Chris Ball: Betting It All — What It Really Takes to Build a Brand With Your Name on It: Pain, Patience, and Relentless Faith

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Chris Ball: As times got tough and money got tight, you know, you kind of just want to stop the bleeding, right? You're kind of just like, "Oh man, let me just take on some money. Let me just take on a partner. Let me just, you know, somebody could help." And always at the end of it, man, me and my brother, my cousin, we would just sit down, and they would be like, "What do you want to do?" And I'm like, "You know what? As much as I want to help the situation and stop the bleeding, being an ex-athlete — collegiate athlete, pro athlete — I understand it takes a little bit of pain to get to some success. I understand adversity. Find comfort in adversity. Find comfort in being uncomfortable." Bryan Fields: What's up guys? Welcome back to an episode of the podcast. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellen Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Chris Ball, CEO of Ball Family Farms. Chris, thanks for taking the time. How you doing today? Chris Ball: I'm great, man. Thanks for having me. How you boys doing today? Bryan Fields: Excited to have you here. Kellen, how are you doing? Doing really good, grateful to talk to Chris today. Yeah, I'm stoked. I think before we get into it — before we get into all the fun stuff — Chris, can you give a quick background on yourself and how you found your way to the cannabis space? Chris Ball: Yeah, man. A little background on Chris Ball. I'm an inner-city kid from Los Angeles, California — always like to say I was born in the trap, raised in the suburbs. Grew up in a little town called West Covina, about an hour and a half east of LA. I played sports my whole life. Played six years of pro ball. Went to play at Cal, Go Bears — big Ram fan too, going to beat up San Francisco tomorrow. But I found my way into cannabis, man, at the age of 16 — that's when I got my first ounce. I'd seen it before through my stepdad. My dad was a weed smoker, had a nice little round tray underneath the couch back in the '80s, used to pull it out, roll up his reggies, his reds, remove the seeds, roll up Zig-Zags. My mom smoked cigarettes at the time — I hated the smell — but dad's cigarettes smelled better, so that's where I started getting curious. Fast forward to when I was 16, my cousin Earl, who actually works for me today, gave me my first ounce because he was the neighborhood weed guy. My entrepreneurship began right there — breaking down that first ounce and selling little dime bags. I just celebrated my 31st year in cannabis since I was 16. That's the origin story of Chris Ball in cannabis. Bryan Fields: Now take us through Ball Family Farms. What's the idea behind the name? Obviously it relates to family — why was that important, and what did you originally aspire to be? Chris Ball: The original intention of the company — there really wasn't one. I'm a Tier One social equity applicant. I had no idea what social equity was. I caught my indictment back in 2010, which qualified me for the program. In 2018 I was illegally growing again, eight years after my indictment — I'd gotten off papers and was growing in Van Nuys, selling to Prop D-compliant shops. My landlord at the time got wind of the social equity program and gave me the information. I went to a meeting at City Hall and realized it was legit. As an ex-athlete, you can't win unless you're in the game, so I filled out the application thinking I probably wouldn't get it — and a couple months later I got an email congratulating me on getting a license. Since I'm from the legacy market, I didn't want to bring in outside people, so I grabbed my family — my brother, my cousin, my sister — and started teaching them the space, saying, "I've got this license, maybe this changes the family legacy, would you guys help me?" They said yes. That was the inception. The name Ball Family Farms came from hiring family — our last name is Ball, so why not call it Ball Family Farms. Bryan Fields: What was that onboarding process like, approaching your family? Chris Ball: My younger brother Chuck was the first one I enlisted — he graduated from Cal Poly Pomona, was the straight-A student, worked in corporate America managing a call center. When I first asked him, he told me hell no, because he was there in 2010 when I got chased by the feds and watched me go to federal prison. So when I came back eight years later with a legal license, he didn't want anything to do with it. I asked my mom to help convince him. On Mother's Day, we took her to Cheesecake Factory at the Grove, I kicked her under the table, and she said, "Chuck, your brother says you don't want to help him." He said Chris was lying, there's no way he got a legal license as a felon. She twisted his arm — told him to look at the paperwork, do the research, and if he still didn't want to help, fine, but give his brother a shot. He did, found out it was legit, and the rest is history. Nothing beats mom's influence — she came off the top rope with that elbow and said, "Go help your brother." Bryan Fields: Early on there's no playbook — you're figuring out growing, licensing, permits. Chris Ball: It was gruesome, bro. For the first two years I didn't know anything. I went down to Building and Safety and stood there for three hours not knowing which line to get in. It was a mess. Eventually one of my old contractors — the guy who'd built my illegal stuff — put me in touch with a woman named Ebony Anderson, who's still my COO today. He said I needed someone who worked for the city