Brett Puffenbarger: The Future of Cannabis Will Look Like This… and Yes, It Will Shock You

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Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields. With me, as always, is Kellen Finney. And this week we've got a very special guest — Brett Puffenbarger. Sorry, Brett, it's been a long day. How are you doing today, Brett? Brett Puffenbarger: Puffenbarger. I'm doing great. Bryan Fields: Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen Finney: I'm doing really well, excited to hold the West Coast down. I think we were chatting earlier — Brett was born and raised in a small town in Virginia, tried and true to East Coast loyalty, right, Brett? How are you, Bryan? Bryan Fields: I love it, I love it. We're not even going to try to answer that question. Thanks for giving in. And Brett, thank you so much for solidifying that East Coast allegiance. So, Brett, for our listeners — I'm familiar, but can you give a quick background about yourself and how you found your way to the cannabis space? Brett Puffenbarger: East Coast, beast coast! Brett Puffenbarger: Oh yeah, that's an easy one. Born and raised in a small town in Virginia — had to get the hell out as soon as I could. Joined the military, didn't really know what I was getting into, joined the Marine Corps, did a couple of deployments, got out. Lived a normal life until one day an ex-girlfriend — long ago — told me I was being a jerk and that I should smoke weed, because she'd seen on the news that veterans did well smoking it. So I did. It just so happened to be right around the time Florida was legalizing, maybe a year before. I was working almost a decade at Harley-Davidson in business development there, and I sold the founder of one of the original MSOs in Florida a motorcycle. Got fired for failing a piss test at Harley, called him up and said, "Hey, I was good enough to sell you a motorcycle — can I sell some weed for you?" So my first weed job was at an MSO, me and a guy from Disney figuring out retail rollouts. The rest is kind of history, I guess. Bryan Fields: I love it. First off, there's not a better sales pitch than closing a successful sale and then telling the person, "Listen, I can do this — let's get started." So those early days, give us just a glimpse into what your role was there and how different the industry was from where it is today. Brett Puffenbarger: So it's actually kind of crazy. I came in a little later than a lot of people, but still decently early — probably around 2016. Back then it wasn't the Florida we know now. It was actually kind of chaotic, in that all of the license holders were beholden to their application process, not necessarily the law, because that's how they worked it at the time. We weren't competitive — I was calling the people at what would become Curaleaf, calling the people at what would become Trulieve, saying, "Hey, what did you guys put for question E on this city form? How did you get a store open?" That kind of thing. So mostly it was building out retail footprint. Coming from Harley, a lot of people don't realize they make more money selling t-shirts, leather jackets, and the brand — apparel and physical goods — than they do actual motorcycles. That was something I was passionate about. Pair me with a guy from Disney who's a god of branding and retail and squeezing every penny you can, and it was a pretty natural fit. The weird part, though — fun little feather in the cap — we got the first dispensary open in the whole state. I was like, "Woo, go us, we beat Trulieve by like 18 hours." Literally, they opened the next day and we're like, "Yeah, we win, we're gonna crush it." I mean, we see how that goes, right — they're kind of titans now. But it was super weird at the time: we couldn't sell high-THC product over the counter, we had to deliver it. So we had this whole thing where it was like, "Hey, nice lady with ALS or MS, I'm going to meet you across the street after you pay me, and then come over there, because I can't do it here." It was so weird. I guess it's not any different than it is now — lots of weird laws making you do lots of weird stuff. Bryan Fields: I love it. Well, my next question — starting this role, there probably wasn't much of a playbook, probably a lot figured out on your own. Was there childhood stuff, entrepreneurially, where you were always kind of focused on those elements? The more we've dug into this from a cannabis-entrepreneur standpoint, there are signs early on that individuals were thriving here, and I definitely consider you one of the people pushing the industry forward. Did you do certain things in your childhood, entrepreneurially, that set you up to problem-solve along the way? Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, so growing up in small-town Virginia, my mom owned a flower shop for 35 years. My very first job was making boutonnieres and corsages in the back — all hands on deck, the whole family there for any major holiday, because that's when you make your money. I got kind of entrepreneurial in the weed sense in high school. I have a cousin who lives up close to DC, a year and a half younger than me. I started buying cheap dirt weed at rural prices and driving my happy ass up to DC to sell it to all her rich, trust-fund-baby friends. So I guess that counts. But honestly, I am and will probably forever be the reluctant entrepreneur. Between the military building in that structure and drive — I personally seek a mission, not a job, not a career, a mission, because that's what the military built into me. You must believe in it more than anything else. So working for other people is consistently a struggle for me, because I want that mission, and I'll buy into somebody else's mission, but you don't control that. For me, it's a balancing act, and I've found a sweet spot doing the fractional and contract-executive thing. It's not to say I wouldn't love to find a full-time home — that would