As a consultant & operator with more than 16 years of hands-on experience launching and scaling cannabis operations across three state markets—from start-ups in regulated Oregon & California to large-format flagship stores in New Jersey—I’ve seen the same error repeat: dispensary owners hiring external experts, then treating them like internal staff, micromanaging them (or failing to actively manager their operations at all), and finally blaming them when initiatives collapse.

This isn’t just a tactical misstep—it undermines value, erodes trust, and signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what a consultant is hired to do. In the fast-moving and heavily regulated cannabis retail space, that mistake can cost you time, money, compliance headaches, and organizational morale.

In this article, I’ll draw on my cross-state experience and detail why this dynamic occurs, how cannabis operators, particularly in cannabis retail, often mismanage the consultant engagement, the risks of conflating consultant and employee roles, and concrete steps you must take to set up the relationship properly—because when you treat your consultant like a staff member, you’re really setting both of you up for failure.

1. Why You Hired the Consultant in the First Place

When you bring in a consultant—whether for market entry, retail build-out, regulatory readiness, inventory systems, or operational excellence—you’re seeking expertise that your full-time team either doesn’t have or doesn’t have time to apply. External consultants bring what internal teams often cannot: breadth of exposure, independent perspective, sharpened tools, a pace of change, and best-practice frameworks that have been tested across multiple markets.  

In cannabis, where regulations differ significantly by state and market dynamics shift rapidly, this expertise is invaluable. But it also means you’re not just buying “extra bodies” like a new employee; you’re investing in a strategic asset. That means you must treat the engagement differently.

Yet too many cannabis operators hire “a consultant” and then micromanage them just like their store manager. They assign hours, weekly check-ins, call them in on daily huddles, treat recommendations as optional, and then blame the consultant when roll-out fails. Why? Because they didn’t commit.

And let’s be clear — some operators don’t just mis-manage consultants, they fail to manage their business altogether. Cannabis retail, unlike traditional retail, cannot run on autopilot or vibes. You cannot “hire a consultant to build it” and then disappear from leadership, decision-making, and operational visibility. I’ve worked with owners who were absent during key build-out phases, missed licensing deadlines, ignored staffing red flags, delegated all authority without oversight, and then resurfaced months later shocked that things weren’t magically functioning.

Consultants are not surrogate owners. They cannot fill every operational, financial, compliance, and leadership vacuum you create by being hands-off. When operators disengage from their own business, the consultant becomes a catch-all safety net — one that was never designed to carry the full weight of your enterprise. If you step away from your responsibilities and the business spirals, that is not a consultant failure — that is an ownership failure.

2. The Pitfalls of Treating a Consultant as an Employee

There are several interlocked traps when you misclassify the role in practice—or even mentally—as if the consultant is just “another staff member.”

• Loss of strategic value. If you treat your consultant as an employee, you push them into execution mode, daily minutiae, and status updates rather than asking the bigger “what” and “why” questions. You lose the external perspective that was the reason you engaged them in the first place. As one consultancy blog puts it: “the consultant brings new ideas and fresh perspectives … the employee ensures those ideas are successfully implemented on the ground.” (datasqware.com)
  
  
• Misaligned expectations. Employees expect directives; consultants expect collaboration. If you override their scope daily, you demotivate them or constrain their ability to deliver. According to HR- consulting guidance, consultants are not subject to the same levels of company control or direction as an employee.
  
  
• Legal and classification risks. Without a clear statement of work and outside-of-business-as-usual scope, you risk misclassifying a consultant as an employee, with attendant tax, benefits, and legal exposure.
  
  
• Blame shifting. Stakeholders often blame the consultant for implementation failure, when in reality the failures stem from internal factors: lack of resource allocation, poor alignment, low accountability, or insufficient buy-in. A consultant may deliver a roadmap—but internal readiness to execute is your job.

In one New Jersey dispensary launch I worked on, the owner treated the consultant exactly like a leadership hire—expecting them to show up daily, attend staff meetings, execute store opening tasks, and report into the same chain of command. When the launch stalled, the consultant was cast as under-performing.

The reality: the owner never freed up the internal team to act on recommendations, never provided the budget for remodel changes, and didn’t hold leadership accountable to follow the deliverables. The consultant ended up exiting early; the store opened six months late and over budget.

