The Role of a Chief Revenue Officer in Driving Profitability Shelly Tallabas, the CEO of Vivid Integrated Solutions, joins Kyra Reed to discuss her role as Chief Revenue Officer and the strategies she uses to drive profitability for companies, particularly in the cannabis industry. Shelly shares her background in the food and beverage sector and how she applies her expertise to the cannabis market, emphasizing the importance of operational excellence and data-driven decision-making. She also provides insights for small operators in analyzing their revenue challenges and suggests understanding the retailer's perspective and identifying selling solutions as key strategies. Produced By PodConx Kyra Reed - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrareed/ Women Leading in Cannabis - https://podconx.com/podcasts/women-leading-in-cannabis Shelly Tallabas - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelly-tallabas/ Vivid Integrated Solutions - https://www.vividintegratedsolutions.com/ Women in Cannabis Mentoring Program - https://hopin.com/events/roadmaptofunding/registration
The Role of a Chief Revenue Officer in Driving Profitability
Shelly Tallabas, the CEO of Vivid Integrated Solutions, joins Kyra Reed to discuss her role as Chief Revenue Officer and the strategies she uses to drive profitability for companies, particularly in the cannabis industry. Shelly shares her background in the food and beverage sector and how she applies her expertise to the cannabis market, emphasizing the importance of operational excellence and data-driven decision-making. She also provides insights for small operators in analyzing their revenue challenges and suggests understanding the retailer's perspective and identifying selling solutions as key strategies.
Kyra Reed - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrareed/
Women Leading in Cannabis - https://podconx.com/podcasts/women-leading-in-cannabis
Shelly Tallabas - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelly-tallabas/
Vivid Integrated Solutions - https://www.vividintegratedsolutions.com/
Women in Cannabis Mentoring Program - https://hopin.com/events/roadmaptofunding/registration
[00:00:00] So what exactly is a Chief Revenue Officer and why does every company need one Today? We'll hear from Shelly Talis, whose goal is to drive company profitability. We'll learn how she does it and some of the strategies she uses for struggling companies. Welcome back to Women Leading In Cannabis, where we get real about what it takes for women to raise money in cannabis.
You can find us on the Pod Connect Network on iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora. And I'm your host, Kira Reid. If you like what you hear, subscribe to women leading in Cannabis and leave us a good review. We surely appreciate it. I wanna give a shout out to our patrons, the Panther Group, for their ongoing support of women in cannabis.
And their mission to close the funding gap women face when it comes to raising capital. Thank you for supporting this podcast and women employed in cannabis. All right. Welcome to the show, Shelly. Thank [00:01:00] you. Great to be here. Shelly is the c e O of Vivid Integrated Solutions. She is a proven and reliable expert in driving superior business performance, productivity, and profitability for complex businesses.
Struggling to scale or. Most recently, Shelly was the revenue and strategy officer for a large West coast M mso, where she drove double digit profitable growth by industrializing operational excellence and optimizing business protocols prior. Shelly served in key leadership roles with leading California cannabis brands, driving go to market strategies, manufacturing efficiency, and market expansion.
Prior to cannabis, she spent two decades in various leadership positions with Fortune two 50 and 500 food and beverage companies. Addressing and solving complex route to market conditions, heavy regulatory burdens and [00:02:00] hyper-competitive pricing pressures affording the businesses the opportunity to flourish and gain competitive advantage.
She has a decade of direct experience in cannabis in hemp, and is committed to advancing the overall stability and maturity of the industry by institutionalizing and applying best in class CPG disciplines, analytic rigor, and proven engineered standards to the ever evolving landscape. All right. Welcome, Shelly.
I'm very excited. Thank you. So I wanna start with your role that you had as Chief Revenue Officer, because this is not, I don't think I've ever had a guest on here who has been a Chief Revenue Officer, and because this is all about driving revenue, I really would like to dig in and let's talk about what is the purpose, what are the tools and outcomes, and why does every company need one?
But first, let's take a step back and get a brief history of how you [00:03:00] found yourself in the cannabis industry and focusing on driving profitability. You bet. So my background, again, as you read in my bio, started in food and beverage, uh, for about 20 years with big companies like Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, yum Brands, which is the.
Um, young brands portfolio of Taco Bell, pizza Hut, K ffc, um, globally, uh, my goal was, and my role was to one seed out, um, their portfolio strategy. So where do we, where do we need to play and how do we win? And that started my venture in, um, profitizing businesses and monetizing opportunities, which levers in a mature business model need to be activated.