be dope if the perfect thing came along — it's just damn near impossible. And candidly, I've become specialized in the B2B cannabis world. I could do B2C all day, direct-to-consumer, all that stuff, but for me, the mission became growing the number of people I can help. Working at a dispensary or a processor, you can only help the people in your network. But if you go into B2B, now you're helping companies who help people, and you're helping them grow. That, for me, is the driving force — how do I help the most people I can? That's helping businesses attract other businesses, because that's where the real proliferation comes from. Kellen Finney: What do you think some cannabis businesses right now are lacking from that perspective, in terms of like— Brett Puffenbarger: Structure, structure, structure, structure. I think a lot of people like to make the excuse of, "Oh, it's cannabis, it's hard. How do we measure it? How do we forecast?" instead of doing it the same way every other business does. I'm the first to accept that all of cannabis is playing on hard mode. I'll never forget this meme of a toilet seat with a piece of cardboard on it and a little hole cut out, captioned "this is expert mode." That's what cannabis is like. It doesn't mean it's impossible, it means you have to work harder, be more on top of it. And I think the issue is, number one, I don't believe there's any such thing as a cannabis industry — I think that's a misnomer. There are 39 of them, or 40 of them, or however many states there are, plus the hemp market — that's how many cannabis industries there are, because they're all siloed, all different. So yeah, it's hard mode, but you have to accept that off the rip, plan for it, measure, and do all the things a normal business does, in spades. I think that's what most cannabis businesses are lacking — either the structure, or the true self-assessment and self-awareness that they need to be playing for keeps, especially with 39 different markets. There's a lot of success despite themselves that happens in cannabis. We're constantly in a boom and a bust, and you see it every day on LinkedIn and social media — "this market's popping off, this one isn't, let's diversify into that one." It's easy to chase the cash. It's hard to survive long term in these various markets. A lot of people are lacking that — they don't do the hard self-assessment when it gets hard, and they don't know how to measure what's working and what's not in order to survive it. Bryan Fields: I think that's so perfectly articulated, and such an incredibly challenging dilemma that we see time and time again — these companies are growing, but they know internally there are challenges they're trying to figure out. They assess some KPI internally, but maybe that KPI isn't accurately tracking the information they need, and there's a disconnect between different parts of the supply chain — the revenue side, the inventory and sales side, versus manufacturing — and things just aren't aligned. From a structure standpoint, does that require an internal champion, an executive, to push that through the organization and say, "I understand this isn't the way we were doing it, but going forward we need to track every input and every detail so we have visibility into exactly how we're doing"? Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, I mean, I think that's where a strong COO comes into play. But more importantly, in my world, it's very easy to say, "Wow, fractional CMO" — I think that title is dying. I don't think there are going to be a lot of CMOs anymore. I think there are going to be a lot of CROs or CGOs — Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Growth Officer — because one of the things people screw up the most, at least within my level of expertise, is marketing and sales butting heads, or marketing and sales doing great but not retaining customers — that whole lifetime-value cycle. I think a strong CRO figure is necessary to keep the whole scoreboard in check, and then if you have a strong COO with proper demand planning and functionality, the two of you can be a partner — that trifecta, with a good CEO who helps mediate the risk between the two, is the core trifecta. You could also replace the COO with a CFO in a lot of instances — I see that a lot in cannabis companies, where it's kind of a hybrid role. Those two are key to enforcing it down; it all starts at the top. Even for the smaller cannabis companies, having those strong structures in place matters, and that's where fractional executives come in — you can't afford the whole team, so have that backstop. Even if you're a small solo operator, get good advisors or good fractional executives who can buffer your stuff. The key piece is you have to trust these people through and through — they're not coming at you to criticize or break you down, it's very much an iron-sharpens-iron thing. My favorite analogy for that: have you guys ever seen the Blue Angels debrief after they fly, where they viciously rip each other apart — "you were three inches off, Todd," whatever? I think that's really necessary, because it brings us full circle to your first question — we're playing on hard mode, so in order to survive it, take the ego out of it, take the feelings out of it. Yeah, founder, it's your baby, but a professional CRO or CFO, fractional or not, is only there to help you. Bryan Fields: I wonder if part of the reason we see this problem is that the industry tried to grow so fast, and as it was growing, people recognized there were leaks in the boat and just threw duct tape on it and kept moving — and then kept growing the size of the boat. Now they're looking back and going, "We've got a hole here, a hole here, a hole here," but they've never plugged leaks before, they only know how to grow the boat. Now it becomes this internal, reflective period, and maybe some people feel like it becomes an attack, but what you're saying is perfectly spot-on — it's not an ego attack. We recognize that historically you were growing, and that's what you needed to do. But today the environmental conditions have changed, and we need to figure out how to sustain and plug all the holes. That means turning over every rock, looking through everything, and figuring out if there's anything we can be doing better today. Because at the end of the day, that's really what you need to do to survive. Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, and it goes to the sunk cost fallacy, right? A lot of people fall into the trap of, "Well, we've invested in this direction." But the second you stop is the second you stop wasting money. The second you stop band-aiding and band-aiding and band-aiding — though I do think there's merit to larger triage band-aids, a gauze versus a true band-aid, for temporary things. I won't say who, but a recent client had a huge amount of historical issues and band-aids in place, and it kind of just became a ball of band-aids. We didn't take them all the way to the studs — we brought them down to a big triage, which let us get good-enough, not perfect, tracking and consistency in the numbers, enough to actually allow more advanced business functions like forecasting. And then you can work toward the full-time solution. I think that's a big problem a lot of companies have — they see it as an either-or situation: either take it to the studs and start over, which is a huge risk, or just keep throwing band-aids at it. There's middle ground for a lot of this. I think that's another piece cannabis companies should be more open to — you don't have to make big transitions overnight. That's where advisors and certain people can come in, where you make a hard shift, get the ship righted, and then replace that person with a full-time hire. That kind of goes back to what cannabis companies need: core, high-output, very specific people. Kellen Finney: Do you think a lot of these issues stem from an identity crisis, right? Early on it was, "Oh, it's going to be like the pharma industry." "No, it's going to be like the alcohol industry." "No, it's going to be like the tobacco industry." "Oh, it's just another CPG." So building those different businesses — those businesses are very different — and you couple that with the fact that it's also an agricultural business feeding all of those different potential business structures. So do you think that's a root cause of a lot of these, quote-unquote, band-aids? Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, it definitely is, and I think there's also this misconception that cannabis is entirely unique. Like, yeah, it is, but it also isn't. The most appropriate analogy is we don't need to reinvent the wheel — we need to put the best pieces together from different wheels. My talk on alcohol is typically around opt-in versus opt-out subcultures. Alcohol went through 84 years of post-Prohibition changes before we got to the craft beer explosion we see now, and that changed drastically. You can make correlations to forced vertical integration, regulatory capture — some of what we saw on the East Coast with reactionary legalization after West Coast free-for-all legalization. But then we overcorrected and ended up with something like Oklahoma, a total chaos free-for-all. Likewise with agricultural processing — I'm going to go out on a limb here and just say it: I think the future of cannabis is going to look like the milk industry. I think people find that weird until you break it down. Think about how milk is bought — if you go to your local store, you're buying from a variety of brands that all got delivered by the same truck from the same central processing facility, where they pasteurized and did all the things that require high lift and steady, medium profits. All that milk came from a variety of craft farms — it's not all large-scale industrial agriculture, there's big ones and small ones — but it becomes this hourglass-shaped world where a variety of business models funnel into it, the high-capital, difficult-science side gets consolidated, and then it gets repackaged and rebranded. Generally, if you pull the milk out of the grocery-store case right now, you could pull three or four different brands that all came from the same place. Batteries are another example — did you know there are only three battery plants in the entire United States? All your Energizers and Duracells are the exact same battery, they just have different plastic on them. It's a silly thing, but I think that's the direction cannabis goes if and when we get to federal legalization. That draws to a secondary piece: I don't know that I think the MSOs are trying to survive long-term. I think a lot of them are trying to cash grab on forced vertical integration and regulatory capture — everybody's playing the same game. They know what they're doing, and if you look at the executive comp structures, they have pretty hefty golden-parachute clauses, exit strategies, and phantom equity. I think most of them know federal legalization looks like milk, whether they want to call it milk or use fancier language and justify it in some way that their post-alcohol, CPG-executive world drives them to. But a lot of these companies aren't intentionally set up for longevity — they're intentionally set up for this current moment. My last point on that: we all act like this is a super-established, mature industry, but we're still in the first inning — probably the first couple of pitches of the first inning. When international cracks off, when traditional commodification begins, we eventually become CPG plus culture. You see the ebb and flow of which licensing types or business models are successful — first it was the MSOs, the first very successful money grab. Then it became the asset-light brands — the Cookies of the world did that. Now the successful business model you see is the asset-light launch brand: the distressed assets of failed operators are getting scooped up by large conglomerates who aren't branding anything themselves — they're literally building themselves to be launch vehicles for asset-light brands. That's an interesting shift in dynamics at play here too. Bryan Fields: I'm going to unpack all that — definitely want to get to the most-impactful-book section, but I've got to start with the milk analogy, there's a lot to go through. Based on that analogy, are you envisioning specialization as the key separator — meaning a vertically integrated company should focus on one part of the supply chain and do it better than anyone else, saying "this is where we're going to survive and excel," doubling down on extraction, or doubling down on cultivation, to prime the protectionary measures from a strategic standpoint of, "We do this better than anyone else, and that's how we know we can continue to fight and survive"? Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, by and large. I think specialization becomes the future. You really have three or four niches you can niche down on: are you the best at growing it, the best at extracting, manufacturing, and packaging it, the best at selling it, or the best at branding it? Those are kind of the three or four that any traditional industry works in. One of my favorite examples: Kraft Foods is the largest seller of cheese in the United States. They own zero farms, very minimal processing, a ton of packaging facilities, and a lot of marketing — they know what they're doing. So it depends — do you want to be the grocery store that carries the weed? That's even questionable. I heard the CEO of Total Wine talking about how, since they started carrying hemp beverages, they've seen a 33% increase in foot traffic — people like me who don't traditionally consume alcohol much, don't ever go into liquor stores, seeking readily available access without a medical card or jumping through hoops. That tells me retail probably isn't the niche you should go down — those products are going to start moving into traditional formats, maybe something like the GTI-Circle K play. So for me, it's: can you cultivate well at scale, or can you develop a unique craft presence at some level of scale? If I had a magic wand and a ton of money to spend, I'd be buying extraction facilities. It's the most stable aspect of cannabis in a lot of ways — kind of like selling picks and shovels. Gold Rush 1849, the only brands still floating around are Levi's and Walmart — that's their origin story. That's where the stability always is. There's always going to be people wanting to process into other things — it's always going to be capital-intensive, difficult to do, requiring specialization. I think that stays the most stable no matter how much other chaos is going on. Kellen Finney: Do you think that also draws a line in the sand? Hemp beverages are a specific product SKU where humans control every input from an ingredient perspective — there's no plant variability, you know the exact concentration of cannabinoids, it can be regulated. That kind of creates a line where the traditional CPG packaging, a couple of factories across the United States, hub-and-spoke model, can apply. But if you're a company that grows fire flower, that whole business strategy and marketing conversation isn't even on the table, because the amount of regulatory change needed — in my mind at least — is a cliff that has to be climbed to allow cannabis to cross state lines at a federal level and support a hub-and-spoke model at this point. There are a lot of dominoes that need to fall at the federal level. It's not impossible, but it would be wild. Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, it would be crazy. I will say I don't know that hemp beverages are as cool as we think they are — not a business-model thing, I think it's great — but the issue of scalping in cannabis and hemp beverage cans is a lot bigger than we want to talk about. If you look at some recent test results or studies, they don't have great shelf lives. If the product's moving quickly, you're going to get what it says on the can — it's consistent. But if it sits for a couple of months, more like a soda would, I think we're going to start seeing a real issue. It comes down to the emulsion process in hemp and cannabis beverages generally. A traditional can like this one — look, I drink soda— Bryan Fields: Not sponsored. Brett Puffenbarger: —has a plastic liner in it. The difference between hygroscopic and hydrophobic, between fat-soluble and lipid-soluble — cannabinoids, terpenes, and other volatile organic compounds are very different from water. The problem is that in most canned beverages, weed sticks to the plastic — it doesn't like to get away from it — whereas the beverage part, the liquids and traditional flavors, don't stick to the plastic. I personally hope to see a lot more Tetra Pak-style Delta-9 beverages, where we can control both of those aspects and hopefully prevent the scalping issue if we're going to go down that path. Bryan Fields: Great point. This beverage category has exploded, and with it come new manufacturing challenges, and the brands navigating this are having to do — maybe this is a bad comparison — but kind of early-cannabis-company stuff, growing at all costs, "whatever we can do, just go, go, go, go, go." I wonder if they're on the same trajectory, where they're going to have to figure out how to tighten up the leaks and make these improvements and investments — the same hill, from an industry-advancement standpoint. Kellen Finney: It's also a safety net though, right? Because all those issues can eventually be solved, but it also means Coca-Cola can't just turn their bottling line and existing infrastructure right into this and take market share. So there's some safety in that problem too, in terms of, if you solve it— Bryan Fields: They've probably talked about it, though. Brett Puffenbarger: You know who uses Tetra Paks— Kellen Finney: Watch out, Kroger, they're coming! Bryan Fields: So, to think that we're angling now — Coca-Cola's not coming, the milk industry is coming. I love it — they're going to be like, "Who are these guys?" These are the milk boys. I want to go back to the Total Wine thing, hearing him speak about that. Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, the TG Lee plant in Orlando is coming for your jobs. The milk guys are here. Bryan Fields: He doesn't want that to ever stop, if they're getting an increase in foot traffic — this is just the beginning of what he envisions as a future rollout. The challenge becomes that the genie's out, and these guys are big players who are going to want more access, more brands, more distribution. Now you're inviting the big fish to come — big alcohol is like, "This is the part of the industry we want." I wonder how that works with the cannabis industry, because it eventually has to get molded together in some capacity — different categories, but how does it all work together. I wonder if the big players then go, "Okay, this is how we foresee it going," and start lobbying on behalf of the industry. I have no idea, just trying to think it through in real time — it's so complicated, so many moving pieces, so many challenges, endless setups. And it's kind of— Brett Puffenbarger: They already are. Bryan Fields: —like, ride the wave while you can, figure out how you go, and then put the pieces of the puzzle back together. Brett Puffenbarger: I think there are a couple of interesting companies that have jumped into cannabis for a test run — Pabst Labs exists, Mary Jones Soda — a couple of the medium-to-large established brands have tried to play in it. But if I were the big, big kids — the Coca-Colas, the Pepsis, the Nestlés of the world — I'd be looking for somebody talking about the whole unsustainable, vertical-integration model, because if you're smart, you'll let their businesses fall apart on their own. I wouldn't be looking to buy the MSOs, like most MSOs think a Coca-Cola executive would. And when I say MSO, I don't just mean general multi-state operators, not even really tier-two MSOs — I mean the large pubcos wouldn't be my target at all. I'd be buying the distressed assets, waiting for them to fall apart upon federal legalization. A good example is Curaleaf's failed play to come out West — I appreciate what they've done in East Coast cannabis, but they got a little too big for their britches, tried to play in a very different, horizontal market, and got pushed out. They had to eventually cut their losses, and I don't see the posturing from them that you'd expect from learning that lesson — they more just licked their wounds and came back to where everybody's playing, the forced-vertical-integration, regulatory-capture model. To me, if I were the Coca-Cola executive, that would be a huge sign of the times to come — I'd say, "Okay, I'll just let you guys sit there for a little bit," because they don't measure time the way we do. Five years, for a company like that, is nothing — but eventually it just falls apart. Bryan Fields: It's better, right? From their standpoint, they're not thinking five years, they're thinking 50, 100, 200 years down the road, because for their expansion into new revenue streams, they recognize it takes capital to invest in these areas, and sometimes that means long-term investments for long-term gains. Brett Puffenbarger: I also think it's important to note that the entire regulated cannabis industry is like one month on the balance sheet for Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, BlackRock, Vanguard — the large, large players. Our whole industry is a blip on their stock portfolio. We act like we're big and bad, but that's where I get to the international cannabis play — I think that gets very interesting. Somebody I know once told me cannabis doesn't really start until the summer of 2028, and I was like, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Dude, that's the Olympics coming to LA — the international community is going to see what a society with legal weed looks like, up in their face. Imagine what they start learning from that." If you pair that with the European model stuff that's popping off — Thailand, a couple of others — we haven't even started. The second inning starts in the summer of 2028, and that's where the big money is. The United States and Canada combined are about 400 million people — that's a third of India, a third of China, that's nothing. The entire population of the United States could fit inside the Buenos Aires, Brazil metro area. I don't think most cannabis players are thinking big enough yet. But it's also too early to jump into that in a lot of ways. Kellen Finney: From an infrastructure standpoint then, if you're a company, how do you balance building a factory that's like, "Hey, I only have this small state to supply," but also, like Brett says, you need to be prepared to sell to billions of people? You can't build like— Brett Puffenbarger: —up your revenue stream, I wouldn't do that. You've got to niche down and be the number-one player in your market, then fix the next one, then pick the next one. That's kind of why I chose B2B — I want to be farther up the value stream, so you can play with that: terpene suppliers, extraction equipment companies, banking software — those are all the things I like to play in, in that B2B environment, because then— Bryan Fields: How do I prepare to be the milk man? Brett Puffenbarger: —you're prepared for it. It doesn't matter where the mole pops up — we can target it with a very specific go-to-market strategy that fits into the larger go-to-market bubble. That's again where my world comes in. But if we're talking cannabis companies that are B2C, you've got to own one market and one niche, and then either go the asset-light play, where you're planning on licensing, looking for those launch ramps. These guys are one of my all-time favorites — not a client, not affiliated