David Belsky, CEO of FlowerHire | Recruitment & Hiring in the Cannabis Industry

Thanks again for joining me today and sitting down with David Bellsky. He is a 15 year recruiting industry veteran and founder of Flower Higher and Executive Talent firm founded out of L.A. This has become the core recruiting firm in talent firm and building block of the cannabis industry. So, I'm super excited to unpack your story. How did you get to where you are today with Flower Higher, your origin story? Why cannabis, why recruiting in cannabis, all that stuff that I'm sure people are trying to figure out and are wondering. So, David, thank you so much for sitting down. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here. So I'm excited that you are here because cannabis is always relevant, always topical, always hot. Recruiting is a beast in and of itself starting a recruiting business not an easy feed. I know a couple of recruiters and you're always trying to find the companies and you're trying to find the candidates so you're sort of marketing on both ends and building the business on both ends. That's not easy. So walk me through your past as I'm assuming in executive talent and recruiting and then well, you actually go back before that, actually. Where did you come from and then what led you to doing what you're doing now? I'll start from the top. Yeah, for sure. I grew up in Austin, Texas and single parent household. As I was growing up, I was an athlete who was good at school and in high school, I started really socializing and getting myself out there and kept a good balance of all three until my junior high school actually ended up getting caught with cannabis at my high school in Austin, Texas and Austin, Texas in the late 90s, zero tolerance. So it was more or less kicked out of school, actually moved to Los Angeles before my senior year to live with my dad and still managed to get into a great college, got into Cornell, played football, you know, and after four years of Cornell, you didn't really have a lot of white collar connections in my sort of circle, so I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had a mentor told me to get into sales and actually moving back to Los Angeles after college and started to look for sales jobs and found one with a tech recruiting company that was kind of modeled after the 80s, you know, phone on the shoulder, no computer, start off making 9.50 an hour basically cold calling and ended up staying with that company for 13 years and survived the sort of great recession, if you will, 2009 and after that was more or less running a good portion of operations for that company and I had the chance to move around the country, Los Angeles San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and helped to temporize that company in terms of actually use technology to have was advantage, you know, build actually hired on board millennials and I got to a point where I was successful yet unfulfilled, you know, you know, 13 years in, I could have kept going but I had this sort of entrepreneurial itch I wanted to scratch, you know, as I was entering my kind of mid-30s and peak career and, you know, I married and kids so I wasn't just looking to jump at anything but around that sort of soul-searching time in 2016 I had a couple mentors in California that pivoted into cannabis and, you know, I was I was living in Chicago actually at the time and when I saw that I was like what is happening right now and is this industry really about to go if incredibly sort of talented successful people are trying to get into it right now so I flew out there and met with them immediately and picked their brain on the industry what was happening and decided that there was a lane for talent in cannabis and I believe that it would be emerging I didn't know how big it would be or what it would be but I felt like I could figure it out and I was fortunate when I, you know, left kind of the safe place that I had built over over 13 years I had an anchor which was I helped I had the opportunity to help ease which is a very high-fly and delivery company in California hire, you know, 40 of their first 80 employees and, you know, from that sort of experience I actually saw, you know, other entrepreneurs in in cannabis which I'll talk about raising capital, hiring people and the challenges of hiring good people in cannabis and that was the sort of light bulb moment where aha, you know, I am in the right place at the right time and so I formally started flower hire a little over three years ago and here we are. And tell me, I guess, how frame it, why were people having a hard time finding talent in cannabis with just too new? Well, there was a stigma, you know, and I think the stigma has actually gone away a lot across the country of the last three years but at the time it was it was almost like a disbelief that there were white collar jobs in cannabis, right, that there were, you know, that the industry needed accountants and financial, you know, minds and lawyers and marketers and actually would be able to pay and attract that talent so and it was also because of that stigma because of being federally illegal, you know, there was, you know, thought that you would be able to attract world-class talent into your organization if you're in cannabis and, you know, and so what a lot of the early work that I did was really try to identify the formula for what made for a successful hire in cannabis and, you know, and ease was kind of the petri dish for that and and the formula was somebody needed to believe that they're at the forefront of a major global industry that would become 30, 40, 50 billion dollar industry over the course of the next 10 years and I appreciate that moment in history as a