What waste needs to be removed. So, uh, the joke with, uh, the Taco Bell portfolio is you could not break the back of house, meaning the operation side of it, but we had to have 52 years of innovation in and out with new product development, but not expanding the portfolio of purchases that we made. So the [00:04:00] procurement team would be involved.
We had to say, um, stay focused on whatever ingredients we had on the menu that existed, and then drive in incremental revenue up to $25 million. At a time right across the US and internationally. So whatever we came up with as a a product idea could not, again, stretch the back of house operationally. We had to do operational shakedowns.
We had to retain quality. Um, create profit in a very hyper-competitive market. How do you, how do you profit a, how do you create profit on a taco? Right? 79 cent tacos. Um, and then maintain standardization ingredients as we rolled out 52 weeks a year. So that's really where I cut my teeth on. What, what does it mean to win in a complex environment against bigger and broader competitors.
Um, and then as I came into the portfolio of Dr. Pepper, most people know it as a, as a. You know, a soda brand, but we had 51 brands in that portfolio, all with different spend levels, including Clamato, penile. Um, we had a licensing team who did, uh, food and [00:05:00] beverage development. So my goal there was I passed through several desks, front end again, innovation and sensory development, which I was all about food and beverage development.
Um, that was working with the sensory team. So if somebody said, You know, we would like a cherry Dr. Pepper. That sounds easy until you sit down with the best sensory developers on the earth and realize that there's 26 variants of cherry, maybe 46 variants, much like the cannabis plant, right? Really indicus sativa and thousands of variants behind it.
But what does that mean in terms of taste, stabilization and effect? So that's where I started to cut my teeth on the sensory side. And then I worked my way through that, um, to the back end of that. Um, Development cycle to protect the band brands on shelf, which is then when I started to lean in and learn retail selling solutions.
How do you sell land against Coke and Pepsi when you're an eighth of their size or a 50% of their size, but they carry 60% of your brand on their trucks? How do you ensure that they won, put you on shelf in, uh, put your points, eruption in store, and [00:06:00] then how do you stay protected on shelf to expand your shelf presence?
So that kind of gave me what I believe is the foundation that I could enter the cannabis market. There was, um, there was a guy who was an investor in the Dr. Pepper brand who jumped into cannabis. He was a VC guy, private equity guy, VC guy who happened to, um, call me one day and I was centered in Texas, in Plano, Texas, and said, would you be interested in coming and working for this company called Med Men?
And I was quiet. I said, I don't know what that is. And he said, it's cannabis. And I was like, absolutely not, right? I was raising my son and I was like, no. I tried to get him not to, not to smoke weed, you know, whatever it was. And. Um, they kept knocking on my door. Then one of my friends actually ended up being hired there through, through another connection and they called me again.
So I entered, um, the interview sequence and they hired me within two days on the spot. So I was their senior Vice President of innovation. [00:07:00] Um, I was the one who helped build out what they called their state made portfolio at that time, and was leveraging the disciplines best in class disciplines. I used.
In the C P G world, um, to bring that forward, including like stage gate product development, if you're gonna fail, fail early, lead with data commercialize responsibly, right? Don't spend 110 million to launch something that never had a chance to stick in the market. So using those disciplines, we helped kind of build out this state made portfolio.
Um, very early in development of that, I was calling audibles on, on pricing pressures, right? So I don't think, you know, if we wanna mon monetize this product line, we need to get better, um, and smarter on how we build each step of the process, including packaging because we're already disadvantaged with two 80 e.
So how do we profitize on top of not those usual customer expenses, not being able to be written off, on top of having really overdesigned packaging at some points in the [00:08:00] process. You don't always win the conversations, uh, based on using data. But that went to market and then I exited and went to a company called Candescent.
Where, uh, they were building out their extraction facility and I was head of, uh, the labs at that point helping them optimize extraction and to stabilize the roll out of their vape pen, which I held back because there was, uh, quality issues. So again, leveraging best in class practices from food development, I put pressure on them to hold back and be safe and do rollout safely, smartly.
And profitably. That's the foundation. We definitely need more of that in cannabis. Yes, yes. So our goal, uh, the reason I started Vivid Integrated Solutions is because I spoke on a panel, um, in Canada. About product development? Well, during my tenure at Candescent and when I exited the stage, I had a line [00:09:00] of people wanting, waiting to talk to me, saying, Hey, could you help us?
Or What does this mean? You know, what does stage gating, what does commercialization mean? What does a revenue roadmap? Um, how do you monetize parts of the business smartly? What do you mean by concept testing? What do you mean by retail selling solutions? So I was teaching them a new language. Um, they weren't necessarily ready for it, but they knew they needed help.
