Sign Nebraska Banking Lease Template Later

Industry sign banking nebraska lease template later

[Music] hi i'm david manchin with cannabis equipment news and with me this week is shawn honaker owner and founder of yeti farms thank you very much for joining me today sean thanks so much for having me so could you start by telling me a little bit about yeti farms uh what are you guys doing out in colorado yeah so we're a all organic outdoor cultivation facility we're the first large-scale outdoor cultivation facility licensed in the state of colorado and uh for a lot of years we focused on a soil to oil business model which was basically cultivate all organic cannabis outdoors once a year take that product and turn that into a concentrate variety of forms whether that be butter wax shatter live htmc hcfse distillate isolate you name it we started covering every single type of concentrates that was possibly available as a consumer we did that for a number of years up until last year we kind of changed things up and started making okay um why the choice uh for outdoor cultivation uh i've been in the industry for a long time um i moved to colorado in 1999 yeah i didn't move here for the industry i moved because i didn't see any future in indiana so i moved to colorado and i was in the financial world uh at that time i was slightly introduced to cannabis but not very much once i fully got into the cannabis scene which would have been roughly about 2005. i was fully immersed in the scene um i started to ask a lot of questions and those questions were how is your cannabis cultivated uh what do you use to as growth hormones how do you actually cure it how do you everything and so at that point i started to realize that everybody cultivated indoors and the reason for that was because of federal prosecution so we started to see a lot of artificial lighting salt-based nutrients that were being used and i did that for a number of years and became very proficient at doing that but i just saw a future that cannabis was a commodity and with it being a commodity it was a very hot commodity in 2006 and 2007 when we began to really start to get into the legal side of this game but saw that price changing as more and more people came into the market the price wasn't going up the price was going down so i have to look at this from a business standpoint and said our cultivation costs in those years were around eleven hundred dollars a pound and cultivate indoors and i saw the profit eventually being lost so i went to my business partners and simply said i think that we should split out and go to an indoor or an outdoor versus the indoor and even a consider consider a greenhouse they didn't want to do that which is perfectly fine they stuck with an indoor portfolio gave me a small buy out and i came down to pueblo in 2014 and started yeti farms on the idea that we can cultivate outdoors cheaper than anybody else can cultivate and we'll be able to use the cannabinoids i was never into selling the flour i was never into smelling or selling the actual smoke i had graduated past that into doing concentrates and so that's all i focused on was a cannabinoid profile versus a flower profile and that kind of led us down the rabbit hole of outdoor cultivation and it all started based off of simple finance you know business what was your initial footprint and uh what's your footprint now yeah so we started out i have no partners i have no investors um i started out i bought a 55 acre tract here west of pueblo about 30 miles and the initial garden held 500 medical plants thought was we put them in 300 gallon containers they grew six eight ten feet tall uh we pulled several pounds off every plant and that was our business practice just checked it and sell it on the medical side when the state began uh when we legalized recreational cannabis we started handing out the licenses i looked at the future that said i think that's where the future is going to be headed and we got into the recreational scene so as we begun to increase our plant counts we had now have a 3 000 plant count for our medical we have an 1800 plant count for our recreational garden and both of those will be increased in this off season so we'll be applying for a tier two in the colorado system on the recreational side which will take us to 3600 plants and then we'll be applying for an additional tier on the medical side which hopefully gives 4 500 plants so in total we'll have 3 800 rack and 4 500 medical for the 2021 cop well i mean uh with such expense expansion have you had any issues with staffing or finding workers or anything with the you know sort of skills gap that other people have run into trouble with yeah so obviously um a lot of people want to work in the cannabis industry it's seen as it's still very new it's cool so everybody wants to a really cool emerging industry what a lot of businesses haven't figured out is how to make money in this industry so unfortunately people are working for wages that there are below actually what their value is worth that's a sacrifice that had been made for a lot of years in the industry and we even made these our employees even made these sacrifices up until last calendar year and then we began a different program we just figured out how to operate the business differently and actually create more profit and we're really big on hand this back to the people that actually have helped us so it is a challenge to find the correct person finding people isn't hard i have 50 resumes right now people that want to come to work it's [ __ ] qualified a person that's willing to be trained to do the proper job uh but at this point we operate the entire facility with nine employees me being number two uh you said that you started with you know no partners no investors uh you know and given the regulatory landscape it's really hard to find financing out there uh could you talk a little bit about the difficulties that you kind of ran into and how you were able to overcome that um i've operated a lot of businesses in my life by far this cannabis industry is the most challenging industry to work in as a small example my very first hydrocarbon extraction facility i ever built no one in the county had ever seen one i was the first person to build one in the county um the electrical inspector came in and looked at it and said oh you used mc cable we can't allow you to do that you have to put conduit up okay you approve the plans but all right we'll do this we put the conduit up they came back to conduit and they said oh god you didn't take the nc cable down did you yes you told us to we're really sorry but we figured out at a conference this weekend that the mc cable is actually what we want we don't want conduit