…we all have the incredibly rare opportunity to be pioneers in an industry that is changing the world. We are the ones shaping the industry that is about to take our country by storm. These, my friends, are the Glory Days of Cannabis, and this is our attempt to chronicle it.
Every now and then, time slows and seems to hover around a seemingly insignificant moment. Later, looking back, you realize why that seemingly insignificant moment needed to become a part of you. As small as it may have seemed at the time, it’s those finite moments that end up defining the most substantial pieces of you.
This happened to me just a few weeks ago as I was driving through the mountains of Utah on my way back from a transformative weekend at Trailblazers. Trailblazers invited over 100 cannabis entrepreneurs from across North America to the remote Powder Mountain in Utah where they left us with no cell phone service for 48 hours. If you’re familiar with entrepreneurs, you know that being disconnected from their brain child is not something we typically volunteer for, but, there I was, on Powder Mountain for 48 hours with over 100 people who think like me and want the same things as me. It was one of the best and most influential weekends of my life.
Those 48 hours flew by and, as I was coming down from Powder Mountain, just before I was fully reconnected with reality, a wave of nostalgia hit me. I realized that I would miss the time I had with all of the other Founders, talking “shop” for hours on end and consuming massive amounts of information about the industry that I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
I started to realize that somewhere in the chaotic shuffle of day-to-day business, I had lost sight as to why I decided to take the leap into Cannabis. As I let myself drop into the nostalgia, I started to feel a renewed energy, an enthusiasm and passion for our industry. I started to remember why I was so confident that the best decision for my family and I was to move across the country and leave a career of thirteen years to dive into something that so many others couldn’t fathom, let alone believe in. I remembered why I took the risk to embark upon a vision that had never been done before. I remembered why I started a service business for the Cannabis Industry and that it was never about the money.
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I continued to let my mind wander through this nostalgic rabbit hole and then the song “Glory Days” from The BOSS came on the radio. That’s when it hit me. These are the Glory Days of Cannabis.
As my mind hovered over that moment, I realized that it is weekends like these that will be the stories we will tell about the start of the Cannabis Industry in 20 years. We will tell those who come after us about our war stories of regularly being kicked out of banks, the constantly changing regulation issues we faced, how difficult it was just to execute what would seem to be a simple business plan, and the never-ending rollercoaster of having a soaring business one day to thinking it’s going to crash the next. But, we will also tell the stories about how exciting it was to be a pioneer in this industry. We will tell those that follow in our footsteps how exciting it was to be a part of building the foundation of an industry that can only be described as a “game changer”.
I left Trailblazers and Powder Mountain, Utah with a renewed appreciation for how special this time is in the history of the global cannabis movement. Trailblazer reignited my fire for why we are all here. We are fueled by a desire to build an industry that has the ability to fundamentally make the world a better place. My experience at Trailblazers wasn’t about how much wealth we could all create from being some of the first Founders in the industry. Our off-the-grid weekend was spent discussing new and innovative ways we could continue to expand this industry to achieve our goals of being responsible, compassionate, educational, and impactful to the grandmother in pain, to the inmate in prison for a non-violent crime, and to both the experienced aficionado and novice user.
Whether you have been in the industry since the beginning or you are looking to pivot your career into Cannabis, we all have the incredibly rare opportunity to be pioneers in an industry that is changing the world. We are the ones shaping the industry that is about to take our country by storm. These, my friends, are the Glory Days of Cannabis, and this is our attempt to chronicle it.