in any way — Fish Whistle Cannabis. For them, they niched down, picked one thing. Do you guys know what a fish whistle is? It's a joint — it's what fishing people call a joint. "Start up the fish whistle, get on your boat, smoke the joint." They picked one niche— Bryan Fields: You want to read that out loud — the audio's bad. Brett Puffenbarger: —dudes who like fishing and outdoor stuff, it looks like an outdoor-company hat, it does all the things it's supposed to do — niche down, own that one niche, and then you can live forever. If you look at all the different traditional consumer packaged goods, that's what happens — there's the soccer-mom lipstick, the party-girl lipstick, this niche and this niche and this niche, and it goes into basic marketing theory, any go-to-market strategy theory of picking a unique differentiator in a niche, owning the hell out of it, and growing sustainably, measuring it one step at a time. You either move to the next slightly larger niche or the next slightly larger market. Bryan Fields: That makes total sense from a B2C standpoint. For B2B, exactly like you were saying — how do companies handling some of those technology elements separate themselves and develop the trust necessary to get an industry that's already very skeptical to start applying these concepts to their work, when they have the ego involved, they're dealing with all these fires, they're trying to figure out who they are, and they're trying to set themselves up for a future of milk success? Brett Puffenbarger: I think number one is problem-first language — you have to address people where they are. One of my favorite marketing lines is: we want to talk about the solution to their itch, not our scratch. It sounds a little kitschy, but it's the truth. Cannabis companies, B2C or B2B, all kind of have the same base issues — which of those issues are you solving, which part of that problem set are you solving, and then how do I make your life better? That's the long and short of it. I think most cannabis companies will give you the time of day if you're truly talking about their problems. Then it comes down to: did you measure it properly, did you follow up enough, did you convince them of it — basic sales theory. I think a lot of B2B cannabis companies lack a strong sense of the close. One of my favorite things to talk about — I've made the joke about it a little — is, "If I had a magic wand, what would the perfect solution look like for you? Great, let me tell you how we stack up against your perfect. We're 80% there. What if I could do this — what would it take to earn your business today?" The truth is, new startups happen all the time and disrupt easily, and most of them, you're either super novel or you just crush the follow-up. Bryan Fields: You do see tons of opportunities, still recognizing we're early in the first— Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's an innumerable amount of opportunity, either to service new consumers on the B2C side or to service new cannabis companies. Going back to the gold-rush analogy — nine out of ten people going out there were going to fail, they were never going to get the gold. But every single one of them needed picks, shovels, flashlights, and Levi's jeans to protect themselves, and so on. There's never going to be a shortage of people trying to get into cannabis, so as long as you can service those people, you're golden — just like there's never going to be a shortage of people who want to try weed for the first time in some format. One of the most novel weed products I can think of: weed inhalers. Have you guys seen those? I am the target market for that — I want to walk around Disney World like I have the worst asthma on the planet, and that's great. I think that's such a novel concept — it goes back to what we started with earlier: we buy the excuses, we buy the BS. I think innovation, novelty, and solving problems is just beginning. Bryan Fields: I love that, because the industry is loaded and it's super, super hard, but hard is opportunity, right? If you can figure out the niche and the value proposition that fits that pain point, you've solved a big problem, and the industry has endless amounts of those, which primes it for the right entrepreneurs to come in. So is there a few areas, for the entrepreneurs listening, where you'd say, "If you wanted to come into the industry and start something, here are three ideas — the biggest problems I see most people facing"? Brett Puffenbarger: Talking B2B or B2C? Okay, so B2B — I think number one is helping businesses track their business better, and I don't mean the traditional point-of-sale stuff, and I don't mean the track-and-trace stuff. I mean actually understanding loyalty programs in a more traditional way. I love a lot of that stuff that exists in cannabis, but let's be real, that software was purpose-built for cannabis, and we're at a place now where we can ask, can we take what the big kids do and apply it here? I think that's huge in B2B land. For B2C, I think it comes down to finding a niche that isn't represented. We still kind of live in this world where men 18 to 45 are the primary market, and the only other two you hear about are geriatrics and soccer moms. There's an innumerable number of niches that exist — where's the brand for sneakerheads, where's the brand for people who love video games, where's the brand for insert-thing-here? The beauty of cannabis is that it isn't necessarily tied to any given culture or movement. It's amorphous, which brings me to the whole idea of cannabis as a concept, not as a product — as a talking point or societal concept, it's on a huge shift. We used to be what's called an opt-in subculture, meaning I have to overcome social stigma to choose to be part of it — like skateboarding, or punk rock, or all the things your mom told you not to do that you did anyway, like being an emo kid when I was in high school. Those are opt-in subcultures. We're now