Can I Sign Oregon Banking Permission Slip

Can i industry sign banking oregon permission slip

welcome to today's grown in conversation sponsored by the cannabis business association of illinois where we learn from experienced dispensary owners and operators across the country what they did to get their businesses up and running commercial cannabis in illinois is still in an embryonic stage nearly seven months into the legalization of recreational consumption cultivators from across the state are still not producing enough product to meet strong demand approximately 60 dispensaries are already in business with new ones opening every week further in september we should see licenses for 75 additional dispensaries awarded this seems like a lot of retail activity until you zoom out and observe the landscape in other states that impose fewer restrictions to entrepreneurs and investors looking to sell legal weed michigan which legalize adult use cannabis sales only a month before illinois has more than 250 dispensaries washington state which legalized recreational sales in 2014 has more than 450 with a focus on delivering business intelligence and operational advice to the thousands of entrepreneurs in illinois hoping to own a license for retail cannabis sales in the coming months today grown in is convening dispensary owners and operators from across the country to share what to do and what not to do upon receiving a cannabis retail license and breaking ground on a new business we will introduce our panelists in a moment but first let's tee up a few issues that are top of mind for everyone let's start with day one in illinois the wait to see who will win a license is excruciating applicant groups fortunate enough to win the right to sell legal weed now must transition from theory to reality this includes finalizing real estate construction and early stage human resources decisions while also establishing proactive relationships with communities where many residents are opposed to having a pot shop in their backyard while all new businesses invariably need to own a bank account this most basic requirement is tricky when most banks won't touch any company that transacts federally illegal products beyond finding a friendly bank how will you accept payments transfer cash and choose the right software to keep your business not only growing but compliant and finally we get to product marketing will the next wave of what in theory will be independently owned dispensaries have access to enough products grown in illinois to meet consumer demand how can operators identify suppliers brands processed consumption types that not only are in stock but also resonate well with customers how do you adjust your marketing plan when you are not the only store in town or even on your own block we will ask and our panelists will answer questions about best practices associated with opening and operating dispensaries as well as what continues to keep them up at night joining us are porsha mittens a dispensary owner in oregon who is also an applicant for a retail license in illinois providing input from a multi-state retailer and cultivator's perspective is gabe mendoza who serves as vice president of illinois operations for phoenix-based forefront and has opened up multiple dispensaries in multiple states finally ron de giacomo owns dispensaries in three states he is also the co-founder of trinity compassion care centers which has two locations in peoria great and welcome we are so pleased to have all of you today and uh you know as as many of the grown-in viewers and readers are from illinois they're in the state that um we're in this prolonged waiting period on dispensaries as we just heard uh a precious few of them are going to uh have a license and then say uh oh what next porsha starting with you what's the first thing that you did upon learning that you had your first license the first thing i did well i was in illinois when i learned of it and what was this uh this was in [Music] november of 2016. and i was actually in a press conference with the then uh mayor at the time and i left out the room and did like a little happy dance and screamed and shouted and jumped up and down and then i strained out my shirt and i went back in i must ask what municipality uh where this mayor of the press conference that you observed chicago chicago in 2016 that's one i've never heard before um let's keep it on day one uh gabe how about you so day one we definitely screamed i remember we we had some neighbors under us in the the offices that we had and we were yelling so loud that they had to bang up with like a broom or something be like what are you guys yelling at at 2 p.m in the afternoon um and then i started to at the time um we were in between zba which is zoning board of appeals in chicago and so it was really a real estate hustle which i could delve into but the long story short it took a year to get through the zba we had to switch locations three different times um the first one was pullman and it became effective we're gonna get we're gonna we're gonna unpack all of these uh uh but but first uh ron you ask your day one story say one story i was in florida at the time looking into that market which was kind of really in its uh confusion states uh like six seven years ago i guess we got water to license and really really wanted to be in the florida market but at the same time we had a team that applied for the illinois uh lottery system kind of if you will um and when i was looking into the florida market i got the phone call like in the afternoon uh somebody got an email saying that we were awarded a license and uh that night just had a couple of great bottles of wine and a good dinner and then looked to tackle the rest that was coming down