capitalist, right? Somebody also needed to have relation with the plan. Like, it didn't have to be a hardcore like user, but I had to believe in its power as medicine, as general wellness, as it shouldn't have been criminalized, as it negatively affected huge portions of disproportionately, you know, minority with incarceration and I had to believe that the right side of history, right? And then the third thing was you had to have some experience operating without a net, meaning, like, early on, you know, companies wanted like the de-agio operations and marketing leader, right? But if that person had never touched a startup, never experienced hyper growth, never developed the tools necessary to do like turnarounds or things like that, coming into cannabis, which is pure hyper growth and in emerging industries is too much. So I looked for people that maybe they had a big company pedigree, but they also had wins that meant rapid acceleration of growth within companies, especially for leadership roles, right? And once I kind of figured out that formula, you know, sort of applying that formula to any search, whether, again, it was an operations leader of, you know, a CFO, general counsel, you know, ahead of distribution to be able to find kind of the right people. And what I found actually, surprisingly, were that there were a lot of people that wanted to believe in what they were doing again, whether they were back industry before, or whether they were working in an industry that was just in a kind of a slow, steady decline. A lot of folks looked at this as an opportunity to do something different, do something exciting, and also do something they could believe in. You know, they felt it would make the world a better place. And that was really the refreshing thing that I learned quickly was, you know, for the right person in this industry, what they did for work actually aligned with what they felt made the world a better place. And when you put intelligent, collaborative, entrepreneurial, creative people in a room solving complex problems, I think really amazing, you know, things can happen. Okay, so you have two sides to recruiting. You have the side where you find the companies, and then you have the side where you have to find the candidates. Now, if you're dealing with cannabis companies, I was assuming there's not a lot of niche recruiting firms deal with cannabis companies. So I would assume that it's not as hard to fill that pipeline. However, on the flip side, I'm sure there's a lot of candidates that don't even know you exist or it's hard to find those potential candidates that you just outlined, like you outlined all those characteristics that you're looking for in the candidate. And part of it is like, somebody wants to be more passionate or more evangelical about where they were. So was it was it correct that it's easier to find the companies and yet a hard time finding the candidates or walk me through like the landscape of building a recruiting company in cannabis? Well, I think there's there's challenges, there were challenges actually on both sides of the funnel and I'll talk through that. I think that flower hires niche is really where the only company of cannabis focusing on strategic six figures cannabis jobs that only does cannabis, right? We don't do hourly workers. We don't have a business that is in another industry that we're trying to apply infrastructure to this emerging industry. So we'll be holding this other revenue stream. We're trying to create value in the lane that we're they're operating in, right? So I think that's given us flexibility to really build something the right way for this industry. But on the client side, you you correctly identified both sides of the funnel, right? Because the end of the day, both sides of the funnel are our clients, companies are the pay for our services, candidates are the one that we help make life decisions of this is the right industry for you. On the company side, I think I just timed the market a little early, like in 2017, there weren't a lot of companies that had capital that were really in growth mode yet. I think that it took until about Q2 of 2018 for, you know, the kind of the peak of the the kind of boom and the Canadian financial markets to really start taking shape and for investment space to come into the plant touching world in mass, right? So at first, it was finding companies that had the capital to not only afford talent, but also afford a premium service to find that talent, right? So in that kind of gap period, late 2017 or early 2018, we did a lot of work with ancillary companies, ancillary technology companies like E is technically at that point was an ancillary technology company because they just got funding first. It was easier for a traditional VC to invest in a tech company in emerging industry versus investing in a dispensary operator, right? But that ended up normalizing it by the middle of 2018 and we've seen kind of clients side demand grow at very steady since for the last, you know, two plus years. On the candidate side, there was never a lack of interest in cannabis, but interest did not equate to that person being the right fit for cannabis, right? So a lot of what we do at Flower Hire that's specific to cannabis is we put a premium on the education, talking to Canada what it's like to work in the industry like the good parts again, talented creative people solving complex problems doing something they believe in with the realities of it. It's the industry doesn't stop. It is a 24-7 industry. You're probably going to make less money. You know, if you're looking for stability, this isn't the place for you in talking about why that is and as well as educating on the specific company is that we're working