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The Kaya Cast podcast is a weekly show where we interview thought leaders in the cannabis industry about their experience and expertise of working with cannabis. The aim of the show is to help cannabis retailers do what they love and share their stories.
Intro: Welcome to the KayaCast, the podcast for cannabis businesses looking to launch, grow, and scale their operations. Each week, we bring you interviews with industry experts and successful retailers, plus practical tips and strategies to help you succeed in the fast growing cannabis industry.
Tommy: Hey, everyone. In this episode, we are joined by Eric, the founder and CEO of Cure8. Cure8 helps companies in our industry grow and scale their it infrastructure as well as security and many other things. Eric is a serial entrepreneur and he not only founded Cure8, he has founded a bunch of other companies in our industry to help businesses scale and grow. In this episode, Eric gives his advice on what he looks for when hiring a manager, as well as how he promotes from within. He also gives us advice on running and scaling a business. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I learned a lot talking to Eric. I hope you guys do too.
Tommy: You've been in this industry for quite some time. What advice would you give dispensary owners that are just starting?
Eric Schlissel: Know your numbers, know your competitors, know your, your real estate. You gotta know your shit. I think that, you know, there's actually a very big need in the industry for new dispensary owners to understand the competitive landscape and understand who they need to hire, what metrics, what KPIs, all of that stuff. And that's one of the reasons, uh, Brittany and I co-founded, uh, forte together. You know, there we have a bootcamp for people that are just getting in the industry to, to learn all of those important lessons from the other markets that have already been out there. And if you're just getting involved in the industry, it's going to be more expensive. You know, I have a friend, I have a friend that's in, um, hospitality, and he says, you know, anybody can own a hotel. You just need a deep pockets and a thick stomach lining. And it's the same thing. You can't get off the ground with just a simple shoestring. You have to be prepared financially to not only launch, but also ride out the initial couple of months when you're figuring shit out.
And then. 12 to 18 months in. Typically, we see competitors moving in around the corner. When more licenses become available. Obviously it's very market dependent, but we do see that there's two waves, right? That initial wave of people that are initial licensees, they make a fortune in the beginning, typically, right?
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: Then it starts getting grindy because the price of flower drops.
The competitive competition goes up, their initial store manager is looking for more money, and then they leave and you have to train a new person. It's complicated. And so for new dispensary owners, I would look at anybody you know in the industry, sit down with them, buy 'em a drink, buy 'em coffee, whatever they're into, and really understand their pain for that first. Firstly, the build out, right When you get your license to build to, to launch that window. So many mistakes are made. So many mistakes, and the more
you can avoid, the better. But then when you get to launch, you gotta
know What?
you're doing. Operate it. So it, it's all these different skills that,
that are required that they don't teach in business school.
They don't teach in traditional entrepreneurship
Tommy: what are some of the financial pitfalls of launching a dispensary? You mentioned that know your, know your numbers. Can you elaborate on that?
Eric Schlissel: your inventory and your people and your real estate, I mean, you have a lot of expenses. And then you have to keep in mind you can't do tax deductions. So a lot of assumptions are made around revenue. Pre-launch, you're looking at your revenue, you don't know.
What you should do is look at your expenses and pound the shit out of all of it until there's very little left. You need to drop your
expenses as much as possible, but also spend in the right places. So, for instance, having somebody handling your payroll, you don't wanna do that. You don't wanna do that, having somebody handle your it, you don't wanna do that, but you do need those things being done. So there's a floor, a monthly nut that you're gonna have to cover and all the ancillary services, your real estate, and then your people are like up to 50% of what your, what your overhead is, if not more people is the hardest part of this. In my opinion. People are always the hardest part of things. They're highly variable,
really unpredictable. We don't know what people are thinking, uh, most of the time. And I think that your initial hires are one of the key factors to your success. Who can wear multiple hats? Okay, you've worked retail, but have you worked this kind of retail? Probably not. Here's what you should expect. It's different. So knowing your numbers around your expenses are is the best place to start.
Tommy: If I was a owner, there's so many different areas in the business that require my attention. What would be your advice on where to start?
Eric Schlissel: Are we're talking about general entrepreneurship or a, uh, a store.