in there because it can hold static electricity and those type of things we had to tear down the conduit but back up the mc cable it cost me three times with the initial electrical bid was those types of things you can't receive financial compensation from anybody for that you can't go back to a loan officer and say oh my my bill just went three times what it should be because there is no loan officer there is no loan i self-funded everything from the very beginning um i had started an oil field business when i was 26 years old actually homeless at the time to be totally honest with you and sold that business four years later and i took the proceeds from that business and were able to dump this into dvd farms the way we did it i burned that money up and that money was gone in less than two years was finished and then what we had to do is take a real hard look at this and figure out how to run this business the right way we've never owned a dispensary we're working on one for next year but with the tax complications that came for that it wasn't in our forecast to be able to do that uh so we stuck with cultivation we stuck with the extraction and for years uh struggled trying to find our niche and how to make this work and how to make profits come together we literally built the company gram by graham so when i sold a gram of constant chains and there was four dollars a profit in that i hope i sold a thousand of them because i need four thousand dollars in profit for this next project that's how we did it we didn't take any credit um we got in a situation uh with a mad former general manager where we ended up uh out of nowhere i was handed 160 thousand dollars in bills that i have no clue we've been created and we had to alleviate those bills as fast as possible to continue doing business and we did so now we literally go grand by graham uh and we operate in in the black the company's 100 operation in the black and we don't owe a single person to buy them anything the entire 55 acres every piece of equipment every piece of packaging anything that's on this farm is paid for in cash when we own it how uh so what was the business that you started when you uh you said you were homeless yeah so i actually came from indiana and was a financial planner for bank one for a number for a while in denver and uh didn't like that got into outside sales didn't like living in the city i grew up in the country in indiana so i moved to the mountains and after a variety of jobs uh i mean i did everything i put a japanese soap tub in neil diamond's house like i i did tour engines out of cars i built custom four-wheel drive rig i did anything i could to make money than my skill sets and um in 2003 i was working at a car dealership and a gentleman came in and spent 150 dollars on trucks asking what he did for a living he said i'm in the oil and gas industry um i went to work for him about a month later and it's a long fun story but uh about a year later i ended up breaking off from him and starting my own company um some poor decisions were made to where i was at a bad point in my life where i was actually homeless and uh my alcohol just be bluntly honest with you my alcohol addiction had taken over my life and i was making poor decisions with that i had an opportunity to start this oil field company with my skill sets and the minimal amount of money that i had saved at that point and someone gave me an opportunity and i went from myself and one piece of equipment i used to drive 41 hours straight and i would sleep eight i would go back and drive 41 hours again i did that non-stop several years before i knew it i had 72 employees who ran 24 7 365 we were doing six million dollars a year and i was 30 years old i had somebody come in and asked to purchase my company i initially didn't want to sell it a very dear friend of mine called me and asked me why i didn't sell it i told him my reasoning and he basically said that was stupid i took his advice and that was in april of 2008 and by july of that year all my friends that told me i was an idiot for selling the company uh were begging me for money to make their mortgage payments so while the holy world was crashing i was a retired 30 year old millionaire i mean uh given your background do you think that's what helped keep yeti farms going i mean you kind of mentioned all these other people struggling to make money and uh kind of uh other companies flaming out you know is that do you credit that for your perseverance there's a long story to my life uh that includes a lot of tenacity and pushing forward but to simplify your answer to simplify an answer to your question yes um a lot of people got into this industry with financed uh partner and investor money and they thought oh this is simple we're gonna make you know i'm going to build this grow and push 200 pounds a month out of it if the [ __ ] sells for four thousand dollars a pound i'm gonna pay this loan off in two months well that doesn't work that way and this business will show you everything where you did wrong very quickly and with that they just kept borrowing money they would just as soon as they couldn't make payroll they would borrow money rather than go back and figure out why they couldn't make payroll and with that eventually those loans have to be paid back so now when we're staring down the barrel of profit margins i speak with my competitors because we're friends now we're competitors but we're all good friends and i look at the profit margins and so it's vast difference look at their books and it splashed with red it is not splashed with red or splash of black that has to do with tenacity that's doing a lot of forward thinking to be honest with you it has to do with growing up really really dirt poor and having a scrape by to figure out how to make everything work i didn't buy a new tube for my bicycle tire i went pulling it i patched the tube and put it back together type of mentality in life can lead anybody to whatever their goal is in life my goals have changed throughout my life they used to be monetarily based i could care less about money at this point in my life it means nothing to me it pays my bills and it gets me food in my mouth short of that it's a nuisance so when we started to give away as myself and as my company we started to give more than we made it was kind of really interesting a lot of good things started happening in my life no uh just from personal experience i can agree with you where uh you know when you grow up dirt poor you're just you know times can be tough and you're like oh we're fine yeah we have a house yeah oh yeah we have a house with the water turned on yeah exactly this house it ain't that bad i don't care if the refrigerator is empty i