with that are trying to fill jobs, what they do, what their business models are. So, you know, filtering through candidate side interest in a more prescriptive way was the challenge, but there was never a lack of people interested in the industry, you know, unfortunately, right? And at the same time, you know, that didn't mean that they had the right experience to pull from for the space. So, you know, the filtering process is really kind of the real heavy lifting and kind of the proprietary, you know, secret sauce IP, if you will, around how we were able to take and synthesize the company's requirements and often they didn't have a written job description and really helped them define what they're looking for, take it back to the candidate filtering process and show them like one, two, three people that they could hire one of them because they're actually good for what they're looking for, right? What did you ever choose to start this business man? It seems like an absolute, it seems very tough. It seems like a very, very tough business to be successful at long term. Well, part of for me and in my previous life, you know, supporting, you know, fast growing technology companies with engineering and executive placement, it just got to a point where it was kind of thankless, you know, it was definitely you could do well and it would be lucrative, but you know, I didn't necessarily, I like to go into work for the people that I worked with, but I didn't necessarily like what I was doing, right? And recruiting is a very kind of, you know, it's a very blocking tackle thing. It's not a sexy business, right? Now it could be a high margin business, it could be a very successful business, but and if done well, it's definitely done intelligently thoughtfully and more kind of scientifically, but the science of a third party recruiting firm is is blocking tackle and consistency, right? So I look at this industry as something like I believe that the cannabis industry needed the right people in it to be successful. I believe that the people that I was going to be able to put into this industry were going to be mavericks and pioneers defining what their skill set was going to be in this world, like how an HR leader in cannabis actually could do their job well. How a financial controller in this in cannabis would actually do their job well. So putting people into this industry that understood like the opportunity, not only if the industry is a whole lot of people themselves personally to bring value to a company in a way that never been done before and really set that stage or something that was really compelling for me. Despite the risk, and I took a bet on myself that I could work hard, there was no doubt there, and then I could figure it out. And so I put all my chips into it and needed to make it happen. You know, yeah. And it's obviously paid off and now the industry has evolved to some extent compared to and contrasted to when you first started. So let's look at the industry then and let's look at the industry now and how has that affected your business? Well, I mean, I think we could look at it in a bunch of different ways. I think obviously for a while, the sort of bubble in the Canadian financial markets drove a lot of buzz and interest in capital, not only in Canada but also in the US markets, right? And that led to a lot of investment dollars similar to what you see in emerging industries where there's not really a good thesis for how that dollar is going to unlock value. It's just we got to get our money in because this is going to be big, right? So in 2018, specifically on the West Coast, what I saw were that companies were raising capital that had like experienced entrepreneurs that have wins in other industries that were marrying themselves in their experience with people of cannabis that you know how to make high quality products. And they're getting money at high valuations. And investors weren't asking about how they were going to run a profitable business. They're just saying, go build your brand, go build your structure. And what happened in 2019 when the decline in the sort of the Canadian capital market started happening is that even for private company investors, they started looking at operatives in space being like, how are you going to be profitable? And the switch happened overnight, right? So for some companies that had very lofty ambitious goals and no way to really get to profitability, you know, their business may never recover from that. Yeah. Right? But what it forced operators to do, which I think long term is as brings a ton of value to cannabis, is it forced operators to be okay, let's not do everything. Let's focus on what we're good at. And how we can actually make money and run a profitable business in cannabis, which has its own challenges. And the companies that were able to take that change in investor sentiment and figure out what they were good at are actually doing extremely well right now. Right? So I also, you know, when I started, we're really focusing on some of the more established markets, you know, California, Oregon, you know, Colorado. And what I've seen over the past year and a half is there's been almost like a, in the US at least, a balance of power shift, you know, as, you know, the Massachusetts market has gotten more traction, the recreational, as Michigan and Illinois have come online. Now you see a lot more investment in new infrastructure and even investment dollars, not necessarily going to California, but going to other emerging markets that maybe have a more of a limited licensing scheme that might have a more of a friendly climate in which you can actually run a profitable business, whether it's a medical or a recreational market, you know, so I