On this Cannacurio episode, Ed Keating is joined by Michael Piermont, President & CRO of Leaf Trade, to discuss how Leaf Trade is leading the wholesale cannabis marketplace and digital payment infrastructure within the cannabis industry, the merger with Sweed, the state of the current market, and more!

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Cannacurio Podcast Episode 50 Transcript

Ed Keating:

Welcome to the podcast powered by cannabis media. I'm your host, Ed Keating on today's show. We're joined by Michael Piermont, President of Leaf Trade. Michael, welcome back to the show.

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Michael Piermont:

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Ed Keating:

Well, a lot has happened since we chatted last summer. So, I'm glad you're able to come back and, we could get, caught up before we get into, you know, the last 10 months or so. I was hoping that you could still tell us a little bit about your background for people who maybe didn't catch, our last interview, and tell us how you landed at Leaf Trade.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah. So I've always, kind of navigated towards early growth stage companies, always kind of in niche or high growth areas. So health and fitness insurance, started a company that did a lot of back office solutions for small gyms trainers. That's where I really kind of got my forte into payments, right? And, allowing, you know, maybe folks who aren't sitting, at a desk or a traditional, work cycle to use payments which, you know, that experience has helped me a lot in cannabis. And, you know, after exiting a few companies, I had always watched, regulated cannabis. I knew there were gonna be a lot of, you know, B2B components, a lot of regulated B2B components that, you know, I had experience in. And no luckily for me, I live in Illinois and in 2014-15, the early medical program started coming together, and, you know, me and my, my partner James, you know, started talking to the early folks in the market, who we all know as, you know, the Verano and the GTIs and his sons and grassroots. But, you know, back then they were really single state operators, maybe dual state operators. And so we really, really just listened and we really believed that these folks were in a position both because of the way that the Illinois market was structured and because of the way that they were looking at things into other markets, Maryland and PA and Ohio, that we thought that really early on this was gonna be the path for, you know, large cannabis companies to grow. And we thought that the market would really adopt this. So we listened to what our early customers said and before you know, we knew it, we were diving in and, haven't left since.

Ed Keating:

Wow. Well, it's so interesting going from fitness insurance all the way to cannabis and running a giant marketplace. I mean that's a great pathway. And really fascinating, could you tell everybody also a little bit more about what leaf trade does? Just so that, you know, we have a good level set here?

Michael Piermont:

Yeah. So Leaf Trade really helps to organize not only all of the inventory on the wholesale side, but really organize the process both internally and externally. So it allows dispensaries, to see real time inventory, but all the data that goes with the inventory, the lab results, the invoice, the packing, all the compliance steps that are needed to fulfill that order. And then, you know, depending whether the state is, you know, kind of a new medical state where inventory is, you know, kind of on the lower side or if it's a traditional legacy market, the back end of Leaf Trade helps the sellers organize that and really sell, you know, not only to external folks, but a lot of our customers are using this to balance out inventory to their own stores. So really B2B procurement platform all the way through all the back office stuff including payment and you know, the collection of payment.

Ed Keating:

Interesting, interesting. Now it's just a question occurred to me that, you know, we've seen a lot of companies in the space on the information side that come in and try and scrape a lot of these store menus and provide intelligent and insight sort of like, you know, stock outs and whatnot. I mean, are those services accurate? I think they're there to empower sales people to go in and say, “hey Michael, you need to buy more of this because we can tell that you're out”, like is that a real phenomenon in the cannabis space now?

Michael Piermont:

Some of them are accurate, some of them are accurate at times, right? And what I would say is without getting into specific companies. If you rely on another company or another source for your information or data, sometimes it's correct and sometimes it's not, sometimes the connection in between the two, into the two products might not be accurate or, you know. So I think there are a few folks who are able to scrape live menus and take that information back to some, to some customers. But it's hard. We actually do that a little bit because we know when people are buying right from a wholesale

Ed Keating:

Yes, right

Michael Piermont:

And you wouldn't, you wouldn't buy if you had inventory or you were, you know, not running low. And that is actually the genesis of kind of what we're doing now and you know, some of the, the moves we've been making.