3. Why That Mistake Is Especially Costly in Cannabis Retail

Cannabis retail is not like other retail verticals. Because you’re operating under dense regulation, license scrutiny, security protocols, inventory tracking, seed-to-sale compliance, and rapid product change, your operational readiness must match the strategic guidance you purchase. If your internal functions are weak, your consultant’s value is limited.

• Regulatory risk: A consultant may map your compliance framework, but if internal teams don’t act, you risk fines, license suspension, or worse.
  
  
• Operational readiness: Inventory systems, POS integrations, staff training, security workflows—all of these need internal uptake. The consultant can specify but cannot execute without internal alignment.
  
  
• Speed to market: Many cannabis markets reward first-movers or well-capitalized entries; delays cost you market share and momentum. External consultants can accelerate that—only if you let them.
  
  
• Staff morale and change management: Treating the consultant like an employee can demotivate both internal and external teams. Staff may perceive the consultant as a duplicate of internal leadership rather than a strategic partner, leading to internal resistance.

In a multi-state rollout across California and Pennsylvania, the difference between success and delay often hinged less on the consultant’s quality and more on the client’s internal discipline: did they meet monthly checkpoints? Did they invest in training? Did they empower the consultant’s recommendations? Did they accept accountability—and follow through?

4. What Successful Operators Do Instead

Here’s a granular breakdown of how to engage, collaborate, and value consultants effectively in cannabis retail:

a. Define roles and scope via a Statement of Work (SOW) and engagement contract

Treat the consultant like a professional vendor—not a staff hire. The SOW should clearly identify deliverables, milestones, responsibilities (both yours and theirs), timelines, review processes, and how internal stakeholders will interact. According to best practices, you must avoid treating consultants as though they are employees in terms of direction, benefits, and integration.

However, simply having a SOW is not enough — you must actually adhere to it. Too many operators enthusiastically sign a scope of work and then immediately begin deviating from it, demanding tasks that were never defined, expecting on-call support, piling on additional responsibilities without re-scoping, or assuming unlimited availability because “you’re here to help us get open.” This is scope creep in its most dangerous form.

When you treat your SOW like a suggestion instead of a contractual agreement, you erode trust, undermine project structure, and set the engagement up for frustration and failure. Respect the scope you agreed to. If priorities change — and in cannabis they often do — revisit the agreement, realign expectations, and modify the scope formally. Professional operators honor process, not proximity or panic.

b. Identify your internal readiness gaps and commit to addressing them

Before or as you deploy the consultant, conduct an internal readiness audit: leadership alignment, staff capacity, budget, technology tools, timeline commitments, compliance frameworks. If you aren’t ready for the recommendations, you’ll treat the consultant’s work as shelf-ware. The key: you must prepare your internal team to execute.

c. Create a governance structure for external advice integration

Have defined periodic review sessions (e.g., bi-weekly or monthly) where the consultant presents progress and you assign internal owners to each recommendation. Create an internal transformation owner—typically a senior executive—who is accountable to implement and monitor recommendations. Without this, consultants deliver but no one drives.

d. Don’t micromanage the consultant—collaborate

Let the consultant advise, analyze, and deliver recommendations. Your role is to stay engaged, ask questions, provide data, challenge assumptions, and remove internal obstacles. But you should not issue daily tasks or control how they schedule their work—doing so collapses their value as an external expert and can lead to engagement failure.

e. Establish implementation follow-through and accountability

A consultant’s work isn’t done when their deliverables are handed over—it’s done when the business acts on those deliverables. Set internal KPIs tied to the consultant’s recommendations: e.g., time to launch, compliance incident reduction, staff training completion, inventory loss reduction. Hold yourself accountable—don’t shift blame to your consultant.

f. Create a culture of listening and valuing external advice

If you treat the consultant’s input as optional or dismiss it tactically, you send a signal the engagement is nominal. Invite the consultant to present to leadership, include them in strategic workshops, and treat their deliverables as board-level documents. Their fresh perspective is one of the key value drivers. When you ignore or push back on recommendations without good reason, you’re essentially treating them as an employee you don’t trust—wasting top-tier insight.

g. Budget for execution, not just advice

Too often cannabis retail operators pay for the consultant’s insight but then withhold budget for implementation. Whether it’s new POS systems, security upgrades, store remodels, or staff training, build a budget that follows the consultant’s recommendations. Otherwise, you’ve paid for ideas you won’t act on.

