We Are the Best LP

This post is about a stanza from a song, 2 movie quotes, and the dichotomy between business and usual.

Last night, the company I’m with, Auxly Cannabis, won an award. Last of the night, best award of all: Licensed Producer of the year.

So, what?

The first thing we dealt with on almost every channel was vitriolic hatred.

Angry people doing angry things on the internet.

Shocking, right?

Thus, I wanted to clear one thing up for those connected on here:

I am proud to work for a cannabis company, the cannabis industry, and with this unreal team.

Many people have asked if I am, in one way or other.

Then when I answer, the response I get makes me think of a line from a poem.

“Hailie Jade, I love that name / Love that tattoo, what's that say?”

If you don’t know it, suffice it to say, I’m broadcasting an invitation to be honest when we next chat. It’s okay, you think it’s weird as hell that I jumped to here after sticking to AAA’s and Blue Chips with a personal brand that was clean cut – (eyeball that profile pic)

?Those who know me well know that I am incapable of removing my heart from my sleeve

I believe in Auxly.

Not just as a place of work, but as a place for me to grow, and learn, and as a space that helps me be a better person. I believe that every person who comes through here, in one way or other, will be made more powerful by the experience.

How’s that?

Each, to greater or lesser extent, has a bit of the magic we associate with the wright brothers in them.

?

What do I mean?

I was lucky enough to be offered a chance to visit the Charlottetown facility a few weeks back. It’s gorgeous, it is setting records in production every couple of weeks, it is a functioning factory.

Do you know how much that took?

You heard that cannabis was a mess, as an industry, and you hear that things were rough when everything got off the ground, but I certainly did not grasp the whole picture.

Imagine hearing someone’s been told to invent an oil rig for Mars.

Proxies exist, sure, but they’re not the same and you would know that what they must do would be massively different, because of concepts like gravity, transportation to the site, probably viscosity, all sorts of things!

Now imagine the power source has to stay on earth, guarded, except when in use.

The logistics, the insanity of it is obviously wildly out to dreamland, but the principle remains the same. People came into Auxly, to each brand-new facility, knowing bits and pieces and being experts in things similar but vastly different from where they found themselves, and they were told “go” but also “we’ll be holding you back.”

Then “change,” then “adapt,” and “oh hey that staircase isn’t licensed so you need to carry your 35-kilo canister 200 meters up a different flight of stairs because the rules changed yesterday.” (True story)

Then commercial comes into play and we look at the most over complicated swamp in CPG. We have to sell to provinces. We pitch them, and for the agency folks in the crowd yes, it is THAT much work, with about 2 weeks’ notice and they decide to “go” with 80%, or none, or all of the things we pitched! Suddenly we need to scale net new supply chain lines in a month or so.

Then retailers decide to order from the provinces, or not.

Then budtenders need to be convinced that we matter enough to push us over the other 50 things that just launched, when all they really want is to get paid and enjoy talking about their passion, or about how much fun the thing they did last was.

For those counting, that’s 3 customer (target) segments in an industry where asking about data leads to: “I think I know how to pull a report from the point of sale?”

The Sales team needs to schmooze all of them, pretty much all at once. all 2800 odd retailers plus the other critical people.

Then there are consumers.

So the brand team needs to think of VBI and messaging ideas per approved thing that are going to be different but not so different as to stand out, and then get everything out the door all at once. Align to people's aspirational archetypes (eh, see what I did there?) without actually pushing pretty much anything typical in marketing.

Meanwhile, 8 or 9 cycles in now, Team Tech has been keeping the Rube Goldberg machine they jury rigged out of tools that were sketchy enough to accept cannabis investment going, so that the flow of bits that ladder into the bureaucracy of annual auditing stay somewhat automatic and don't drive everyone involved absolutely batty. Among other things.

Through all this, Legal is trying to figure out how to put out every fire all at once, and C suite is sitting trying to just figure out funding because at the heart of it all a lot of people who ‘believed in what you are doing’ really just wanted to win this horse race and no one actually trusts stoners, right?

Then production has to start again. And that 35-kilo canister is now full of corrosive material. And the stairwell licensing still hasn’t gone through because someone sneezed and it set off an alarm for illegal THC.

You get the picture.

I’ve worked for a lot of companies that claimed agility, innovativeness, or adaptability.

I was in performance media when no one knew what a CPA was, then in tech when interest targeting included ‘considering a baby within 3 months’ and ‘just broke up,’ then in B2B when CASL came out.

None of those hold a light to this.

From June to November 2021, I went through 15 RFP’s while pitching the idea of a digital ecosystem even being viable.

The scale of production with our success has led to people 3d printing tools at home to help automate edibles counting.

Media (shout outs to Eloise, Derek and Cameron at UM) has been a wild journey of 2007 level inconsistency around imagery, verbiage, and ‘implication.’

Brand and Trade team member’s have spent days on projects only to have them cut short because somewhere, something took a sharp left turn.

We found out in Charlottetown that changing packaging material to try and make the package feel and look nicer screwed up the automated opener machine we invented for the old version.

This isn’t Campbell’s, we’re not settled on two can sizes yet.

It’s a business of the Wright family. Like them, every member of this company, past and present has seen and experienced failures out of their control. They always stand back up, dust themselves off, and come at it anew. Keep the thing flying, every inch off the ground is cause for celebration

From Charlottetown, to Carlton Place, (to a house 10 minutes away from Carlton Place: Happy 3 years Jodie!) and on to Leamington, every person is coming up with new solutions, streamlining things no one has ever done before, and trying their best every day.

?

The response?

“I hope you all get sacked, been with you years, the market knows what’s up; good riddance!” an actual quote on our win. Thanks Jon.

Makes me think of the line in Blades of Glory

? “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative! Gets the people going!”

When was the last time you saw an industry born from an illegal trade? Where my 1910 babies at? Looking for the real ones; those who celebrated the end of prohibition!

No one? Then perhaps you can chat about how insane this whole thing has been over wine.

When was the last time you tried weed? Not because a friend pressured you to in high school, I hope? I hope you made an effort to go outside your comfort zone and see if there was something you like or don’t. I hope you take that time before you judge anyone for working in cannabis. ?

We won an award last night that I firmly believe we deserve. No business is usual. No one sits back and goes “ah, what a nice job with no curve balls.”

With that said not many people have had to invent new ways of working, ground up, every day.

An Award might not mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but it sure got the people going. I hope that every member of the Auxly family looks at the haters and laughs.

We know what’s good and “love the smell of napalm in the mornings.”

There it is.

This post is about a stanza from a song, 2 movie quotes, and the dichotomy between business and usual. It is also about the best damned team I’ve had the privilege of working with.

Whatever happens next, I am extremely proud of everyone at the company for our win at the award show last night, and I am proud to be a part of the Auxly Cannabis Group.

Hope you're willing to give us a try.

To the rest, we know, you hate us cause you ain't us.

And that's okay.

#thisisauxly #cannabis #number1 #IWHBYD

#disclaimer: For those who need to know this - I speak for myself, and not for Auxly in this.