Ed Keating:

Oh, good, good. Well, thanks for, let me digress in it out because, you know we've seen some of this going on and I'm in agreement, especially if somebody's using your platform, they wouldn't really need another platform to tell them what they have or don't have. So, why make it more complex? But, you know, some of that, some of the big news is, is recently you merged with Sweed and curious to hear what brought that about. It's a big story.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, I mean, again, we just sat there listening to our customers, and, you know, we've been really, really focused on the wholesale side. We've been really, really focused on just nailing that, making sure the inventory is organized in real time. And we've been hearing, you know, some consistent problems that it's hard to get the inventory into point of sale systems once it arrives. At the dispensary, there's a lot of manual processes that take time and there are but tenders and managers that don't have that time, right? And then we also hear that it's like we talked about before, it's really hard to get an accurate assessment of what's at their store and when they should order right?

Ed Keating:

Right

Michael Piermont:

So there's an inventory component then someone's buying and they have to go round and round and buy from all these different folks. Whereas now we can connect the point of sale, loyalty, eco all the way back to leaf trade. So if you know, Verano in their store is out of a certain level of inventory or their inventory goes down, that can call back to leaf trade and create an order for themselves or for someone else, right? So getting, getting real time data, but more importantly, actionable data where you know, boom click order done next, as opposed to like, you know, create this data set, send it to the, you know, wholesale team or the inventory team then go, you know, and look for inventory and create orders.

Ed Keating:

So this is helpful for me understanding the process, so I appreciate the education part of it. Is one of the things that you have done then is bridge the information gap from wholesale to retail, which I'm assuming may also have some compliance benefits too like, you know, where everything is and it's a single chain of custody instead of like let's get Bob in the warehouse to stitch it together. I mean is that how it comes together?

Michael Piermont:

Exactly right. It's the same product it starts at leave trade, it starts really even before that in bio track or metric right comes over to leave trade, right? And we're just continuing down the path. But instead of, you know, dropping the the box off at a river and walking away, you know, we're putting it safely in the boat and you know, handing it off to, to Sweed and and then they can hand that inventory off to the customers, whether that's in the form of eco you know, with loyalty attached to it or they go in store and buy something, right? So we're just, we want to make sure that information, the lab data, all the components behind cannabis are you know, accurate because I always use this analogy when you go to 7-Eleven, you know every Pepsi, every Coke is the same, right? And when you, when you pull out the the cannabis batches, they all, they're all are different or could be different or have, you know, different THC levels and people sell differently on that, right? So it's really important that every batch is accurate and has a full data set all the way through the supply chain.

Ed Keating:

Got it, got it. So in, in the work that we've done in cannabis media, we've looked a lot into the point of sale space and, and the software stack. And the last time we did our big point of sale report, the number was about 79 unique point of sale vendors or brands in the United States. So obviously you, you chose Sweet and I wonder if you could give us just a little bit more background on that company and, and sort of, you know, what they do and, and why they were so attractive.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, so we've looked at a bunch of them you know, 79 is a big number. We didn't look at that many. So, you know, suite is a very, very similar path as leave trade. They really, really focused on the enterprise customer first. While we, you know, had some really good early customers who helped us with the product and were great adopters, they did as well. So was one of the really early customers and one of the big differentiators with Sweed is it's an all in one solution, right? So you have the inventory that is very well organized in Sweed and then they push out to an eco platform that's their own right? And Sweed stays behind the scenes. So it's not a marketplace, right? So can put sued directly on their website and you don't see other stores, right? You go right to, to their site, the other all in one feature that's really nice is the loyalty aspect of it, right? So, so now as you're bringing your stores together regionally nationally, you can have one loyalty program that can stretch across the company country. Right. Now, people are doing it very, very regional, you know, you may have a loyalty program for Illinois, but that might not transfer to Arizona, right? And so the consumer who shops every day that dispensary by their house, they don't even know that there's another dispensary in another state, right? And you know, that's that's a huge, huge component. The other aspect of that is compliance, right? There are some states that look at loyalty or marketing programs differently, right? And so because you use one platform, right? And is this is nothing new vendor consolidation is has been around - it gives them more operational leverage to build everything correctly, build the right loyalty across the country, build the right marketing set, the right eco process. And really what I think is kind of the next iteration of cannabis is, you know, having these processes centralized especially for the larger companies, right? So, so they can, you know, scale, you can't scale with 35 different processes and 25 different tech products that you know, all do different things. It it becomes really, really hard to manage and we forget a lot of the, you know, medium to large cannabis companies got there by acquiring other companies right in different markets with different tech. And so, you know, I've been really impressed about how fast folks have been moving to consolidate to streamline operations because they have to right, there's no margin left prices are going down. So the only way to, you know, make the same money or more is to really, really, you know, lean into efficiencies.

