Walk into almost any dispensary and ask the manager what their biggest headache is. It’s not inventory. It’s not marketing. It’s people.
A budtender gets hired at fifteen or twenty dollars an hour. The company trains them. Teaches them the product. Teaches them compliance. Teaches them how to talk to customers. A few months later, the budtender is good at the job. Then the shop down the block offers them fifty cents or a dollar more per hour, and they leave.
On paper, that sounds small. In real life, it’s not. A dollar an hour is about forty dollars a week on a full schedule. That is more than two thousand dollars a year. For someone making twenty dollars an hour, that is a meaningful raise. It does not matter whether they like their manager or the music in the store or the brand on the wall. At some point, the math wins.
Founders usually describe this as a morale problem or a loyalty problem. They talk about culture and engagement and burnout. Those things exist, but they are not the main issue. The main issue is that cannabis jobs carry more stress and more risk than most jobs that pay the same. When another employer offers even a small bump in pay, the deal changes.
We already know how people behave when compensation is structured properly. Salespeople work harder on commission than on salary. Business owners work harder than employees because the upside belongs to them. This ties back to incentives.
Most cannabis roles are paid as if they were ordinary retail or operations jobs. They’re not. They come with regulatory pressure, constant audits, and the possibility that a mistake costs the company its license. Over time, workers realize they are absorbing business risk without sharing in business reward.
Raising wages helps, but only temporarily. A higher hourly rate fixes today. It does nothing for next year, and it certainly does not change how someone thinks about staying when another shop offers them one dollar more.
The reason commission works so well is simple. Effort and reward move together. The harder you work, the more you make. The problem is that most roles in a cannabis company cannot be put on commission. You cannot commission a compliance officer or a cultivation supervisor without creating new problems.
Ownership is the closest substitute.
Ownership turns long term effort into long term pay. Instead of earning only for the hours they work, people earn for helping the business grow in value over time. The longer they stay, the more they have at stake. Leaving does not just mean finding another job. It means giving up something that has been building.
This is why companies with ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) keep people longer. Not because employees suddenly become more loyal, but because the job stops being just a paycheck. It becomes a financial position. The structure does what culture speeches cannot. It makes staying make sense.
Darren Gleeman is the Managing Partner of MBO Ventures, the cannabis industry’s premier ESOP investment bank. The firm provides ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) expertise and will also invest its capital alongside company owners and/or management teams. In 2023, Darren received a patent pending for his ESOP methodology used in completing the cannabis industry’s first ESOP, alleviating tax implications of 280E for a plant-touching multi-state operator, Theory Wellness. Darren was also awarded the Green Market Report 2024 Top Financial Advisor Award.
