How to Get Into the Cannabis Industry

One of the most common questions members ask at Chicago NORML meetings is how to get started in the cannabis industry. At Chicago NORML’s 420 celebration in April 2020 interviewer Kyrié Kirkland posed this question to industry veteran and marijuana legend Sparky Rose.

Rose has worked in brand marketing for 30 years. He was working in San Francisco in the early 2000s in a marketing position for an Internet services company. Then the dot com bust arrived followed by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and he was suddenly out of work as were many Americans as the country sunk into a recession.

Few were hiring. Tired of sending out countless resumes, Rose joined a punk rock band. He had played the drums since he was four and was “stir crazy” at home without work. The band’s bass player had lupus, an auto-immune disease that often causes fatigue, headaches and joint pain. The bass player was a marijuana consumer, as the plant relieves a lot of Lupus symptoms, and worked behind the counter at a cannabis club.

He told Rose he could find a job selling weed behind the counter. The job didn’t pay much, but it would pay the bills until he found a job at a technology company. Rose had never set foot in a marijuana business before. Eight weeks after starting, Rose became the Executive Director of Oakland-based Compassionate Caregivers.

The organization had two dispensaries and a cultivation center. Within 18 months, Rose expanded the operation to seven dispensaries and three cultivation centers with $5 million in monthly revenue and 280 employees. On October 3, 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the operation and arrested Rose along with 14 others. He ended up pleading guilty to 14 marijuana related crimes and was sentenced to 37 months in prison. Charges were dropped for the others caught up in the raid.

About a year after leaving prison, Rose moved to Chicago and worked in brand marketing at the big global agency Ogilvy and Mather. Yet, cannabis kept calling. His wife introduced him to a woman who wanted to start her own cannabis company called Sacred, which now produces CBD topicals and tinctures. Rose did all the branding and marketing. After this, he helped launch the hit brand Papa and Barkley, the most popular topicals brand in California. The company raised $35 million in a recent financing. Rose told Tom Howard of Cannabis Legalization News in August 2020, “As a brand marketer, Papa and Barkley is easily the best work of my career. I don’t know if I will ever beat it. I am super proud of the work I have done for that brand.”

Eventually, he became the Chief Marketing Officer for the multi-state cannabis company PharmaCann, headquartered in west suburban Oak Park. He is the one who developed and launched Matter, Pharmacann’s product brand, and redesigned the company’s dispensaries under the Verilife brand. At PharmaCann, Rose realized he was in the cannabis industry for good. Currently, he is the managing partner of the Chicago cannabis consulting firm Supercritical.

Looking back on his experiences from a dispensary worker to helping lead a major cannabis

company, Rose reflected with Chicago NORML’s Kirkland on the skills that enabled his success.

“Coming from a brand marketing background is really important. Cannabis is fundamentally a consumer-packaged goods industry. If you have any brand or CPG experience, it is going to do you a lot of good in operating in cannabis.
[Working in the industry] requires a lot of focus, a lot of discipline, and …a somewhat insane focus on the customer. That’s really what the industry is all about. If you are not focusing on the customer and the consumer experience, you are missing the boat and you are going to have a lot of problems.”

— Sparky Rose

When he was in the Internet services space, he worked as a marketing consultant for Alliance. The company’s biggest client was Robert Half International, one of the world’s largest and most admired staffing companies. He was hired by Robert Half to manage their e-business initiatives. “Learning the staffing business was a huge help for me, particularly on the dispensary side of the cannabis equation. Staffing a retail dispensary is like staffing any retail location, and it’s very difficult to keep well staffed. In retail, you tend to get people who are more transient in their careers or have other obligations that may arise in their minds to a level that is a little more important than perhaps serving your customers. Keeping a strong retail staff is a challenge and it is something that will always be part of a dispensary owner’s day to day,” Said Rose.

Rose was asked how someone without brand marketing or retail merchandising experience could enter the cannabis industry, such as a teacher. “The thing to remember about the cannabis industry is that it is like every other industry. Whatever you do, chances are there is a job for you doing the same thing you do now in cannabis. They need all the same people every other company needs in the back office to keep the day to day running.”

This was echoed in a July interview with Brad Spirrison of Grown In. “Chances are, you’re needed in the industry no matter what you do,” Rose said. “Janitor? We need them. Human Resources? We need them. IT Admin? You guessed it. Cannabis companies require all the same support systems as other traditional businesses and, in many cases, even more. And if you can’t find your career path in a leaf touching cannabis company, I assure you that there’s an ancillary company that needs you. There are cannabis-focused insurance companies, banks, brand marketing companies, software companies, data science companies, and the list goes on. This industry needs your skills.” — Sparky Rose

Rose explained to Kirkland of Chicago NORML how teachers have transferable skills. “Education is a huge deal in cannabis because, as this is coming from someone in brand marketing, typically in regulated states there are limits as far as what you can do as far as marketing goes.” Rose said the ability to advertise is unavailable, but “one thing you can do, almost with impunity, is put out messages educational to the public or sponsor educational programs. It is a great brand building exercise to use education to get your message out.” People with a teaching background could create and perform internal training as well as write standard operating procedures, which Rose describes as “integral” to the operation of expanding cannabis companies because rule compliance is a “big deal” in the industry.