moving toward what we hope becomes an opt-out subculture — something like being an iPhone user, or consuming alcohol at bars in your twenties or thirties, where I have to intentionally opt out of a known subculture that exists, because nobody behaves the way they do in a bar all the time, but you know that's how you behave when you go there. Cannabis is in a very weird spot culturally with that — it depends on where you are, who you are, how you're interacting, your social circle. Sometimes you're the weirdo if you don't smoke weed; flip that in other social circles or regions of the country or world, and it's "that's the devil's lettuce, this is terrible." I don't think we as a movement or a community do a great job of acknowledging the variety of opinions that exist on cannabis. We look for positive signals like "92% of Americans support some level of cannabis legalization" — great, but 85% of those don't agree on how or what. There are tons of people who want legal cannabis but don't want to smell it every time they walk down the street — that's not me, I don't care, but you get where I'm going. There's such a variety in what it means to be a cannabis consumer that you can pair almost any demographic or psychographic interest group with a form factor of weed and own that. Bryan Fields: A lot of that is understanding the true consumer and then meeting them where they are. Brett Puffenbarger: Yeah, I mean, that's Business 101, B2B or B2C — understand the niche, understand the problem, meet them where they are. One of my favorite business quotes is from a guy named Rob McPherson, who basically retired from Bacardi and then became this big meanie-head on LinkedIn, telling cannabis everything it did wrong. The smartest thing he ever said, and I still think it's brilliant, is: every business has one purpose — to delight your customer. How do you delight your customer? Sell them something they want, at the price they want, in the location they want, and make sure it's the same every time. That is Business 101. Kellen Finney: Simple. Bryan Fields: Would you say so? Kellen Finney: I said simple. Yeah, no. Brett Puffenbarger: That's simple, not easy, right? Simple, not easy. Bryan Fields: That's the beautiful part about business — some of the core aspects of it are simple. To run a successful business, you need to make more than it costs you to run the business. You need to track your numbers. You need to be consistent with your product. You need to understand your consumers. I think that's part of the guidance of where cannabis has the opportunity to improve — growth has been the full focus, and now it's, "All right, let's lock it down, let's figure out where we are, and let's specialize" — whether that's consumer demographics, honoring the B2C side. The milk thing is super fascinating, I want to go back to it one last time, it's still percolating in my brain. So if I'm a B2C customer, or I'm a brand, what can I do to position myself if the industry moves toward the milk model? Brett Puffenbarger: Same answer — niche down, find your niche and own the hell out of it. It's kind of what we were talking about in the green room before we started — what do you do, make it obvious what I do, who I do it for, and why I do it. What's the message we want to convey? Most of us don't really think about how we participate in the social contract of branding — "oh, I wear this brand t-shirt." We fall for that kind of marketing all the time. Great example — this looks like a nothing shirt, absolutely nothing shirt. It's a brand called True Classic, and I bought hard into the marketing where they said, "Hey, chubby guys, it'll make your man boobs look smaller, it'll make you look more svelte." And I'm like, "That's exactly what I need — I need a basic t-shirt that makes me look slimmer than I am," I want that. It's that simple. Nobody thinks, "I want to own the t-shirt game," nobody thinks like that. Same thing with shoes — Hoka is a great example, they started with a very specific niche group and grew it. The same thing applies to cannabis — become what people think signals some level of status, and it doesn't have to be high-fashion status, but we all subtly communicate through the way we wear our hat, the pants we wear, the shirts we wear, the things we hold, the car we drive — each one is a subtle social signal within the social contract of the country, or the world. Pick one and become that thing, insert-X-interest-with-cannabis, that's how you win. Because eventually, when the big guys we were talking about earlier come knocking, they're going to go house-of-brands, not brand-house. Brand-house is what Disney does — Disney Pixar, Disney Star Wars, Disney Marvel, everything branded Disney. Versus what something like Kraft Foods or Nestlé, some of these larger conglomerates, do — where you don't even realize the milk-replacement drink is made by the same company that's making the cookies you're eating with it, and the same people who made the plate it's sitting on, capturing different aspects of the value. So if you're a B2C company planning for this inevitable future, become that thing they need to have — "I need to scoop this one up to attract this niche" — because eventually the people who think broadly, who are looking at the whole pie, are going to want to capture as much of the total addressable market as possible. Niching down lets you own one small lane and become one piece of the larger pie when that eventually comes. It's also guaranteed cash flow — yes, you're giving up a certain amount of total addressable market, but you're going deep, not wide. I think that's a problem a lot of B2C cannabis companies have — they want to go very wide, capture the most total addressable market, mostly because they think that's how they get more money and investment. I think that's a misconception within the broader VC and private-equity world. Going deep is amazing — if you can capture 60 or 80% of market share, even in a single