don't care if the transmission's out in the car right now that doesn't matter yeah dogs are chasing the ball i can simplify my life that way i'm not impressed by big houses ferraris and fancy cars that [ __ ] doesn't mean anything to me i'm really impressed by the human being that lives extremely humble but has the power to be able to throw down and do anything they want for the better of human humanality and people that that impresses me that's the goal i care a little bit about having a range rover and a big nice diesel truck i have a biggest diesel truck 260 000 miles on it i love it the thing drives all over we have a lot of fun in but uh i started to look at life differently and simplify my life which made my business and my personal life a lot better just to simplify it well it sounds like you uh are looking to take your business acumen and help new help people out i saw that you recently announced some uh consulting services uh particularly as the five new states uh were legalized this election i actually was a little bit late to our meeting i apologize i had a cons a client call from oklahoma um that i need to be over i'm leaving for oklahoma tomorrow then i have to go back next week i'm working with several groups over there trying to simplify these processes what we find a lot when it comes to the consulting and believe me i there are some amazing consulting companies out there that are far more better resourced than i am i promise you but we look at things differently we actually look at the profit margins we take the cool factor out of it and we actually look at the business so with that my build outs aren't really cool they don't have a bunch of sensors on them we don't have a really cool flashy tvs playing hip music in the back we don't have any of that [ __ ] we have what makes money we buy the equipment from manufacturers that understand not everybody has a rich uncle with 25 million dollars they can borrow money from some of us have to start at the bottom and be creative uh i'll give you an example my distillation machine that we use on a daily basis the first quote i ever got for that machine was 72 000 the gentleman that quoted it just came to my shop last week as a matter of fact they saw that we were up and operating and they asked like how much do you have set in that entire setup what's the cost based on that i'm seven thousand dollars invested in myself we pieced it together i bought glass from china i can't afford german glass so i'm not gonna buy it so we bought china glass yes it's not the highest quality in the world but it does damn good and when it breaks you don't freak out and be like oh there goes a seven thousand dollar piece of glass you're like so what it was six seven hundred bucks we got another one sitting in the back so when we really broke it down and looked at that um we got a ay from the bling bling side to look really cool we just look at the numbers and try to make the try to make the numbers look as good as possible then people are astonished when they finally get to kind of get my numbers which i have no problem sharing with anybody when uh you sit down with those companies uh what is sort of for somebody starting out what's an ideal uh mix of in terms of staff and what sort of equipment are you looking for you know like when people start out should they be you know a mom-and-pop shop you know with minimal equipment or sort of what's your advice there so it kind of really depends on your end goal i have a good friend of mine i won't mention his his business or his name but he is one of the top three in the united states with operating this canvas conference in a couple countries in multiple states everything very down-to-earth man really really really good guy him and i had a a dinner about two weeks ago and we sat down with some peers of ours and it ended up just being him and i kind of volleying back and forth on the pros and cons of the way we ran our businesses he went out and borrowed 70 million dollars and built a damn empire he's in litigations there's constant arguments no one can ever see on the same page of [ __ ] going on all the time me i didn't borrow a dime i didn't borrow anything from anybody and struggled to get by on graham by graham oh [ __ ] 2018 winter came in early knocked out our crop well that just cost me four million dollars like potential income when we looked at the differences between the two of us and where we're standing at right now we had to understand that respectfully we took two different paths and he ended up in a different spot than i and it really comes down to your personal so i'll speak from my personal standpoint on what i would personally do i love the idea of a small mom and pop that slowly creates and builds its own business and grows off of its own profit from that you have to be able to cultivate at the cheapest cost per gram of anybody else and you have to be able to call uh you know cultivate on a consistent basis if an outdoor crop as an insurance as a insurance policy is what we call that you could get it you could not get it the outdoor crop is generally knocked down into concentrates or distillate the indoor crop needs to be done in a geothermal greenhouse setup we provide these through i have no problem telling you who it is you go on to youtube right now and type greenhouse in the snow the gentleman's name is russ he's up in nebraska he makes the best greenhouses we can produce cannabis for twenty five dollars and ninety four cents a pound with this in complete stuff i have that's dried weight cannabis per pound these greenhouses i can produce 87 and a half pounds every 12 weeks out of the greenhouse so if i had to do this all over again with the knowledge that i have right now i would put in 12 of these greenhouses open an extraction facility in i would have a kitchen and i would have a vertically integrated to a dispensary so i can vertically integrate all of my own power prop product for the retail profit if you have 12 of these greenhouses in you'll produce between 87 and a half and 105 pounds of dried mud every single week plus the trim that comes off of that you can talk about 40 of that would be trim you can turn that into concentrates you have your outdoor to turn your distillate you would make edibles you make cayenne concentrates and you sell flour with that model right now in the state of colorado the wholesale model on that produces a million dollars a month not the retail not not the dispensary just the whole model this is a million dollars a month so uh one of the things that i also found interesting was that you're uh you go all the way from cultivation to it sounds like uh you said you have plans to open your own dispensary as well could you talk a little