Ed Keating:

Yeah, absolutely. I think operational efficient efficiency is key and you know what you're talking about in terms of having sort of a single system is a presentation that somebody in the past industry talked about where they interviewed their customers and they'd asked this great question that, that I've, you know, kept hold up for many years, which is, "What were you using the 10 minutes before you use my product and the 10 minutes after? And, you know, they started to build that out and it sort of seems like with what you guys have done too, it's like, well, people have this need too and how do we do it? And at the end of the day, they came up with this great metric which is not share of wallet, but how much of your share of day do I own? And I love that because it's just so such a thoughtful way of thinking of, you know, how your customers are having to make choices and if they're hopping between lots of software installs, or, or, or pieces of software that's not terribly efficient. And, you know, they're not gonna meet those numbers that you were just talking about.

Michael Piermont:

It's also tough for the customer, you know, maintaining logins to an eco platform and then your local store, right? And maybe even, you know, some brand, some brands have you in, you know, some, some loyalty programs and it just becomes tough, right? And there's no secret, you know, Nike sells shoes on Amazon, but they sell more shoes on Nike.com, and they sell them for more and that's where they want you to go.

Ed Keating:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Now, as you were, working with Sweed, you know, you mentioned, you know, a couple of other customers was, was there much customer overlap between the two of you? Because I know when I've gone through mergers, you know, that's one of the things you look at and it may have been a driver or might not have mattered at all. But I'm just kind of curious.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, there, there's some a lot of our dispensaries who don't pay for leave trade, but use it to acquire products and purchase as a full procurement platform, of course, are, are starting to migrate or have migrated to Sweed. And then there are a lot of customers who are in the process of migrating to Sweed, that we've got to, you know, our customers that we've talked to during the merger. So that's what's nice for us is not only is their focus enterprise, which has always been our focus, but they're kind of, you know, ahead of the game as, as far as already starting to migrate some of our current customers where we can jump right in and, you know, kind of help them and connect the systems. Right.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Yeah. And, and you've touched on a couple of these, but maybe if you could sort of go through the list, like what are all the piece parts that you now offer somebody because, you know, we've talked about wholesale, we've talked about POS I think you mentioned loyalty. Are there other elements to that, you know, you know, like payment or, or other things too that really build out that stack?

Michael Piermont:

Yeah. So on the Leaf Trade side, you've got we have marketing services where we actually do, you know the heavy lifting, whether it's campaign creation. Also we maintain the list and you know, all the analytics around these campaigns. There's, we do also have a payment service on leave trade where we'll extract payment on the, the day that the invoice is due, right for a very small fee without interest. Of course, the analytics platform, like we talked about understanding the inventory. On Sweed it’s really full service, retail, everything. So you've got Eco on the front end, there's loyalty, of course, point of sale and then True Pin Debit that integrates right into it. So full service all four components as well as you know, the, if there is B2C delivery, we allow the B2C delivery companies to hook right in to the point of sale as well. So we can actually move the, the inventory to the delivery companies

Ed Keating:

And for your customers in terms of how you offer that, that those are a lot of choices. I mean, there's quite a menu if you, if you'll excuse upon there. Can people go a la carte because I, I'm getting the impression that you're not a forced bundle, like take it all or leave it. So how, how do you do that?

