Join Henry Finklestein, the brains behind Cannabis Big Data, for an essential overview of how to put the data you’re already collecting to work for you.
@Henry and his team have managed enterprise data architectures in industries as diverse as e-commerce, consumer goods, health care, finance and construction. They’ve worked with start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, so they know what it takes to get from $1 to $1B in revenue. Click here for more on Cannabis Big Data.
Unless you’re sure you’re using all of your business information to its fullest, you won’t want to miss this Ask Me Anything event.
Welcome @henry and thanks for doing the AMA. I’ll kick us off with a question - what’s the most common question that your clients want to answer about their business?
That said, regardless of your business type, everyone is always worried about gross and net margins, so we spend a lot of time looking at revenue and cost structures.
Sure, to build on my last comment, product unit costing is something that most dispensary store managers or owners don’t know.
And I don’t mean “a gram costs me $XX on average”, I mean that specific gram, on that shelf, from that batch and I’m going to buy right now. How much did that gram cost you? Vs. the one in the next jar over? Vs. other product SKUs? That’s Retail 101 for most businesses, but cannabis businesses are only just starting to perk up to why that’s so important
Sure, almost every single time! That’s why I love playing in the data
One thing that we saw at one medical dispensary was a “liquor store” trend where there were bi-weekly seasonal spikes on Fri & Sat - paydays. This is a well-documented trend in the liquor market and I was somewhat surprised to see it in a medical store (makes sense for rec, but I guess med too …)
Thanks for doing this AMA! I have a lot of questions, but I’ll just start off by asking when, how, and why you decided to found CBD? What made you want to get into the cannabis space?
Absolutely, as long as the growers are maintaining strain-level grow notes. If someone is using one of the softwares we chatted about in another thread, no problemo as we can export those records and drill into costing by collating grow batches against accounting purchase orders.
For those who are not yet capturing information at that level of detail, we work with them to set up web forms to digitize their records, thereby enabling that type of analysis moving forward.
I’m fascinated by the plummeting wholesale costs of flower. A couple years ago, a wholesale pound would easily go for $2-3k, nowadays it’s getting closer to $1300 in Colorado, and that’s nowhere near the bottom. Hops, the closest agricultural relative of cannabis, grown at scale yields a wholesale price of $20 / lb.
That’s a very stark trend to watch over the next 5-10 years, and it has drastic implications for cultivators, processors, dispensaries and brands across the value chain.