think, you know, again, the balance of power is shifted from the west coast to the east coast and the Midwest in the US cannabis markets, it's in terms of if you're an investor looking for a return, as well as general job growth, right? I mean, you're looking at facilities opening up for the first time in areas that you have customers as soon as you open, because they never had it before and they'd love to have a traditional retail experience for buying their cannabis, right? So just, canoe construction, more licenses being issued alone is leading to tremendous, tremendous, I think growth from an employment standpoint and also also for the industry. And that growth is happening when an industry also understands a little bit more about the boundaries for how do you maintain profitability in an industry challenging as this? Do you find that the industry has matured to the point where it's somebody who's looking to get into the industry may not have to worry about lack of stability or perhaps not having, like you mentioned before, you're not going to have premium pay scale in contrast to other industries. It hasn't changed and now it's just more normalized where if somebody going to cannabis, they don't expect these things anymore. I don't think it's definitely not where the rest of the world is yet. There are some companies that are a little bit more established, you know, like your Crescos and your Cure Leafs and your Terracens of the world that do offer things like 401K plans and some kind of fringe benefits you'd expect in other industries, but still for the most part, you know, comp compensation is, you know, when people change jobs, obviously COVID is different, but when people change jobs before COVID, you know, normal as you expect to raise, it's a tight employment rate, right? That's still not necessarily happening in cannabis. What is interesting now is that a year ago, a year and a half ago was not possible to hire a lawyer that had cannabis experience or an accountant that had cannabis experience or a classically trained sort of CPG manufacturing or food manufacturing person that had cannabis experience, but now you can. So there's a lot of people that were their first mover pioneer types into the industry that are now looking for their kind of second cannabis job, if you will, and those folks are getting raises. Hey everyone, Scott here. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's show Every Plate. What is Every Plate? Well, Every Plate is pre-prepared meal kits that could ship to your door. It gives you all the ingredients you need to cook a delicious meal at home. Now you've probably seen these meal kits. They've been advertised a lot over the past year. I've started researching them when we were staying at home and ordering Uber all the time. Just got extremely expensive and I was kind of sick of the restaurants in my area. I couldn't find much variety so I started looking into meal kits. Every plate is one of the only meal kits that consistently delivers quality ingredients, creative recipes, with simple, easy to follow instructions. 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You have to use the code success story 199 at everyplate.com. That's $1.99 per meal. And then an additional 20% off for the next two weeks of food delivered to your house. All the ingredients with cooking instructions pre-measured, throw it together in about 30 minutes. Check it out. You won't regret it. You know, so I think stability, I mean, you know, I think that some of the larger best-named operators in the space have had the most public financial troubles, right? So again, I don't think it's necessarily still stable, but maybe in the grand theme of things and how the world of work in general is being turned upside down. And there were these major kind of shifts that were happening, you know, with preferences towards delivery and moving away from traditional retail. Maybe cannabis is comparatively more stable than other industries now, for sure, you know, because no one knows what the world of work looks like. No, I think I think everyone's all turned on their head right now. Right? So in that way, cannabis almost looks less risky because you know, it's just going to get bigger because more more states and are going to open up more and issue more licenses and more facilities are going to open up. And that's been an interesting shift, you know, COVID has been an awful thing for a lot of people. So it's not a positive thing whatsoever, but it has, in a sense, probably been positive for the cannabis industry specifically because it was allowed to remain open. And because of that, it's now entered into more of a national kind of narrative about a search for tax revenue and jobs. And one more point for somebody who is looking to get into Canada, actually a few more things. This is very interesting to me because I want to understand somebody going into an emerging market, emerging market, you know, I put that in air post because it's not so new anymore. But still, what would a red flag be for somebody who wants to get into cannabis in terms of a company they shouldn't work for or not work for? I think that in general, there's been a lot of hard working people that have been able to pull things off in other industries that I'm going to pull off here. So I would look and make sure that they actually have money in the bank. They're not waiting for investors because, you know, all we have money coming in soon means we never get money or we get money in a year, right? Making sure they actually have licenses granted to them because the application process is not a short thing in any state. So the first thing to kind of look at from as you're looking at the industry is do they do they have the capital