Hello all! I am hoping to get a little insight regarding hiring a trim crew for a boutique, craft cannabis facility. We are located in Massachusetts, which requires you to register each one of your employees (cost is around $1k/employee). The state has not yet allowed for trimmer businesses, where you could simply outsource the job to a different company. This is an issue for us considering we would be hiring seasonally, after every harvest.
Our next issue is TIME. If our product isn’t being trimmed, it is still hang drying. So if we have a trim crew of roughly 7 people to trim 200 lbs at a rate of a lb/day, that would take an entire month. So, our product would have been hang drying much longer than we’d prefer (10 days).
Our first year, we plan on harvesting once - roughly 200 lbs.
The following years, we plan on harvesting 4x - roughly 1,600 lbs annually.
Does anyone have any recommendations on hiring a trim crew to get the the process done as efficiently as possible? Number of trimmers? Additionally, in regards to retention, how could we structure this opportunity so we do not have to register a new trim crew harvest-after-harvest?
Side-note: If anyone has any additional insight on ensuring that our trim crew would not be stealing product, that would be appreciated as well.
I look forward to hearing feedback from this amazing cannabis community!
Great question. When I first started out as an independent contractor on trim contracts, it was 10/20 on contract, and the grower doesnt have to worry about the number of trimmers, as thats the trimmers concern!
As a dispo owner, likely if you build your rotations on your grow, you will always keep your trimmers busy. Thats where turn over happens. Going with “lulls” between trim w/o pay, will kill a crew fast.
When dispos starting pushing growers and trimmers outside of parameters, you risk burn out.
How many plants do you intend to cycle, and how often.
I work my grow to harvest every 3 weeks. On a large scale, i would run every 2 weeks. Those help keep staff around!
Thank you for your insight. Year 1 we will only have one greenhouse, with 600 plants. Year 2 we will have both a Veg Greenhouse and a flower greenhouse with 1,200 plants. Since we’d only be harvesting 4x annually, a lull in between each harvest in inevitable.
We may have to reach out to another established cultivation facility to see if we could utilize their trim crew as well.
@williamfgrady If you can get your cycles working as @KrisGrows suggested that sounds ideal for ongoing production. With the idea that you’re working to grow to that level of production (early congrats on adding the new greenhouse for veg/flowering stages), your idea of seeing about paying trimmers on-loan is a great idea.
Coming from a construction background a bit, I know that workers without work are open to the idea, but the companies that pay those employees aren’t always open to renting out their employees. Just something to be mindful.
On preventing and tracking possible theft, my company, supergrower, has a reporting/audit trail feature that helps with this. It’s good for much more than theft prevention though. If you’re interested at all, let’s talk further.
4 person trim crew. 1,200 lbs per year. approx. 25 a week. Hang 'em to dry, run thru a small Greenbroz trimmer and hand finish. They also do some maintenance work, all the harvesting and deleafing and all the cleaning in a 10,000 sq. ft. facility. Bud quality (tightness, size, shape, larf or lack thereof) makes a big difference. The better the growers are the easier the trim!
