Print Part Deux?

Welcome to my new monthly newsletter. With 2022 bringing a return to my pre-covid routine of attending 15-20 cannabis industry expos/conventions a year (in addition to NECANN's 6 or 7) my goal here is to provide insights, updates, and other worthwhile info about the industry I pick up along the way. To help you get a handle on my point of view, inherent biases, and limitations in communicating coherently, this first edition will also serve as a bio & recap of the last couple of years. In other words, I'm introducing you to the newsletter by presenting a format and content that won't resemble the newsletter (i.e., you can skip it & just go to the questions at the end).

First of all - I'm a born & bred, 4th generation New Englander (that can mean a lot of different things depending where YOU are from, so do with it what you may). In addition to that I was born in Massachusetts then lived in Maine for 14 years (where I was required to hate myself for being from Mass), then moved back to Mass (where I'm now required to be contemptuous of myself for having come from Maine). Also, no. I'm not from Boston. I know it's a relatively small area, but there are 14 million people in New England, and only about 5% of them live in Boston. And the remaining 95% of us hate them.

I came to the convention industry after a long stretch working in media (primarily newsprint), having started there soon after the internet first appeared. Bad timing of course, but it really did take a while for the web to have any real revenue impact - newsprint advertising hit an all-time high of $65 billion (adjusted for inflation) in the early 2000's and my early years in the Alt-Weekly world of the Phoenix Media Group were an amazing learning experience and quite frankly a blast. It eventually went downhill pretty fast though, with newsprint advertising dropping to less than $20 billion in 2013 (again, adjusted for inflation). As a member of Senior Management as declines became constant (and larger every year), the weight of the failure grew as well, taking a psychological toll that eventually became too much. "Never give up" started to sound like a really stupid motto, so I gave up and made the switch to live events in 2014 (Note: print media is by no means completely dead and there are still quite a few great alt-weekly newspapers & magazines out there doing just fine).

Since monetizing in-house events was a huge component of the revenue model at the media companies I had worked for (being able to advertise events for free in your own print & digital assets was a huge advantage), and Maine and Massachusetts were inching towards legalization. creating a cannabis convention series was a natural segue for me. That bring us to:

MY FIRST CONFESSION

I don't consider myself a cannabis expert.

I feel like this is an important item to address because nothing really compares to the cannabis industry when it comes to the importance of credibility, especially in older people (like me). There's just no way around it- if you didn't advocate for or support cannabis use when it was illegal, you have a lot to prove before people who did can become comfortable with you. I do feel I pass that credibility test as a cannabis consumer for 40+ years who has never hidden that fact or passed on the chance to argue for it's legalization, and exclusively worked at progressive media outlets (The Phoenix & Dig Boston) where cannabis normalization was part of the editorial mission. I've also picked up a decent amount of knowledge about the plant, the community, and the industry over the last 8 years.

All that being said, I'm not a grower. I wasn't a tireless, front-line activist. I wasn't unfairly prosecuted for cannabis use because of my race (as a white male in the 80's, quite the opposite. A slap on the wrist was a given. It wasn't until I was a little older that I found out some people actually went to jail for cannabis possession). I don't know all the science behind extraction, I don't know the names and properties of all the cannabinoids found in cannabis, and I can't give advice on which canna-stocks to buy. Just full disclosure.

So back to my worry-free life running a live-events company. By 2020 the scars of the rapidly declining print industry had healed and the future looked brighter than I could have imagined just a few years earlier. Then came covid-19. Before I whine about how hard it was for me, let me be clear: I count myself incredibly fortunate personally to not have suffered the loss of or permanent injury to anyone very close to me during the pandemic. So I'll only whine a little. The immediate and total obliteration of the entire events industry was not something I was prepared for, and considering it was now the 2nd industry I chose only to see it implode soon after, you can't blame me for feeling a little bit like Roland Schitt & Johnny Rose.

Starting with the first event cancellations in early March, the rest of 2020 and much of 2021 was spent guessing how long "this thing" would last and repeatedly pushing show dates out 3-6 months or more. I'll not bore anyone with the details of a daily routine that consisted of an endless stream of exhibitors and attendees asking legitimate questions I couldn't answer, AR people asking me for money I didn't have, and sales people pitching me six-figure virtual event platforms that were essentially zoom meetings with lipstick. Trust me, it sucked. At one point we actually had an 8-month period where the 12-month rolling revenue was the same as Daniel Blutarsky's grade point average:

In the end though we managed to come out the other side, and just recently had our largest convention ever in Boston last month. So maybe this is NOT Print Part Deux. Either way I already wrote it in as the title so that's it. If you read it all, you should have a decent understanding of the lens I see things through, which in turn will help you know when you can skip more paragraphs in the future.

I would like to get a couple quick answers from you if you have the time to leave them in the comments below:

1) What is your role in the cannabis industry?

2) How do you feel your company is positioned coming out of the pandemic?

3) What is your best guess at the cost to provide 50 bottled waters, 50 soft drinks, and 100 servings of coffee to your staff or guests for one day at a convention center in a high-end city? The person who guesses closest (without going over) to the total on our last bill will receive a $25 apple or google play gift card.