CFN Media Exclusive Q&A with Andrew Duffy and Jake Levin of Best in Grow

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In the cannabis industry, the path from seed to sale can often be a complicated one. In addition to the normal every day workings of a business, when you throw in compliances, SOPs, marketing, and customer retention, the technological web can run deep. Enter Best in Grow. Co-founded by Andrew Duffy (CEO) and Jake Levin (COO), two Harvard grads who wanted to take their behavioral economics and psychology backgrounds to the next level, the Best in Grow platform helps to seamlessly connect operators, employers, and brands in order to help achieve a synergy not yet heard of in the retail space.

 

CFN Media recently spoke with Duffy and Levin via phone to learn more about the history of the company, how to harness the power of the budtender, and why brick and mortar is making a comeback in a big way.

 

CFN:  How did you develop the initial idea for Best in Grow?

 

Andrew Duffy:  A big part of our experience in the Canopy Boulder accelerator environment was the incentive to hone in on “what’s the problem, how can we solve it, and how can we do it in a way that best benefits the people that we’re trying to help?”

We knew initially that what we needed to do, more than anything, was gather as much information as possible. We spent a lot of time going to networking events, going to industry seminars, learning events, everything we could do to meet people in the industry.

 

What we found was that dispensaries and brands had some pretty massive issues. Dispensaries in particular were having a lot of trouble managing their employees, particularly budtenders, who in general we think are underpaid and overworked. They were having trouble getting those people to effectively do what is a very difficult job. They didn’t really have the right tools.

 

When we saw that sort of dislocation, we saw we could provide them with tools that will help them to more efficiently operate in the workplace, but what we then realized as well, was that there’s a big issue with the brands who see budtenders as the gatekeepers to their customers, which is completely accurate. 92% of consumers that walk into a dispensary take the exact recommendation of the budtender when purchasing product, which means that those budtenders have a massive amount of say over which products succeed or don’t succeed on the shelves.

As a result, brands care a lot about what those budtenders think, why those budtenders make particular recommendations, and how they can potentially get more information into the hands of those budtenders to ensure that their product gets a fair shout on the market. That was an important piece of the puzzle we knew we could solve. Our vision is to put a tool into the hands of every cannabis retail employee that will provide them access to a community and to the resources that will help them provide the best possible product recommendations and be the best frontline representatives of the cannabis industry.

 

CFN:  You focus on servicing three key groups in the cannabis space. What are they?

 

AD:  The first is the retailer, the actual dispensary operators and dispensary managers – the people who need to ensure that they are bringing in enough revenue, keeping costs down, and, most importantly, maintaining compliance.

 

What we provide to them is a way to streamline the entire operation of their dispensary from top to bottom. Essentially, Best in Grow allows them to use our web and mobile applications to coordinate everybody on their team, communicate directly, share files, and maximize organizational efficiencies by consolidating all of their software platforms into one single, streamlined interface.

 

What we try to do for dispensaries in particular is replace as many existing software platforms as possible, so they can do everything they need to do logistically in one place. And where we’re not able to actually create those features, we plug into and integrate with other industry leaders to make sure that we get those features as closely tied to our platform as possible.

 

Jake Levin: That’s particularly relevant for companies who are growing so rapidly.

Dispensaries that are one or two locations can obviously see a lot of value in Best in Grow, but once a dispensary has three, four, five locations or more than that, managing all of those people is such an undertaking, and the tools that exists in other industries are just not really designed for cannabis. Most internal communication platforms, or intranets, are designed for people who sit behind a desk all day and have access to a desktop. We are really focusing on the distributed workforce, empowering those frontline employees with all the resources and tools right in their pocket.

 

Our real priority when we first got into this was building that relationship between not only the budtender and their immediate dispensary network and their manager, but also the brands who actually make the products that the budtenders are selling. To that end we have a lot of collaboration and engagement tools that transcend a dispensary network into the broader localized and even state-wide cannabis industry.

We have groups for brands where they can own their own brand story, host brand resources, collect information from budtenders, post updates on new products, and collect feedback on packaging concepts or on new flavor ideas. In that sense, it’s almost a professional networking type of platform, where all of these insights and experiences are kind of coming together to push the industry forward and derive the best practices and best product development direction for a lot of these brands.

 

AD:  For dispensaries operators, streamlining their management workflow. For budtenders, just making their job easier on a day-to-day basis, getting the information they need and training them.

 

JL:  And giving them a seat at the table.

 

AD:  Yeah. Allowing them to have more input into what’s being sold, how, and what products are being made. And then for brands, it helps them to directly connect with an engaged community of budtenders who are verified as the people that are selling their products in dispensaries. It’s an ecosystem that doesn’t really exist anywhere else.

 

CFN:  How did your initial research affect your priorities in developing this software?

 

JL:  On the brand side, that was really motivated by so much that we learned early in our journey. We found that cannabis brands are spending 80%+ of their marketing budget just trying to access these budtenders through in-store pop-ups and swag and product sampling initiatives.

 

If a budtender has sampled a product, they are over 200% more likely to sell that product that week, so sampling initiative is a really powerful marketing campaign. But up until now, brands really were only able to send off their samples and hope that it got to the budtenders. Oftne times, managers were in fact stocking the shelves with those samples or even just keeping those products for themselves or giving them to their friends.

