The dispensary chain embarc opened its first store in 2020, right as the world was shutting down. embarc’s founding team, led by Lauren Carpenter, was getting ready to open its first store in South Lake Tahoe as the shelter in place order was issued, which was challenging given the store was actively being constructed in real time. Undeterred by a global pandemic, Lauren and her scrappy team persevered in their singular mission of creating a retail experience rooted in community, normalization and advocacy, all underpinned by unwavering business discipline.
In the five and a half years since, California’s cannabis landscape has ballooned, collapsed, and reinvented itself, shedding many companies and operators along the way. embarc, however, has been a rare consistency: growing steadily but not aggressively as it stayed squarely focused on retail, even as its peers chased quick bucks into the hazardous areas beyond their expertise. embarc resisted the hype and put in the hard yards, and today is held up as an example of cannabis retail done the right way for the right reasons.
So we asked Lauren to share some of her top lessons from 2025, which was another hard and consequential year for California cannabis. There are many learnings here for cannabis operators of every stripe.
1. “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Hyperbole (But Sometimes You Have No Choice)
Look, Mark Zuckerberg can keep his mantras. Unbreaking things, we realized in 2025, is annoying as hell. But when California’s excise tax structure changed with literal days’ notice, we had to move f**king fast. Our teams adapted operations to this new tax structure in 72 hours. Was it messy? Yes. Did we have a choice? No.
The lesson: Yes, set your thesis, stay focused, build for stability…but when the ground shifts beneath you, don’t stick your head in the sand. Evolve or die is a daily operating reality in this industry.
2. Be the Dumbest Person in the Room
There was a time when I thought that I had to know everything to be an effective CEO. I insisted on keeping abreast of every pulse in the market, knowing every product in every store, and being CC’d on every conversation.
Welp, once you get past a couple of stores that’s absolutely exhausting, inefficient and a fast track to burnout. Now I strive to be the dumbest person in the room and focus on coordination and cross-functionality, two areas where I can actually add value.
We hire experts in specific focus areas because they’re smarter than me in those domains. My job is to make sure the smart people talk to each other. Not being a deranged, stressed out tyrant who makes a mess everywhere she goes.
3. The Roots vs. Suits Tension Will Kill You If You Don’t Set Guardrails
Just about every modern cannabis company has been forced to confront this awkward, sitcom-worthy mash-up of cultures we often call The Roots vs The Suits.
As readers of Beard Bros know, there is a tremendous amount of wisdom, best practices and talent among the OGs who built the industry. Likewise, there’s a lot of exceptionally talented people outside of the industry who want to bring their finance, legal and operational prowess to help legal cannabis mature.
embarc has overindexed into both at different times, and it has cost us time and money every single time.
What we learned is that you must embrace both with clearly defined roles and value for each. Culture matters immensely, and so does the spreadsheet. Neither works without the other, and neither should run the whole show.
4. Stop Building for 10x When You Need 3x
We kept building systems that could support a business ten times our size. Future proofing your business sounds smart, right? Sadly not. At times we overbuilt, wasted resources, and created complexity we didn’t need now.
Build for three times your current size. You can always scale infrastructure when you actually need it. Premature optimization will destroy your cash flow, and you never know what kind of challenges you’ll face in the next quarter, let alone the next dozen quarters.
5. Be a sports team.
We’re not a family. We’re not best friends either. We’re like a sports team. We work extremely hard to support one another. Sometimes players we like get traded or don’t make the cut for reasons beyond anyone’s control. That’s the reality.
To run an effective team at scale you need to have accountability structures that aren’t mean or corporate or anti-culture. They should be designed to build a team that respects each other enough to show up and deliver. Accountability, we learned, is actually the most respectful thing you can build into your culture to benefit one another.
6. We Hired for Résumés When We Should Have Hired for Hunger
How many cannabis companies have been seduced by fancy resumes over the years? Sadly, we’re no different. We fell into the trap of overweighting résumés with big experience and underweighting traits like urgency, creativity, adaptability, and velocity… you know, the things a startup actually lives or dies on.
What you can’t see through the insecure fangirling of Big Corporate Brands is that these are wildly different from cannabis companies. They’re well-oiled machines with established systems. Cannabis is total chaos unfolding atop a mountain of compliance paperwork. It’s a mess. You need people who move, ship, adapt and solve problems without being asked.
When we hired for titles instead of tenacity, we got talented people who couldn’t operate in our reality. Fortunately, we also have a handful of folks with big fancy resumes – but they are the ones who understand that we only benefit from their expertise if they adapt to our pace.
7. Staying Focused Is Really Fucking Hard
FOMO is real in this industry. A competitor drops prices, and now you’re offering 90% off 1/8ths. Someone launches a new product line, and you think, “You know, maybe it is time for us to launch that hard seltzer…”
Perhaps the biggest lesson we’ve learned is that it’s harder to stay focused than it is to copy someone else. Focus takes discipline, conviction, patience, and the courage to believe your way will win, even when nobody else is doing it yet.
This one requires constant work, every day.
Here’s to 2026. May we embrace the lessons, free ourselves from the burden of expecting perfection, and make entirely new mistakes – while hopefully learning from a couple of them.
—Lauren & the embarc team
