Big Weed (24 page)

From where I stand, the fact that we can even talk seriously about the new marijuana economy is evidence that the United States is becoming a better society.

For close to a hundred years, the United States put its sons and daughters through hell because they dared to play with a plant that made them feel good. The nation's might, and its spite, was so great that it sucked other nations into that hellish vortex. The American war on drugs hasn't just wreaked misery on Americans—it's crushed and killed human beings all over this planet. Citizens of neighboring countries and far-off continents have died, and are still dying, to serve America's illegal marijuana habit.

A habit that shouldn't be illegal in the first place.

So when reactionary politicians and pundits say legal marijuana is just a charade, I have to shake my head. It's so not. It's about evolving into something better than we once were. It's about moving away from the sins of the past. It's about becoming the best “we” we can be.

Call me crazy, but I feel as if the entire United States is going through a process of enlightenment. That's the theme I see emerging through the eyes of the cannabis industry. The legal marijuana story warms my heart because it reveals an America that is ready to right past wrongs and grow as a society.

I believe it's finally happening.

16

The Cannabis Ranch

I love the smell of weed in the morning.

In the wild, the female cannabis plant may not flower until the end of the growing season, when the days grow shorter. But indoors, we can manipulate the lighting to trigger early flowering. In our grows, the young plant is about two weeks into the flower cycle when its buds begin to sprout. Prior to that moment, the plant puts all its efforts into the vegetative growth cycle—producing leaves and growing tall toward the light. Then one day you see the first nubby cluster of small leaves that announces that something different is about to happen, that all these leaves and the race to height has not been for naught. There's a preordained purpose here.

The next time I come into the grow, I know that those nubs have become flowers overnight because that section of the building is suddenly perfumed with the scent of lemons and pine and berries and apples and cinnamon and cloves and honey and mangos and grapes and cherry nectar and spicy mint.

That's when I know that the magic has begun.

The longer I am in this business, the more I am struck by how closely the growth of these plants mirrors that of our own lives. When they start out, the clones look so fragile you can hardly imagine what they can achieve on their own. But every gene in their system is
imprinted with the knowledge of how to survive, grow, and thrive. They follow those instructions, and their maturity is marked by the arrival of beautiful, blossoming buds.

People are the same way. Businesses—the good ones, at least—are too.

The plants have taught me so much, more than I ever thought they would when I first chose to become their steward.

I have worked in businesses before that didn't earn their keep by growing living things. I didn't have the opportunity to interact with nature the same way that I do now.

When I was young and foolish, I focused on finding business opportunities, pouncing on them, and wringing every drop of profit from them. Profit was my only goal. What else was there?

Six years later, I'm still a red-blooded American capitalist. Yes, I still believe that starting a business is one of the most rewarding experiences a human can have.

But it's not the only one.

I believe every human being longs to be creative and to watch his or her creativity bear fruit.

Businesspeople are no different. They're just not accustomed to calling what they do
creative.

That word scares a lot of people in the corporate world.

When young people graduate from the Harvard or Wharton schools of business and enter the workforce, they're told to pay their dues, to follow the rules that have served businesspeople in good stead for hundreds of years. Their path to success, if in fact they even achieve it, is paved with musts.

Things must be done this way . . .

A prudent investor must act this way . . .

A savvy business must move forward in this way . . .

Businesspeople like to brag that they're all about taking risks. But so much of their time is spent minimizing risk. Say that young people followed the musts upon graduation. In six years' time, where
would they be? Would they be ready to take over a major corporation? Probably not. If they tried, they'd be laughed out of the office.

You only have six years of experience! What can you possibly know?

Contrast that experience with mine: In six years, I and my fellow ganjapreneurs have invented an industry.

When we started, marijuana wasn't just something corporations didn't do; it was illegal.

The day our product became legal for medical purposes, there were no guidelines, no rules, no musts. Everyone who was paid to govern our industry—from the regulators to the judges—had no idea how to respond. It was still just too new.

What did we do? We got creative.

We went out and started flying by the seats of our pants. When a question cropped up, we answered it. When banks said they couldn't serve us, we moved to others. When those kicked us out, we improvised. When the states and feds demanded their tax money, we figured out ways to pay it. When our crops did poorly, we figured out how to boost our yields.

Three years in, our firm won our industry's top prize.

Five years in, we did it again.

Six years in, we'll gross $20 million in sales.

Twenty years from now, when the cannabis industry is old hat and everyone looks back, they'll see that we were the ones who set the standard. When we started, it was a blank canvas, a block of marble, the silence of a song that had yet to be written. What we do with this opportunity will be guided by our vision, free will, and the decisions we make.

What could be more creative than that?

In September 2014, we closed on the 15-acre site that would become the Cannabis Ranch. The long work of making the dream a
reality was solidly ahead of us, but I thought of a fun way to mark this milestone. I invited some friends and employees to come out to bless this site on which we would build a dream. Then, on our private land, we loaded a bowl of Ghost Train Haze, the best weed in the world, and had a smoke.

