm of business and I teach leaders to do that and starting with CEOs and then downstream, of the way that we create meetings inside of our teams, whether it be the one on ones or the department meetings or the quarterly and monthly business reviews but that those meetings should all fall into some sort of predictable framework that the people who participate in them kind of know what they're coming to. It's like an agenda that exists ahead of time and that different people have different levels of accountability within that agenda. And there should always be space for celebrating wins every single time, so that people get used to thinking about wins as they come, because often we just sail past them.

Speaker 1: 34:19

Oh, that thing worked. But if people know that once a week on their weekly sales meeting, their national sales meeting call, there's going to be a five minute block where there's a space where everyone is encouraged to share a win, then people are going to think of those wins, and often the wins are small, yeah, but just thinking. But we have to stack them and we have to make space for them all of the time, especially in a transparent, collaborative way, so that we're seeing who the other people are that we're winning with and that inspires us to also, like, want to meet that moment and to win ourselves what still shocks you about what you have to explain about the industry.

Speaker 2: 34:53

I mean, you're such a longstanding leader, you've got such a network right. You've talked about that, like when you meet normies, as Jordan Wellington calls them, what still shocks you? That you have to explain to people about regulated state, legal or even hemp Like what still shocks people.

Speaker 1: 35:10

In general, the people that don't work in the industry just absolutely have no idea how the industry works. They don't understand that there is an interstate commerce, that there is not the ability to bank in basic ways. It's that there is not a consumer and a broad sense of what we face as cannabis businesses. And so you really just have to start at the basics every single time in a real business. Yeah, yeah, we have to start at the basics, and it surprises me, but also it actually has gotten me to a place that I have stopped being surprised, because it's helped me to understand that. Actually, of course, why do we in the industry have an expectation that the consumers or the people that work in other sectors are going to understand the challenges that we face or that the way that our supply chain works? Just as much as I don't understand the Cheetos supply chain and how it works for them to make that that cheesy crunchy thing in a plastic bag, that I would probably surprise. It would probably surprise me to learn about how that all comes together. But when people are looking, especially like I talked to I talked to financial analysts from around the world often that are looking at different opportunities for investment as part of a diligence process, like somebody might call me up and and often it's like explain to me how this works. And they really need me to start at the very beginning, yeah, and explaining that in every state there's licensing, and even within each state, that the way that the transactions move are different. Some have required distribution and some don't. Oh, yeah, yeah, the whole thing.

Speaker 1: 36:52

And and then what I have been most surprised by which you didn't ask, but that I have been most surprised by over the last year is is not just hemp broadly, but but really what hemp has proven and the lesson that hemp has has helped me to understand, which is just that there is an enormous amount of opportunity in front of us in the cannabinoid space, because there's still today, after all of these years, is an enormous amount of unmet demand all over the place, and the fact that hemp has gotten the amount of traction that it has just proves that there is a tremendous amount of people that aren't being served by the medical and the adult use markets that exist in states for some reason or another, be it that the channel isn't the right fit.

Speaker 1: 37:45

They don't want to go to a dispensary. There isn't a dispensary, whatever it is. There's a huge amount of excitement around trying these products and that keeps me really excited about the future. Yeah, and resolute to keep solving the biggest problems and to building businesses that are imbued with a sense of purpose and leadership truly like building to long term, sustainable success in the industry.

Speaker 2: 38:08

Thank you so much. And for our listeners, where can they find your podcast and get more information about you?

Speaker 1: 38:12

Oh, yeah, and so in addition to Wolfmeyer, I have a weekly podcast called High Spirits that I do with Ben Larson, who's a close friend, and we are on all of the podcast platforms, so you just look for us there and we also record live on LinkedIn. So if you want to hang out with us while we record and comment, you can find us there at the High Spirits LinkedIn page. I'm extremely easy to find on LinkedIn. That's the easiest place you can message me if you want to get to know me, and wolf-meyercom is my website and there's a contact form and you can reach out about anything that you want to know.

Speaker 2: 38:45

Thank you for joining me today on Practical Politics. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to like and subscribe. I'm Sabrina, your lobbyist lady reminding you that every policy has a person behind it. Thanks for listening.