bit about that decision versus i mean you know maybe it's different for some people maybe some people are just cultivators and they don't want anything more why did you choose to kind of you know do the entire spectrum and continue branching out is it because to keep your costs down yeah as cliche as this sounds it's actually for the end user for the seats for the customer um we know that when we produce live soil flower it's the cleanest flowers beyond organic we know this and most of the time when you try to buy this flower it's extremely expensive it it is extremely expensive to buy it they'll they'll charge you up into 300 an ounce sometimes they'll get 350 an ounce for this if i'm lost with 25 and 94 cents a pound i can turn around if i can sell that pound at 2 500 2 000 as a retail i'm extremely happy all the profit i need to make yes there's still meat on the bone but i would rather the consumer get that meat than me with me remember if i set this up and do it the way i want i have 12 greenhouses i'm harvesting 100 pounds every single week i have to move that hundred pounds i want to go on so the next week when i got a hundred pounds it's fun too if i sit there and try to knit bone and charge people 350 an ounce i'm gonna get into a very elite small percentage of people i charge 200 an ounce for fire live soil organic weed i won't be able to keep it on the shelf and the consumers will receive the benefit for it they'll go tell more people they'll tell more people eventually we open up more stores and open up more and more just as an organic growth i don't like anything other than organic growth everything from the plants to my food the way my business operates so i mean i like your sort of uh bare bones equipment approach to startups but as you're growing are you adding more automation the sensors sort of more the things that'll help streamline the business yeah so where we spend our money is uh we invest into the field we invest into amendments in our field to keep the live soil korean natural farming techniques going in the field it's not that much money it really doesn't cost us that much annually to do that so where we'll invest our money as an example uh we've been packaging all of our yummies which is our brand of gummies we've been packaging those by hand for about three minutes four months it's a brand new sku for us i just went out and found the 30 000 by the time i'm done it'll be a 37 000 packaging machine so instead of packaging 400 packages now we can do 380 in an hour and put the types of we started out literally mixing our gummies up and we're mixing them in a kitchenaid that's what we mix one kitchenaid and when they sold and we kept selling and then we're like we can't it's not fast enough we need something bigger than h well then i went and bought a 20 liter reactor which is about a five gallon reactor and we mix inside of five gallon i just had a meeting this morning but if i take on a few i have three large recreational accounts that we're not ready to take on until we reach that level because the last thing we want to do is disappoint a client not be able to provide the order that they put in to get to these three we're gonna have to have 60 liter mixer in order to keep up with that so right now we have 20 so it's gonna be three times that size so now we're already looking at like okay february march we're going to probably have to buy a 60 liter mixer and that's just how we do it we we basically use that old bicycle until the things just broke there's nothing there's no trend nothing left over the chain keeps falling off no matter how many times you tighten it and then we're like okay put that in the garage in a special spot because it's been great to us it's made us a lot of money we may come back to it but here's a brand new bicycle this one has two speeds this one has this this one has this well in six or eight months we'll wear that one out and then it'll be to get the new one the carbon fiber frame bicycle and go but i can never start out with a carbon frame bicycle i'll kill everything what if this doesn't go then i'm sitting there looking for a bicycle that looks really cool but it's useless for me i much have a little bmx bike that's a single gear and it go in the garage and never do anything if it doesn't go if it goes that little bicycle will get us to move just a little bit until we can go to the next level next no there was a on a previous interview i had a um somebody had mentioned the equipment that winds up collecting dust at facilities yeah just as as a part of a reckless not reckless spending but people overextending and uh sort of uh not forecasting well enough um he said that that's one of the things that kind of breaks his heart is that he goes into the facility and they're like oh we don't use that anymore there's a i don't tell you at all this i walk into facilities commonly and see 150 to 450 000 co2 extraction machines that are just sitting there yeah i asked i'm like you have a million dollars sitting there what are you doing oh we haven't used that thing in three years it just takes too long we do hydrocarbon i'm like sell it just sell it well no one wants to buy it well yeah because they're [ __ ] you you listen to the wrong i'm not saying they're all [ __ ] i'm just saying these particular ones weren't a good product so what happens is a lot of people dump in this with the whole idea of oh my nephew he's been growing weed in the basement for three or four years he knows exactly what he's doing so he told us to buy this when they should have spent the money with a consultant and gone out and saved the money in the long run it's always cheaper to hire a professional we all know this i mean in the beginning if i could have paid someone to teach us how to make these gummies it would have saved me nine and a half months of making gummies and never selling a single one 422 recipes of gummies throwing 421 of them away just make it throw it away put away that's labor that there's all sorts involved in that that type doing that that way though it's going to make our profits for it in the end because i could have gone up 100 thousand dollars for the recipe no problem it would have been packed but it would have worked and everything we found one that was better it probably ended up costing me pretty close to about the same amount of money and it took me so much more time to do it i learned so much more in that process like everyone says i mean an engine blows up in your car and you go have a swap out you don't have any clue what just happened pull that engine out yourself rebuild the entire engine all the way down to the crank bar and put it back together put it in your car when you're driving down the road you hear a tick