Michael Piermont:

We're not a forced bundle, but there's been very few, maybe one or two who have not taken it all because really the, the bread and butter is, most of the folks have tried one or two of the pieces and got stuck trying to connect to the other pieces. So the all in one aspect is, you know, clean data in, clean data out type of thing. There are one or two who, you know, wanted to keep both eco situations going, right? They wanted to keep the Amazon and the nike.com, and that's ok for us, but all the other ones have, have really focused or at least brought in payment P OS as well as loyalty and marketing.

Ed Keating:

Got it, got it now switching gears a bit. I noticed in doing some research that, you know, you are on many of the metric state systems as being a featured vendor or, you know, or, or an appropriate vendor. So, you know, it makes me think of sort of the whole compliance angle which is, you know, is this a big issue and how do you manage it? And now that you, you know, you've got a merger of two companies. What is that like? because, you know, my background is in compliance and the rule of thumb we had is, you know, when somebody tries to do business in usually 3-4 states, that's when a, a client will come to some service provider and say, yeah, uncle I give up, help me out here. So, with the number of states you're talking, I imagine that's got to be an important rule that, that, that, that you must play and have to deal with,

Michael Piermont:

You know, it's kind of like a, a doctor scrubbing in, you know, it's just kind of the world we live in. Because all on the Leaf Trade side because day one starts with the plug in to the seed to sale. Like before we can even launch a state, we focus on the compliance. How do we get into the seed to sale? What, you know, even though we may have an integration with metric in six states, the seventh state might do things, you know, differently. There might be an older version of BioTrack that's being used. So really before we even look to launch a state, that's what we're building. It's kind of that last mile compliance piece. And because we allow folks to really lean into the compliance tools, they have to use the seed to sale tools that, you know, are state mandated. Once the inventory is in our system, it has to be set up compliantly because it came from the, you know, the seed to sale, right? And so that's, that's kind of the first focus always when launching a market and it's just, that's our ball game, right? It’s we are the connector that allows, you know, medium to large companies run single processes but still have that differentiator or that compliance tweak in each market.

Ed Keating:

Sure, sure. We, we'll speak of markets and, and medium to large companies, you know, helps me think through my next question, which is as Canada's media and I'm sure as you have looked across the country, you know, we, we joke that, you know, every state is its own sovereign nation when it comes to compliance rules, regulations. I mean, it, it's just mind boggling what people have to keep track of. So I'm curious, you know, how you and your team, especially in your role on the revenue side, see the market, like, you know, we've got, we've got Oklahoma, which, you know, last count had like, you know, 2,400 stores, I think one store for every 70 people versus Connecticut where still, where I live where it's kind of a, a small set. Are there certain states that are attractive because of the regulatory structure versus ones that you shunned because maybe not shun, but they're not the first place you're gonna send your sales team to.

Michael Piermont:

That's actually basically our whole strategy focus on the limited license states, and with Sweed, it will, will start opening up a little more, right? Because if someone has 30 dispensers in California, that's great. But typically Leaf Trade is really focused on and we even call them. Our primary markets is, you know, the highly regulated newly emerging states, which typically are limited licenses, right? There are a few states that act more like limited license states like Massachusetts, even though there's not technically a limit just because of how they issue licenses. But, you know, the, the less licenses that are, distributed early in the market, the better that we think that market has or, you know, better future that, that market should, should, lean into. So that's kind of always been, you know, we've, we've shied away from Oklahoma shot away from Oregon, California really. On the Leaf Trade side we've shied away from, and, you know, the Nevadas and Arizona while on the west coast to us, feel a little more like, you know, kind of the limited markets that we're used to, I think as leave trade starts expanding, gets bigger, our customers get bigger. We will be in every state, it's just a question of time and, and resources and for us, you know, fundraising has always been a focus of where does the dollar go, the, the longest and, you know, raising money to get all of Illinois and all of PA and all of New Jersey and all of Connecticut, you know, is more important or was more important than getting a few folks in California, right? And just, you know, we've seen some competitors and some other people in the space raise a lot more money than us and then burn it in some of these non-regulated states.