Tommy: Gen, just general entrepreneurship.
Eric Schlissel: with your people. Always start with your people. Always, always start with your happiness of your people. The contentment in their work, the challenges that they
face, and showing them what the roadmap is and having them help you achieve those goals.
That it's the, the most important part of your business is the people you have that are with you, um, for the journey. So there,
Tommy: But you know, the one of the best advice I've, I've ever received was most likely your people will know the answer.
Eric Schlissel: Absolutely Abso, I'm, I'm guardrails, right? Like at the end of the day, this, I'm, I'm the CEO, but I'm all, I'm really the, the person that just keeps everybody moving in the right direction. And Relu
removes that upper limit that people put on themselves or their education put whatever it's, and helping
them achieve their goals, helps the business and helps them be happy.
And then it makes our clients happy. Having a happy team is the, the, and a healthy culture that's the key to it. The rest of the metrics, KPIs and, and all of that other stuff that's obviously important. You have to run a business, you have to make money where you can't pay those happy people, right? But, Mm-Hmm.
Tommy: If you were hiring your right hand person, . , what are some of the characteristics that you would look for?
Eric Schlissel: So it's funny. It, that's a really great question. There are several people in this. I have multiple arms now. It is not just one right hand person, because
we are, we're, we're a series of companies at this point, and so I have a leader for each one of those companies. In addition to a leader of each one of the shared services.
We offer each of those companies. And so what I look for in each of these leaders is firstly their ability to problem solve, right? Culturally that's a given, right? They have to be a good culture fit.
They have to understand the context in which they're working. They have to understand, you know, the way that we, our ethics and the way that we operate our business, that table stakes, right? But then I look at their ability to problem solve a little bit sideways, if, if you know what I mean? It's not, I hate saying out of the box because I, I don't think the box actually exists. I think that's a mental block regardless. Um, their ability to think cleverly about problems that, and see things that their experience teaches them, their gut. That stuff is the most important stuff. And also how they handle stress, right? So
stress behavior's huge. And that's hard to tell in an interview, and that's part of the problem.
Part of the problem with interviews in general is that it's staged. You don't really know until you're in it for a lot of people, but you can tell when you have a conversation with somebody, you can see that there's something a little extra about them. It's that extra that I like and I don't care if the extra is analytics. I don't care if it's creative, I, it's just something to build from. It's a spark. And that's what I look for in leaders. I look for that, that ability to not only comprehend what they're doing, but also see a couple of steps ahead. I'll look five to 10 steps ahead that that's my role, but you have to kind of help me get there.
Tommy: Do you typically hire leaders for a role or do you hire people and help them move into leadership positions?
Eric Schlissel: The latter. The people that are in leadership positions, one of them has been here for 10 years. Manir has been here for,
Tommy: Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: I don't even know, five or six years at this point. Greg's been here for eight years, like I develop internally and I, I'm a firm believer.
Tommy: So let, let's, let's walk through that process. So you have one of your, one of your generalists have been here for 10 years. What was he hired for and how did you
No. And, and what was the, what did you see early on and how did you progress him into somebody that's such so integral to your business?
Eric Schlissel: two great examples of this. The first is, um. One of the guys that's been working with me for 10 years, I hired him. He was in a career change. He was a regional manager of Blockbuster in Southern California, whatever. Right? It,
Tommy: yeah.
Eric Schlissel: matter because I saw that firstly he had ambition. He wanted to change his career, and he is a technical person.
He has a technical, analytical mind and can do that.
So
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: I hired him firstly because I could afford him at the time we were, you know, getting by. Uh, but secondly, I saw that what, what I put in front of him, he would grab and then build on. So I said, Hey, can you reprogram
this firewall for this client? We're swapping it or whatever.
And he's like, ah, I don't know how to do that. I'm gonna start Googling. I'm gonna figure it out. And I saw that. And frankly, he's had 20 positions over 10 years. I.
Track 1: Oh, wow.
Eric Schlissel: grow, we grow in a very, you know, looking back it looks like that, but you know, as you're reconfiguring the foundations, you have to move people around.
And his ability to change
hats, we just changed his hat again yesterday. Changing his hat over the years has given him access to different aspects of the business, and therefore a more
Track 1: Yeah.