they need to complete their construction and build out and have some runway? And do they actually have the licenses they think they're going to get already? And if they don't have those licenses now, there's a chance they may never get them, right? And so there's something to be cognizant of. And once they once they get those licenses and they have the funding, okay, that's fine. Now, I want to I want to get in the industry. I want to work with a firm like Flower Hire. Is there is there competition? Are there other people that are cannabis-specific pruning firms? Are there things you should stay away from when you work with a recruiting firm? They're definitely are and let me just let me just make another point here about getting into cannabis like as society, at least, you know, in the US and I know in Canada as well, we're very programmed to look at career ladders in a hierarchical way. I start off my career, I'm an associate, I'm an analyst, I become a supervisor or a manager, maybe become a director of VP, that director job isn't going to be available in my company because my boss isn't leaving, maybe I should go work somewhere else to get that director job. That's how like we're programmed to look at career. Cannabis is not yet linear, right? Both people with a management title and cannabis are doing like executive level responsibilities because there's just no one else there. So I think for now, my advice is if you're getting into the industry, just try to land in whatever lane you are from a skill set perspective and believe in the next two to three to four years, the owner is just going to normalize and being a first mover will make up for itself a future title and responsibility. Like you can't look at this industry as I deserve a certain title, right? And I think that's a hard thing for people to get their head around when they start looking at working in this phase, right? If you're able to drop the ego and realize you've got to learn a whole new bag of tricks to work in this industry, but there's a lot you'll be able to apply for what you've done before, but you're going to be ready that you're going to have to figure out new ways to solve problems. And as a relationship competitive landscape for us, I think there's a lot of other firms that are hardworking, recruiting and staffing firms focusing on cannabis. Again, I think many of them are pivoting to more of the hourly niche, right? And because you look at, well, we need hourly workers to work at retail cultivation and processing, and a lot of those firms are doing more of like a contractor model or like a freelance or gig type worker model, which I don't think actually works really well in cannabis. I can talk more about that. Yeah, sure. I love to hear that, because gig economy is big too, right? I didn't realize that intersective with cannabis. I didn't understand that. Well, if you think about like, you know, freelance, you know, seasonal work, like for most cannabis companies, it gets hard to really, they don't have the data yet to forecast, okay, we're going to need to hire somebody and it will have work for them for the next 12 months no matter what, right? So whether they have a, you know, a plant that are being harvested, that they need people to make sellable, like trim them and put them in a packaging, or they have a big production run for manufactured items, you know, like edibles, but they don't necessarily consistently manufacturing, or even at the retail level when they're expecting, expecting some surges during around certain holidays or weekends. So there are some firms that have set up like an hourly kind of bench workforce to go and for companies that's based to call. I personally think it's hard to see a model where you can be profitable as a recruitment firm doing that because the level of insurance that you need to carry on those type of workers as a third party agency is much higher than if even if it was a normal manufacturing job, right? A normal retail job. So what, you know, so we've stayed very focused in this, in the niche of like strategic sea level positions and six-figure, quite a salary of jobs. That being said, you know, we've built relationships with some of the marquee operators around the country, and there is still a huge pain point for companies as it relates to hiring hourly workers. You know, like if you're going to hire a, if we're going to open a dispensary and let's just say Detroit Michigan, you probably need to hire 30 on the low end, maybe 50 people right off the bat. How do you know, and we're talking, you know, 90% of those being, you know, hourly kind of retail associate but tender type folks, what do you do if you're a company? You, all you can really do is post a job on indeed, right? What do you get when you post a job on indeed? You get a thousand applicants, right? So for most cannabis companies are somewhat understaffed in their HR and talent lane. So what ends up happening is the assistant general manager for that dispensary gets a thousand indeed resumes and they look at probably the first 20 or 30 open them up look for who lives local and seems relevant on paper and starts there. There's no filtering process. So one of the things that flower hire and kind of our next journey is we're partnering up with a group that has built kind of HR tech software platforms. We're actually going to create an intelligent matching software to connect people with the right jobs and cannabis because a lot of people don't know what I like being a but tender when I like working in a cultivation when I like being a, you know, B2C delivery driver given people cannabis. I don't know. So if we can put some IP behind that filtering and take that thousand resume response rate to a retail job and wiggle