tick tick you know what it is you know it's probably you fix it that's more of the companies that i work with and help create you've got to be able to drive your own equipment in order to work into the way we do this and that does not work for everybody a lot of guys like to sit on a chair and pay that invoice to have someone drive their equipment for them so i guess you kind of uh you sort of answered this already uh but when you got into when you got into the gummy set of the business edibles did you seek out any sort of like food manufacturing expertise or did you kind of start with it sounds like you just kind of dabbled with the kitchenaid yeah so the way we got into this is i went uh i'm very fortunate i get to travel all over the country and into different countries not just for cannabis but a lot of it's based on cannabis so my travels i tried to buy about a year ago i started buying gummies everywhere i went to every where i went i'm in canada i'm in mexico i'm in california oregon nevada you name it i'm all over the damn place my gummies it's not necessarily that i like gummies i just kept proving the same thing to myself it all tasted like [ __ ] they're sugar coated they're citric acid coated there's false flavors they're adding [ __ ] color they're adding color to a gummy why what do you need to add flavor or coloring for it doesn't make any sense to me and the worst thing is you can taste the cows it just tastes back your power you're like i don't want to taste that so what we did is there's a brand and one of these days i'm going to meet this guy there's a brand called albanese and scott albanese you're familiar with them they're out of maryville indiana i'm from indiana so i had no clue who they were about two years ago i whip into some gas station i'm on my gummy thing you know because i've been thinking we're gonna make it i go in and i buy every damn brand of gummy they have i first off i open this bag up and the olfactory senses hit me the smell it's just my sensors i'm like whoa this is a total new level of gummy this is insane put it in my mouth and chew on it there's like no coming out of my life it's soft it breaks apart perfectly it holds its firmness that's really hard to find usually they're too hard they're just wax they don't taste right so this is how we actually came up with it a good friend of mine i've known since i was four years old um his daughter decided to move to colorado uh last year so she's been with her and her husband have been with us for about 17 months now he came in did some harvesting started at the very bottom where everybody starts to start working okay and in december of last year november december i told her i said hey have you ever had an albany's gummy and she has no clue what's coming she's like no i don't give her this gum what do you think everybody in this chop's eating wow these things are great these are great i said cool so you're going to be a gummy manufacturer you're going to run the kitchen and she's like oh okay how do i make these gummies how do i make a gummy i said well turn that bag over you see that ingredients list right there the first one is the most the last one is the least that's how we figured out how to make a gummy nine and a half months later 422 recipes later she handed me a gummy and i said that's it that's the flavor that's the consistency that's exactly what i want you have found the ratios we reverse engineered it now you can send this stuff off to a lab i know what they send that gummy straight to a lab and they'll actually reverse it they'll tell me how much high fructose corn syrup they'll tell me how much they'll tell me how much sugar is in it so how much flavor and citric they'll tell me everything but again it's a little like the engine thing i just talked about if your engine blows up i want to know everything that goes into that engine that's just me it's how i do it so we know how these gummies are made we created our own gummy it's our own recipe it's our own sop and the two compliments i was fishing for when we got these going was number one i would eat this gummy if it didn't even have cannabis it's such a good gummy yeah and the second one was it's the most consistent gummy i've ever eaten and the first customer said the exact words i was like well something now i know we're on to something um of course there's ups and downs as you start to grow and expand sizes so you're going from a kitchenaid one gallon mixture increasing there's problems we failed some tasks we lost some product i've lost a hundred thousand dollars from the past because of different homogenizations and potencies these are things you learn as you scale so we i don't let people [Music] and with that i now have a very confident team we just hired the second crew we're going to 16 hours a day six days a week of making guns uh we're on permanent back order right now with our medical gummies in the state of colorado which is 10 100 milligram pieces equaling one gram or a thousand milligrams in each package we're looking into the future to start adding in cbd and cdn to get different entourage effects as you're eating it but right now we're on a permanent back order for making the thickness i mean uh so of the 421 what was the worst attempt for me what was the what of the uh 421 recipes that failed which one was like just the most memorably worst oh okay so uh so some of these flavors you have to mix them in order to come up like we have a um a black cherry okay so that's actually a couple different flavors that we mix we have a saturday morning pancake breakfast so there s three different flavors that go into that to make those ratios can get off horribly where the taste is so intense your taste buds this turned into something very unique for us that i'll get into your taste buds just basically jump off of your tongue and say no no no no this is way too we've never had tangerine taste like this before it's out of this where we kind of mess with everybody and we all know what we're doing but you walk up you're like try this and see what you think they're like just tell us the flavor when you get it and they'll eat it watch their face just suck and they're like that's lime that's slime like yeah we tried a margarita this is what it comes out to so i would say to this day margarita was the worst there was salt there was tequila and there was lime in it and it tasted like a pile of poo it did not come out good it was not tasty in the least bit in the texture what happens when you add some of these different ingredients it'll change the texture of the gelatin so it becomes soupier but generally what happens it doesn't get harder it gets soupier so this was like the thickest gelatin margarita net out of like the