Eric Schlissel: holistic approach to everything I give him. So, another person that I hired, also a career change. This guy
Track 1: Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: was referred in by one of the guys that's been with me forever, and he's like, Hey, my old boss is looking for work.
He's not technical, but he's flown around the country rolling out retail locations for major retailers that you've heard of. And I don't know how much I can actually disclose about all of that, but he, I, he sat across the desk for me, and I, I saw that spark and I, I felt a comfort level in his presence that I. Was unique. I had not met anybody like him, and I had no role for him, but I hired him anyway. I hired him anyway. And I said, all right, you're in charge of AR now go collect. And then I said, okay, you're gonna hop into marketing, look at these metrics, tell me what you think, build something. And we did that for years. And every,
Tommy: Oh wow.
Eric Schlissel: part I put him into, he saw something I didn't, and something the other team members didn't. And he was able to construct and he was able to move the, the company forward. So obviously his title's like operations, manager, whatever, you know, whatever that means really. We don't know. But we gave him that title and then I just kept moving him around.
And now he runs, Cure8, literally runs Cure8 every day. So
Tommy: Oh wow.
Eric Schlissel: Manier, that's who he is. You put
something in front of him and he just goes. And that's what I look for. And part of the problem with that is timing. When I, I often need somebody. To step up. That's not ready yet. That's a conflict,
that's a problem. And we, I've needed people to lead certain aspects of the company that just weren't there yet. And I've tried it both ways. I've tried both waiting and I've tried putting them in and applying pressure, you know, light pressure, not like, but enough that they understand the,
the, the stakes. Right.
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: It's very, I can't tell you which one works better. 'cause very dependent on the person. It's completely dependent on them.
Tommy: You've have
tremendous success hiring, really hiring people that are transitioning out of their careers, seeing something that's, um, special in them, and then grooming them to be leaders in, in the business. Any advice that you would have for dispensary owners looking to hire their general manager?
Eric Schlissel: That's a very good question. This person, if they're new dispensary owners, this general manager is going to have to solve these unsolvable problems and is going to have to deal with
challenges they can't foresee. That's the, that's the, that's what to look for when you're looking at a resume. You look at firstly, why people left their previous job.
That's my favorite question. You know, you can tell when somebody's making something up. You can tell when they've been asked to leave. You can tell all of that stuff, but you can also tell when they're being
sincere. When they say that it wasn't challenging enough. I was just bored, so I got this other job. I can assure you that the general manager of new dispensary will not be bored. right? You wanna
find somebody that has had that happen to them because it shows that they want more and they know they're capable of more. They know they're not satisfied. Now, keeping that person with that personality in the long term, that's a different problem, right? You'll get a year and a half out of, out of that
Tommy: Yes.
Eric Schlissel: and then the question is where
your company is, and if they plateaued in terms of their growth, like if you're not continually feeding a person like that, additional carrots and and milestones, then they are gonna get bored and move on. But that's the type of mind you need in the beginning. Somebody that is not particularly satisfied in other roles because it was just like, eh, boring, doing the same thing every day.
Tommy: If you were to name three top three traits that you would look for in promoting a person to a manager or, or initially hiring a manager, what would they be?
Eric Schlissel: So I handle things a little bit differently than, than a lot of people. I, we have an 80 20 rule here. If
somebody can, else can do your job, 80% or any part of your job, 80% as well as you can, you give it to 'em. Just give it to 'em, and you handle the 20%
of the, until they can handle it. So the the three traits, they, again, they vary by individual. It's like, I hate to say
it, but it's kind of, you know it when you see it, and until your gut is really honed and, and that hiring, you know, what's the word, uh, fatigue sets in it and you know, when it's like a two minute interview
versus a 20. That up until that point, having a list of of traits doesn't quite work, especially when, for me, especially when you're starting something new, I start new things fairly frequently and often I have to run them and that's okay because I don't know what I'm looking for. For a new dispensary owner, when they're
looking to hire or looking to promote somebody from within, you want that person that shows up happy. That person that you can have a drink with or a coffee with or whatever, you are going to get very personal with that person. Not with regards to your personal life, but just knowing them, knowing who they are, knowing what they're
capable of, you're going to be tight regardless of what happens outside
of work, within work, that's your right hand, that's the person that's going to be with you in the trenches, and so you wanna make sure that person has, um, staying power because the worst thing to do is promote, train and then have the person leave. And because it
wasn't a good fit or they're, they're not satisfied or they found something better somewhere else, you have to know who you're promoting and know that they're in for the long run. I know it's an end run around your question, but that's what I got.