it down to the best 30 that they should talk to. A, the hiring is going to be more prescriptive. B, it'll have a effect on turnover that's positive and C, it'll be a huge value add in terms of the efficiency of the hiring process because at the end of the day, most of the hourly positions turn around, turn over, you know, two and a half three times a year as well. So you're in this constant state of hiring for those roles, right? And there's not a lot of insight on how to do it well, right? And so I think technology is the right thing to solve kind of the hiring of all hourly workers, right? So I can take that kind of secret sauce learned from vetting people on this industry and explaining it and apply that with some behavioral scientists into a intelligent matching filtering process. That's, that's something that we're working on as in we're hoping to launch here by the end of the year with the largest cannabis careers event in the history of the world after the election in the middle of November here. So more coming on that, but, you know, no, I appreciate it. And it's also fun because literally everything you're doing is leading edge, it's cutting edge in the industry, right? Like that's that's what's fun about it. So you launch some tech and that's going to pave the way for like you mentioned, it's truly changing the entire cannabis industry, the way you launch these products or the ZIP or whatnot. Yeah, I mean, it's exciting. And I think that the, you know, we've done hundreds of placements in the cannabis industry the last three years, you know, average salary into the mid 100s. We've done dozens of sea level placements across the country. And that's a very kind of like white glove hands-on service, right? But, but at the same time, those are the people that are making these decisions as well internally for companies around how do they get involved and become more efficient. So, you know, what's really interesting as flower hire is we're connective tissue. Like we actually know what different operators are doing, even in the same state that don't really know what each other are doing because yeah, talks about it. And, and because of that, even though we're started in California and I'm based in California, you know, half our team is on, is, is not in California on these coast, but we're able to take the lessons that have been learned from how talent and the right and the type of talent is able to succeed from a strategic standpoint in companies, and able to succeed in solving the problems of this industry and take that kind of formula and apply it to different states, you know, and find that kind of homegrown, you know, mass you know, person for a company of Massachusetts, just based on, you know, the experience, you know, out west. No, no, very, very interesting. I wanted to, I do want to ask a couple like life insight questions, but before I, before I pivot, I just wanted to make sure with what you're working on a flower hire, we went over like the cannabis industry, the industry, the industry, evolution of the industry, the, the, the process, your story, the tech that you're rolling out of future plans, we learn anything that we didn't touch on, that's, that's relevant to cannabis or flower hire that you wanted to, that's like on top of mind right now. I think we've, I think we've covered, you covered a lot of it, you know, I think at the end of the day, you know, our goal is to continue to provide education and awareness and, and just content of what it's like to work in this industry, because this industry needs to hire potentially a million people in the next five or six years. That's a lot of people, you're right? And, and, and there's not a lot, there's no insight and information about what it's like to work in the industry. So we try to put on webinars that, you know, talk about different roles in the industry and, and, you know, we're going to be launching our, quote, a website, careers in cannabis.com, which will be an education and content destination, where you can actually see what type of job in cannabis you would enjoy. It would be right for you. Right. So that's, that's coming. So we aim to just bring, you know, I guess we're trying to find what is professional cannabis and really, and own that lane, right? It's not professional tech, it's not professional beverage, it's professional cannabis. You know, the era of taking pictures of purple nugs, you know, is, it's great for some audience, some customers, but it's not for the majority of what is, are currently customers, right? And so how do you blend like some stale corporate, you know, career recruitment, you know, vision with the legacy cannabis and find that like modern contemporary workforce for cannabis. We're trying to, to kind of solve and bring value to bringing more clarity in that lane. As, as this, as this industry evolves, I think it's very important that we, you know, that you that you do have like thought leaders and groups that provide that insight and education because it's a little bit more than just a career in, for example, like AI or a career in robotics. It's because there's not only a new opportunity and a new industry that's evolving, but you're also fighting stigma at the same time, right? Where AI doesn't really have much of a stigma, except maybe perhaps like self-driving cars and ethics and stuff like that, but outside of that, it's not have the same type of stigma that cannabis has. You have to sort of overcome, and I've spoken to other people that have cannabis stigmas and a lot of it is about, they're not cannabis stigma, excuse me, people that run companies are trying to combat stigma in in their industry and cannabis, and it's all about education. That's really what it's all about. And there's