bottom of a garbage it was just gross it just didn't come right but of course we made everybody try it just so they could say that they got to try it oh yeah it opened up our mind to make us understand that our taste buds have an awful lot to do i know this sounds silly to say this but the taste buds have everything to do is when you're eating these gummies so a friend of mine in california they work in the coffee industry and a couple of them work in the food industry as well these guys group of guys you used to hang around with in denver and they moved out west yeah i'm talking about the gummies to them and things and one of them goes how do you get rid of the cannabis taste i said oh we use distillate so you don't really taste the cannabis and you call [ __ ] on me this is your first chip you can taste it at the tail end well you can actually you can taste it at the very tail and he says i've eaten enough gummies i know and he says well sean why don't you use a bitter blocker excuse me what's a bitter block what that is he says well it's in sixty percent of the food that's available to consumers on a daily basis really is it like take take a soda for example if you drink a soda there's actually so much sugar in that that your taste buds will send a signal to your brain to regurgitate the soda because it's a poison this is the sugars that's poisoning your body well you have these bitter blockers in there so they go across your tongue and it dulls down the percentage of sugar that your mind actually thinks you're getting so you can stomach all that soda it'll go down no problem so they have thousands of different bitter blockers and we found a combination of two different bitter blockers that block only the cannabis taste nothing else they're not known for that it's not an industry thing that people know how to do it we just figured it out that was part of that nine and a half months so now you don't taste any cannabis all you taste is the actual flavor of the gummy like horchata you literally taste the sweet rice milk and you taste the cinnamon you taste that you don't taste any cannabis on the table at any point uh did you consider abandoning the uh edible journey oh yeah hell yeah yeah um before it even started i abandoned it twice um out of my own fears for the market i was just creating my own fears my own anxiety and being like listen i keep going to these dispensaries and they just keep telling me they have too many guns there's just too many gummies on the shelf how am i gonna stand out and then i would come off my little my little high ladder and be like okay how are you going to stand out because you're going to make a completely different gummy that's that's it so the best tasting gummy the cheapest price you sell the most oil yeah um how has the pandemic affected your business well i will say that unfortunately for a lot of people 2020 has been a horrible year covid has infected personally i have friends that have gotten coveted uh they're healthy now there doesn't seem to be any problems with it but more importantly the biggest problem is i've watched that one of my friends that are entrepreneurs that have risked everything if you ever been an entrepreneur you know what it is you risk it all your time your money you're losing relationship all of it for this successful business i've watched literally just get shot full holes and deteriorating the foundation fall over it's it's heart-wrenching um i'm thinking of one particular person now that she did such good we're all so proud of her and now covet has stripped her of her livelihood um it's hard to watch and we had the meeting in april and i said listen guys if the state says we're closing this down like we're not essential business i'm telling you right now we're going down to one to two people just to keep the wheels moving and we'll come back the unemployment we'll do everything we need to do but i'm going to start laying people off i'm not going to go broke trying to keep going through code and the mayor came out governor came out i'm sorry and said no cannabis is an essential business recreational and medical is an essential business we kind of breathed a little bit of a sigh relief like oh thank goodness it's still going to be a rough year we know it's going to be rough here i was completely wrong we've smashed every sales record i've ever had i can't make product fast enough dispensaries are constantly calling looking for more and more product it's the best year my business has ever seen uh were you guys threatened by uh any of the wildfires thank goodness we were not uh we had some smoke issues uh that came about but actually to be threatened by the fire no we did uh uh in 2017 we did have a fire get about a mile and a half from the farm um we ripped the entire field out in three days uh so that's the biggest issue we've had this year our big issue was september 9th we had nine and a half inches of snow at the farm uh so then it just doesn't happen well of course it'll happen in pollution we had nine and a half inches of snow we ended up recovering from that very well the plants are actually had enough moisture in them they just bent over and then they back up with the sun releasers i have two large lease farms on my property two ten acre leases their plants were massive they're 10 12 feet tall actually split like a giant stepped on them and push them to the bottom and let the plants keep growing because it the cambium layer was still there so sending nutrients to everywhere where it's supposed to be and they just finished harvesting for this last bit of snowstorm but they were realistically looking at pulling around 30 35 000 of dried weight and that number decreased to about 25 to 28 of dried sellable flour so it wasn't a huge drop but when you're talking you know roughly a thousand fifteen hundred dollars a pound for weight it's it's a substantial amount of weight that was lost uh because we're outdoor farmers this is just what happens this is no different than raising beans and corn which is what i was raised up doing and sometimes you have bad years the reality is though we don't have any federal supplemental loans to help us we can't push off our principal payments until after harvest and make interest payments all year which is the way i was raised up that's what you did when you know when the door knock happens they want their money they want it right then just i do i want my money when there's an invoice i don't need excuses i got bills to pay like everybody else so it is a struggle uh and then you add on top of that the farming aspect that we do it it increases the percentage of failure but a little bit in my mind i'll just be honest that's kind of what i like i i like the idea of it not