Tommy: Well, you mentioned something that's very insightful. You generally do . When you start a new business, it's you that's doing the work first because you don't know what you're looking for. How important is that when in running a
Eric Schlissel: So, you know, it's funny, a lot of what I've been thinking about lately, lately is succession planning. And we have an internal initiative that I, I kicked off yesterday in an all hands, that everybody's got a partner and that partner's gonna know what you're up to, not necessarily on a minute by minute, hour by hour basis, but certainly on a week to week and understand your scope. And understand a lot of what you're doing. That way you can both hand that person off. And if you get hit by a bus, you know that other person can take it. If I'm a new
dispensary owner, I am, I don't have a lot of time for that, but I would, if I'm going through a bootcamp program, uh, like fork, I would sit in and learn that role. You're not gonna have time to do every role to store, but you should know every store. You should know what it takes to be your bookkeeper. You should know what it takes to be, you know, your buyer, because unless you know what that is, you don't know how to manage it and management's where you need to be.
But in order to manage, you gotta measure. In order to measure, you gotta know.
And unless you're in there in the weeds, how do you really know?
Tommy: You've done such an amazing job at promoting people from within. What are some key common mistakes that you see other people do or, or that you've done? Personally.
Eric Schlissel: at at heart, right? You, you, you, somebody can rise to their level of mediocrity or incompetence or whatever. The, the actual phrase is
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: too fast, is in the wrong direction, is a problem. I go really fast, but I also have a lot of experience. Part of the problem is that people say yes whenever somebody says, Hey, that job's perfect for me.
I kind of write 'em off. Okay, it's perfect for you. I get that it's something you want to do, but how are you specifically the right person for us? Right. It might be right for you in, in, in your dream, but how do you prove the fact that you are the right person for that role? How do you, show me your experience that it, it doesn't have to be exactly parallel, but it kinda has to be somewhere in that neighborhood. Show me something you've done that shows me that you can accomplish this if given that opportunity. And I think that a lot of people when they promote from within, do it out of loyalty as opposed to what's right by the business. Sometimes you gotta break bad news to people. You're not right for this role. This is not,
I do need to bring somebody in from the outside. There's, or I need to promote somebody else. But being honest and being clear and being very, very transparent about all of it helps those conversations significantly. And if there's no
Tommy: How can somebody avoid promoting the person? There's nothing worse than that.
Eric Schlissel: There's nothing, you can't go back. Right. You've ruined the
Tommy: You can't go back.
Eric Schlissel: What I would
do is the 80 20 role, I would sprinkle in some of the responsibilities of the role that you wanna see them in, see how they handle it. If they're unable to take
on that additional scope, even if it's parallel to their own scope, what are they gonna do when they're given more responsibility?
Especially in a growing company where
you don't have clearly defined job roles, right? Like
everybody wears a lot of hats early on in every business. It's just, it's the fact of the matter. If people are showing you early that they can't wear other hats, or they need help sizing the hat too much, and you're spending too much time with them doing that, and they're not, they're not able to take initiative.
Well, there's a lot of reasons for that. I wouldn't just blame them. I would, I would look internally, I would say, did I give them the right tools and the right training and the right mentoring and so on for them to achieve it? Then I would look at, okay, what's their skillset? What have they shown me in the past? It's a really hard mistake to
make and everybody makes it, and I, I, I'm sure I'll make it again. It happens.
\
Tommy: I wanna pivot a little bit and talk about some, some of the problems that I'm seeing in this industry revolving around expanding. I often see companies looking to expand before they're ready. What are some considerations that you have or that dispensary owners should think about before making the leap, uh, and opening up another location?