something to be said about, if you're going to work in this industry, no matter how successful you've been and what your wins are and how intelligent you are, you're going to meet somebody that went to jail for this plant, lost their life savings because of the plant, and you got to be able to bend the knee and appreciate that person, you know? And because of that, it's such a different workplace than almost anything else in terms of like how complex it really is. As a industry, it's really an industry of industries, right? And there's nothing quite like it. Yeah, no, very well said. Okay. So I'm some rapid fire insight questions just to because your experience and what you sort of overcome as an entrepreneur, building out, building out flower hire, what was your largest challenge and how did you overcome it? I think it was just dealing with the idea that as soon as I started this was actually two weeks after I had the birth of my fourth child. And being able to like, you know, I ended up moving up my family across the country to start a business in a brand new emerging industry that was still stigmatized. And so that was a big life adjustment and upheaval. And just being able to, you know, continue to stay sane during that time period, in order to make sure that the work that I was being, that was being done early, it was really going to be something I could grow off of. That was a big, that was a big challenge. The thing is like this industry is so quirky and complex and, and, and hard just to operate in, whether it pay way too much taxes, whether the state is states are challenging to deal with, whether the sophistication of different people you're dealing with in the supply chain and the retail side just isn't quite there. That, you know, when you're working and partnering with entrepreneurs and executives that are actually running companies, like just understanding how challenging their world is and being able to like, like be that sounding board for them and, and actually bring value to where they're at. Like that's been both the challenge and the biggest reward and something that I wasn't finding in the, in sort of the tech industry is just, what's your service provider, this industry that actually follows through what you say you're going to do and is a value add, like the level of camaraderie you have with your clients from actually being able to help them is, it's, it's, it's special and it really is consultative and, and, and by being consultative, the fact that, you know, we charge a premium fee for our service, companies are happy to pay it, right? And it just, it took some time to really understand how this one was different, that it was able to take like very kind of formulaic best practices of how to do recruiting, learned over years and, and, and be able to then figure out and marry that with the realities of this industry. And in this industry, I was like, I just don't want to waste my fucking client's time, the hard job that mankind has ever conceived as being the CEO of a cannabis company right now, I want to give them what they actually need. And, and, and it wasn't about throwing things against the wall, it was really about being prescriptive about not only the diagnosis, but the fit proposition. Very, very smart. And well done. What, where do you go to learn and stay on top of cannabis the industry trends? Well, I'm, you know, fortunate that I have a team of, of now, 11 people that is talking to people in this industry all the time. And so just from word of mouth, we do really some interesting insights and intel on what's actually happening behind the scenes. You know, that being said, I subscribed to probably a dozen different, you know, newsletters and things of that nature. And I listened to, you know, you know, podcasts like this, but where they feature different entrepreneurs in the space is to hear their story, right? You know, whether it's, you know, thinking outside the boat or messing cannabis, but, um, you know, I, you have to stay informed, right? Part of what I do for my team is I create an environment and a, and a platform in one of our, you know, we're called our Slack channel, um, even though we use telegram because I like it better. Um, where we can honestly share information and news that we're learning about the market, because I think it's important for everybody here to really be an expert because, because they're, people we're talking to, especially on the candidate side, like they look at us as experts anyway, we have to, we have to know our stuff, right? Um, there's just something you have to stay on top of. And I think that also ties back to, if you're working in this industry, you can't rely on anyone else to teach you this industry, you gotta go out there and find it, figure it out yourself, read the regs, you know, for whatever state you're in to really understand it, you know, um, so we try to live that sort of, uh, sort of need for education internally for sure. Um, in the world of cannabis, what's, what's new that people may not know about that your researching or that you're interested in right now? Uh, I think that, um, people may not know like how quickly, how different these different states are. Like as an example, like a Michigan, there's 500 retail stores in Illinois, there's only like 90 and they're both recreational markets that open up around the same time. Like they're, there's, every state has its own little quirks and little differences and nuances. And I think that, um, that's obviously challenging if you're a larger multi-state operator to be able to figure that out, but also realize that what's going on in your state is going to be completely different than the state next door if there's cannabis activity, right? In terms of