always being just mundane and the same thing um i like the idea that mother nature can bless me or pinch me and i have to be prepared for that in every way shape and form so you talk about growing up on a farm like uh do you see yourself as cultivator first manufacturer second or do you like to be sort of in every every part of the business or do you have a focal point so i would say i used to kind of view myself as a cultivator then i viewed myself as an extractor first and foremost i think i view myself as a cannabis business person i have a lot of years of business behind me i have a lot of years of business cannabis business behind me but first and foremost if you're not growing plants at the right price or the right quality you don't have anything so from a business standpoint to me i'm a cultivator at my my core and at my heart with that the reason we ever got into extracts and i started doing xjax all the way back in 2006 uh is when i started making my first extracts when we started making them in those times it was just to refine the product and make it a cleaner uh consumption because when you're smoking the flour you're smoking a bunch of carcinogen you don't need plant and material you don't need all we actually need is the oil off that plant for the medicinal benefit so that's what kind of started sending me down that rabbit hole extracting i did every type of extractions you can do and then i kind of handed the torch off to what's now my general manager and he went far beyond what i ever did his extraction skills exceed what mine are and we'd commonly do consulting across the united states together uh but with that what my new role for this company is is to be five miles out ahead of my team and sending back word of what's coming and what we're doing i used to run five miles out run five miles back do it all run five miles back out do it and i can't you can't do that it won't work with a mom and pop you're forced to do it but after a while you realize this just isn't sustainable i won't be able to operate the business at the level i want to if i continue to keep going all the way to front and coming back with the word of oh here's what we need to do so jokingly i say i just send back the homie pigeons now with the information and i don't mind being drawn back to come back and take care of what needs to be but i have a team now but they don't need me here i don't have to be at my business every single day for my business to operate they operate just fine without me i leave tomorrow morning for 36 hours they honestly will barely even know i'm it's just that's that's not my role anymore stand there and go are you doing this correctly you're doing that it's now my role to support them when they do wrong and tell them it's all right we're gonna keep moving forward and help guide them the right road where they can make the decisions where they don't make wrong decisions we uh i tell a lot of people i'm thankful for all the dark that led me to the light and there's a lot being said in that statement but the reality is without all the mistakes and without all the [ __ ] ups there's no way i would be where i'm at today and i try to express everybody it's just not me it's not just this business it's life that's life and if you have someone there to support you when you fall down rather than kicking the side of the head and tell you [ __ ] up it's a whole lot easier so that's kind of the mentality that we go i like to keep a small crew you heard me say i had 72 employees at one time that's a lot of energy for me to deal with i'm a very energy based person that's kind of hard for me to absorb all those energies i like dealing with the 10 young individuals that i have working for me now that are aspired to get to the next level and working for me is not the easiest thing in the world i i had a complete stranger tell one of my employees one time i don't even know the guy said i bet working for sean is different and they stood out what do you mean i don't think he would accept anything but the absolute best you can do and they said no he wants you to even do better than that because you know you can't and so it's not for everybody i'm not the cup of tea for everybody believe it or not i do realize people don't like me and that's okay as i said you should take all my advice with a shot of tequila and a little assault maybe one more shot at tequila we know that we're doing things not wrong so we know we're we're not doing things the wrong way pretty sure we're doing the right way but i can't guarantee you that my way is the only way we just know that it works the way that i do it and there's a reason that people called me from all over the world and asked about my simple-based approach a quick side note i'm working with a gentleman in massachusetts they had a quote from an 18 million dollar greenhouse setup they automated super cool really great that didn't include that was just the kit it was an insulation that wasn't operations that was the kit it's been 90 minutes on the phone with this guy i replaced every bit of that square footage with a lower cost per gram to cultivate far less employees and it was all said and done and finished his bill came to 4.8 million instead of 18. that's why i'm noted for doing what i do and i don't hold any secrets you can call russ finch right now and order your own greenhouse i don't care i just figured it really well if i'm gonna teach you to do that i will i'm very reasonably priced i'm not into this give me a hundred grand it's so easy i'll even tell you how it works right now if you call me right now and said sean we want to know how this is going to work we're in mississippi great it's five thousand dollars ready when i get there pay for my flight pay for my hotel my food my rental car everything tell me your idea when we get there i'm going to shoot at full holes i'm going to tell you over dinner how to fix it right there you can leave and never say another word to me in my life but i've just given you millions of dollars of ideas and how to make money over a steak most of the time what i have is another check waiting for me at the end of the dinner that says how much can we consult for i do it on a monthly basis so at the end of the month you don't want everyone to deal with me again don't wire me the money you'll never hear from me again i promise you i ain't going to call you if you don't give me the money so that's how we do it we don't lock people in all these contracts you're locked in and you got to buy this you've got to get likes from argentina i'll give you my guy's number i'm not trying to make money on him he's trying to make this is my friend i want him to make money you can buy it from anybody but my guy's the best deal i