And that was the gap I needed to fill, which is we're here to industrialize seriously industrialized cannabis with a CPG format. And it's, it's hard to do, but the first thing we talk about is operational excellence. Operational excellence is the key foundation to everything because it links the business end to end through analytics and through data so that these owners are not surprised by things that are happening at the operational level.
Right. They get visibility. They get quick access to if something turns red on the profit line or the revenue line or a quality line, they're the first to know. [00:10:00] And then that a team or that leadership team can identify how that path, what's the path to green and is it worth the squeeze. So we set up dashboards, operational dashboards that start at the base level and there are KPIs.
And, and, and metrics that must be hit at every step of the way through that organization in order to meet market demand and to meet timelines to go to market. And if any of those become at risk, it automatically allows the owners to stay focused on what really matters. They're not guessing, they're steering, they're not reacting.
So that's what we do is we set that up. So when you were working in food and beverage with these huge brands, There was a lot of empirical data in the market. Right. There was so much information for you to pull from that. There wasn't a lot of guesswork. How has that been in cannabis where, you know, state to state it's different.
Mm-hmm. New state versus, you know, state that's been around for a while, medical versus rec. How are you, how do [00:11:00] you deal with that? How do you strategize against wishy-washy data? No data. How does that work? Right. Um, it's really capturing custom data, right? So it's putting a little spend behind, you know, talking to your bud tenders, talking to your retailers.
Now we say it's retail back, right? If you wanna really understand, demand starts with the consumer wallet. So if everybody's building the same product, then it's gonna be about who does it better, faster. Higher quality and consistency, that's where the standardization comes in. So you've gotta match the front to the back, and it starts with, again, voice a customer.
And then you roll it backwards and say, here's how you build your roadmap, your product roadmap. So do you really think it's smart to build something that's emerging? And you see this all the time, I wanna build a soda, I wanna build a. I wanna build a drink and I was pushing back pretty hard on some, um, some companies I was consulting with because I was challenging them to think forward on the [00:12:00] economics, right?
This is what a revenue officer does. You say, okay, you wanna do that, but do you understand the distribution risk that comes with building something that's an eight ounce drink? Do you understand the pressures on shelf that comes with that in terms of stabilizing the formulation? I mean, you have to kind of take and tie all of those pieces to say you can't just think where you are.
You gotta think where you're going, and the economics have to connect end-to-end. So this operating system that vivid, uh, my company Vivid and grade solutions will build, is a custom operations system, again, end-to-end for that business model. And we tend to focus on vertically integrated, um, owner operators.
We get tons of, uh, responses on, can you help us do a product formulation? And we can do that all day long. That's just a one off. But where we, where we actually do our best work is to come in and look at the operation in a 360 degree view. Look at every ounce of their business, every piece, and see what needs to be.
Either optimized, adjusted, or [00:13:00] even thrown out, right? Because there's, there's no good in waste. You wanna use lean manufacturing principles and continuous improvement to continue to, to extract profit from your business. So let's say we have a two or three person operation. I make balms. I have a vape, I'm hyper local.
What. Strategies or what advice could you give me to help me kind of figure out why I'm not driving revenue? Where, where should someone who's at a that level really start to analyze what is going wrong? Why am I not getting on shelves? Why, why am I bleeding money? Mm-hmm. What are some good strategies for someone in that position?
And the, yeah, so typically for the smaller operators, especially when you're in the early stages of revenue, um, if you're not getting your fair share of shelf or you're being delisted from shelf, right, the first thing you understand is the voice of that retailer. Why am I being delisted? [00:14:00] And then understand, is there a, is there a selling solution that's missing?
And by that I mean, do they understand the benefit of your product? Did they understand? Why it's important to the market. Because if you launch into market quickly, you sometimes we see a lot of, um, owners who haven't done the previous homework to say, what is my point of difference? Why am I meaningful to the mar market and why do I have a right to win if I'm seated in California?
Um, when I was running kind of the retail inlets, incoming brands at, um, state, um, sorry, against state made coming into med men, we saw the best in class. Companies coming in from Humboldt, and you can see who had the best pitch decks, right? Who did their homework? Who understood why they were differentiated?
Who understood why their pricing architecture was going to gain, gain traction on shelf? Because you can't race to the bottom on price alone, right? You gotta have something to stand on, and that's where it always starts with, tell me diagnostically what's happening at Shell. [00:15:00] Is it a quality issue? Is it a price issue?