Eric Schlissel: Why are you expanding? A lot of people expand because they have ego attached to it, or they've seen that their first location is doing exceptionally well. Like, well, why don't I duplicate it? Every single retail location is a unicorn. It's, it's, it's snowflake or whatever. It's a, it's a unique
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: a unique company. is Really challenging having it be its own thing is something else. When you say, I'm going to open this other shop, you kind of have to look at it, okay, we're in the same brand, same ownership, and some economies of scale and so on. But firstly, you gotta stay in your own region, right? You're gonna have to swap people back and forth between location of somebody calls in sick, right? You have to be geographically close, but not close enough that you're cannibalizing yourself. You have to
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: really understand if what happens if you open the second one, right? There's always lead time between when you decide to open and when you do open.
What's the licensing landscape? What's the competitive landscape? What's the, the flower pricing landscape? I, that's kind of hard to tell, but after the first 12 months of people growing in any market, there's always saturation. What does that do to your business model and your profitability? You have to think through all of this and be real sure that it is the right financial move for you.
And also I. You can't take your eye on off the ball, the first one that's successful. So, and then also it comes down to people, right? When you go from one store to call it three or four, well now you're talking about having a real ops director or VP of ops over all of them. And you have to have infrastructure for that. And that infrastructure is expensive early, and it's the first thing to topple when the market ships. So you gotta be real careful
that, that I would truly advise people to have second and third thoughts about doing it before you do it. It can be great. I, I don't mean to scare anybody out, but again,
you gotta know your
Tommy: Yeah. You know, there's a quote that I always get reminded is great sales mass problems.
Eric Schlissel: That's true.
Yeah. That's good.
Tommy: you know,
Eric Schlissel: I like that.
Tommy: you have, you have a location, you're doing fine, you're doing great. Sales are fantastic, but what are the problems that it's massing? And when you open multiple locations and sales drops, these problems now magnify exponentially
Eric Schlissel: you gotta look for cracks. Again, it goes back to that foundation. If you're not constantly looking for cracks in the foundation and seeing, okay, well this broke once or twice, what happens when we double our revenue? What happens when we double our employee account? What does that crack turn into? Is it a one-time thing or does it really turn into a big problem? And the funny thing is, you don't know what's going to turn into a big problem. Often you know that something is a
problem and often it's like, oh, well that's fine. It'll be fine. But unless you're being
super meticulous about patching everything, you're gonna get hit from
the side and not even see a colleague. So you always have to be looking for those
cracks and patching them in, in whatever format is necessary. You don't actually have to, you know, weld something together. It could just be some spackle, but you have to kind of.
Tommy: yeah.
Eric Schlissel: You have to keep looking at that. And that's why we're always recreating. I mean, we, we've rolled out, I actually have every quarter's org chart going back to like, uh, five years now. Yeah. I,
Track 1: Oh, wow.
Eric Schlissel: new tab in my, in, in, um, my program where I keep every org chart. I just wanna see where we were.
It's always a snapshot in time. It's fascinating stuff. I know that's not really, but, but looking back,
Tommy: No, no. That's cool because you know what, what you can do. It's really good. And this is it, it makes me think of Warren Buffet. Warren Buffet. What he does when he analyzes a business is he'll read obviously the previous financial annual reports and he'll read what the CEO says is gonna happen, and then he'll say, Hey, it happen or did it not happen?
And why didn't it happen? Right? Because you're able to see the future if you read the past.
What are some key mistakes that you see business owners make in this, in, in the cannabis industry,
Eric Schlissel: Overspending over extension. It's over. Extension is, is,
it's so deadly. And that comes to that second location.
It comes to hiring too many people, paying too many consultants, and getting it over their head. I also see a lot of people
getting into this for the wrong reasons. This is a grind.
Tommy: Yeah.
Eric Schlissel: The, the growing too fast problem is huge. Not looking at what inventory moves and shifting out of bad products fast enough, like knowing those numbers are really important. Knowing what your bud tenders are stealing is really
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: All of those little things add up to success, but it's the, the death by a million paper cuts that that really gets to a lot of people that are trying to make it in this industry. And I think that's true for
whatever vertical you're in. It's like what are your, how are you making your revenue? What is your margin and how much overhead can you get rid of so you don't end up in a problem there if you are really like, this is a really good point you made earlier. Sales do mask a lot of problems. Horrible inefficiency and so on, and then it becomes 20 times worse when those sales drop there. There's no writing a ship
Tommy: That's the story of this industry. That's, that's, that's the story of what you mentioned emerging to existing. It gets saturated very fast.
