Cannabis taught me business. For more than 15 years I built companies in an industry where you have to find the opportunity, win the licence, fund it, build it, open it and make it profitable — often while the rules change underneath you. Cannabis became my expertise. Building businesses became my skill. It took me a surprisingly long time to understand the difference.
I figured out I was good at business by choosing an industry that gave me almost no room to be bad at it.
For more than 15 years, people have known me for cannabis. That makes sense. I built my career there, became deeply embedded in the industry and eventually knew it better than almost anyone I was sitting across from. But when I look back at what I was actually doing all those years, cannabis was really the backdrop. The work was business.
What Does It Actually Take to Open a Cannabis Company?
Opening a cannabis company is not as simple as finding a storefront, putting a sign on the door and selling something people want. In many markets, we first have to identify an opportunity and decide if it is worth pursuing. We build a budget around something that doesn’t exist yet, assemble the right team and compete through an RFP or RFA process just to earn the right to start the business. Sometimes we spend six months to a year doing that before we even know if we’ve won.
And winning is really just permission to begin.
Once we have the license, we have to turn what we promised on paper into a real company. Long before I had kids, my days bounced between go-to-market strategy and planning and zoning meetings, branding conversations and corporate structure, raising capital and meeting with interior designers. We were finding real estate, working with attorneys, building budgets, hiring teams and making a thousand decisions about businesses that weren’t open yet. Eventually, the doors opened, but even that wasn’t the finish line. Then we had to make sure the business could operate profitably and, ideally, run on systems and SOPs instead of the founder’s sheer willpower.
I didn’t really think about how unusual that was at the time. It was simply my job. Find the opportunity, understand it better than everyone else, figure out what it will cost, win it, fund it, build it, open it and make it work. Oh, and do all of that in an industry where the regulations, timelines and sometimes the rules themselves can change while you’re doing it.
Preferably while looking good.
For a long time, I thought what I had become exceptionally good at was cannabis. I was right, but only partially. Cannabis became my expertise. Building businesses became my skill.
It took me a surprisingly long time to understand the difference.
How Do You Compete When Nobody Is Waiting for You to Catch Up?
I didn’t enter cannabis as some polished executive with a business pedigree and a five-year plan. I was a small-town girl who found herself in a very big industry very quickly, and there were plenty of rooms where I could have been eaten alive.
The cadence was fast and furious. I was sitting across from investors, attorneys, government officials and men in suits who had been doing business longer than I had. Nobody was going to slow the conversation down because I hadn’t been in that room before. The government certainly didn’t care whether I understood why something was due or whether the timing was convenient. A deadline was a deadline. If an application was wrong, we could lose. If I wasn’t prepared for a meeting, everyone at the table knew it. There wasn’t much room for “I didn’t know.”
I think that’s probably where my intolerance for excuses came from. Not because I always knew what I was doing — I absolutely did not — but because I learned there is a huge difference between not knowing something and using not knowing as an excuse.
When I didn’t understand something, I said so. Then I figured it out. I asked questions, found someone smarter than me on that particular subject, researched it, learned it and tried not to ask the same question twice. There was no shame for me in being the person in the room who didn’t know something yet. The mistake would have been pretending I understood it and staying ignorant.
There wasn’t a giant safety net underneath me while I learned, either. There were years when I was getting on planes I could barely afford, putting suits on credit cards and walking into rooms trying to look like I belonged there while quietly figuring out how to belong there. I needed to make money. The businesses I was building needed to make money. I didn’t have the luxury of waiting until I felt completely ready.
The funny thing about early cannabis was that while I was worried about everything I didn’t know, the truth was that nobody really knew cannabis. We were building an industry in real time. There were incredibly smart businesspeople around me who knew finance, law, real estate or operations far better than I did, but cannabis itself was new territory.
That was the opening.
I didn’t need to know everything they knew. I needed to know something they didn’t.
So I learned cannabis obsessively. I learned the regulations, licensing processes, markets and politics. I learned what made an application competitive and why another one lost. I learned how municipalities thought, how regulators thought and eventually how to see around corners because I had watched enough of the same patterns play out.
At some point, the small-town girl trying to keep up became the person people called because I knew something they didn’t.
That changed me. It also taught me one of the most important things I know about business today: your advantage doesn’t have to be that you’re the smartest person in every room. You need to know what you’re exceptionally good at, know where you aren’t, and build around both.
Cannabis was the first thing I realized I knew better than almost everyone else. It wouldn’t be the last thing I realized about myself.
Why the Problem Is Rarely the Problem
After you’ve been inside enough businesses, you start recognizing patterns. Different founders, different industries, different products, but surprisingly similar problems underneath them.
A company will tell you it has a marketing problem because sales aren’t moving. Sometimes that’s true. But I’ve learned not to accept the first conclusion too quickly. Maybe the customer doesn’t understand the product. Maybe the product isn’t actually what the customer wants. Maybe the pricing makes no sense. Maybe the company is generating revenue but losing margin. Or maybe marketing is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and sending customers into an operation that isn’t capable of serving them.
