An Ant and a Weedhopper

A Momentous Day

What a day! Investigator: assigned. Fingerprinting: scheduled. Lease: signed, sealed, and delivered. These were three massively important milestones that we’d been anticipating for months. When it rains, it pours, and I want to take a moment here to comemmerate the highlights of the last few months.

Standard Operating Procedures, Policies, and Plans. Oh My!

This past summer, it was time for TLEHL to prepare and submit our Conditional Conversion application to the NJ CRC. Some entrepreneurs choose to hire consultants to prepare these materials, but at TLEHL, we believe so deeply in regulatory compliance that we want to ingrain it into our company DNA. The best way to do that, it seemed, was for I as the CEO and Founder to write these documents myself.

It was no easy task; I ended up with a total of 160 pages of new single-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman font, one-inch-margin documents to send on to the NJ CRC for review. Our licensing and compliance legal team helped make sure the Standard Operating Procedures were properly written (for example, they gave the great advice to include a version number on each SOP). By the time this set of documents was ready to submit, Labor Day was right around the corner, and I suddenly realized that I had apple frittered my summer away preparing this application, like Aesop’s proverbial ant!

Emerging from a Paperwork Chrysalis

As the summer ended, the next chapter began, and it involved a barrage of industry networking events. In fact, from the NJ CannaBusiness Assocation, to the Real Cannabis Entrepreneur conference, to NJ Cannabis Insider Live, to groups like 420Cannect and the Cannabis Connection, to other smaller one-off events, the TLEHL social calendar has never been more packed. Add to the top of that pre-buildout tours, private pitch events, recruiting, supply chain relationship building, and general local business networking outside of the cannabis industry, and you can imagine how this feels like trading one non-stop project for another.

What You Say, Get Dis Money

Some consider fundraising to be a painful process. I might of been one of them, had I not spent the whole summer with my nose in technical documents in the equivalent of a root cellar! Anything feels like a relief after that. So, to my fellow pre-launch cannabis entrepreneurs: the next time we see each other out and about, pardon my chipper attitude and semi-legal smile when the topic of financing inevitably comes up. It’s just another stop on the obstacle course, and we are a bunch of hurdle-jumping weedhoppers!