the pipeline which i'm sure you're going to get into but well let's let's let's start getting into it so it sounds like there was maybe um a celebratory event yeah and then the morning after and gave the all three of you started you know gabe outlined you you talked about zoning uh i mean uh like okay that first set of things your first set of priorities i would love starting with gabe all of you to expand on sure it's different in every state dependent upon how the applications are structured do you need to have real estate ahead of time or not in our case for the the medical licenses in illinois we had a couple locations that we were in the middle of zba on and so we had to go ahead and apply for those i think that in if people are from illinois and are applying under this realm they should probably keep in mind the fact that you didn't necessarily need to have real estate so your trek you should be if you're looking right now to do something identifying the areas in which your municipal the municipality which you applied in zones you know are you going to be able to zone correctly do you have to change the zoning that takes time that takes money that's a really big one i think and that's one you can do right now for relatively cheap if you put the legwork in and so that was the first thing obviously working with your local regulators to understand uh the timeline you have to build out working with your gcs to understand what your site plan is going to be based on your square footage based on what it is you want your dispenser to be able to do um and so there's there's a lot to do at the beginning but really you have to understand that you're going to need a place to sell your product and so starting there is a great idea obviously hiring all of your ancillary services your lawyers your hr and stuff kind of follows follow suit but that's where i would start ron is it location location location yeah i mean we had a location picked out we had already done the grassroots work with the city council letting them know that we had applied we met with a lot of the which is a great idea meet with the police commissioner um the fire commissioner just get the community involved and saying that hey you may win one and you know we we did a lot of leg work even before we even knew we won one just to kind of be welcome in the community because you remembered illinois this was a total new thing nobody knew what to expect with the program um it turned out great as as is but still there's always a community like oh my god is my city going to go downhill because now people are we're selling marijuana out of a storefront uh we had an issue where the city pulled last minute they pulled our zoning when we had a zoning we had us we didn't have to get a special use we were kind of like grandfathered there but they uh they kind of pulled you know really you know a week before we're going to open they kind of pulled our zoning back uh some councilmen felt that they weren't fully uh educated uh on the process so then we had to get an attorney team and kind of go back in there and say hey you can't do this to us on final hour before we're going to open up and we need our our ceo and things so um yeah it was it was a little crazy and you know it's always a fight with these things because nobody a lot of times the the local municipalities do not get educated on on what the state puts out right that's always a that's a and then you're you're you're in that owner's position of educating your local city officials and if they're not educated and we did a successful job at that and you know luckily but that i would i would caution everybody you know you know that's going to get a dispensary license to do that leg work make sure that you're working with the local city that you're going to apply for and get that under your belt well porsha's local city was chicago and the last time we checked with her she was doing a happy dance walking at us i guess it was mayor emanuel's press conference yes then and what then we know my dispensary was in oregon so then it was like oh shoot i gotta move to oregon but oddly enough um we had zoning issues there as well zoning was my first thought it was like because the city was sort of anti-cannabis but we had followed all of the rules and regulations and they tried to put in ordinances after the fact to keep us out so then we had to go get a attorney that specialized in zoning and land use and fight the city and we won obviously um and so we have to we have to decide do we halt building out while we're working on this only thing because if we lose we just waste this money or do we continue going and so you know me i was like you know what i'm not losing so we just kept going while we were fighting with the city at the same time and thankfully we had some people who were on our side and the law was on our side but zoning is a huge thing and you know just mirroring what the other two gentlemen said with people there so lesson there and then um so that's a common denominator uh i'd like to to get an idea on starting with ron the number of months it took you to open up after you the initial license at least uh about nine months nine months yeah we opened up like december 7th and we got awarded uh like in april sometime of 15. and then beyond zoning what what's the what are the what we don't want to call them secondary because everything's important but what else what else fueled your priorities at that point um of course trying to hire a staff and educate them on cannabis you know coming from the colorado markets and things you know it was easy to find bud tenders and uh in other states that had knowledge but you know when you working with a new job market like this uh we knew we had to ramp up our our education