Eric Schlissel: yeah. And knowing, knowing what you're, what's going out is just as important. What's going in. Yeah. I, I, I admire people that are starting out in this industry. I do. I, I admire them and are, all of our services are geared towards other entrepreneurs and helping them grow, not overspending, but also looking at the right things and realizing that, okay, you know what, if I can't process and order, I make no sales, it's worth spending a little bit to make sure that my stuff's always up. I'm always transact. I'm not embarrassed with somebody standing on the other side of my till not being able to give me a, a card or cash or whatever. That's the whole game, right? The whole game is always being transacting, always being able to say yes to your customers, and always having enough to sell at the right price to the right people. And a lot of this is fundamental for any business, right? A lot of this is not different than any other retail out there, but you know, firstly you have all of these business problems that other people don't in terms of taxes and in terms of licensure, in terms of compliance and all of that other stuff. Then you have, you know, the, the fact that this market is really backwards in a lot of different ways and you're dealing with career falls you didn't think you had in the past or you didn't know that you'd have in the future. And I think that a lot of folks aren't able to just take a beat. My walk to work, I'm gonna go back to that. I don't know how many new dispensary owners have time to breathe. Simply breathe to think
about things from an outsider's perspective. If I'm, if I'm some investor looking at this business, what am I seeing? Right? What do I need to see in order to see that this is a healthy business? They should be asking themselves that, even if they don't have investors, or even
if they do, they should be answering this question before they do. How do I know this is
successful and how do I know it will be if I can answer those questions and the KPIs right themselves.
Tommy: Yeah. And would I invest my business
Do I know enough of my, my
no.
Eric Schlissel: and uh,
Tommy: If I had a million dollars, would I invest my business or what have I, would I, would I do something else without money?
Eric Schlissel: it's a valid question. It's a hundred percent a valid question, and I think
people have outsized expectations of both themselves and their people, and that turns into a whole different
problem.
You know, the most, I I, the the most dangerous word for a new entrepreneur is just all, just will just. right? When you have those
problems where you're like, I'll just have the store manager ha handle that, or I'll just do that myself. You are ignoring the whole problem, the root of the problem, and you're not solving for that. It just kind of occurred to me that like, you know, it used, I used to say a lot that the, the, the, the most expensive words in business are, it's a write off. We don't have that here, but we do have people taking on too much responsibility and getting buried in their dailies, getting buried in meetings, getting buried in dealing with minutiae that they don't necessarily need to deal with because they just decided to take that on, as opposed to saying it's not a just, it's not a, we're not just making do, we're going to actually have a solve for this that's repeatable and scalable and that is somewhat automated and that's, you know, I don't think that a lot of the, the point of sale companies are doing a good enough job at automating a lot of what people work. Uh, you know what the work is in operating a retail dispensary. They're automating a lot of the, the sales process and, and collections and so on. But in terms of operating a cannabis business, the systems aren't really there, right? You've got your financials, you've got your point
of sale, but the gap in between there is actually significant, the amount of the tools that other businesses have to run their businesses on.
There's no small market ERP for multiple locations, and you got QuickBooks, right? You, that's not good enough. You don't really have a, a, uh, RMA system. You don't have a, a ticket management system. You don't have all of those tools that other businesses do have, so you kinda have to rely on spreadsheets and you have to rely on fuzzy math in some cases.
Tommy: What are some of the problems that you see in this industry that you are looking to tackle?
Eric Schlissel: . We're going to make it easier for people to operate their, their dispensaries through tools that already exist, that are customized specifically for this industry. And those tools take many different forms,
Tommy: Hmm
Eric Schlissel: right? Firstly, it's how do I launch successfully? What are the components that are currently missing in the industry?