how the regulatory landscape is shaped up and that's, you know, you'd think that like states would learn from other states and what they've done and what works and what hasn't worked, but it's not, it's just not, it's not the case, right? It, um, it's a patchwork quilt of things that often make no sense. And, um, you know, no, it's just, it is what it is, man, it is what it is. That's just the way, so it's, again, brings back like the cost of learning. Yeah, covering that, through that truth on the ground in different markets is really what we, what we put a focus on. Somebody wants to get into, uh, into cannabis. You mentioned a few things. What would be the main thing that you would want to tell them? I tell you. It's, it is not just a job. It's, you really, it's really going to, if you're the right person for cannabis because it's going to work that you love doing and it's never going to cease, it's going to change the relationship you have with other things in your life, with your, your family, your friends, you know, and it's going to change, you know, kind of the balance that you found. Um, and I'd be, be prepared for that. And I think also you'd be prepared to constantly have to pivot. And even if you're an experienced executive level person, you're going to have to be massively tactical and massively strategic at the same time, right? There's often there's just no one else to get the things done that you know needs to get done. And so some people excel in that. And the goal is obviously to build out infrastructure and personnel and teams and, and move, move up, right? But, but when you, when you join and really to learn this industry effectively, you have to be tactical. You have to really understand what the whole experience is like in the eyes of your customers, of your employees, what it's like to work at a grow, like you really have to immerse yourself so you can really understand how to apply your experience and your instincts to the space. Um, and as an entrepreneur and the career long, you know, career long professional, a lesson that you tell yourself, tell your younger self, excuse me, after you've gone through career and now entrepreneurship building your own business, switching industries, what would you tell your younger self? Uh, I say, when the, when it's the hardest, that means the most successes right around the corner, you know, just have faith and keep going, you know, and because I think that, I think it's very true. You know, I think that, you know, if you're looking at the career ladder, when you're struggling the most, whether it's from a stress or whether it's from an uncertainty or whether it's some real challenges as a business person or running a business, getting through that and getting the other side of that gives you immense confidence, perspective, and ultimately the, the whatever, you know, level of success that you've never achieved before, you know, is being able to constantly, you know, go through adversity. Um, and that's how you learn, that's how you grow, that's how you evolve, and that's what, you know, kind of separates, I think a lot of people that are successful, um, as entrepreneurs versus versus not. Yeah, no, I like that. It's a good lesson. Um, and the last question, and then I'll get some, some socials in my place from you. Um, what does success mean to you? I mean, success, our goal is to be the number one talent platform for the cannabis industry. You know, I like to think that, um, there's a unique generational opportunity to do so right now. I like flower hired to be, you know, a fixture, an institution of the, of the space, you know, in perpetuity, you know, I, you know, I ideally wouldn't, well, be running it in 10 years, but I like for it to be around and be, be a big part of the, the overall story of this, the space and, um, and helped to build, you know, a, a sort of conscious and relevant cannabis industry early getting the right folks involved and, and making sure that the, the operators that are going to, you know, have the right assets and, and have the right attitude are going to get the right people on board to succeed and drive this industry forward. And, and for you, for you personally, what a success, uh, look like in terms of your end product, your fulfillment in life and career. I mean, at, you know, at this point, um, I've been on, um, we'll just say, uh, a fairly transactional hamster wheel for, you know, the last, you know, 16 plus years of my life and, you know, 5, 10 years, I'd like to just focus on being, you know, more strategic and trolling my time more, you know, and enjoying that kind of the teenage years of my kids, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's the goal, right? Um, but, um, but every, every day, um, you know, it gets closer to that goal, right? Um, and, um, that's what I think is what we're all kind of working towards. Yeah. The sense too. A freedom. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. Uh, most important question, people want to go check a flower hire, people want to connect with you social, uh, all the website socials, all that. So, uh, flower hire.com is very simple. There's lots of different forms for getting in touch on flower hire.com. If you go to flower hire.com slash blog, there's a lot of the content that we've put out there, articles, interviews. Um, I think that you can go to YouTube and look for sunset session. It's a series that we do with our partners with, uh, at razzle where we put on, you know, video interviews of, you know, entrepreneurs that in the space, um, you know, you can follow flower hire on Instagram. It's at flower hire. Um, you follow our posts on, on LinkedIn. Um, and if you want to get in touch with me personally, David at flower hire.com.