Short Impact: Operating a Cannabis Business
Beard Bros Media Network’s #B2BCannabisShow delivered such an excellent episode of Travel Tuesday. This Short Impact article gives cannabis business owners further information about licensing, types of licenses, and business strategies for creating consumer and community friendly policies for operating.
Travel Tuesday is hosted by Brian Applegarth (Cannabis Travel Association International; Applegarth Strategies).
Episode 2’s special guest, Scott Schmidt, gives a colorful history of cannabis prohibition, innovative projects in Emerald Village (where he’s the executive director of the now forty-year program), some funny West Hollywood anecdotes, and one “bad trip horror story” that is highly recommended! You can find all of that in the full episode here.
Cannabis Marketing Tips: Property and License Tips for New #Entrepreneurs and Veteran Businesses
BA: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Travel Tuesday, part of the Beard Bros Media Network at the intersection of culture and industry. On today’s show, we’ll be diving into the Emerald Village of West Hollywood, the very first city-sanctioned destination marketing organization specifically for #cannabis. I’m thrilled to be joined by Scott Schmidt, the executive director of the Emerald Village.
SS: Thanks for having me, Brian. You know, I’ve been a West Hollywood resident for more than twenty years […] We were serving medical cannabis since the 1990s. I believe West Hollywood in 2001 was the first city to create its own cannabis ordinance and say, ‘we’re going to legitimize this’. We’re going to create a formal process. And then in 2018, when recreational adult-use cannabis became legal in California, West Hollywood said, we’re going to issue forty different business licenses. We’re going to create new categories of businesses.
So not only are we having medical dispensaries and recreational dispensaries and delivery, but we created two different types of lounges. Some lounges where you have full smoking and vaping and anything with cannabis in it you can consume there. And some where we dedicate a certain amount of the square footage to non-smoking consumption. If you’re allergic to smoke or have an aversion to smoke, there’s places where you can consume cannabis in a way that doesn’t involve sparking it up.
BA: Can you share a little bit more about how West Hollywood approached the consumption square footage for smoking versus non? I thought that was really clever from a ‘city approach point of view’ as far as destination development.
SS: Yeah so, originally the city wanted to have edible-only lounges and smoking lounges. [It] was the first city to ban smoking in restaurants indoors, and we wanted to provide non-smoking spaces. We [then] realize that maybe that’s not a viable business model if you can’t infuse the food directly: there’s [regulations on] packaging, testing, dosage … that come with infusing food. So, we allow for those edible lounges to have 50% of their square footage to be smoking. [That’s a] license type.
New #entrepreneurs and veteran business owners have a cost-effective advantage in this broader spectrum of services that can be provided to all types of cannabis consumers.
Cannabis Venue Operations and Pain Points
BA: We have a few more minutes, Scott. If you could tell me the three pain points that you had to overcome to get where you are now?
SS: Well, yeah – I think, the first pain point was getting these people to work together. They did not like each other. There were lawsuits, ballot measure initiatives, lobbying, and [subsequently] years of fighting each other. And eventually, in the summer of 2020, the city sat everyone down, got everyone together, and Emerald Village came out of that process.
Challenge number two was figuring out what we call ourselves, how we fit in, and [catering to both] the external audience and the internal audience. Because inside West Hollywood, we had to convince the residents that we were adding something of value to the city. [Even though] 83% of voters voted for legal cannabis, they didn’t necessarily want a dispensary next to their house, right?
I think the third pain point – and it was really a pain point – was when we tried our first special event; the first ever city-sanctioned cannabis street fair on Halloween last year, and it was in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. The city imposed a lot of requirements on us in terms of odor mitigation, visual mitigations, security, and a lot of things that maybe were not [necessities], but having done it without any incidents, you know, we’re hopeful that they will reduce some of those burdens in the future. And [consider the reality that] it cost a lot of money and convincing, [getting] the cannabis businesses to buy into it was a challenge.
BA: Awesome. Well, you heard from Scott. You got [to create good] policy. You got to organize your cannabis stakeholders. You got to unite around a common strategy and brand for a destination/ for what you’re offering and then start marketing and building those products.
The #BeardBrosMediaLiveSeries platforms top-tier #B2B and #B2C content on all things #cannabis, #weed, #hemp, #cannabisbusiness development, and of course, the local and global menu of cannabis-infused products. Subscribe, and join us on #LinkedInLive for upcoming episodes!
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