market, and then move to the next little niche, some adjacent niche — fishing people and hunting people overlap, so now that I've crushed being the fishing-and-weed brand, how do I become the hunting-and-weed brand, or the cowboys-and-weed brand? I think you get where I'm going with that — that's the answer. Bryan Fields: That's a great way to describe it. The first thing I thought of was Wyld moving from edibles into the beverage category — they've got the trust of the consumer, the brand recognition, and you walk in and there's a bunch of brands you don't know, but you know that one. I wonder, from a TAM standpoint, that's just a sexy metric, and the bigger that number is, the more enticing it is for investors. But you're right — having a better understanding of customer acquisition cost, and then figuring out how to increase lifetime spend for those customers, matters, because you spend so much money to acquire them that getting them to repeat may be more important than getting them the first time. Depends on how you're moving forward. So let's hard-pivot here — one year from now, what has changed? Brett Puffenbarger: In cannabis? I think we'll hopefully be mostly past the hemp-versus-cannabis conversation, and more into being one larger movement that has to work together. The writing's on the wall — a lot of the big players are starting to jump into the Delta-9 beverage space or the gas-station play. If I had to go pie-in-the-sky, I hope we get safer banking and some level of access. I just saw, two or three days ago, the first crack at a bipartisan bill — I think it's Representatives Nancy Mace and Ilhan Omar, despite their public dislike of each other, both agreeing on this one specific rule: that the National Drug Control Policy advisor to the president isn't allowed to take a stance on Schedule I drugs. The person currently in that job is pro-cannabis but legally isn't allowed to talk about it now that they have the role, and there are some funding restrictions too — it's kind of the reverse of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which barred spending money on researching a Schedule I drug. This small, niche coalition of politicians is really pushing that, because at the end of the day, we could theoretically get legal weed without Congress, without any of that — it could come from the FDA, some of those agencies. And love him or hate him, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has by and large been pro-cannabis as well, but also legally prevented from really talking about it in a measurable way right now, outside the officially sanctioned FDA discovery process with the DEA and everybody else. I don't think it gets us there overnight — it's not a magic wand, tada, it's legal — but it would be really great if we could actually have candid conversations with politicians who have real influence. That little tiny blip in the news has given me hope for that. Bryan Fields: I love it. Most impactful book? Brett Puffenbarger: For me personally, it's Venture Deals — two venture capitalists and their lawyer decided to give everybody the playbook for how they do it. I just find it interesting how the money side impacts the way people look at business. If it's not that, then it's Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, because who doesn't love it. That, or Alex Hormozi's $100M Leads — how to make strangers want to buy your stuff, or whatever it's called. That's another one. Bryan Fields: Dream smoking session — three people, dead or alive? Brett Puffenbarger: Oh, I have no idea. I don't really like to smoke with other people in any sort of in-depth environment like that — I like it as a by-myself thing, or a social-environment thing. But if I had to pick, I think it would be really interesting to sit down with Buzz Aldrin, Clint Eastwood — who's my third? I don't know if I have a third. I guess if we had to do it, I'd want to talk to Seth Rogen, just because he's one of the lesser weed gods. Bryan Fields: Great trio. Brett Puffenbarger: And it would be a really weird conversation. I feel like Seth Rogen and Clint Eastwood would just start arguing, and me and Buzz Aldrin would be like, "So when do we get to talk about aliens?" Forget all this. Bryan Fields: Let's skip this, let's get right to the aliens. Oh, that's got to be your first question, right? Kellen Finney: Did you really go to the moon? That would be fighting words to him, probably. Bryan Fields: What, do you think I'm a liar? Brett Puffenbarger: I like when people talk about that, like, "Oh, the moon landing's fake." I like taking it and messing with people, being like, "Oh, you think the moon's real?" Just totally throw people's lives off. Bryan Fields: Last question — what question do you wish more people asked you? Brett Puffenbarger: Honestly, I wish more people asked me about what the experience of being an autistic professional who's successful is like. I'm very fortunate because I have what's called hyperverbal autism, so I come off very normal — it doesn't mean my base processing isn't much different from the way most people process things. It's kind of a double-edged sword. In a lot of ways I appreciate that most people don't make that an aspect, they just treat me like a normal person. But I do wish, to some degree, that it was more a part of the conversation, that people truly understood that what you see isn't necessarily what's happening inside. Bryan Fields: I love it, that's a great way to end. So Brett, for our listeners who want to get in touch, want to learn more — where can they find you? Brett Puffenbarger: LinkedIn. I talk shit there every day, almost every day, usually something people don't want to talk about, or some kind of hot take or angry thing. That's the easiest way, man — drop a comment, shoot me a DM, I'm there all the time. Bryan Fields: Love it. We'll link it up. Thanks so much for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Brett Puffenbarger: Thanks, guys.