5. Real-World Case Study: Where the Shift Happens

I’ll share one contrasting example from my experience:

Scenario A: A regional dispensary chain in Pennsylvania engaged me to build their second-generation store concept. They treated me as another store manager, scheduled me into daily stand-ups, expected me to recruit staff, and exercised internal control over my schedule. Because they never gave me operational decision-making authority or budget autonomy, the store opened eight months late, went over budget, staff morale waned, and part of my recommendations were disregarded. When revenue lagged, the owner blamed “consultant’s bad advice” rather than the internal execution failure.

Scenario B: A multi-state operator in California did the opposite. We signed a SOW clearly defining scope, timelines, deliverables. The operator executive team appointed a “transformation lead” internally. I presented monthly to the board. They provided a dedicated internal budget and a 90-day action-plan aligned with my deliverables.

They did not try to control my day-to-day—but treated my deliverables as strategic guidance to be executed. The result: the store launched 4 weeks ahead of schedule, capex was below budget by 12 %, staff retention was above benchmark, and compliance audit outcomes exceeded expectations. The consultant—me—was given value for the strategic advice. The operator executed accordingly.

The conditions were identical (regulatory items, market shifts, product launches). What made the difference was how the engagement was treated.

6. Why Some Operators Default Wrong—and How to Change It

Why do so many cannabis operators fall into the “consultant-as-employee” trap? Here are some root causes, and the remedies:

• Comfort with hierarchy: Many dispensary operators grew up used to internal hierarchy and treating external parties like staff under their control. Remedy: Reframe the engagement as “strategic partnership” rather than “hire a person to do work for me.”
  
  
• Desire for control: Because cannabis retail has high risk, owners want to control every detail—including the consultant. Remedy: Accept that you hired a specialist; your role is to apply their recommendations, not micromanage or completely ignore what needs to be executed for your business.
  
  
• Confusion of role: Not understanding the difference between a consultant and an employee is common. As one firm noted, “Consultants generally set their own hours … and are not subject to the direction or control of the company the way an employee is.” (launch.wilmerhale.com)
  
  
• Budget obliviousness: Owners often pay for advice but not for execution. Remedy: Build the execution budget alongside the consulting contract—allocate money, resources, timelines, internal owners up front.

7. Final Practical Checklist for Cannabis Operators

Before, during and after your next consulting engagement, walk through this checklist:

• Have we created a clear SOW and contract that differentiates the consultant role from an internal hire?
  
  
• Have we identified an internal owner accountable for implementation and follow-through?
  
  
• Have we committed internal budget and resources for executing the consultant’s recommendations?
  
  
• Will we treat the consultant’s deliverables as strategic guidance and invest in data, governance and accountability to act on them?
  
  
• Will we avoid micromanaging the consultant (e.g., daily stand-ups as if they’re a staff member) and instead collaborate at the strategic level?
  
  
• Will we make it safe and expected that our internal team listens to and acts on the consultant’s input—rather than viewing it skeptically or ignoring it?
  
  
• Will we monitor KPIs tied to the consultant’s recommendations—track implementation, impact, and adjust as needed?

8. Conclusion

In the cannabis industry, with its accelerated growth, regulatory complexity and competitive intensity, consultants are not luxury expenses—they are strategic enablers. But only if you treat them as what they are: external experts and partners, not internal staff. When you treat your consultant like an employee or as the sole person responsible for executing the needs of your business, you degrade their value, blur roles, set up misalignment and create failure risks—you then often blame them for your own lack of readiness.

If you will commit to the proper framework—clear scope, internal readiness, budget accountability, governance, collaborative respect—you’ll extract far more value. The consultant’s insight becomes your competitive advantage. Your internal team becomes enabled rather than defensive. And as a result, your dispensary builds not only faster, but more compliant and more sustainably.

Consultants are there to diagnose, advise and design. You are there to execute, align, and commit. Once you understand and commit to that formula, the consultant becomes a force multiplier, not a scapegoat.

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