“I can’t stress the importance [of compliance] in the cannabis space. It is your

life blood. It is your life. You could lose your license and you are done for good.”

— Sparky Rose

In the interview, the frustration of younger Chicago NORML members was shared. Employers in general seem to want multiple degrees, certifications and many years of experience. Rose was asked if the cannabis industry was the same. The marijuana legend stated; “It is real interesting what is happening with cannabis. It really depends on what level position you are talking about l If you are talking about a patient care representative, bud tender, or frontline retail position, they are not looking for people with degrees or any such thing.

As a matter of fact I would caution anyone in the dispensary space not to hire based on their knowledge of cannabis. That is really the least important thing for a retail hire out of everything you have to consider. You want someone who is reliable. You want someone who is personable and you want someone who is empathetic, someone who can connect with the consumer and can have a pleasant discussion. I can teach you everything you need to know about cannabis.

I can teach you not to be a jerk, and if you are a jerk that’s not going to help me no matter how much you know about cannaibs. So on your lesser skilled positions, it is probably more about character than it is about competence. When you start talking about higher level positions, management positions and otherwise, …it is still really hard to find lots of people with lots of cannabis experience. The legal cannabis industry ostensibly started in 1996 with the passage of proposition 215 in California but really didn’t get rolling until Colorado passed adult use,” which occurred in 2012. “No we can really talk about multi-state operators and things like that.”

— Sparky Rose

Rose observed that today in the higher level positions such as for top marketing, sales, finance, and human resource roles, “there are so many people in regular industries who really want to jump on the cannabis train that you find executives from giant alcohol corporations like Diageo or Bacardi, and folks from Pepsi and folks from Apple all willing to take huge pay cuts to get in the cannabis space.

They are bringing all their huge amounts of expertise outside of cannabis using that to kind of get in because they can afford not to take so much money. They will take stock, which is what they really want anyway. You are finding a lot of extremely qualified folks as far as the general subject matter of what they do for a career and taking big pay cuts to come into cannabis.

Now that the cannabis stocks have been devastated, they are probably a little less eager to jump ship, but it was a problem before because if you were someone very skilled with cannabis experience you were getting some very, very, very senior people coming from very well-known companies that you just can’t compete with the name recognition, especially if they are publicly traded”.

Industry knowledge was stressed. Another key mentioned was networking, and Sparky Rose said,

“There are some great networking opportunities here in Illinois.”

Rose said, “The key to getting in is I think understanding the industry, getting an understanding of how it works, and really showing how you understand what it is you do and being honest and saying ‘I don’t know everything there is to know about cannabis I don’t know a whole lot about cannabis but I got a voracious appetite for learning and here are the things I have been doing’.” Rose suggested those interested in the industry go to places like Green Flower, which offers online educational resources.

“People hire people and I hire people more than I hire qualifications at the end of the day.”

— Sparky Rose

Finally, with so many job experiences in the cannabis industry over the years, Rose

has some advice for people who applied for a dispensary license but did not get one.

“When it comes to entering the [cannabis job] marketplace, you don’t have to really do anything, …having gone through the licensing process.” He assumes the applicants were “very hands on, either help author or at least most certainly read through each and every exhibit that you submitted.
If you helped write it, chances are you read the CRTA (Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act) so many times it is going to drive you crazy. I mean I can kind of recite it in my sleep. Having that much knowledge about the law and what it is to be compliant, what you can and can’t do, etc. [is] a …huge leg up in any position you may want to apply for here in Illinois.
‘Hey, I know the regulations like the back of my hand. I know exactly how those regulations pertain to the type of position I am applying for . Let me count the ways 1-2-3-4-5.’
Any operator in this state, or any state for that matter, you come in and you are able to quote the law and the legislation I am going to take a hard, hard look at you because again compliance and remaining compliant is so unbelievably important in this business. It’s almost as important as having capital.
If I know that I have someone who is going to do job A but also can be a resource to make sure that the people around them also remain compliant when there is a question about compliance so what do we do and I know this person is really, really knowledgeable that’s gravy, that’s what you want.
You want compliance evangelists within your organization reminding everybody how important it is to be compliant, making sure people stay compliant. I think if you have gone through the process, you’re way better off already to show, start talking to folks.”

— Sparky Rose

Watch the full interview with Kyrie Kirkland and Sparky Rose on Chicago NORML’s YouTube channel

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