 

Our platform really does provide tangible ROI on those sampling initiatives. We can tightly track the efficacy of those sample campaigns or follow the in-store pop-up campaigns and the e-learning and training modules that we deploy. Drawing that connection between the front line influencer and the brand is really foundational Best in Grow.

 

CFN:  What sets Best in Grow apart from potential competitors?

 

JL:  There are certainly some other players in the space who are providing learning and educational tools. Our approach budtender training and learning is very unique, and it’s really informed by our background in academia from Harvard.

I equate it to a high school or college classroom where you have your very traditional lecturers who stand up at a podium and just speak for an hour, and that was the lesson. And that is very similar to a lot of the e-learning platforms out there today, where there are just slides and modules and you just watch a video or you read the text, and at the end you take a quiz.

Best in Grow is like the cool, hip teacher that makes each lesson a discussion and a debate. It’s a very back and forth way of learning, and that is very representative of what we’re trying to do with Best in Grow, rather than just creating a one-way push of information to budtenders.

We’re creating an environment where that two-way flow of information and that more meaningful, authentic engagement between the people who are trying to teach someone something and the people who want to learn, but also want to feel like they have a seat at the table and help to steer the conversation in the direction of the brand and the industry at large. That’s really the ethos behind how we’re approaching the education piece.

 

CFN:  What are your projections and plans for growth in 2019?

 

AD:  Our focus has really been building out our tool in the Colorado market, which is the most advanced market from a professional and market dynamics perspective. We are building out the tool in the Colorado market so that we can then rapidly expand and repeat our processes across the US.

 

The past six months have been dedicated to testing the product and partnering really closely with some of the most professionalized brands and dispensaries in Colorado to ensure that we’re building Best in Grow to be an invaluable tool for both large, multi-state operations and small mom and pops.

 

We currently have test clients in California, in Massachusetts, and in Canada now as well, so we’re testing out how to best expand into those markets by discussing with and engaging with customers there to make sure that our tool is customized to the unique needs of those markets.

JL:  We’re going to be raising an additional round of growth capital in the middle of this year, and using that to move into some states on the East coast as well as the West coast, with a focus on Canada, as well.

 

I think there’s also a tremendous application for our platform outside of the cannabis industry, and that’s something that is a long-term vision of ours for Best in Grow. We’re excited to someday expand into other verticals where that in-store employee has such tremendous influence over purchasing behavior.

 

That’s something that is relevant in industries like nutraceuticals, (like a Vitamin Shoppe or GMC), in clothing, and in make-up. We’re increasingly seeing stores that were traditionally online like Warby Parker, who used to be all digital, who are now opening brick and mortar retail experience stores.

These retailers are all about the in-store experience, where the customer experience is so personalized and is so perfected down to every single interaction. Even the person they’re interacting with is a well-trained genius on the product and on the service. That’s our vision for Best in Grow and how our tech can help brick and mortar retailers to push into the future of what it will mean to provide a superior customer experience.

 

AD:  I think that’s an interesting point to note in terms of the ways in which the cannabis industry has presented a really incredible opportunity to leapfrog other industries and other technologies.

If we were to try to start this company as a brick and mortar retail tool, there would be a lot of incumbents. There are incumbent point of sale systems, there are incumbent team management systems. But in cannabis, there are almost no incumbent competitors, which means that we can build out a platform that is totally new, offering a new technology as well as a huge new step; a new way really of engaging with your customers and their experience in the store, and then leverage that into other industries where it’s just as important to control that customer experience. Anywhere where there is a highly expert retail employee who doesn’t have a desk and is operating through their mobile phone is the type of environment that we can optimize and make much more successful.

 

CFN:  What else should people know about Best in Grow?

 

AD:  Brick and mortar retail is something that people think of as kind of a bad word. They think that it’s going down, as if it’s the Titanic, but first of all, that’s not true. It’s a place that offers you an incredible opportunity to create loyalty in a way that you can’t in online forums.

 

We are taking all of the knowledge that we have that has, thus far in retail, been abstract, and turning it into systems that can help every single brick and mortar retail operator, cannabis or not, to more effectively activate their store as a revenue opportunity.

I think a lot of people want to be able to A-B test different ways of engaging with their customers in the store, just like Amazon is constantly A-B testing every pixel that they put in front of you, but they just don’t have the tools to do that. We’re helping brick and mortar make sure that they can optimize for every single customer that walks into their store, create a loyal, long-term relationship with them and generate more revenue.

 

JL:  I don’t consider us a cannabis company, I don’t consider us a data company, or really even a technology company. I think of us as a decision science company. That’s our background, that’s our passion, and at the end of the day, that is really everything that we’re about: that exact moment where a customer in a store decides to buy something.

That kind of critical inflection point is something that we just obsess over day in, day out, and something that we are building these features and these tools and technologies and our entire business around influencing, optimizing, and pushing into the 21st century.

 

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This article was published by CFN Enterprises Inc. (OTCQB: CNFN), owner and operator of CFN Media, the industry’s leading agency and digital financial media network dedicated to the burgeoning CBD and legal cannabis industries. Call +1 (833) 420-CNFN for more information.

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