on getting our our attendants educated we don't actually call them we didn't we never called them bartenders because we wanted to stay medically focused uh you know the first person the first patient that walked through our door was a veteran in a wheelchair who had ms uh wanted to find out how cannabis can help his condition uh right away that kind of just threw up like flags like okay i'm gonna go out and hire an rn that's got a lot of cannabis knowledge and really ramp up the education side so we we can take care of that so so to answer your question i don't want to digress too much but we really staffing became important to us hiring the right people the right management we actually hired a manager that had a high security background in casino business because you know these things were going to be targets we knew that we you know we knew we weren't going to get a manager in illinois unless we imported them from another state but we thought the security and it worked out really well because you know we've never had an incident and we all have to kind of protect the program the state even all the new operators right making sure that we don't sour the program that's running pretty efficiently right now so ron you're nine months after zoning uh it's staffing and education training and understanding the market uh uh you've done multiple gabe you've done multiple you know um what was what was after zoning so i've done uh the fastest i've gotten one done is three months and that was in arkansas we were the third fastest in arkansas that was great it's actually turned out to be a really productive market and then the longest was the first one was in it was in illinois back in this medical round it was our first one and we had to switch around zoning so many times that it took us over a year and we were one of the last ones we finally ended up in in the 10th ward which is an amazing ward here in chicago all over the sugars has been nothing but helpful and gracious to us but after zoning in illinois because i want to say illinois specific because there's definitely similarities to hopefully what a lot of people will go through once they win a license here we're running parallel so with each zoning ordinance you need to know what your site location is obviously right and so then you're able to build a site plan based on that location so when you're doing zoning if you have a strong feeling that you're going to pass you will probably want to start architectural drawings and then after you're done with the drawings you want to get gcs out there you want to start having them bid against each other in order to get the best price for that spec out your drawings and then go to work it should take you know if if you've got a good set of drawings and get architected about six months tough tight months but if you can draw them in six months to go ahead and do that and then it's the hiring and training portion where you want to start to look for your your new hires probably about a month and a half to two months beforehand so you can get them into a training program that meets your what you want to do and then obviously ordering hardware software um getting your point of sale installed getting all those um softwares that you're going to be using up to date and then getting final inspection certificate of occupancy of course is important and then regulatory final inspection i specced out about 260 days for you guys who are about to apply um that's like that's what i've specced out it's going to take to open up a dispensary here specifically in chicago because of the onerous zoning so keep that in mind porsche in terms of the timetable we're hearing variability as few as three and as much it's more than a year a lot going on there what's what was your first experience um it was three months i think we got awarded in november we opened january 31st which is you know february 1st essentially um but like we had like i said we were doing our build out while we were still going through zoning we didn't wait uh i would advise other people to wait i was a little crazy um you know that's just part of my personality but i was like you know i'm just going to build it i was like build wrong they will come um so we were able to save some time because we kept building even though zoning was not in place um so for me the the next bigger thing was security security was a really big thing wanted to make sure that we had you know ample security the right security um you know at the time i believe where because of where i was there was not a lot of um internet service so it took me a really long time to get the right cloud service for our security system so that we would be in sync with what the state required so we're getting into the area of things that you didn't anticipate that came up you know everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face as a boxer used to say so ron um what was the first big surprise or you know for our audience you know a lesson learned that you don't want to make again and you want other people to know about um i i would have to say that you really have to watch make sure you're fully capitalized for when the rainy days like that hit you know like if the zoning gets prolonged and you you start you know like portia said if you if you're going to take a risk and start building out even before you have zoning make sure that if you have an investment group they all understand that risk number one and number two you know just try to limit that as much as you can because we all kind of like want to get open as fast as possible especially in a new market right and i think you just have to watch that capitalization make sure that you you you can cover those those burn rates when you're not generating revenue because