to help navigate this. I offered her a percentage of the company since I didn't have cash to pay her — I needed all the money to build. It all worked out; she's the one who got us across the finish line with the licensing, the MEP permits, all of it. Bryan Fields: Fast forward — plants are in the ground and growing. Then you have to figure out branding and marketing. Take us through that, including the names you kicked around. Chris Ball: When I first came up with the name, it was going to be "Ball Marijuana Family" — until I realized the abbreviation was BMF. I didn't want any smoke with that, so we went with BFF, which had a double meaning: Ball Family Farms, and "weed's my BFF." For the logo, my ex-girlfriend Franchesca Sele and her partner Jasmine had a creative company called JNF — since she was my ex, I got the marketing advice basically for free. They hired the graphic designer and shot several logo options at me. There was an old one with a weed leaf that looked kind of like a baseball logo. As we grew, I wanted to move away from looking so "urban," so Jungle Boys-looking — shout out to Jungle Boys, Roach, all those guys, no disrespect — and elevate it, clean it up, get rid of the weed leaf so people wouldn't immediately think "cannabis" when they saw the name. For the strain names — coming from the traditional market, I knew OG had been the number one strain since the '80s. Everyone told me you can't launch with just one strain, but I knew better. When I found my strain — my GMO Times OG — everyone else was naming strains after foods and candy. I wanted to go against the grain. I'm a movie buff, and my favorite movie growing up was The Karate Kid. I was going to call it "Daniel" something, but my friend Ron, who runs Kingston Royal out of the Bay, told me to make people think a little — call it Daniel LaRusso, so only people who knew would know, and everyone else would have to go look it up. Everyone told me I was only marketing to myself, that Gen Z and millennials wouldn't get the reference — but I didn't care. And then Cobra Kai dropped on YouTube, and suddenly a whole new generation was learning who Daniel LaRusso was. That's when I knew — we were going to the moon. Bryan Fields: Take me through the moment you realized it was really hitting. Chris Ball: The money started coming in — this was during COVID too, when everybody was a self-proclaimed billionaire. But what really put the nail in the coffin was getting a DM from Berner — the GOAT. My marketing team screenshotted it and sent it to me: he said, "I see you, keep doing what you're doing." That was the moment I knew — this thing worked. I still have that screenshot saved. Bryan Fields: How did you evolve from there — did you expand strains slowly? Chris Ball: After the fear went away with Daniel LaRusso, I dropped Miyagi-Do — went crazy. Then Bonsai — went crazy too. At that point I had the confidence to just run with it, naming strains after movies, shows, and characters that inspired me as a kid — Ferris Bueller, Debo, Lo Wang, Shogun, all of it. I started making merch, character t-shirts, and people would come up to me in public recognizing the movie references. It felt great to be scared of an idea and then have the community validate it. Bryan Fields: How do you pair a character or name with a strain? Chris Ball: At first it was about what the smoke made you feel. Now we have around 60 strain names banked, with the artwork already done, and the weed is trying to catch up to the names. Early on I was buying cuts — like the LaRusso cut from a friend — because I wasn't deep into cultivation yet. Now we're popping seeds, pheno hunting, crossing genetics ourselves. So now the team looks at the list of character names and picks what fits — sometimes based on the smoke, sometimes just to introduce a character to the following and see what the reaction is. Bryan Fields: Financing is always a challenge early on. Was there a critical fork-in-the-road decision you're glad you made? Chris Ball: The big one was at my first licensed facility — the 20,000-square-foot building I'm in right now. We had shells built out for nine rooms but were running low on money. Everything Ball Family Farms has came from my shoebox money out of the legacy market — I bootstrapped it myself because nobody was going to lend to an ex-felon with a brand-new social equity license. The decision was whether to half-build three rooms and run them all, or fully build one room perfectly and reinvest before building the next. I chose to do it one room at a time — pay full rent even with only one room online — because in the legacy market I'd lost deals to guys with better quality weed sitting next to me at meetings, and I never wanted to be in that position again. We built one room perfect, and room after room came online after that. Bryan Fields: Did you ever consider bringing in outside money or a partner during that tight period? Chris Ball: It was tempting, man. As things got tough, you just want to stop the bleeding — take on a partner, take on money. But every time, me, my brother, and my cousin would sit down, and I'd come back to: being an ex-athlete, I understand it takes pain to get to success. I understand adversity — find comfort in being uncomfortable. I'd heard too many horror stories about partnerships going bad, so I never trusted it. We just bet on ourselves — if we couldn't get it done on our own, we didn't belong here. That mentality came from both my legacy-market instincts and the work ethic sports instilled in me. Bryan Fields: Talk to us about how you connected with Hood Baby. Chris Ball: That came through my cultivation manager, Oscar