I'd come a long way from the day I snuck a puff of Jake's life-changing weed on the seventeenth hole of the Red Rocks Country Club. The day I tasted what quality marijuana could be like. Our company had taken its baby steps, faltered, fallen, but gotten right back up. Employees had come and gone. I'd bonded with some new mentors, made lots of new friends. And gained a legion of loyal customers.

Now, on the site of a former airplane junkyard, amid this moonscape of dead weeds and cratered soil, we were going to make something beautiful. We were going to heal the land by excising the toxins from its soil. And happily, we had caught a break on the cost of the remediation. I had budgeted $800,000, but it actually would cost closer to $640,000. When the work was done, we'd be left with a giant hole in the ground. We'd use that hole to build a very deep basement level and a sturdy foundation upon which to build the rest of the building.

Ours was going to be some basement: 50,000 square feet, about the size of a football field or a large supermarket. The hole would be excavated to a 14-foot height, allowing us to build a complete indoor grow underground. When we were done, that underground grow would become home to six hundred grow lights—a far cry from the sixteen lights I'd installed in my first grow back in 2009.

Remember my rule of thumb: More lights equals more weed.

The Cannabis Ranch construction called for a second grow facility just next door: a 100,000-square-foot greenhouse, double the size of the indoor grow. All together, we'd have 150,000 square feet of growing space to start.

Now, admittedly, the greenhouse still represented a leap of faith on our part. We would be growing in part by the light of the sun for the first time ever. We would still need grow lights to make up for
the seasonal nature of sunlight. We were studying different options, trying to decide which lights would be best for us. It wasn't a complex problem, because people have been growing fruits and vegetables in greenhouses for years. But this would be the first such facility for marijuana in the world.

Yes, I still needed about another $16 million to take the project to completion—the visitor center on top of the basement grow, the restaurant, and the amphitheater. But I wasn't worried. I was locked in the eternal dance with investors. I already had $9 million from two institutional investors. Being able to mention such investors to would-be backers would give the newcomers confidence.

If people asked me why I wasn't terribly concerned about finding investors for the remainder of the project, I'd point to the model of the Cannabis Ranch I had kept in my office for the last year and a half, and I'd tell them of the vision I saw so long ago.

I was confident that the Cannabis Ranch would ensure that Green Man Cannabis would become the largest legal marijuana company in the world. All told, when the two facilities were finished, we'd have the equivalent of three football fields in which to grow marijuana. I projected that we'd be growing 55,000 pounds of marijuana—or 27
tons
—a year.

Once I turned on the lights in those grows, I would be kick-starting the economic engine. From that moment on, investors would be nice, but if they took a while to emerge, we'd be fine. The plants in those grows would be fully capable of paying their own way.

The Cannabis Ranch's progress signaled a shift in our company's future, one that mandated a new direction for me. We were now running not one but two companies. One grew and sold marijuana. The other raised capital and created business development opportunities for Green Man to grow. One company was about ensuring an even supply of product and making customers happy when they walked in the door to buy weed. The other was concerned with ensuring the growth of the Green Man brand. The latter is the bigger deal.

Potentially, there was a conflict of interest there. When I first started down the path toward building the Cannabis Ranch, I knew that such a dilemma eventually would arise. Going forward, the Cannabis Ranch would function as the landlord to Green Man Cannabis. I wanted what was best for both companies, but it was conceivable that, in the future, what was best for the Green Man might not be the best for the Cannabis Ranch, and vice versa.

My course had always been clear: In the coming months, I would have to resign as CEO of the marijuana operating company to take the helm at the new company, American Cannabis Partners. I would continue to drive the vision and business development and stay on as the chairman of the board to both companies, but I would not manage Green Man's day-to-day operations.

So now I was presiding over what I thought was yet another first: the first executive search for the CEO of a legal marijuana company. We were putting out feelers to locate a top-level corporate brain, a Harvard MBA type, to take the company into the next decade and beyond. We had attracted institutional investors; now we needed great management. I didn't think it would be hard to find the right person. Lately I had met so many professionals who were eager to do something, anything, in the world of marijuana. Was it so unrealistic to think that the right CEO was somewhere out there?

Everywhere I looked, I faced bittersweet decisions. I loved Green Man. Moving into a new role would be hard, but it would be the best way to grow Green Man to its full potential.

It would also allow me to look at big-picture issues, such as the overall perception of the industry, which I had begun thinking of on a regular basis.

Every year one of my daughters' schools has a silent auction to raise money for school events and trips throughout the year. Each year I offered the parent-teacher organization a coupon good for up to twenty adults to tour my grow facilities. I know the demand is there, because experience has shown me that people are insatiably
curious about the burgeoning marijuana business. So far the school has rejected my donation each year. My pride isn't wounded, you understand. But as the years go by, and I make a point of offering every year, my gesture has become more about gauging how receptive the school is to my offer than anything else.