you're carrying rents and real estate becomes you know a real important factor if you own the building or rent the building just look at your timelines on your construction and and when you're anticipating opening and making sure you're you're fully capitalized you know most companies thought under capitalized thinking that they can you know everything is going to work like clockwork i've been in business a long long time it's networks that way dave how important is the proverbial rainy day fund i think that's a really important differentiation between the medical application and how it really required you to be pre-capitalized uh beforehand in this adult use application where individuals could arguably have gotten through by paying a marginal amount of money or maybe some equity to apply use somebody to help them apply for the license and so i really want to kind of pause in this in this situation and if anyone hasn't gotten their capital that is obviously number one right so if you have not been capitalized you need to go ahead and do so and then you obviously have to value your company correctly and that depends on the location which you're going to serve how the financials that you're able to present and sell to an individual that's going to be really really important and it's going to be a mixture of of course not giving up too much equity versus not being underfunded that's the first first thing that any one of us needs to do in order to be successful because you're just you're going to need it so the proverbial rainy day fund is is is all important and it's important to not to not sell yourself short on the the how much money you think you're going to need so these are these are massive uh strategic business building questions capital versus how much you're giving up to whom and how that can bring you while you're standing up a business it's federally against the law porsha you're also moving during that time and like so so um and it was a within three months startup so where did the funding uh strategy come into play as you were standing up a business so quickly um me it came into play like immediately um i had to make a lot of adjustments in my personal life and i had to make a lot of decisions about my retirement in those moments and say okay portia i literally made this phone call to my mother i said mom if this fails can i come sleep on the couch i see said i can rebuild money but i can't be homeless that's what i can't do i said i'm not made for the homeless life but um so i you know i looked into the resources that i had and um was like okay you know this is approximately how much i think i'm going to need this is what i have this is what i can afford to lose and you know just went forward with it i was very fortunate in that i believe oregon had so the barriers were a lot less so the bills were a lot less the requirements were so much in terms of you know the type of security they require like you know in illinois for the recreational they will require you to have a person on site a security guard on site and so that's the end you know that's something i did not have to incur in oregon so that's you know much less money i had to worry about so for viewers out there when you talk about three months and when you talk about i figured it out the expenses were less the regulations were less so um with with with more involved in illinois and opening up it's not necessarily going to be is uh you know illinois is a totally different monster and as as gabe said in terms of you know we've been raising funds um we you know we evaluated the company and we've been you know raising funds more than what we think we'll need to start off but it's better to have more than enough then not enough except uh we've all had challenges figuring out where we're going to put our funds uh gabe how do you how do you choose a bank well it's not you choosing the bank it's really the thing it really really is uh it's tough it is one of the toughest things in this industry and it's been that way for a really long time fortunately you know there are banks that start to open up you've got to look for mostly state chartered banks right these big banks that are uh nationwide don't want to touch the money because of its federal illegality so you really got to find someone local and hope that they have enough people on staff in order to file those suspicio suspicious activity reports those sars that every bank has to do when they take our money in or when we dish when we give it out to somebody and i have had such a wide gambit of experiences with the banks that we've used and some of them have just had to close their shop because they just couldn't hold on to it bank of springfield used to bank all of the the uh players in the industry and they just had they couldn't they couldn't hold the weight i've been asked i'll never forget this i was asked by a bank that we were banking with that shall not be named to provide the ownership structure of chase manhattan bank and i just i i didn't exactly so at the at the time we had to provide uh ownership structure for entities that any entity that we prove that we sent money to or received it we had to get their ownership structure obviously i convinced them the error of their ways in that what are you talking about but it got that that wild that they thought that those were the things that they needed to ask for and uh so it's tough it is really tough you have to find you have to hopefully find banks that are already banking other dispensaries because you don't want to be the guinea pig and they don't want to be the guinea pig and then go from there ron uh same batty experience with the banks yeah bank of springfield was one of our first banks and uh yeah we lost that account and went on