There's significant components missing. A lot of it is project management, which nobody wants to take on, right? That's scary because project management's a bottomless pit, a thankless job, and something people don't actually value. But it is the most important part of going from start to launch. If you don't have a project manager or you're not that project manager, keeping track of all the little bits moving along the, the, the, the line and then correcting your launch will be,
Tommy: So in terms of project managing, what are you referring to when you're starting a
Eric Schlissel: two different levels of project management. I have this conversation with Brittany, my co-founder Forte quite often there's the construction project management, right, the build out, but then there's the operations side of it too, right? The construction build out is surprisingly, not surprisingly complicated.
There's, you know, you've got your GC and they're managing a bunch of the trades, but at the end of the day, you're responsible for making sure that you've picked the right trades and the right fixtures and all like IT company like Cure8 or security company like Cure8, right? You are responsible as the owner for the construction and
that often completely takes the attention of the owner. But you're
ignoring the fact that you gotta hire that store manager. You have to have job descriptions, you have
to have inventory control. You've gotta implement your point of sale. You've gotta actually have some marketing and have materials and a branding and all the, the soft stuff, the
operation stuff typically gets ignored or at least lip surface is paid to it and they just say, I'll just handle it.
Now that's a problem. So there's, there, there's a construction project management, which GCs don't do very well, by the way. They're builders, not
project managers. And for, for most local people now, you look at a company like Temeka, they do a great job. They'll manage the whole construction project, they'll handle it, but they don't do the operational component of it. And I think that's a pretty big
blind spot. And it's one forte is filling. Um, but it's, it's very big. It's bigger than one company can handle. I think there's a lot of room for movement there.
Tommy: Yeah.
Eric Schlissel: But then even after
you launch, there's a lot of consultants, right? Consultants are are dangerous, some of them are phenomenal.
Like there
are great consultants out there and I'm happy to provide a list to anybody that wants them, that we really love. They do a great job, but there's also a lot of consultants that just don't know their shit. And they'll come in and they'll charge 50 K for whatever engagement and then it just, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and nothing actually gets done. You feel like it 'cause you have someone
to call. But the consulting world is tough both in the pre-launch and then the operational side of things. And again, I, there are lots of people that I love that do that very well and I would highly recommend, um, but there's a lot that give them a bad name and that, that's a challenge.
Tommy: So tell me, when does, when are you guys launching Forte?
Eric Schlissel: been going
Forte's.
Tommy: Oh, it's been going.
Eric Schlissel: at it for a year. Um, we, we've
Tommy: Oh wow.
Eric Schlissel: launched the bootcamp, um, right before MJ Bizz. We've already got people applying and, and we're running our first cycle through the bootcamp now. Um, the platform has been up for a year where we have the SOP storage and, and SharePoint based, um, approvals and so on.
That's, that's been up
Tommy: Where, where can people find it if they're and they're, they wanna learn more? say that again. Forte
Eric Schlissel: Yeah.
And then the, the train and launch again, we've done this, you know, over a hundred times at this point. And, and independently, Brittany's done it, probably another a hundred. Um, that's Happening now we're, we're bringing people on and, and doing it. Um, we're largely focused on New York at this point because that's where the biggest need is.
Um,
Tommy: Mm-Hmm.
Eric Schlissel: and we're going from there. Yeah.
It's exciting stuff.
Tommy: That's exciting. That's, um, I see a huge need for a, a huge need for what you're doing, uh, with Forte. Uh, and, you know, hopefully the market appreciates or what, hopefully the market one day appreciates the work that's involved in post-launch and accepts that
Eric Schlissel: Yeah. I think
that.
that it also depends on who the owner is. Right? And it also depends on the
market. Um, post-launch is, it's just very tricky because people, I think, are looking at the wrong numbers. And I think that pointing a lot of the. You know, clearing a lot of the CRT out from data is just as important as
having a consultant, and I think if they know what the metrics are, know what to look for and can do it themselves, that might even, that's better for the entrepreneur.
It might not be better for our business, but
that's not what this is about. This is more about giving them the tools and maybe the post-launch thing is more of a reporting suite and a check-in or something along those lines. I don't know.
Again, I don't know what's out there. I'm not focused on that right now. I know Brittany's giving it a lot of thought. I'm working on some other things that are taking priority
at this moment.
Tommy: Well, I wanna thank you so much for,
for joining us.
Eric Schlissel: for having me, Tom. Appreciate it
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