Ed Keating:

Well, an analogy on that one to me is, you know, companies like Acreage and MedMen where they went for the land grab and they were getting licenses in marginal states where there were, you know, three patients or something on the state's roll. And yeah, you, you planted your flag there but at what cost and it seemed to be pretty high cost and then the market eventually punished them. I think, you know, pretty hard, I think, you know, acreages may have come back but, you know, med men, you know, my shares are worth about two cents a piece now. So yeah, I think there's definitely some challenges there but, you know, also too, with that approach, you know, you're following your customers. So if they are in a certain state, you may have to be in there and, you know, you'll, you know, follow them, but it doesn't mean that you have to service everybody in the state. So that may make make the sanity check.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah. And for us, just like you said, you know, we may go to California and service a few customers but doesn't necessarily mean we will spend marketing dollars or move sales reps there. Right. And so, for us, you know, we actually are live in California with a few customers in that exact situation.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Yeah, we did the same thing. There's some features we roll out where we go to certain people and try it out first. Make sure it makes sense before we, you know, push it out even further. So, so staying on the marketing sales front, you know, we always like to ask how, how, how does Cannabiz Media help you achieve your goals? Because you've been a customer of ours for a while and we always like to hear how people are, are able to use us.

Michael Piermont:

You know, even way back when in 2017-18, when we were a two or three person shop, that was it all I had was Cannabiz Media and because our whole business relied on limited license states, it was so important that I can know exactly who had that license. Was it valid or not, you know, was it transferred? That was it, you know, there was no other, there's, there was no other way to do it. And so for us, it's really important because we are not out there, you know, Robo dialing and, and sending 50 emails because we're in such of these limited states. So we have to have the right data all the time in a kind of a limited scope.

Ed Keating:

Excellent, excellent. Well, we're, you know, striving to continue to do that. You talked about limited markets and my team is working on the Alabama information that was just released and I was looking through some of the 950 page applications. It's sort of like Florida and New York in the old days. So, but, you know, we're pouring through the…

Michael Piermont:

It’s funny they didn't, they didn't get that many, responses. And then I did the same thing. I looked at the application. I was like, well, that, that's why it's 984 pages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's bad because you'll get the real, real people who've thought this out and, you know, aren't trying to win the license to sell it.

Ed Keating:

Right. Right. Like, you know, the two that I, that I saw are actually my colleague went through them. Trulieve is one of the ones that's in that list as well as, a hometown favorite here in Connecticut, Fine Fettle. You know, they go to FFD. So those are the two that sort of jumped out at me. I haven't looked at all 90 yet. But, but before the weekend I probably will. So yeah, it's good to hear and, and, you know, we, we're also working to help people do exactly what you said through technology solutions to help them check whether a license is valid now. I mean, that's become a compliance piece of our business, not just a marketing one as well. So sort of looking at the, the business and the industry, you know, going a little bit broader out. What kind of challenges are you contending with now? I mean, the market is very different than when we were, you know, recording this 10 months ago or so. So what, what challenges are, are you seeing out there, Michael.

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Michael Piermont:

Yeah, I mean, I think listen, prices are going down and companies have less folks to navigate through tough times. You've also got just like you said, 10 months ago, 14 months ago, two years ago, things were better, right? There was, everyone was, you know, walking in everything sold. People weren't fixing problems because there weren't as many problems or they didn't see the problems. So, you know, the challenges are still there and we have less people to deal with them or the companies have less people to deal with them. But what I've seen probably faster than I even thought or, you know, the consolidation of both tech and people. So you're seeing a lot of big companies kind of consolidate wholesale and retail right, especially if they're vertically integrated, they don't have these huge wholesale teams and these huge retail retail teams with a big, you know, wall in between and now all of a sudden they're trying to figure out, hey, you know, we're all working off the same inventory. How do we stretch it out? How do we get the best price? How do we get the best margin? So you're seeing the company come together internally and even though I think cannabis does a really good job of folks working with each other's competitors. I think you're seeing it more, right? Especially in, in different regions and states. but you know, there is less money per unit and there are less people to do the jobs. So we shouldn't, we should never forget that. And I think cannabis and the industry in general will be better having gone through this early in our life cycle.