More often than people want to admit, the real problem is a partnership problem, a vision problem or a leadership problem. I’ve seen teams full of talented people working incredibly hard while everyone is running toward a different finish line. Sales is chasing one goal, Marketing thinks the priority is something else, Operations is trying to solve yesterday’s emergency, and the CEO is wondering why nobody understands the vision that mostly exists inside their own head.
Then there is ego.
CEOs have big egos. I can say that because I’ve been one for a long time, and I’m certainly not pretending I don’t have one. You almost need some ego to build something from nothing. You have to believe in an idea before there is much confirmation that anyone else should. The problem comes when believing in your idea turns into believing the market owes you agreement.
Founders want their idea to be cool. We like the branding we like. We become attached to the service we created, the customer we imagined and the way we think something should work. Then the market tells us something different, and instead of listening, we sometimes spend more money trying to prove ourselves right.
I don’t think the job of a CEO is to be right. I think the job is to build a healthy company.
That distinction has shaped the way I look at businesses. My approach is intuitive, straightforward and much less “me” driven than it used to be. I’m interested in money, people, and culture because those three things will usually tell me far more about a company than its pitch deck will.
When I walk into a business, I can usually start to see what it is before leadership finishes telling me what they think it is. I want to understand where the money actually comes from, where it goes and what is profitable. I want to see how people communicate when the CEO isn’t in the room, where decisions get stuck and whether the people making those decisions are working toward the same outcome. I want to know what customers are actually buying, not what everyone wishes they were buying.
Sometimes the answers aren’t particularly convenient. The founder’s favorite offering may be the least profitable. The employee everyone thinks is failing may actually have a management problem. The partnership that made perfect sense five years ago may now be holding both people back. A company may think it needs more customers when what it really needs is to stop losing the ones it already has.
This is also why I’m skeptical when marketing is prescribed as the solution to every growth problem. Marketing is incredibly powerful when you have something healthy to amplify. It can also amplify dysfunction. If your positioning is unclear, your operations are broken, your margins don’t work, or your team can’t deliver what you’re selling, putting more people through the front door doesn’t fix the house.
I’ve become much more interested in fixing the foundation first.
The goal isn’t to build the company the CEO thinks is coolest. It’s to understand your audience so well that you can give them something they actually want, build an organization capable of delivering it, and make money doing it. Sometimes what the market wants isn’t exactly what you wanted to sell. That’s business. You listen, adjust, and remember that the company is bigger than your ego.
Always Assume Something Will Go Wrong
If cannabis taught me how to diagnose a business, it also taught me never to become too emotionally attached to Plan A.
When cannabis picked me — or I picked cannabis, I’m still not sure which — the underlying theme of the entire industry was pivot. A client changes direction. A partnership falls apart. A legislature changes the law. A regulator interprets the law differently than everyone expected. A municipality changes its process. Capital disappears. A landlord gets nervous. An application date moves. Something that was absolutely happening on Monday is suddenly absolutely not happening on Friday.
After enough years of that, uncertainty stops feeling like an exception. You start building for it.
That’s where my slightly obsessive version of business doomsday prepping comes from. Before we begin something, I want to understand what could derail it. I want enough time in the schedule to survive changes without creating an unnecessary emergency. I want alternatives for the things most likely to fail, and I don’t want the entire strategy dependent on one person, one outcome or one perfect set of circumstances.
That doesn’t mean I operate from fear. It’s actually the opposite. Preparation makes it much easier not to freak out.
I’ve watched very smart people make terrible decisions because something unexpected happened and everyone reacted before understanding what had actually changed. Experience has taught me to get the facts first. Is this annoying, or does it materially change the strategy? Is this a temporary disruption, or has the business underneath us changed? Do we need to move, or do we need to sit still long enough for everyone else to stop panicking?
Cannabis also made me conservative with money. I’ve watched capital flow freely and then disappear. I’ve watched timelines double and markets stall. I’ve watched companies behave as though one great year guaranteed the next one and then discover how quickly their options disappeared when the environment changed.
I like options.
Cash gives a company time, and time gives leadership the ability to make thoughtful decisions instead of desperate ones. Saving for a rainy day isn’t particularly glamorous when everything is going well, but neither is running out of money because you built your company around the assumption that nothing would ever go wrong.
I think that combination — move quickly, prepare obsessively, conserve where it matters, and don’t panic — came directly from cannabis. We have had projects change hundreds of times between the first conversation and the final outcome. You learn that the strategy isn’t sacred. The outcome is.
A pivot doesn’t mean the original idea was stupid or the strategy failed. Sometimes it simply means you learned something new. Good operators use the new information. Bad ones protect the old plan because changing it feels like admitting they were wrong.
I’d rather be profitable than right.
Are Cannabis Business Skills Transferable to Other Industries?
For a long time, I thought my career was cannabis. Now I think cannabis was where I learned my career.
That difference has become clearer to me over the last several years because I started finding myself in conversations outside the industry and realizing how familiar they felt. Different product. Different customer. Different regulatory environment. Same underlying questions. Where is the opportunity? Who is the customer? Does the business model make sense? What will it cost? Who needs to be involved? Where is the risk? What isn’t working? And how do we actually get from where we are to where we say we want to go?