Is it a differentiation issue? There's some key diagnostics that can lead you back to the root cause, and everything is foundationally based on what is the root cause. Okay. And is it worth fixing? Can I, okay, so I've gotta ask you from your perspective, is I am woman owned, or my product is woman focused, or I'm minority owned, or my product is minority focused.
Is that the. The, the differentiator, the powerful differentiator that we think it is when we're building the company. Does it really translate? Um, here's what I like to say. This is something we learned for years in, in C P G, including female owned brands. There is a point of difference because the story is believable, but at the end of the day, here's what you have to think through is what is, what is the, what's in the pocket of the consumer right now?
And right now we're under what I would consider pretty strong [00:16:00] recessionary type pressures. Not maybe true, full-blown, but you're seeing extreme pressures on the pocket of the consumer that changes everything. So what used to become the primary selling point? There's always huge support for what I call the underdog, right?
So female known businesses, minority like us, um, brands that we prop up the market. Like one of my commitments is to always support female supply chains in a big way. And, um, my link into Florida that where I've raised this 300 million to help prop them up when they come into licensing here in August and November, um, is a black-owned female who's been trying to enter the space for a long time, fully committed.
Has years and years of experience, building relationships, but needed the leadership to help her go to market. That's my commitment. Very believable. Helps create a reason for fundraising. Gets the attention of the VCs and the PEs and the money line. But when you go to market, that's not always a differentiator cuz it depends on the [00:17:00] economics of the consumer wallet.
And two, the best pla, the best approaches I've seen is if you're not creating solutions for the consumer. Then you're gonna have, you're gonna lack what they call repeat purchases or depth of repeat. You won't get, you won't get your money back because they're gonna say, well, what's in it for me? What do I get for it?
Yeah. So it's not enough to be minority owned. It's not enough to be that. That's a differentiator, and that's another additional prop. But at the end of the day, how are you solving something in their life? Why does it matter to them? And why does it make their life better? How does it enhance their purchase occasion?
Why does it make. Why does it make it come back to your brand? What is it that you're doing differently in traditional retail, um, we used to fight, you know, head to head on soda because it was under pressure for calories and the diets were under pressure because of having bad aspartame or different sweeteners, there weren't really healthy.
Um, so what you had to start to do was look at your total portfolio and balance it with healthier options, calories in, calories out, [00:18:00] right? Getting a little bit more, what we call occasion based marketing surrounding it. Which is, we're not just this, we're broader than this. Um, an example of that is, um, in fountain food service, there are contracts that lock down the fountains, right?
So Coke will go in and say, I have a service contract with, um, this fast food provider. So no other, I'm only gonna allow maybe one other competitor to be on maybe one of those little fountain pools. Well, we did work with Dr. Pepper and learned that if you place it next to Coke, it lifts the entire, the entire selling cycle.
It creates incremental consumption across the entire line. If you set it next to Pepsi, it doesn't become a substitute. It becomes a replacement because they're both sweet. Those are the dimensions of what we call occasion based marketing or insights modeling that help you create incremental revenue because it's the mi, the doubles in the details.
And that's, you know, my experience in [00:19:00] analytics and stuff that I used back in the day to set up roadmaps, kind of monetize into the selling solution, which then creates selling stories on category management and staying on shelf and getting faster rotations. So it's an end-to-end view. I'm going in different places, but it all ties back into the insight of the, of the human behavior.
It really does, because they're the ones that manage the pocket. That's so interesting. You know, when you were talking about Dr. Pepper, it just took me back to being a kid and excited when we would find a fountain that had Dr. Pepper because it wasn't easy to find. And then I know several people that would go and they would fill up every a str a drip from every soda, right?
Mm-hmm. It hit everyone. Consumer behavior is so interesting, but then it, it is interesting. It's unpredictable, but it's predictable at times, right? It's un, it's unpredictable in brand choice usually, or brand, what they call used to call brand loyalty. People say, where's the loyalty? Well, guess [00:20:00] what? Gen Z, they don't even know what that means.
They don't know what that means. So that's where occasion based and solution selling comes in is, you know, why does it matter? It's a total solution now. And, and a b and a. This is old school retailing, but, um, we had a company back in the day that said, we can't get our marshmallows to move. I'm not kidding, this is all consulting.
Back when I started jumping into consulting, um, the only way we could solve it is going to camping moments and land what they call center of the store by doing a, a Hershey's tie-in, right? So, Now you walk into a Walmart or a Target during camping season and you see they land the lobby. That's a big solution.
Selling moment and CAPS in stores then translated into Amazon. So our youngsters that are coming to the store that are just turning 21 and walking into the store are looking across that going, okay, well I'm used to endless aisles on Amazon. I'm used to eight screens digitally, which I call it Amazon Effect.
Right. They're digital natives. They don't think, like we think at moments of Truth [00:21:00] on Shelf, they have a different mindset on how they shop and they are becoming the next between them. And then the older cohorts, which are old school, which have the big pocket books or the youngsters who are coming in that shop, very different.
Those two worlds have to converge and you gotta see that. So how the clarity in those two, how do you make that work when cannabis purchasing? Is done. It can't be done online. I mean, you can go put your order in online and you get it delivered, but it's very different than an Amazon experience because you're still limited by that retailer, whether it's delivery or not.
Ab abs, absolutely. How are you? Absolutely. With the Gen Z buying habits against cannabis, retail, it. Well, they still, they still shop with the same mental model that they do and they shop everything with the same mental model, right? It doesn't matter that their end result means going to, is driven to a store, um, just [00:22:00] because it's the product.
But the way they think is similar based on their purchase decision making process. Um, we do a lot of research. Again, I always come back to. Knowing the mindset to those consumers and the frontier data does a lot of that. You'll see them come out with, you know, the cohorts and understanding that those dimensions are really important when you bring a product to life through a product brief.
Because who are you targeting? Do you have a right to win? Like you, there needs to be standardization when you're building that first product on the reason to believe that it should exist and why it exists, because the money will, will come later. But, um, that first step is. Truly important. And that's when I walk into, like when I was the Chief Revenue Officer for this large multinational or this um, M mso, I came in and the first thing I did is say, show me your, your product portfolio.
I. How did these products come into the market? Because there's gonna be a fast follower, right? There's first mover. Advantage is now accelerated. So a lot of people went, I was [00:23:00] first to do X, y, z, live resin, live, you know, something like that. Um, diamonds, you know, something. Well, now everybody's doing it right?
So how are you winning? And I will tell you that it, it came down to the power of the brand. It came down to the power of the brand. It really did. It was like your tagline, your branding opportunity, your ability to, to get to the heart of that consumer because there are moments that matter will absolutely monetize.
And it did. And that's where we got that lift. Right? But it meant, it meant two things, cutting. What didn't work. Recognizing what could work and being abduct and agile and refocusing your business opportunities time and time again, that's rapid continuous improvement. You can't stay the course and never change.
And it's, again, it's always comes down to, to small changes and small adjustments as you work your way up to that revenue line. So for any women who are [00:24:00] listening right now and are as. Fascinated by this is I am, um, and, and really understand the need to drive higher revenue for your company, but maybe stuck.
Are there any books that you can recommend that can really help guide them in how to think, think strategically around this? Any other books, resources, blogs? Where can they go? I mean, yes, they can go to you, but. You start to get some education on? Cause it sounds like it is, I mean, it's a make or break for a company if you don't understand.
It's how ab ab absolutely. It, it is, it is. Um, you know, I think the best thing for me to say is, let me get back to you on that because there's a, there's a, some re I wanna be very specific about where I would point small operators to, right. Because I'm, I'm in startup mode too, on some other ideas, but, Um, there are definitely places where you can look [00:25:00] at marketing to moments and these things that work because it's, it's, it's not as complex as it sounds.
It, it's not as complex as it sounds. I mean, it means that you have an ear for, for things that other people don't hear, or is to see what others don't see. And it's almost those things that you go, well, didn't you hear that? That that's how that could become a platform. Not everybody has that intrinsic skill.
So the other thing to do is kind of find coaches that can coach that or two point 'em to resources that say, here's the steps to try to get there. Right? It's a blending of two words, two worlds. And I'll say that what I've seen is the creatives of the world. Who are the people who build like advertising campaigns that you see on tv, you know, the big deutsches of the world, the big ad agencies.
Those are very different. Very different thinkers than people who have to monetize business like a revenue line, right? I'm call, I'm what they call a center brain thinker because I [00:26:00] have both sides of the model crossing over. Um, one from experience and two, just because that's how my brain is built, but I.
I have worked with people who said, I can't cross, I can't cross that line. So that's when I say find a mentor who does find a friend who does Right. And brainstorming is, is that moment where the more the merrier, the more people in the room that you can bounce ideas off is when you hear, sometimes you hear magic.
So sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a friend group. Sometimes it's, you know, getting mentors and, and, and friending people that you didn't know existed. Just pull 'em onto a phone call and say, you know, what do you think about this? And you can kind of hear magic in, in the conversation unfold. That's why your networking groups are so beautiful, and that's why everything you're doing as a foundation, you know, to promote female leadership works because all of these different thinkers in the room, in diversity comes together.
It can be, it's, it's, it's a, it's beautiful work. Thank you. Okay, so this show is about fundraising. So let's talk about how [00:27:00] revenue obviously has a big impact on being able to get somebody to invest in your company, but what kind of revenue are they looking for and how do you build a company that can achieve that?
There are a lot of different types of companies that are really good at raising revenue, but then they're not really an investible business. So, How do we know, like this is my dream project and it's great, I'm making money and I can pay a couple of people, but it's not really ever gonna be attractive to an investor versus, oh yeah, this is a hot business that investors are gonna love.
I'm revenue positive. How do I build more? And what, you see what I'm getting at? Like, what kinda revenue are they really looking for? Well, we, so we've run in as vivid. Um, we started helping doing fundraising support about five years ago, and it, it morphed outta conversations. [00:28:00] Um, when products were failing in market because of quality issues.
So it started with, Hey, my formulation has a red ring. What can I do? My bait pen's leaking, and all of a sudden, oh, we're gonna build something different. These were companies who had, you know, 20 million in revenue. But we're losing ground. Or we had a super, super startup who said, I have a great idea and a vape concept.
Um, so I'm pre-revenue. So there's pre-revenue, there's large revenue that's losing share. And in the mid ground there's, you know, startup and I'm gaining traction, and is this going to take me to the next level or not? Is this idea gonna, you know, penetrate the market? Um, The, the thing that I've always seen over and over again, they're very different paths to funding.
As you stated, hedge funds will never go after pre-revenue opportunities ever. That's where you have to go after private money. Right? So then you have to go after the VCs. The VCs that we're running into and Vivid has, is backed by [00:29:00] 160 connections back in the background. Um, Here's what they've asked us to do.
This is just by way of example. We have a checklist that's a 370 point checklist, that if it's an somebody who manufactures products, they say, I wanna place my bets. I wanna place something. I wanna place 15 million somewhere. Tell me where to place it. Cuz you have connections in the industry. And we come in with our scorecard and assessment as third party partners.
We assess the opportunity and we come back and say, here's a quantitative score. Take it or leave it right. They say, no, I don't wanna invest because it's too high risk, or, yes, but let's get in kind of, let's get in bed with them to talk about how we can restructure the opportunity. Right on a partnership deal or a strategic partnership or, um, not taking equity of their company, but putting in a debt structure.
So we'll talk about that deal structure shifting. There's a million ways to structure a deal. Um, what you usually find out is twofold. [00:30:00] If you can prop up a concept just for screening on, Hey, here's my idea. Here's a basic two pager or one page pitch, and you can send that through some of your VC partners or your funding partners.
They're gonna tell you whether there's date, demand there. Are they hearing that? And always back to, is there demand in the numbers? If your forecast, you rarely see bad forecasts, right? But who builds a bad forecast? But if there's true traction and it's meeting what you see, the projections are in market trends, then there's a real story there.
So it's where is the money going, and then where is the data going? And are those two converging? If you are building. Something that's ahead of the curve, a product type that maybe is starting to emerge and you're an early adopter. Those are the hardest ones to monetize and the hardest ones to lean into from a, from a solution selling.
Interesting. So being an early adopter can be really work against you. Not everyone is a Facebook or a [00:31:00] Twitter. Right, right, right. Early, early development of products that don't have a known reason to. Be in existence. A new usage. A new usage type. Right. I'll, I'll, I'll throw out an example here. I work with a lot of medical companies on the doctor's side and, um, they talk about, you know, I'm gonna create products for cramps, uh, female centered product, or I'm gonna create.
Um, well, we'll just leave it there. There's sexual intimacy things out there. Those are all really, really specific occasions that people understand, um, that you don't have to explain. But when you start to get into that mid-range, and this could be specific to a medical product or a rec product, doesn't matter what the rec product is, if it's a new usage occasion, um, I'll give an example.
In, in traditional grocery stores, you see those little, you know, the Kool-Aid things, the little pack sticks that what they call PSDs. Those don't really exist in the cannabis space yet. They're not [00:32:00] really there. They're in hemp a little bit. They're in C B, D all day long. But that powdered form hasn't been in existence because there's a formulation challenge in play there, just like there is on solubility, on shelf stable versions.
So we were working with someone to try to bring that to the market and we couldn't do it because the consumer wasn't familiar with that in the cannabis sector yet. What do you mean? What do you mean? What do I do with this? Does it, can it be applied into hot and into cold? And the minute that they have to ask more than three questions, you lose their interest.