the hunt to find another one but was not easy um you know once again like any banks that said yeah we'll take your money had no idea about what was involved with that because it was the vincent act did allow banks to actually do business with us but many banks did not want to put the dedicated resources at it but the local state charters like gabe said are your best bet to go to and see if they're interested in looking at the program i think more banks will come online i understand that there's you know a little bit more um less restrictions uh coming coming down the pipeline for the banking industry with our with our industry as well so we can all keep our fingers crossed on that and this one's gonna add something to that yeah please um atms or something is something that owners need to think about um how they're going to utilize the atm and how they will get the money from the atm so they need to start looking into those options when you're talking to banks as well letting them know you know if you plan on having an atm how can that work and then also something i ran into i don't know if they ran into it but my personal accounts were also flagged the ones that had are attached to my name and my personal social and i had one close this is in your this is as you are now in oregon or in illinois uh i was in oregon but it was a national bank it was a national bank and so i personally got my account flagged and closed down thankfully i had you know a backup but it's always good to have a backup or a rainy day fund so it speaks to that i mean porsha the the experience you have coming from sounds like the political world in chicago so you know how the town and the state work to opening and operating in oregon and then coming back to chicago um what else you know so atm was a is a is a key thing here you know what else are you thinking about now as an entrepreneur here that knows how the city works with all the lessons you have from the industry um relationships keeping relationships with the with your area with where you're going to be once you get zoned once you get in your area um and just knowing chicago if you're going to be there are certain areas that we know you're going to need more security than others you know there are certain relationships you may need to form within that community with certain people and with certain organizations so that you have a friendly relationship and you can have open conversation um you know knowing that if you have people that will watch your back quote unquote you know watch your dispensary when you're not there and let you know you know these cars keep driving by that's what i'm thinking community human relations human community relations community relations i mean political was fine but realistically at the end of the day the politicians are not the ones sitting outside of your door living down the street you know the politicians don't know what conversations are being had six blocks from where your dispensary is you know what i mean yeah very very much uh very much so um so we're we're talking about precarious nature of banking relationships and what they do to use individuals now in terms of like transactions um uh gabe what are you doing you know what are your recommendations for you know a point of sale system you know when you're just getting started sure i've gone through a lot i've gone through quite a bit of point of sale systems my first um set of advice is look at what point of sale system the state is mandating that you use for traceability so essentially every state requires some sort of um third-party system that will take this information and report it from the dispensary to the state and you then have the decision to either lay your own point of sale on that or use that point of sale system in order to effectuate transactions and if you're in a brand new state i completely 100 every time suggest that you use the point of sale system that is mandated by the state because that point of sale system usually is slow to give api keys which is just a it's it's how you take data and share it between companies they're usually really slow to give it to other point of sale companies because of course they want to get those first the first round of customers so you're very liable to not be accurately reporting your inventory uh to the state which is uh you don't want that that's a really big way to get shut down um but in states that have already been established like illinois their the current point of sale is bio track i've used that it works right it sends the information up um to itself and so that works right now we use a system called leaf logics and um it's so funny i hope i hope dan's watching here dan grabowski you're welcome um he's the owner of leaflogix but uh that's the one we use we really like the reporting feature because you you're able to take variables and create your own reports which biotrack doesn't doesn't really allow you to do numbers are really important margins are really important costs are important you want as much data as you can and you want to be able to merge that as well as you can and so i found that leaflogix is is for me at least uh works really well and use that in all of our stores in maryland pennsylvania massachusetts michigan and here on uh similar advice in terms of state mandate and what are you using um so we were um first starting out with biotrack uh like gabe said it's probably smart to go with the where you don't have to have that integration but then we realized that biotrack was kind of limited in what we wanted to do as far as e-commerce and online ordering uh some other functionalities that some of these other companies came to us with we were on leaf logic we're actually making a move to cover right now which gives us