promise you that's why you work with me so we've simplified this it doesn't work for everybody because they're like it's just too simple you make it seem so easy we want to complicate it more okay go ahead a gigantic indoor grill go on ahead and have a perpetual harvest where you harvest on a daily basis use salt-based nutrients and then come back in two years and tell me how broke you are because you're not going to make any money you're not doing that we actually try to get freaking money i'm not saying that people don't make money with that portfolio because they do make money with it i'm saying i make more money and it's all about the cost per gram my consulting company is called cpg consulting cost per gram consulting because nothing else matters at the end of the day is what it costs to cultivate that grant with cannabis then we can go down the road of do we want to sell this flour do we want ourselves a free rule we want to sell this concentrates when a cell isn't edible we want to sell as a vape pen we can go down that road later but when my competition is up into the three and 450 to produce pounds and i'm telling you i can do it for 25 dollars and 94 cents there should be no comparison in that once in the pudding is uh when you say you know you're running five miles down the road in front uh is that uh cpg consulting is that the future or uh do you plan on you know growing uh yeti and cpg simultaneously simultaneously i'm going over to oklahoma tomorrow to start a licensing agreement this will be our first uh licensing agreement that yeti farms has done um this will only be or the edibles we have licensing agreements for council for cultivation concentrates and edibles now this is only for the edible side um we go tomorrow to start the licensing agreement process so that is going to be a yeti adventure is what it will be it's a yeti farms deals cpg is just for the new clients that don't have any interest in doing any licensing with this don't want to emulate exactly what we've done or follow our marketing brand they simply just want to know how to do this for the cheapest cost per grant that's what received finding is the more and more states we go to after they visit my my farm my facility and sit and talk and get a few months relationship now what we're finding is most of these clients are wanting to partner with us and move forward through everything they've seen enough of everything else they they like the way i pour a cup of tea fits for their palate and then they say we just want to do the full licensing agreement we want to do everything um where i'm running into an issue is exclusively uh some people want exclusive agreements and i i'm having a little bit of a problem with that i really like helping mom and pops and people come from a lower level to an upper level and when you get exclusivity it knocked out the opportunity for a smaller group to be able to uh benefit from the licenses so these are all personal things i have to figure out for myself and decide what i want to do with them but uh what the decision will be made is whatever makes me sleep next night well uh i really appreciate you taking the time today sean like it was very insightful and uh just um i mean really enlightening thank you very much yeah i appreciate you guys reaching out thank you so much i uh i love doing these interviews i'm often throwing into them on the spot i'll show up and do a speech and then ten minutes later someone's like can you do a speech over here for me sure what's it about and i enjoy it um i'm i have a new phrase in life a new saying in life and we've all heard this but i try to really live by this i'll give you a little bit of a back story on it when i went to amsterdam and started meeting people in 2007 i decided this was going to be a direction in my life i was going to go i remember getting this book i remember looking about three quarters the way through this book and at the very back of it and three quarters the way there's a picture of a gentleman in spain he's in the basque region of spain and he's sitting in a hammock underneath the tree and looking over a field of about 100 maybe 150 large outdoor cannabis plants and i'd have been you know 2007 this was 13 14 years ago so i was a kid at that point about 30 and i remember thinking holy [ __ ] that's what i want to do and remember i was retired i'm like that's what i want to do with my life this is that's all i want to do i want to like have my dog and chill in the bass region of spain fast forward now i have this rather large legal cannabis farm in the state of colorado which i love immensely colorado and all of its resources and snowmobiling and all that hunting's a big passions of mine and now i've realized that that guy underneath the tree and that goal i'd set for myself i actually have it i have my own gigantic farm i have my own lab i have my own kitchen i have my bass that hounds with i've got everything in my life i wanted so kind of my new phrase is i just remember when i wished for everything i currently have it tends to minimize things for me and make me very pleased and happy with the decisions i've made to arrive where i'm at today excellent uh no and uh to hear you're a hound guy that's just it's even better oh hold on a second awesome this is who's this is irwin this is irwin chapman he's a hungarian european basset hound he came over she's 17 months old this month and he weighs 84 pounds oh my goodness that's a big he has a little brother roman that runs around here too but um my boys are uh definitely the light of my life uh yeah a lot of fun with them here at the house and uh my endless laughs so yeah i'm definitely one guy i got one when i was 16 years old and i've had a bass hound ever since then so oh my goodness well it looks like he's having a good day oh he's he's loving it i'm dad picks him up he's having a great day so we appreciate the time and reaching out to us thank you so much if uh if we can help you out in the future anybody else out in the future it doesn't always have to be about money you can just call and ask me questions anybody that sees this i also love to help people with their personal growth so if anybody has any questions about your personal grow call and chew my ear off i will be more than happy to help you with anything growing your own cannabis at home was one of the most rewarding things you can ever do for yourself if you're a cannabis consumer and i highly encourage that for people so i'll pull out all the techniques and share all the secrets for anybody that would have any questions about homework well thank you very much for your time again and uh i'm uh you know hope to talk to you again soon anytime my friend thank you so much for your time [Music]