Ed Keating:

Yeah, I mean, one of the observations that somebody shared that I read was I remember going to conferences in the fall of 2019 when we were going through a first sort of mini contraction where it was harder to get money and they're talking about operational excellence, MedMen and Acreage and others were having trouble. And then we had COVID come through and everybody was home, more cannabis was consumed, it was essential business and there's a lot of government money that went into households. So it gave everybody like another year and it was almost like a false hope like, oh, we're doing fine until we got back to the situation where now we had a war that started a year ago and, you know, suddenly it's much tougher for people to do it. So we are in this sort of operational excellence environment and not everyone is gonna make it through, you know, through the end of, of this economic bubble, which I'll get to in a minute. But I did want to touch on something that you mentioned, which is sort of the contraction in the technology space. And you know, the M&A, you, you guys have gone through a merger with another company. There's a lot of that happening right now. I mean, Akerna has left the industry, Dutchie had changes at the top of their organization. There are other companies that have been bought or, or pieces of companies that are getting bought. Do you see more of this happening? Because obviously, if you just went through a whole, you know, merge your process, you probably get to see a lot of decks and books and whatnot. So, I imagine there's a lot of companies that are quietly for sale.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, I mean, the day that we announced the closing, we had, I think 15 or 20 calls from representatives of companies or founders themselves or chief executive officers wanting to, you know, ask if they could be part of it if there was room, some of the companies are complimentary, right? Like it makes sense. Now, some of the data companies you could put in between Sweed and Leaf Trade, but some of them are, you know, out of cash, right? Or, you know, may have some cash but, you know, their customers aren't using their service or consolidating or closing stores or closing markets. You know, we're always opportunistic. So we look at everything, and we've got, you know, one or two that, you know, will probably flush out in the next 10-12 months. But for us, it's just really straight line focus on, you know, the enterprise solution, focus on the multi-state operators, whether you have, you know, four grows in four states or 20 grows in 10 states or 100 stores, the, you know, multiplicity, multiple markets, multiple stores add, you know, no pun intended, multiple you know, issues, right? And that's kind of always been the the thesis of Leaf Trade in Sweed, right? Is just be that enterprise solution because I don't believe an out of the box solution really works, right. It always needs to be tailored and focused on the customer and that's what enterprise enterprise tech is right is, you know, you get, you get 80% there and then you've got to bend into kind of their internal stack.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've wisely focused where the money is, you know, enterprise type customers that have that multi-jurisdictional complexity. Those people also have a probably a good tendency to pay the bills and, and whatnot as opposed to chasing around some of these, you know, let's say smaller operators in these smaller states that, you know, are just really don't have the revenue to kind of support sophisticated solutions. So it's, it's good, it's good to have focus.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, it's good. I will say though, I am also really impressed with, I call them, you know, the medium sized customers but, you know, maybe they don't get all the headlines of, you know the Curaleaf’s, the  Veranos, the GTIs, some really impressive brands like, you know, Grano or Item Nine where, you know, if they've got the same problems, and they're dealing with them head on and some of those folks will come out, you know, really, really strong, and so we've, you know, we've seen them on both sides. We've also seen the other side where, you know, the, the, the tail winds coming against them are, you know, are, are gonna make it impossible and their business union economics won't make it easy for them to survive.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's very true. I think we, we've come much more to, kind of an operational excellence, survival mode for a lot of companies. And because if you're not, you're, you're, you're not gonna be around for, for very long because we, we ourselves have seen it where some of the companies have been customers of ours have just left the industry like there are multiple industries and just pulling back there was a, you know, payment firm that just you know, stepped out there. They're, they're working with a different bank who doesn't be in cannabis and they're a giant company, cannabis wasn't a big piece of the business too volatile right now. They just, they're just out. So yeah, I think as you said before, the, the people who are standing at the end of this time are, are, are, are, are gonna be hopefully in, in, in good stead. So two last questions, one following up on that one, has the industry hit bottom yet or do we still have? are we in the valley? We just don't know, you know how long we have to go before we come up on the other side?