That's, that is really good advice because, yeah, the cannabis industry is full of women who have been touched deeply by the plant and now are building businesses. Mm-hmm. And some of them are businesses that are not going to succeed. And I've watched a lot of women throw their wealth away because they weren't educated.
They were [00:33:00] being driven by passion. I mean, I've seen it in my own family. Hundreds of thousands of dollars gone into a product that. Never, it just became, you know, a vanished into thin air. So, yeah. And, and if you can't, here's my take on it, right? And, and I run into this a lot cuz I've mentored female entrepreneurs for a long time, a long time, who were trying to make it to the C-suite in traditional models.
And now in cannabis, my science officer, like my 11 people on my team, all but one are female. Right? So it's like, I hear you right. We have psilocybin emerging. We have psychedelics emerging. Um, very hard road to toe. If you're not heavily funded. Know where to place your bets and be realistic if you can't monetize passion.
Yeah, you want to, it's fun to have a pet project, but you know, you see that even with big owners, and we call 'em pet projects, which is like, we get that. You love that, [00:34:00] but that's not the one you put on blast. That's the one that you put on the side and let float along because you're creating revenue over here to co-fund that without eating, letting this be your only place to eat.
That's why you have to have more than one idea to monetize it. So we can float these little, what we call pet projects. But I, I just like you, I've seen it a lot and it, it, it hurts my heart because you don't ever wanna see that happen. Yeah, me too. I wanna plug all the holes in the industry where women are losing money.
And this is, this is one of the big ones. I'm guilty of it myself. So, oh, I, I, we've all been there. We've done it. I, I've done it. Um, I've had, I have plenty of failures under, under my cap, right? In terms of, boy, that didn't work out the way I thought. But, you know, our ethos, or we'd like to say is when we come in to consult with a company, operationally or otherwise, it's win fast, lose fast.
That's it, that's what you wanna do. I mean, that is, that is the, that is the point of entrepreneurialism is knowing when to call it quits. Cuz that's part of strategic [00:35:00] leadership is saying, I know when this isn't a good idea and I know I need to pivot. Yeah. Versus the little, uh, cartoon where the guys digging the ball and then he just up right before he makes the breakthroughs like, Right, right.
Ah, boy, those are two competing ideas, right? It's so, it's so hard when you believe in it though, it's so hard, but you can still believe in it and come up with a potentially different idea within that strategy, right? What they say is don't, don't change the goal line and don't change the strategy. Change the ideas that are, that are kind of surround, you know, emerging within that, that structure.
Keep your structure right, just like redecorating your house. Don't change the structure, redecorate. Right? That's good advice. That's really good advice. Okay. Yeah. So we're gonna move on to our final segment, which is, she had my back. So I love this part of the show because it's all about what we're doing here, supporting women who are doing the real work behind the scenes, who actually rarely get credit for what they [00:36:00] have done.
So today I have our two submissions, but I want to ask you to name a woman who has had your back. That doesn't get the credit she deserves. So I'm gonna let you think about that. I'm gonna read these two, and then we're gonna come back to your submission, okay, Shelly. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So our first submission today is from Dotti.
Luk. Dotty. I hope I pronounced that right. She wants to give a shout out to Dr. Joan Irving. She says, Dr. Joan Irving's continues support and encouragement as I transverse through the ever-changing cannabis industry. We went together to the N C I A lobbying days in 2019 and she helped guide me through the process.
She's available as my mentor to listen to my questions and concerns. When she sees a potential position on LinkedIn, she forwards it to me. She sees the long game and knows how to pivot. Since she has had, since she has [00:37:00] needed to do that many times herself, her focus is now cannabis education for active 55 plus her years of being a therapist certainly come in handy.
Thank you, Dottie, and thank you Dr. Joan for the great work that you both do. Up next we have, uh, Shifra Klein. She brings Janice hard badass owner of K-Town Collective dispensary in Los Angeles, founder of Confections Cannabis Kitchen in California, and co-founder of Hamas edibles in la. He tells us that Janice is an OG in the industry owning an LA dispensary back in 2008.
Wow. That is an og. Wow. Wow. In 2015 when I was looking for ways to relieve my son from his severe symptoms from autism, Janice was donating flour to me to experiment with. When I began to heal my son, I started to help others in our community and join forces with Janice. Once she got licensing for her kitchen, she invited [00:38:00] me to join her in revolution, revolutionizing the edibles industry.
We've created together Hamas edibles, the first and only certified kosher premium, fast acting vegan, gluten-free gummies in California. I couldn't do it without the support of Janice. Together we're educating the community and bringing inclusive, accessible products to the people. He is a blessing. Wow, that was a beautiful way for a friendship and partnership to start.