a little bit more functionality in areas so um we're now using cobra in the three states that we're operating and actually two states and probably switching out colorado to clovis as well so you know the biggest thing is that whatever company you use do your homework with how their development team their project management team is integrating with the state traceability systems because that's where you could get into hot water right if they're not talking to each other you have a state inspector come in start to do an inventory spot and then all of a sudden your inventory is not matching the biotrack system which is the state traceability system bam if you don't have a good explanation or you can't show what happened you know you can get warning citations and it could start costing you money so my recommendation is look at what you need for your business day-to-day if you're going to offer the online ordering pickup come in will calls kind of stuff um look at all that stuff because that's we wanted more kind of robust on inventory reporting actually accounting reporting some of the report features just weren't there for us and by attract so um yeah we had to make those decisions but you know as we you got to remember that when the industry first started there was very few options um you know seven years ago now there's probably a handful of pos you know people are integrating with metric and biotrack in various states so yeah so i've heard twice about it pays to um um work within what the state has approved and to some degree like it or not porsha same same story with you same exact story um you know since we will be new in illinois we are currently doing our homework and you know checking and seeing what's out there what's available what the integrations are what the reporting is because just as gabe and brad both said it's important to know it's important to have the reporting so that you can do your budgeting so that you can know you know how much you're spending and what's selling and what isn't selling and how you can manage your inventory and things of that nature and you also always want to be state compliant i mean you just have to be and you also want to think about um what do you plan for your the future of your dispensary to look like like brad said they were looking at online ordering and things of that nature so if that's something you plan on doing you want to see if your pos system can accommodate that in the future yeah the other thing is too and the banks really appreciate this a lot of the software's have their third party like if you wanted to do a cashless atm at a register right um a lot of times they'll help you you know navigate that integration and if you can get more money in your account providing you have a bank that you know will accept the money then you have let less cash going out of your facility which the banks appreciate because you got to remember you know these these these uh dispensaries potentially can generate a lot of cash and when you when you bring it to the bank in an armed car they have to have a team of people counting that money under camera um you know all those things you need to you know help the bank if they want to do business with you you almost have to help them because they do choose you like gabe said but you still once you have them if you're not organized or you're not trying to work with them as far as handling cash then um that's another reason why we made switches just to integrate cashless atms at each register that talk to the system so when you do your cash closes right you it's not you know you're trying to figure that all out it's all integrated with one one system smart and smooth so so we talked um talk ay one we talked zoning location banking education uh let's go transport uh we're we're wanna wanna also you know remember that our audience are first-time dispensary owners uh so uh starting starting with porsche um which when you started in oregon what um what did you use and what are you contemplating here from a transport perspective so in oregon um we hired a company an existing camp transportation company that delivered on for us um oregon did not they do not require that you use a transportation company so it's a little different in that the growers the edible people they can come directly to you with product and drop it off so that was something that we really didn't have to concern ourselves with too much thankfully in illinois we know that is a different story and so we will have to get an armored car we will have to look into we actually apply for transportation license as well so that we can do our own transportation so that's that's gabe a similar story in terms of experiences out of illinois and what is uh required here from a transport perspective sure when i think of transport i think of it in two different ways i think of cash transport which we use a third party but man they can i mean i've i've paid at times as much as fifteen hundred dollars for one cash pick up and transport because our bank's in timbuktu and we have to drive it all the way over there so those x amount of hours from where we are to the bank adds up and so that's one way i think about transportation cash transportation but there's no there's no way around that you don't want to be driving a bunch of cash anywhere the next is obviously is product transportation and i know that we we basically all of the cultivators have their own transport um there now is a new round of licenses that were you know potentially people people have applied for and they're unlimited licenses which is good but all the existing cultivators also applied for or not they didn't actually apply they kind of got grandfathered and they had to do an application process but it was much less