Michael Piermont:

I don't, I don't think the, I don't think the industry has hit, I don't think there's ever gonna be a bottom, right? I think because the industry is so fragmented that certain markets might have hit the bottom, right? And I think that's how we should look at it is Illinois is great. I love Illinois. It's been awesome to watch it grow and it's been awesome for some of the west coast brands to actually come into Illinois, but prices will come down, they'll come down slower. And, you know, everyone will be, you know, kind of working together, but in 10 years, Illinois prices will look probably not as low as California but more there. So I think it's more stages of markets. I think some of the markets will have to kind of blow up before the reset, right? Or some of the legacy providers won't be able to make it or you'll see some of them get acquired. But I think, you know, we as an industry are really, you know, being smart about it, people are talking about it. People are making changes, you know, if this was another industry and we see it all the time, I don't think we can make changes this, this fast or I don't think they can make changes this fast. And if you think about, you know, some legislation will help this industry out, right? Maybe it's in six months, maybe it's in two or three years. But if we can get past this right? And the consolidation and people leave the industry, like you mentioned, it's only gonna, you know, feed the, the folks who are still here.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. No, that’s very true. It'll be interesting to see, you know what this is like because it's happened in lots of other industries before and we're just going through what, you know, some of us have experienced ourselves in other industries. you know, I was around when the dotcom bust happened and, you know, it was messy and if you could hang in there that was good and then you came out the other side and you were typically much better off because, you know, it forced you to focus as a, as a business. And if you didn't focus, you weren't going to be one of the ones standing at the end. And obviously, you know, you have done that and so far cannabis media has as well. So hopefully we'll, we'll be there as you know, we, we, we pop through this. So any other trends, Michael you're looking at or things that we should be you know, keeping our ear out for in the industry or, or even with Leaf Trade and Sweed.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the, the message to take away from this podcast is while there's this gray cloud, you know, we all see it. We all read it. Even folks who aren't in the cannabis industry when they start asking you about it, you know, then, you know, there's, there's some gray clouds but under those gray clouds, I think there's more positive change as far as processing people than people realize. And I, so I think not even the turnaround but the upswing like you mentioned that kind of, you know, maybe, maybe falsely happened or happened too fast in 2020 because of COVID. I think it's gonna start happening the right way. And I think we'll be better for it. I also, you know, have been really encouraged with a lot of the West Coast brands where we kind of thought we were setting up for, you know, a lot of the large multi-state operators kind of shutting those brands out, going full vertical, and just sticking with their products and we, while some of them have gone more vertical and of course, we're seeing the inclusion of some of these, you know, legacy, really dominant brands on the West Coast start coming, you know, into the Midwest and the East Coast the right way with, you know, the, the partnership of, of some of the MSOs which at the end of the day, if the stores are great and the products are great, the consumer will have a good experience, they'll spend more, they'll come more, we'll all win. And I think that's got to be the focus.

Ed Keating:

Yeah. Excellent, excellent. Well, Michael, as always a very thoughtful time spent with you. I learned a lot as I'm as I'm sure our listeners did. So once again, thanks for joining us today.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, I really enjoyed it and I'll see you in 10 months.

Ed Keating:

Yeah, exactly. Well, Benzinga is out in Chicago, so I'm gonna be there. So, I'm, I'm hopeful that you'll be there as well.

Michael Piermont:

Yeah, I'll be there.

Ed Keating:

Excellent. Excellent. So, thanks for joining us on today's podcast. I'm your host, Ed Keating. Stay tuned for more updates from the data vault.