Thank you for sharing that with us Shifra, and thank you, Janice, for your compassion and generosity with those around truly comes around. All right, love it. Next, what woman would you like to celebrate that has had your back? Oh, this is so hard cuz there's so many. There's so many. So I reverse it. I'm reversing a little bit on, it's not someone that mentored me, it's someone who.
Sticks by my side, thicker, thin, maintaining the most positive composure and professionalism. [00:39:00] And I, I, I, these are people that you know are your superstars because they uplift you, right? And I'm like, she's never in a bad mood. She's just always there to help me win. It doesn't matter the situation. She's fully committed and she's my chief science officer, and I met her because she worked.
At the lab in Candescent, and I didn't really know her then, but I would talk to her and I was like, there is something about her. She intrigues me and I don't know what it is and I want to get to know her more. And a friendship emerged. And then when I started Vivid, I pulled her in and she's been here ever since and I adore her.
And it's Sierra Solnick. Um, Sierra Sok has, is now completing her medical training in Portland. So I propped her up. I provided recommendations. Um, I attended med school, so there's like this continuity there that we, we love with each other. And, um, I propped her up and said, let's go. And I started connecting into her places where I thought would kind of support her end goal of [00:40:00] being a psilocybin expert.
Wow. She has direct experience. In the psychedelics realm, um, internationally, uh, extracting psilocybin and we're working to get, um, a license under our portfolio because of her expertise. And my goal is to help her launch her company. I have her helped her set up her business infrastructure, her pitch deck.
Um, she does beautiful work and because of her scientific knowledge and her com, just her commitment, um, to using it through a medical lens, but understanding the rec market and how those two worlds come together. There's gonna be a place for her in a big way. Always, always. Not only with me, but in the, in the bigger.
I think she'll be a c e o very soon. Wow. She has it in her. I will look out for Sierra and her amazing company. I would love, she's she's, she is one of the best. Uh, no where, no matter where I place her, no matter what I ask her to do, she, she rises to the challenge and she doesn't let anything stand in the way of [00:41:00] becoming making it a success.
And she's our chief Science officer. I adore. That's awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Shelly, and thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today. And ladies, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. It has been. Listen, this was a great conversation and I really would love to have you.
You have so much fascinating knowledge, not just in this RPG world, but if driving revenue. And I think that is a conversation we need to have over and over and over and over again so that women become more comfortable talking about it and smarter strategizing their revenue. So thank you for everything you gave us today.
You bet. And my goal, um, just as we talk about, you know, where we, anytime I can mentor, I'm up for the challenge. Anytime I can coach, I'm up for the challenge. That's just part of giving back. I love it. It's love, it's what I love to do. So, um, you know, he is talked about, I. Propping up young females who maybe don't have the language or the [00:42:00] experience yet to sit at that table and sit with the corporate giants, as I call 'em, right?
These, these funding people, when you're talking about a hundred million dollars coming into the industry, or you're, you know, along with Panther Group, Charlie, and the team fundraising, those are, those are behind the scenes. Those investors have a specific language. And if you're gonna pitch your ideas, just like going in front of Shark Tank, so we, we gotta get you ready for that, right?
There's coaching that can occur to say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a little playbook here on, on the steps to get there, right? There's a roadmap. But number two, are you ready? And can you, can you believably withstand. The headwinds that are gonna come your way because you've got to stay in your ground and you've got to believe, make them believe that you know what you're doing.
Well, you might, you might have the idea, but you gotta have the business acumen to follow. And if you don't have it, how are you gonna find it? That's what they're gonna ask. Right? There's forward looking questions. Every investor's gonna ask, are you ready? I love, well, I may have the perfect [00:43:00] opportunity for you.
The Roadmap to Funding mentor program that. W I and the Panther Group has launched in, our first session is on June 7th. It's an eight week virtual course set up. Oh, wow. To discuss exactly what you're talking about. And I still have a few thoughts open for mentors so, I will be talking with you after this.
Please do. Please reach out anything you need. Thanks. I, I've, I've supported you from the day that I saw it. You know, um, I've been trying to prop up every, you know, share what you guys do cuz I believe in it so, so much and it's, it's great. I'm great that it's starting to emerge more and more in the industry.
So I look forward to staying connected. Thank you. Me too, Shelly. Thank you ladies for tuning in. If you haven't yet downloaded the roadmap to funding the Essential Guide for Starting your Funding Journey for Success, go to the Panther Group co slash roadmap to funding and tune in again next week for another episode of Women Leading in Cannabis.[00:44:00]
Wow, Shelly. Thank you.