onerous so they have their own transports it's really those transportation licenses are only for the cultivation centers or for people like porsche if they are to win a craft grow and then have a transportation license as well um they then don't have to pay for somebody else you never want you never want to move cash uh in a chevy necessary definitely not no okay ron uh similar yeah pretty much um what i'm being told being dispensary owners you know now we have two locations it would be nice to be able to move inventory from one location or the other without having to worry about it you know so talking to uh the officials at the ivf pr i think that's coming down the pipeline that dispensary owners will be able to apply so anybody on the call that might be opening up several that's always a nice option it's i think it's going to be a 10 000 license fee or something to be able to transport your own cannabis you know and move stock around because right now you can't the way the way we have two locations a new one opening up tomorrow that we would love to be able to take some of our existing stock that's you know and bring it over but it's not possible right now well the the final topic i want to get on and we have about five minutes left so maybe uh you know no more than a minute at a time has to do with anticipated management of inventory um specific here in illinois the state there are many dispensaries that can open a license that don't because they don't have enough reliable supply at this point obviously uh the state just got started seven months ago but uh porsche starting with you in terms of okay you're focused on getting the license getting up and running business infrastructure what strategically can you do to secure inventory uh for day one of uh operational sales you know that's a good question that's a really good question um since i be since we do not have one here currently i was hoping and expecting that the state of illinois will allow will give us a list of the current growers and cultivators here so that we can contact them let them know who we are you know this is what we're looking for and start building relationships with those growers relationships to your point earlier it starts with the lit relationships um gabe how do you know you know the climate here um how are you in approach uh preparing for uh needing to have more inventory to sell i think it's it's a the reality of the matter is whether you think that supply is uh gonna the current cultivator is gonna be able to manage that uh enough supply or not the reality is they're the ones we have currently craft growers are a while out so you really need to focus in on establishing relationships with the current cultivators in order to get product on the fu down the line and i think that's as simple as just trying to find somebody who you can uh maintain contact with like porsha said a relationship and hope that once you build out your dispensary six seven months down the line you continue to maintain that relationship where you're able to then uh be supplied by those cultivators and of course they're going to be expanding their supply or their their canopy space so hopefully there is enough but time will tell ron yeah i i think that's important like i i i think that the that might be public information to find the current cultivators in the state um but i'm not entirely sure but if it is public information definitely of course it said reach out to them even if you want to invite them to your facility and show them what your plans are excite them that you're going to run a top-notch facility and i think you because of supply restrictions right now it is difficult for them but i know they're allocating a certain amount to their own dispensation a lot of cultivators also own their own dispensaries so you know how much do they have available for independents that are coming down the pipeline is always going to be a question but i think that the state is overseeing that and trying to make sure that there is supply you know and and putting some mandates and restrictions on them but until the great cri the uh craft growers get online it it's gonna be it's it's definitely all about building that relationship how much of the debt do you think the craft growers will actually make in terms of expanded inventory i think a substantial i mean there can be space is limited but i think uh they'll have a substantial impact i think i think because some of the growers here's the opportunity in the craft grow i think the large growers are expanding they're becoming huge companies right the craft growers can actually you know like we have in colorado we have a kind of a brewery model we have a boutique shop in the back and selling it in the front of the house it's very vertically integrated but people love that people love that okay we know that we're we're running a small grow in a very controlled environment not mass-produced not outdoor fields or anything like that so i think you can make this the accurate statement that the connoisseurs of cannabis know the difference if it's grown in more of a boutique and a craft grow area you can brand yourself like that and i think that's important for the pro is to realize so uh it pays to even though that you're the buyers it pays to be nice to all the cultivators and um there will be a stan adams brand in chicago before too long i think i want to thank everybody for joining us on this webinar porsha mittens gabe mendoza ron de giacomo i also want to thank our sponsor the cannabis business association of illinois uh the uh a recorded video of this webinar will uh appear online shortly and then tomorrow morning's grown in thank you so much for joining us thank you everybody appreciate it thank you appreciate the opportunity