I know this question is pretty vague. But I wanted to get an idea of commercial grow operations and production as well. Size of the facility, How many employees you have, including upper management, trimming packaging, maintenance, growers, laborers, sales, marketing, CEO, CFO, accountants, office admin, compliance, inventory managers etc… Did you have to create specific roles (job titles) for people that normally dont exist? Thanks in advance for your responses
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I would also be fascinated to hear people’s responses to this.
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I think to best answer this question, we would need to look if the operation is able to be legally vertically integrated. If the state mandates separate licenses for processing/extraction/retail facilities, then you will be limited to number of staff you need to merely run your cultivation facility. I currently operate a small facility with a very small staff and we rely largely on automation. We are able to cut a lot of the overhead associated with indoor cultivation by seriously limiting the number of staff associated to the facility. I like to allocate staff according to the needs of the facility.
Indoor operations can be largely automated, but there still needs to be maintenance staff and other individuals that manage certain manual aspects of the operation. The questions I might ask you include: what kind of facility do you intend to operate? Indoor, outdoor, greenhouse? How many square feet/acres?
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Thank you for your response. I was just inquiring on people’s personal experience in their current operations. Like you mentioned your facility is small and you only need a handful of employees. Can you tell me more? What size is your facility? Is it indoor, light dep, etc… What tasks, procedures are automated? How many people work there part time/full time? Outside of the grow what other jobs do people do? Sales, marketing, bookkeeping, admin, compliance,. Is there a CEO, COO, CFO, if so what are their specific duties? Thank you
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I run a rather unique facility these days, but I think some of my past experience may be more useful for the purpose of this thread. One indoor cultivation warehouse is about 11k square feet broken down into a series of cultivation, processing, infusion kitchen, office and extraction rooms. About 65% of the facility is dedicated cultivation space: 1 propagation room, 8 bloom rooms, and 4 vegetative spaces including a dedicated mother room. The rest of the building has two extraction labs, one harvest processing room, dedicated drying/cure space, 2 offices, one safe room and secure dry storage for finished product, and an entrance area that allows for proper PPE doffing. The facility can accommodate a large staff, but we kept a bare bones cultivation staff of 4-7, trim staff varied based on needs, but generally we kept 3-4 on hand full time, 2 lab techs, 4 full-time kitchen staff, 2 folks dedicated to administrative functions, and 2-4 guys around whose sole job was facilities maintenance. This was a small operation compared to many others, but the model can be very easily scaled.
Other functions transcending the cultivation facility can be a bit more complicated depending on the size of the operation. I’m happy to keep answering questions about facilities design/staffing 
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Thank you! I was just curious because I know some facilities that are 20k square feet and have 60 + employees working there and I’ve also heard of people with 65k square ft and only 20 employees. Im not saying which way is better. I know a lot of it has to do with technology and automation. But I just wanted to know what the different roles and positions within organizations.
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Less is more, IMO. I feel there is less of the interpersonal staff dynamic with fewer people which is far less easy to mitigate than are automated environmental controls!
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