The Amazon of Weed
If only we could plant our freak flag
The Family Stone is a holiday movie I like to watch every year around this time. Ripe with relational family drama, a memorable takeaway is to be yourself, show yourself - fly your freak flag! The proverbial freak flag is about being honest with who you are and developing a strategy to succeed unapologetically. And so we have from the get-go with this dispensary license thing.
We received good news today!
We’re closer to checking off the boxes/hurdles for the next planning board meeting bringing us closer to getting a “special use permit.” The permit then deems the building we have been renting (for almost a year) a “retail dispensary” so we can sell recreational cannabis on location. Makes sense. Our strategy, our business model from the jump was to focus on delivery (be the Amazon of weed) and then build out the retail once we got the permit which according to OCM is within our licensed approval because we passed compliance for delivery operations from our retail space. The town noted they have no say in controlling our delivery operations as long as we don’t advertise and not a single customer steps foot in our space. No problem! We’re not built out for customer-facing service because we know we need a special use permit. Got it?
Well, though all of this is on paper and legit, the town is pushing that we still need a special use permit to store cannabis in our approved location for our business. Total B.S.!!! The town has not issued any special use permits though they have five applications (I found on the website) waiting to be processed - Brown Budda New York in the pile. We are licensed and were operational until our strategy was thwarted by regulations made on the fly pretty much due to pressure by lawyers of the other applicants in Southampton wondering how we became operational without a special use permit.
We do want to open the retail store in the spring, but it makes it a whole lot more difficult when cash flow is halted. We are shopping our deck (again) and have two legitimate offers for a sizeable share of the company. This is a good thing. We also have a few “Friends and Family” shares available for those who want in before the end of the year. I watched a video on Jeff Bezos talking about the first raise of a company, in his case $1M for Amazon, was the hardest thing because no one understood the business. He raised 1M through 20 investors at $50K each in 1995 and prevailed. As of December 13, 2024, Amazon's market cap, or net worth, is $2.39 trillion.
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