I wasn’t taking cannabis knowledge and trying to force it onto other industries. I was using business knowledge that I happened to develop in one of the most complicated industries I could have chosen.
Cannabis gave me a very difficult sandbox in which to learn strategy, operations, finance, branding, partnerships, leadership, real estate, government, capital, hiring, culture and execution. It taught me how to take an opportunity that existed on paper and turn it into a company with employees, customers, systems and a front door. It taught me how to make decisions without perfect information and how to change those decisions without losing sight of the larger goal.
Those aren’t cannabis skills. They’re business skills.
And that realization has been important for me personally because, truthfully, I spent a lot of my life not feeling particularly good at much. I’m dyslexic. School wasn’t where I shined, and there wasn’t some obvious straight line between the small-town girl I was and the CEO I eventually became. For a long time, the way my brain worked felt like something I had to work around.
Then I found business.
For the first time, I could see that some of the things that made my brain different were useful. I could walk into a situation with a lot of moving pieces and find the thread between them. I could see an opportunity, but I could also see the problems hiding underneath it. I could move between branding, operations, money, people and strategy without seeing them as completely separate conversations because, in a real business, they aren’t.
I had found something I was really good at.
Once I realized that, I did what I’ve always done when I find an opportunity: I leaned into it.
What I’m Building Next
I’m still deeply proud to be a cannabis businesswoman. I’m not running away from the industry that built my career, and I’m certainly not done with it. But cannabis is no longer the box I use to define what I do. It is where I earned the experience that taught me how much more I can do.
That’s probably the biggest shift for me right now. I’m interested in what happens when I take everything cannabis forced me to learn and apply it more broadly. What happens when the conversation isn’t only about licenses or dispensaries, but about the founder who has a great company and can’t figure out why it stopped growing? The brand everyone loves that can’t seem to make money? The business spending on marketing when the foundation underneath it needs attention first? Or the entrepreneur with the right idea and no idea how to turn it into an actual company?
Those problems feel very familiar to me.
I still love the chase of a deal. I love winning. I love doing good work, and I love that moment when something we’ve talked about, budgeted, fought for and built finally becomes real. After spending a lot of my early life unsure of what I was particularly great at, there is something pretty special about getting to this point and knowing.
Business is my superpower.
I’m still learning it. I’m still refining it. I still get things wrong, and I hope I’m never arrogant enough to think there isn’t another room where I have something to learn. But I’m also old enough and experienced enough now to own what I’m good at.
For more than 15 years, cannabis gave me some of the hardest businesses I could possibly build. It taught me to see opportunities, find the real problem, protect the downside, adapt when the plan changes and keep going when things get complicated.
Now I’m interested in what else I can build.
Because at the end of the day, I don’t just build cannabis companies.
I build kick-ass companies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did cannabis actually teach you about business?
It taught me the full arc of building a company, compressed and under pressure: find the opportunity, understand it better than anyone else, budget for something that doesn’t exist yet, win the right to start, fund it, build it, open it and make it profitable. Cannabis was the sandbox. Strategy, operations, finance, branding, partnerships and execution were the actual lessons.
Do you only work with cannabis companies?
No. Cannabis is where I earned the experience, and I’m still proud to be a cannabis businesswoman, but it is no longer the box I use to define what I do. The questions I get asked outside the industry are the same ones: where is the opportunity, who is the customer, does the model work, where is the risk, and what isn’t working.
How long does it take to win a cannabis license?
In many markets you compete through an RFP or RFA process, and that alone can take six months to a year before you know whether you’ve won. Winning is really just permission to begin — you then have to turn what you promised on paper into a real company with real estate, staff, systems and a front door.
Why do you say the problem is rarely the problem?
Because the first diagnosis is usually a symptom. A company says it has a marketing problem because sales aren’t moving, but the real issue is often pricing, margin, positioning, an operation that can’t serve the customers marketing is already sending, or a partnership, vision or leadership problem underneath all of it.
Why are you skeptical of marketing as a growth fix?
Marketing is powerful when you have something healthy to amplify, and it will just as happily amplify dysfunction. If your positioning is unclear, your operations are broken, your margins don’t work or your team can’t deliver what you’re selling, putting more people through the front door doesn’t fix the house. I’d rather fix the foundation first.
How should a founder prepare for things going wrong?
Assume something will. Before starting, understand what could derail it, leave enough time in the schedule to absorb change without creating an emergency, build alternatives for the things most likely to fail, and don’t make the whole strategy depend on one person or one perfect outcome. Preparation is what makes it possible not to panic.
What do you look at first when you assess a business?
Money, people and culture — because those three will usually tell you more than a pitch deck. Where the money actually comes from, where it goes and what’s profitable. How people communicate when the CEO isn’t in the room, and where decisions get stuck. And what customers are genuinely buying, rather than what everyone wishes they were buying.
Work With Sara
Sara works with entrepreneurs, executives, investors and brands on business strategy, cannabis licensing and investment, brand collaborations and speaking, and mentorship through The Strategic Woman.
Explore the ways to work with Sara, or get in touch to start the conversation.