Figueroa. Around the end of 2023, I'd fired basically everybody — the COVID boom had given us all a false sense that we knew what we were doing, and when the market crashed I realized we weren't good operators and didn't manage money well. I went back to running things myself. I ran into Oscar at Elevated Equipment Supply — he was rolling a joint with the shop manager, recognized me, and said he'd love to work with me. I hired him over another candidate. About six months into his tenure, Oscar brought up a kid named Zach — Hood Baby — who he used to work with at another grow that had gone under. We needed a propagation manager. In the interview, Zach told me he'd DM'd me on Instagram two years earlier saying he wanted to work with me. I didn't believe him until he pulled up the actual DM on the spot. We hired him. He told me if I gave him the shot, he wanted to hunt genetics and bring me my first trophy — I was skeptical, told him to start at entry level taking care of the moms. A year later, he brought in a genetic he'd hunted — Oakland Oranges times Zkittlez — and we entered our first Connect Community Cup competition out in Vegas, judged in part by Sergio the Custodian, and won first place. After that I stopped questioning him, started the Rare Breeds program, put his name out front, helped him build his own brand and logo, and started teaching him how to run a business. He's since been promoted to a management role. Bryan Fields: Was there hesitation before entering that first competition? Chris Ball: Honestly, my director of cultivation Drew and Oscar made that call without me — I didn't want to risk getting embarrassed if we lost. I wasn't even at the competition; I was elsewhere at MJBizCon in Vegas. Zach called me screaming that we'd won first place. Now, whenever we pheno hunt, we pick two winners — one obvious, loud-nose pheno for my brand, and one subtler pick for his — and every time we send samples out to R&D partners, his pick is the one that surprises everybody. Bryan Fields: How do you balance resources between experimenting with new genetics and running the core brand? Chris Ball: Credit to Oscar for this. We used to have a dedicated 20-light R&D room, but Oscar pointed out that meant we'd only get new phenos every harvest cycle, roughly every 80 days with dry, trim, and cure. Instead, we pulled two lights from each of our eight flower rooms and ran 16 to 18 lights' worth of new phenos spread across all the rooms every week, so we're constantly getting new data without sacrificing an entire room's revenue. We've transitioned from full living soil to a cocoa-living-soil-and-rockwool grow, and we've adopted a lot of new tech — Aroya, TrolMaster, sensors, climate stations, crop steering. A lot of veteran growers can't teach an old dog new tricks; they made money by feel and resist change. We've tried plenty of tech that didn't work — maybe two out of ten actually do. We tested an AI feeding system from Aroya on one grow table versus manually feeding the others, and found the manually watered product still came out better. Tech helps enormously — it lets me manage facilities in Canada and Arizona remotely — but there's still no substitute for a human walking the rows, checking that a dripper hasn't fallen out of a plant with no sensor on it. Bryan Fields: That openness to testing and controlled experimentation is rare in this industry. Chris Ball: It's not always easy — Drew gets nervous every time we want to change something, because it's expensive and disruptive. I'm a zero-to-100 person; I used to want to change an entire room at once. Oscar and Drew reeled me in — now we test in ten lights instead of thirty, so we can find a diamond without risking the whole operation if it flops. Bryan Fields: Talk to us about the Rare Breeds program. Chris Ball: It's a platform for young legacy growers and breeders to come into a licensed company, show their skills, and — if they're truly talented — get help launching their own brand, the way I did on my own but without the years of trial and error. If you don't have the drive or the palate, you won't get the platform; this isn't a fly-by-night thing. Zach started at entry level cleaning up mother rooms before he ever got a trophy. Part of it is also teaching legacy-market mentality how to operate inside a legal framework — sales, HR, professionalism — and part of it is mentorship on a personal level. I've been through late nights, tears, and the birth of Zach's son with him. Cannabis culture is small and tight-knit; everybody knows everybody, so it's about building both talent and character. Bryan Fields: Last question — hard pivot. What question do you wish more people asked you? Chris Ball: Something like, "How often do you actually get paid as a CEO?" or "Are you really the richest person in your own company?" People see the brand crushing it and assume I've got it all figured out with no worries. I feel very blessed and fortunate, but it's been a lot of hard work, and I feel like I've earned it — it wasn't given to me. Sometimes I just want someone to acknowledge the journey instead of assuming it's all glitz and glam. Bryan Fields: For our listeners who want to get in touch, buy merch, or buy product — where can they find you? Chris Ball: www.ballfamilyfarms.com. Our Instagram is Ball Family Farms — look for the blue check, there are fake ones out there. You can follow me personally at Chris Ball 445. We've also got a comedy page, BFF World, since we've got some actors on the team, so keep an eye out for that too. Bryan Fields: I love it, we'll link it up in the show notes. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun.