Richie Proud on the iAnthus Turnaround: Why Selling Arizona Fueled Core-Market Growth

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Bryan Fields: What’s up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I’m Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellan Finney. This week we’ve got a very special guest, Richie Proud, CEO of iAnthus. Richie, thanks for taking the time — how are you doing today? Richie Proud: Dude, great to meet you guys. Great to be here, and I love your studio setup. I feel a little naked right now — I’ve got nothing in my background. It’s just a wall. Bryan Fields: Appreciate the kind words. Kellan, how are you doing? Kellan: Doing really well, grateful to talk to Richie today. How are you, Bryan? Bryan Fields: Yeah, I’m stoked. I think there’s a lot we’re going to learn in this one — you guys have kind of been flying under the radar, maybe a little too much, and I’m ready to figure out what I’ve been missing and what’s going on. When I was doing some research, I was mesmerized by just the size — I understood the complexity of everything that’s going on, but I couldn’t believe how big it was. But before we get into that, can you give our listeners a quick background on yourself and how you found your way into this space? Richie Proud: Sure, absolutely — excited to be here. I’m a Southern guy by trade, grew up in Georgia, went to the University of Georgia. Cannabis wasn’t exactly embraced there, so everything we did was with our local plug on the street. My first access to cannabis was the late ’90s, early 2000s. My journey really started after I left college — I went to work for my fraternity. I had the coolest job in the world: I was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, and I worked for that fraternity for two years, traveling around the country college to college. What more could a guy in his 20s ask for? I actually learned a lot from that experience — things I’ve carried into my professional life: public speaking, how I interact with people, how you make an elevator pitch, what people really want to hear, conciseness of message. All of that resonated at the fraternity level. From there I found my way into fashion merchandising. I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch for about twelve years — that’s where my background started, in women’s clothing and merchandising. Then I moved up to Canada and did more of the same. In the summer of 2019, I was speaking at a retail conference — forecasting, inventory management, brand portfolio — and in walked a group from Grassroots Cannabis. I was shocked that a cannabis company had walked into a corporate retail conference. This was a clothing conference with Victoria’s Secret, Express, Lululemon, Abercrombie & Fitch — and then a cannabis brand walks in. That was very different for me. I started talking with that organization and joined Grassroots in 2019. They were acquired by Curaleaf, and I stayed at Curaleaf until the summer of ’23, when I became CEO of iAnthus. Bryan Fields: What attracted you to iAnthus? What drew you to the role — was it something specific about the company, or something you heard in the pitch that made you think, “This is the next role for me”? Richie Proud: I think some of us who are builders enjoy chaotic situations. If you’re in the cannabis space, you have to have some affinity for getting beat up and loving chaos — it’s a hallmark of all of us. The clothing world is fast-paced; we were launching tens of thousands of SKUs a year across multiple brands, so speed means something different to everybody. When I sat down and talked about the iAnthus opportunity, I’d heard of iAnthus — I was familiar with the name and some of the brands — but it wasn’t really on anybody’s radar at the time, and it wasn’t something that felt especially relevant. As those conversations continued, the opportunity to jump in and be a builder — to take what I like about operating organizations, put together marketing and operations, create clarity of message, create a survival story, a phoenix rising from the ashes — that resonated with me. That’s what I wanted to do, and it was an exciting opportunity. Two years later, I think we’re making some pretty good moves, but it’s been an interesting journey, to say the least. Bryan Fields: Let’s talk about iAnthus. For those who are unfamiliar, can you give a quick rundown of the size of the company and some of the assets in the portfolio? Richie Proud: Sure. iAnthus operates across roughly seven states. We divested our Arizona assets — three dispensaries and our operational capabilities there — at the beginning of ’25, and we have one dispensary left in Arizona, operating under the Health for Life banner. One thing you’ll notice is that I’ve got five retail banners, so in terms of complexity, it’s a little over-complicated — multiple brands, multiple retail banners, and trying to find consistency of message across all of it is not easy. It’s a massive pain in the ass, honestly. In Florida, we have the Grow Healthy retail banner. We’re fully vertical there — 22 dispensaries currently, leases up to 28, and we’re growing to 30 by the end of the year; that’s the goal. In Massachusetts, we operate as Mayflower, also fully vertical. In New Jersey, we have three dispensaries operating under MPX as the retail banner. In Maryland, we operate under Health for Life, with three dispensaries and processing operations. And in New York, we operate under the retail name Be. We’re medical-only there at the moment, but I’m building out our cultivation facility in Warwick, New York. So whatever day you catch me, know that today is the least stressed I’ll ever be — tomorrow I’ll be more stressed than today. I’m always at peak stress this year. Bryan Fields: I love it. Let’s talk about those first couple of days on the job, because what you just described isn’t something you can sit down and understand in a few days — where to spend your time, what’s working, what needs attention. Especially with vertical operations across all these states, each with its own nuances, that’s trial by fire. So when you’re getting started, how do you piece it together — how do you figure out, “I need to spend my time here, this part of the business is working, this part needs me”? Richie Proud: It starts with how much pain you’re willing to endure, and whether you did your research in advance. You have to ask the right questions — I think that’s a common theme everywhere. If you ask good questions, hopefully you’re not surprised by what you get into. I was well aware of what iAnthus looked like when I joined in the summer of ’23. Looking at the portfolio of assets, they were good assets in good states — pretty strong — they just had never been optimized or managed effectively. There had never been someone who created a real vision for the organization. That meant doubling down on operational excellence, bringing people along for the journey, and communicating a clear message to consumers and employees. For me, that was a great opportunity. There were about 40 dispensaries across the country doing right around $200 million in annual revenue — something that, if done correctly, we could build from. But I wasn’t unaware of what I was getting into. This was an organization that had been off the radar for a while and had gone through a pretty public falling-out in the early 2020s, followed by a pretty aggressive restructuring. Looking at all of that, you have to ask yourself: am I ready for this? Because now I’m dealing with equity holders, lenders, employees who are happy, employees who are sad. I’ve got to create a vision and a message, and optimize assets everyone’s known about but nobody’s optimized. What makes me think I can do it when others haven’t? If you can answer those questions, at least you have a starting point. Nobody’s going to tell you that you didn’t know what you were getting into — and that’s how the journey started for me in 2023. Bryan Fields: But optimizing those assets — you’re a one-man band, there are fires going on at each facility, everything’s moving. What did those first steps look like — figuring out where your team needed to spend time, and bringing people with you that you could trust and position well? Because there are so many moving pieces, it’s almost difficult to comprehend the depth of what you described, let alone how you hop onto a train that’s already moving at speed and start making changes while still moving forward. Richie Proud: Yeah, it starts with the idea of survival. That’s what I’ve been most proud of, honestly, as we walked into the organization. I knew I had to clean up the balance sheet and make it from ’24 to ’25 to ’26 to ’27 — what does that roadmap look like? Break it down to the lowest common denominator: what needs to happen today, what needs to happen tomorrow. Then you start to assess the people. Can they help you get there, and are they passionate about getting there? You start taking notes on people — I write a lot of things down. With every interaction I have with different team members, I’m writing things down: what are they telling me, what do I think, are they on the team or off the team, engaged or not engaged. I’m trying to make as many people-decisions as I can. I recognize what I’m good at — operations, messaging, overall strategy, understanding financials. Cultivation, from an operational perspective? Not my strongest suit. I didn’t grow up cultivating or extracting cannabis, so I know that’s a weak spot, and I need to spend my time accordingly in the areas where I’m not comfortable. I think for anybody — and I’m a first-time CEO, never done this before, didn’t read the playbook — you naturally gravitate to what you’re good at, and you spend too much time there instead of challenging yourself outside your comfort zone. For me it was about asking questions, recognizing operations were key, knowing we had good brands, assessing the people situation, and keeping survival the name of the game — survival today meaning keeping the lights on, survival in the future meaning how do we grow, how do we operate, how do we take over other assets. Can I create that message quickly and then execute, execute, execute? Keep my head down, focus on what profitability means. Cash flow matters more than anything to an organization — it’s not about top-line revenue, it’s about how much cash you can generate. Can you eliminate enough noise and create enough positive momentum to generate positive cash flow? I knew I had a runway to do that, and we were successful in cutting out the noise, eliminating some positions across the organization, and getting the right people in the right seats, all while recognizing it’s a journey — and being able to see, as you reach a stage gate, whether you’re ready to move to the next one, or whether you need to raise your hand and say you’re in over your head. Luckily I haven’t reached that position yet. But like I said, every day you see me is the most stressful day I’ve ever encountered. It’s been an exciting process. Kellan: At what point in that journey did you realize it was time to divest your interest in the Arizona market? Richie Proud: Pretty early on. When you start looking at an organization where cash flow matters most, and you agree with the equity holders and lenders on where you’re taking the business, you have a limited amount of cash to play with. My background is financial forecasting — it’s all planning: how much inventory do I need, how much cash am I going to generate, what are my revenue expectations. If I can create an accurate forecast, I can create an accurate cash flow model and start to project how much cash I’ll have to deploy. Then it’s a matter of where I see growth and where my bandwidth is. My assessment at the time was that most of our assets were east of the Mississippi River — Arizona was the only thing west of it. For sheer proximity, and given where most of my employees are located, investing east of the Mississippi felt like the priority. When I ranked where we’d invest five or ten million dollars, Arizona wasn’t number one, two, three, or four on the list. At that point you have to take a self-assessment and recognize that Arizona wasn’t a top-five priority for the organization — therefore it wasn’t an invest market for us. It was a hold-the-line situation until we could make the strategic decision to divest. That’s basically what the process looked like for Arizona. Bryan Fields: I love that — really well thought through, because you’re right, you only have so many bullets in the gun, and you have to figure out where to put your resources and capital to grow the areas that need doubling down on. On the flip side, was there a market where you looked and said, “This is where we need to put more assets”? Arizona clearly wasn’t it — but where was the top of the list, the first place you said, “This is where I need to spend my time, this is where we can really make gains”? Richie Proud: It’s hard, because I started with a theme: what did I want iAnthus to become, and how long would it take to get there? That theme was becoming a flower-first organization. A lot of organizations want to talk about product quality, but at scale it’s hard to grow quality cannabis. Could I solve that puzzle? If yes, where would that message resonate most, and where did people need it most? Florida was certainly important because it represents the majority of our dispensaries — we have around 40 dispensaries total, and 20 of them are in Florida. That was an easy call right off the bat: we had to make sure Florida was right. Our Northeast assets were performing very well too, so it was about focusing on the operational side of the Massachusetts and New Jersey facilities. New York was probably the hardest. We had one of the original Registered Organization licenses and seven and a half acres in Warwick, New York — I’m sitting on that old prison compound; I can literally stand outside and throw a football and hit GTI’s door, we’re all in the same corridor. We had this plot of land and hadn’t done anything with it. Could I get the organization to a place where I had the cash flow to build out the New York facility? That’s how I started prioritizing: New York was where I wanted to invest, Florida was where I wanted to invest, and the Northeast needed to be stabilized. That’s why Arizona ended up on the back burner — and also because there are a lot of great operators in Arizona who love that market, know it inside and out, know the consumer base and the product. That wasn’t me, and I wasn’t going to go in and pose as if it was. I wasn’t going to out-Arizona The Mint, Jars, Story, or Sonoran Roots — those guys do Arizona so well. That created the conversations that eventually led to the partnership and divestiture. Bryan Fields: And the best part is those relationships, right — how important that is. Maybe today that conversation is beneficial for them, but in the future they might come back to you and say, “Hey Richie, we’ve got this asset in Florida or New York that doesn’t fit our portfolio anymore given how things have changed — what do you think?” That’s where relationships really make a difference. Richie Proud: All relationships. Oh, 100%. It’s all about strategic alignment — can you find that alignment in relationships in cannabis? It can often feel manipulative, so how do you find honesty in this industry while trying your best to build good relationships? When you connect with people who have strong relationships, you want them in your corner — you want to build your own network of “super friends,” your own version of a cannabis Avengers that can go out and break down walls. That’s the stuff that gets me excited about what we’re doing at iAnthus: building a strong super-friend network, being friendly with the traditional market, and finding the people who are going to break through walls to make this happen, because it’s sheer will and determination. A lot of people have opted out of these positions, and if you can keep it going — turn a survival story into a growth story — you’ve done something others haven’t. Some people want to be part of that journey, and I’m looking for those people. Bryan Fields: When you’re investing in those markets, do you set KPIs, and do you have a way to monitor them as you go? Because when I think about positioning yourself — you invest in Florida, that’s moving, now you spend your time in New York — how do you keep an eye on everything? Do you need connected tools to have visibility across the business? What does that process look like? Richie Proud: Oh my gosh, that’s probably the bane of my existence — still today, creating enough tools to manage things from afar. How do you know enough to make strategic decisions while still letting people stretch their wings? I’m a first-time CEO, and I now have a first-time CFO too. My assessment was about building a team of people who have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove. Can I put people in positions to succeed? That gets maximum bandwidth out of the whole team. That’s what let me start building trust and capability. Retail I’m comfortable with — that’s where I’ve spent most of my career, connecting with the consumer. Operations was harder, so we made sure to invest in the right people on the operations side. From a KPI standpoint, absolutely — we’re looking at ways to keep increasing our overall canopy, because I don’t have unlimited canopy space. I’ve got to make the best decisions I can with the canopy we have, make sure we have a plan for every gram coming out of our facilities, maximize yield effectively, and do it as cost-effectively as possible while staying true to being a flower-first organization. We start with where we’re doing best, confirm that, make sure we have the right leadership in place, and then work our way down the line so we’re spending time and attention where it’s physically needed. That’s why I’m always on the road, my operations team is always on the road, my retail team is always on the road — we don’t have a home office. We’re a true work-from-home environment: work from the road, work from a suitcase, work from an airport. We put those dollars to use to stay high-touch wherever we have availability. New York is my hardest, because I’ve got to build it from the ground up, so I’m spending more time there than I’d like. If any of you are bored, I’m getting a house up in Warwick, New York — come hang out with me, we can record a session from the compound. I’ve always had a curiosity about how a quality cannabis company can take strong West Coast principles — look at California, facilities built there growing great weed in a highly suppressed market — and build something similar in New York. If yes, is that a competitive advantage? I want to see it, be part of it, experience it — partly out of my own curiosity, since cultivation isn’t my skill set. That’s where the curiosity takes over. But the KPIs are huge too: how many reports can we develop and then shrink down to the one or two that really matter? How much canopy do we have, what does our yield look like? We’re installing under-canopy lighting in all of our facilities — that’s more of a West Coast thing than an East Coast thing, and it’s something we’re now putting into practice to get better at what we do. Bryan Fields: You made that sound so easy and straightforward, but in reality it’s nearly impossible — you set up KPIs that work in one state, but other states have different variables, so those KPIs can’t be the same, they’re really different. Maybe you’re limited by canopy size, which just adds to the complexity and difficulty of this game you’re playing. Richie Proud: Yeah, that’s right. There are 24 hours in a day, and you can’t be in this industry unless you try to maximize as many of them as possible. As you go facility to facility, market to market, regulatory body to regulatory body, you see all the pain points along the way. No one makes it easy, so let’s stop complaining about how hard it is and just do what we can do successfully — build the best dispensary we can, analyze what works and what doesn’t, test as many things as we can, get feedback, not be offended by it, build strong relationships, and listen to the people who’ve done this before us. A lot of people have been very successful in this space living by a certain set of principles — sometimes embraced, sometimes not. My goal is to find those people, learn from them, and turn that into our competitive advantage. I’m never going to out-Curaleaf Curaleaf, or out-Verano Verano — that’s not my goal. My goal is to build something unique and specific to iAnthus, a competitive advantage we can message, control, and use to connect with the community and build strong relationships — internally, externally, and with the consumer. That’s the name of the game for me, and it’s what I obsess over: getting closer to the plant, closer to the consumer, and doing right by the people. Because when I talk about the survival of this organization, I’m talking about protecting seven or eight hundred people. I want to give them something to be happy about and proud of. That’s a burden a lot of people don’t recognize as operators — we carry the weight of everyone’s stress and try to make things as productive as possible, because we need that productivity from them, and we need great employees who can bust through walls. Kellan: How different are the consumers from state to state? Richie Proud: They’re very different, I think. What I’ve found makes the biggest difference is whether a market is highly MSO-driven or highly fragmented — that changes how consumers approach access to product, and how much choice they have, which changes things over time. Bryan Fields: You’ve got New York and Florida — those are pretty consistent, right? Richie Proud: The regulatory body can also be a factor in how you communicate with consumers. Communication matters — you want to tell people about the product, and in medical states especially, you want to communicate the medicinal benefits and how it can improve people’s lives, while also acquiring new consumers. All of that comes into play, but it looks very different state to state. What one state considers high-quality innovation or a great new brand doesn’t necessarily translate to another state — quality and “what’s cool” are defined differently, consumer to consumer, state to state. That’s very different from the clothing industry, where in my fashion retail background, if you like a brand, you wear it and stay loyal to it. That loyalty is much harder to generate in cannabis. You’re tackling all of that at once, and I wish there was more symmetry, because it would let us communicate more effectively about the products we’re making, the technology we’re using, and the message we’re trying to share — because it’s not fluff. We’re in this industry because we believe in what we’re doing. We believe in wellness in some form, and wellness matters to all kinds of people from all walks of life. How do we define wellness if we can’t even talk about it consistently? How do we bring new consumers into the space? Those are hard problems, but they’re not unsolvable — just not easy. Bryan Fields: What do you think is the biggest challenge there — the lack of uniform regulation, the fact that different states are at different points in their timeline, or that some consumers just haven’t settled on a brand yet because it’s all still new? Richie Proud: I think the first two matter more than the last one. We owe it to consumers to produce a consistent quality of product, but plants grow differently in different environments, so it’s hard to create that consistency — some brands have done it well, but it’s a hard thing to do broadly. The regulatory environment is definitely a challenge too. The ability to message to consumers matters a lot, and the competitive landscape differs by state because it’s not always a truly free market — that also affects consumers’ ability to connect with choice. You want a free-market environment where consumers vote with their feet, but that’s not how it works in every state. Florida is honestly the purest form of competition — I can’t sell wholesale, so if you like my product, you have to come to a Grow Healthy store. That makes it really interesting for brand-building, because you learn how your message resonates with consumers, and you get to teach your budtenders how to talk about products. If I had to pick the single biggest difference from state to state, it’s when budtenders have a preference for a product that isn’t your own brand — that creates very different dynamics state to state. Florida doesn’t really have that dynamic, since I can’t sell wholesale, so it gives us a chance to test messages and work with consumers in a way we can then apply to other markets, where you’re going up against twenty, thirty, forty, fifty — a thousand — other brands. It’s a good built-in testing ground. Bryan Fields: Florida is basically one giant social experiment. Richie Proud: It is. It is a social experiment. Bryan Fields: So one of the brands I’m really fascinated by is Cheetah. Talk to us about that acquisition and how it fits into the portfolio. Richie Proud: Yeah, absolutely. When I entered cannabis in 2019, most businesses east of the Mississippi and in the Midwest did business with LeafTrade — LeafLink and LeafTrade were the two big wholesale platforms at the time. I became pretty good friends with their chief revenue officer, Michael P. Ramon, and stayed in touch with him over the years wherever I’ve gone. When I came over to iAnthus, that relationship just continued. When I saw what he was doing in Illinois — creating the Cheetah brand — he was filling a market void he’d identified, and I like that kind of analysis behind creating brands: sometimes you create a brand because there’s a message you want to communicate, sometimes because you found something on the floor, and sometimes because there’s a market void that needs filling. He’d really focused on an all-in-one liquid live resin product and doubled down on that technology. It was in a market I wasn’t operating in — I didn’t have operations in Illinois, and we only had a minority interest in two dispensaries there. Neither was Pennsylvania, which was about to come online. So we started talking about what he was building. It gave us access to two new states, and it brought him on board — someone I already knew throughout the industry, who understands the East Coast cannabis mentality and helps us navigate strong markets like New Jersey and Maryland. As we thought about brand proliferation and how to create new brands, there was a lot that had to align with our timing as a business. I couldn’t have done this in ’23, or even at the start of ’24 — I needed a variety of stage gates to pass before I was in a position to say we were ready to acquire a business, and that this business mattered for these specific reasons: it gave us access to new consumers and a new product category we weren’t covering, and it let us bring that into our overall brand portfolio. That’s basically how it came about. We closed that acquisition pretty quickly — December 30th, right before the end of the year. In terms of how acquisitions typically go, that one moved fast. We had good alignment on what the role would be and what the product would be, and it became the starting point for our growth story in ’25 — really learning what it means to stand behind a brand and communicate about it. iAnthus has a variety of brands, but we haven’t historically done marketing very well, so this was another opportunity to check something off the list: a brand we liked, a person who brought a lot of value to the organization. What are the long-term benefits for iAnthus and our employees, what do we learn for the next stage of the journey? Stage gate achieved, acquire the business, and now we go. Kellan: With acquisitions like that, do you keep it siloed? How do you manage the bleed-over of their SOPs and internal processes that could help, while balancing all your other relationships? Walk us through those dynamics. Richie Proud: The team was pretty small — a couple of core founders, a couple of core investors, and some people behind the scenes handling extraction, figuring out product quality and strains, and how to make the best product possible for the consumer. They had strong marketing and messaging — it’s a cheeky message, easy to grasp, they get to talk about speed and animals, and who doesn’t like animals? People respond well to that. So there were built-in benefits, but then you get into the harder question of integration. In our case, the integration was really just two people we already knew, so the team side was small — but it was a big test of how our people respond when they walk into our operational facilities and see something done differently. How does our team embrace new things? Do we need to upgrade our extraction equipment in certain areas? Are we servant leaders willing to take feedback, or do we think we already know everything? It was a real test for my team too. But it was relatively low risk, since we weren’t acquiring a business with a hundred or a hundred fifty employees to integrate. We spent a lot of time visiting each facility, focusing on how they extract product, making sure we used the same methodology as we upgraded our machinery to accommodate liquid live resin, and focused more on our fresh-frozen processes. It filled a gap we weren’t experts in to begin with, and it’s leveled up a large portion of the organization. The Cheetah business has grown exponentially since we acquired it — we’ve opened it up in numerous new markets, and it’s been great to watch that unfold. It’s not without pain points — everybody comes in with new opinions — but that’s what shows resilience in an organization: being able to listen to feedback, where both parties make some sacrifice but get to an end result they both agree with. That’s a win for everybody, and I think that’s where we ended up. Kellan: So it was almost like an IP acquisition as well. Richie Proud: That’s correct. Yep, correct. Bryan Fields: Were you personally involved all the way through, visiting the different facilities? It must be exciting to integrate something like that and see the opportunities, but you also can’t be in two places at once — you have to hand off the operation and get back to the board to ask, “Where’s the next fire to put out?” Richie Proud: Yeah, so much of what we do — and I think this is true for operators in general — comes down to trusting your employees, and trust takes time to build. People often use the phrase “trust but verify,” but that phrase really means you don’t trust someone. You have to find the moments that build real trust. In my previous role I wasn’t really involved in operations — here, I control operations, so I wanted to learn as much as possible and make sure the people running operations had my best interests at heart and were willing to teach me, without it being a problem if I asked questions I wasn’t aware of the answers to. That created an open environment. That trust was built in 2023 and carried into 2024, so by the time we get to an acquisition like this, we already know where our product portfolio has gaps. When we talk about the stage-gating process for where our brands fit, we’re always assessing whether our brands cover all aspects of the consumer base, whether they overlap, and who the target consumers are. We knew the Cheetah acquisition covered blind spots in our product category and opened up new markets. When it came to visiting the cultivation and operational facilities, yes, I tried to go each time, and I’d also visit dispensaries, since our footprint is fairly compact — New Jersey especially is a compact state, so we can cover multiple things at once. But I let the operations team run point on the extraction side and make sure everything moved according to plan, and the KPIs would come back to us: are we hitting our overall metrics for potency, are our operational metrics on output effective, is wholesale growing, is the message resonating with consumers? Then we turn attention to the retail footprint, because retail still makes up about 75% of the iAnthus business. I wasn’t at a point where I could transform every dispensary in the portfolio all at once, but we’re now starting to transform every dispensary’s messaging to incorporate the brand into what we’re becoming. My vision for what a dispensary should be might differ from everyone else in the industry, but I want people to walk in and feel closer to the cultivators, closer to the brands, closer to the plant — like they’re walking into a cultivation facility. That’s where brands like Cheetah fit: creating a brand-portfolio experience inside a retail environment that feels like a cultivation facility. The answer was yes, but those conversations started in 2023 and took two years to turn into an execution play. Our first concept store opened in Sarasota, Florida about six weeks ago, and now we’re refining it and rolling it forward — that full experience of how the iAnthus brands connect with the consumer through the retail portfolio. Flower first. Bryan Fields: Can you give us more of an example of what someone would see and feel walking into that store, and what’s different about it? Richie Proud: Absolutely. One thing I’m most excited about: we took photos from our cultivation facility and had them installed on vinyl wrapping over the frosted windows that separate the waiting area from the dispensary floor in Florida. Depending on the light, it brings out these bright colors from all the strains growing behind it — it was a snapshot from a beautiful cultivation cycle when we had a lot of new genetics coming online. So every customer who walks in gets to see what it looks like inside a cultivation facility. The second part is installing some kind of real-time feed into the cultivation facility — instead of just showing daily promos, showing what’s actually growing in our facility that day. It’s all about getting people closer to the plant. So many people are just fascinated by cultivation facilities — they’re inherently curious about what goes on inside one — and when they get to see it, the sheer size and scale of these operations is genuinely impressive, especially for first-timers. It’s fun to see how consumers interact with that, but the vinyl wrapping was such a great unlock for us, and we’re going to bring it to all of our locations. We want it to feel more like a farmers’ market, more like the cultivators themselves — telling the stories of the people growing the plants, the genetics coming down the pipeline. There’s a brand we’re developing that launches in the next fourteen days built around nostalgia genetics, and it’s going to be fun getting to tell those stories. Bryan Fields: I love that — it’s kind of like at a restaurant where you can see into the kitchen, see the process. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, and it feels like nothing’s being hidden. It becomes a social experiment too — someone tells a friend, “Dude, you’ve got to see what this place looks like, these growers are beautiful, look at these photos,” and now someone who might normally shop somewhere else drives an extra few minutes to your dispensary and ends up buying something. Now they’re hooked. Richie Proud: That’s correct. That’s how you build community — how you build what people actually want. Like we talked about earlier, consumers are different in every state, so it’s hard to give every consumer exactly what they want. But I want to be an operator who’s very close to the plant, who brings in people who understand and embrace cannabis. I’m not looking to bring in high-powered CPG résumés and drop that playbook onto cannabis — it doesn’t work. You have to understand the plant, embrace the plant. I’m lucky to have come into this industry in 2019 and been able to learn as much as I can, and to stay open to feedback — there are things I know, and things I don’t. The most exciting part for me is putting together a team of people who understand the plant, want to tell its stories, want to be emotionally connected to the consumer, want to talk about genetics, and want our budtenders talking about genetics too. Even on the education front, we just struck an exclusive partnership with the people who run the Ganjier program — we’re going to be one of their exclusive representatives, and we’re sending our entire staff through that program so they can get more education and communicate better with people about what it means to be in this industry. That message is still a struggle for a lot of people to tell, and I intend to tell it as well as I can. That’s the goal. Bryan Fields: Are there other elements from your consumer-clothing background you’re trying to pull in, even if the timing isn’t quite right yet — things you think could really improve the experience? Consumers shop a certain way, and when a store feels comfortable, they tend to act normal. But I’ve heard from my mom, who’s walked into a few dispensaries and said it just feels like a normal shopping experience — and I ask her, “Mom, what did you think was going to happen?” I love bringing people like you in who have that retail experience and can say, “This is what a great shopping experience actually feels like.” Is there anything you can tease that you think could make a real difference in the future? Richie Proud: Yeah — you’ve got maybe three or four sentences you get to say when a customer walks in, and those sentences really matter to a budtender. Everybody wants to focus on sales techniques and upsell strategies, but I want to focus on things like: what’s the latest strain we’ve got, why is it fire, and why would you be a fool not to walk out with it? Those kinds of stories only land if the consumer is embracing that kind of experience, because I lead with flower in every market — it represents the lion’s share of our revenue. When I think about my clothing background, when you walk into a brand you like and see someone wearing the product and looking good in it, you think, “I’ll look good in that too,” so you buy it. That was Abercrombie’s whole ethos, and it was the easiest thing in the world for us to do there. That doesn’t necessarily work in cannabis. Instead you’re trying to understand what the consumer is feeling, how they’re using cannabis for wellness, and how you get them to try something new that’s outside their normal routine but still fits what they’re looking for. That requires knowledge and authenticity — people in cannabis can spot a poser really fast, and budtenders are especially good at that. You want a staff at your dispensaries who can really communicate with consumers about strains, effects, pricing, appearance, smell — everything that gets people excited about cannabis. Are the buds big? Is the potency high? How does it look, does it smell gassy — whatever the target is. If you can communicate those things clearly, you’re meeting the consumer where they already are; they’re already looking for that, but as an industry we don’t do a great job communicating it quickly. Some brands lead with that well, but they’re usually brands focused on just one thing — flower genetics only, no retail; edibles only, no retail or flower. For a retail operator, you’ve got a thousand messages colliding at once, and I have to pick the three a budtender gets to say, then make sure it sticks with the consumer so it builds broader community over time. That’s hard to do. In terms of what I’m bringing from my background, speed matters differently to different industries, and I define speed the way clothing defined it — releasing thousands of SKUs a year. For me, innovation is about communicating with the consumer through a social promise. In Florida, my promise to the consumer is that we release new products every single Wednesday for the rest of the year. Every time you walk into my dispensary on a Wednesday, there’s a new menu — new strains, new products, new merchandise, new accessories, something new every week. I’m always looking for the next promise I can make so people walk in thinking, “You said you were going to do this — did you do it?” And I’m also looking for the people who say, “You said you’d do this and you didn’t meet my expectation” — so I can learn from that and get a little better. Bryan Fields: Is that a real thing on Wednesdays? Richie Proud: That’s a real thing on Wednesdays — every Wednesday, new product drops. Bryan Fields: People come in just to see what’s dropped. There have to be people who used to buy every other Monday and now they’re a Wednesday person. Richie Proud: Yeah, you’re trying to build some consistency and train a certain behavior. It’s hard to launch products constantly without intent — if I launch something new every Wednesday, it’s easy for my team to rally around. The message resonates, people know new things are coming in the pipeline; something might be ready by Friday, but we hold it until Wednesday and get the marketing assets ready. Those are all muscles we’re building. Do we do it perfectly? Absolutely not. But is it a social promise that matters? It absolutely is — and in a state like Florida, where people vote with their feet, that consistency matters even more than in other markets. Every company is trying to build community, and while you want some consistency across companies doing that, you also want your own community that really resonates with what you’re doing, so people say, “They do it better at iAnthus, they do it better at Grow Healthy than anyone else.” That’s the message I’m going for. Bryan Fields: I’m going to steal that. That’s a great idea. How do you balance moving fast and breaking things with product development, QA, and QC on some of these launches? Richie Proud: Probably my hardest challenge. Your natural tendency is to be conservative — you recognize the guardrails you’re working with, and you don’t get to make a lot of mistakes. Every company gets a certain number of mistakes it can make; some get more, some get less. For where I’ve positioned iAnthus, we’re trying to be one of the companies that makes fewer mistakes, quite intentionally. So when I think about how we’re positioned overall, I have to be really intentional about how we move forward. I think I went on a tangent there — if you want to re-ask the question, I’ll answer it more directly. Bryan Fields: No, I think that’s essentially the answer — at the end of the day you’re trying to move fast and push the line, while also figuring out how to hold to certain quality standards that matter for your team when you bring products to market. Richie Proud: Right, because I went down the path of everybody being naturally conservative. I want speed to matter, and because I want speed to matter, I have to be okay making some mistakes — but only small ones, never big ones. I have to define what mistakes I’m willing to make and which ones I’m not, and I also have to give things time to breathe. I have to understand, from experience, how long things take to properly test, and how long I need to wait before I can call something good or bad. How do you teach people what that means — when something’s good, do more of it; when it’s bad, do less — and how do you push that down to every level of the organization? How do you talk about principles that really resonate? At this point in my journey, speed matters. Making a decision is better than making no decision. Falling forward is better than doing nothing. But I’ve only been able to position the organization to make those calls because of certain financial benchmarks we’ve hit — I couldn’t have done this a year ago. Our EBITDA performance in 2025 was really strong compared to 2024, and 2024 versus 2023 was night and day — that gives us credibility, even within our own board, to make different decisions, and that’s how you build trust. I don’t want to be in a “trust but verify” relationship with my board either. There have been benchmarks I’ve had to hit to make everyone comfortable that the vision I have for iAnthus is right, that we’re moving with speed and intent, that we understand the importance of cash flow, and that we’re not getting distracted. I have to drown out the noise — what’s happening in the macro cannabis environment, at the federal level, with other businesses — because my team just needs to focus on executing the plan and hitting our stage gates. Discipline matters to me, and teaching a team about discipline matters, and that’s where you get speed: fail forward, move with intent, move with discipline. I say three things to my organization on a regular basis — three mantras we live by. Number one: repetition is recognition — I’ll repeat things over and over so people understand how important they are to me. Number two: bad news doesn’t get better with age — you cannot gatekeep information; as bad as it is, you have to tell me, because I can’t fix a problem I don’t know about. And the third — I’m a huge Green Day fan, I’ve been to 57 Green Day concerts, no judgment — is ballet versus mosh pit. We have to move in unison, we can’t collide with each other; from a distance it has to look like a choreographed dance, because there are a thousand things that have to happen at exactly the same time. We’ve spent so much of this conversation talking about the operational complexity of this business. Bryan Fields: We’re not judging you on this podcast — just the three of us. Kellan: Green Day, I love it. Richie Proud: You’ve got to find the moments where it’s a little easier, and that comes when teams keep those things in mind. All of that ties into how I communicate a message to the consumer, whether it’s “every Wednesday we’re launching a new product, come hell or high water” — that’s the promise I make to the Florida consumer. Can I do that in every market? I hope so — right now it’s just Florida, but it should eventually be everywhere. Bryan Fields: What about AI? Anything you’re playing around with that you can share? Richie Proud: Yeah, I’ve got a cool thing you guys should see — just between the three of us, no one else knows about this yet. There’s a business I’ve been working with called ShopSight. It’s an AI platform whose CEO is very deep in machine learning and AI — it wasn’t designed for cannabis, it’s designed for clothing and fashion, for making fast decisions. The problem it solves is: how do you get fast focus-grouping, real-time intelligence, and A/B testing knowledge within a rapid time period — twenty-four hours? How do you get as many people onto the platform as possible, how do you put up campaigns on it? This is a brand-new thing I’m tinkering with, but it’s designed for me to focus-group in real time — learn about strain names in real time, colors of flower in real time, merchandising, what graphic images work. No cannabis companies are doing this yet, and I think all cannabis companies should move in this direction, because the more companies that use a platform like this, the better the data gets for everyone — better predictions about the right campaigns, the right graphics, the right words that resonate. We spend so much time trying to dissect those things because we can’t do traditional marketing — we’re doing maybe 5% traditional marketing and 95% guesswork. If a machine can help with that through AI, it gives us a little more ammunition to do what companies outside of cannabis are already able to do. It’s all about real-time information instead of guessing, making the best decisions we can in real time. That’s what I’m really excited about — a company called ShopSight. Bryan Fields: That’s the motto, right? Real-time information, no more guesswork — just blast off. Richie Proud: No more guesswork. Just go. Bryan Fields: What’s the most expensive lesson you’ve ever learned? Richie Proud: God — if you don’t take care of your operational facilities, it costs your company millions of dollars. Everything we do starts with operational capability: making sure the grow rooms are set up right, the extraction equipment is set up right, the SOPs are correct. We’ve had situations where we ended up damaging a brand-new machine because we didn’t follow the SOP correctly, didn’t learn from it properly, didn’t train the team appropriately — and it led to a catastrophic equipment failure. Those things are expensive, but we try not to dwell on them. We try to figure out the lesson, because it’s on us to make sure we have the right training in place. That’s helped us get better at bringing in the right experts, learning the right way, nailing down the right SOPs, and following process — process really matters in an operational facility. You want cannabis expertise mixed with operational expertise so your SOPs really resonate. You want people to remember the one or two things that matter in every grow cycle — making sure the curing process is correct, for instance. There are a thousand ways to mess up growing cannabis, and you can grow the best flower in the world and still ruin it after you chop it down if you’re not careful all the way through to the consumer. That’s an expensive lesson for a lot of people to learn. It happens from time to time — you try to learn the best way out of it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But operational lessons are the most expensive, by far. Bryan Fields: Is there someone on your team whose job is specifically to look for technologies and tools that can prevent those kinds of catastrophic events going forward? Richie Proud: We try to take it on as an executive team — we’re always out there looking, always asking questions. We’ve built a good network of “super friends” — the Avengers-of-cannabis idea I mentioned — networks within networks, so when something goes wrong we’re learning how to fix it, and the problems we had in 2023 aren’t the problems we have in 2024, and those aren’t the problems we have in 2025. Things are very different now, and that network really comes into play. I’ve tried to get close to a lot of traditional-market operators, spending a lot of time in the California market with brands that have done really well there, because I believe that when a business has succeeded in a market like California or Colorado and moves east, it’s often a little easier — the business environment there tends to be more friendly, even though barriers to entry can still be tough and it’s not free business in every state. If you can take some of those principles and bring them into your own organization, you learn faster, fail forward less, and make better decisions more quickly. That shows how we’re evolving as an industry, how I’m evolving as a person and as a leader, and what makes me comfortable. I’ve been really proud of that part of the business. We struck a licensing deal with a group out of California called Golden State Banana, and we’ve launched Sunshine Bananas in Florida, with plans to launch it in other Northeast states — that’s a really cool thing for us, and it comes out of the same kind of super-friend network. We’ve also become close with a lot of dispensary operators in New York, particularly people who hold social equity licenses and have really built the New York retail environment from the ground up. A lot of those people came from the traditional market and understand those business principles far better than I do, so building relationships with them has been transformative in how I think about the business. It lets me step back and recognize that while a large part of me comes from corporate America, I’ve evolved as a leader — I’ve had to unlearn some things from the retail and CPG world to get closer to cannabis. I’ve learned a lot from the traditional market, and I’ve embraced that. Now, as the leader of this organization, that’s something genuinely interesting for us as we move into New York and do more business in the Northeast — with a different mindset, a different group of friends who all have the same interests at heart. That alignment is the magic. When you’re aligned with the people you work with, that’s where the magic happens — you can argue passionately, but once you align on the decision, you move forward together. Those are strong principles no matter what world you’re in, and if you can live by that inside of cannabis, that’s the stuff that gets me excited: full alignment across my team, alignment with my partners, bringing in brands that are emotionally aligned with what I’m trying to do at iAnthus. We’re just starting to put those things into practice, which is part of why I’ve been under the radar — I’ve been fortunate to be able to fly under it. We’re a publicly traded company, but about 95% of our business is owned by a group of lenders, and that gives me the flexibility to keep my head down, focus on what matters, focus on operational principles, and just be diligent and execute — execute, focus on cash flow, avoid the noise. Bryan Fields: Love it. Last question — what question do you wish more people asked you? Richie Proud: Oh, wow. I wish more people asked about how we connect with consumers. The question you brought up earlier — are consumers different state to state — I think that matters a lot. I think consumers should walk into dispensaries and ask a ton of questions. They should be educated about the businesses and the brands, understand what sets one brand apart from another. This plant has so many benefits and shows up in so many different products — ask us what makes a great product, ask what separates our genetics from others, ask about the stories behind the genetics, because where we source them, those stories are genuinely fascinating. When you’ve got the person who has the original cut of a Blue Dream, that’s a great story to tell for people who are really into it — that’s an awesome thing to connect over. Ask questions, engage with people — that’s how we build community, one conversation and one piece of information at a time. No questions are off-limits; we’ll answer whatever we can and make sure we’re building that community, for iAnthus and for our customers. Bryan Fields: Awesome. Richie, for our listeners who want to get in touch or buy any of these products, where can they find you? Richie Proud: Absolutely — in Florida, look for Grow Healthy. In Maryland and Arizona, Health for Life. In New York, Be. In Massachusetts, Mayflower. In New Jersey, MPX. We’re standing behind the Cheetah brand, MPX, our Anthology flower line, and our relationship with Sunshine Bananas. This is only the beginning — it’s going to be an exciting journey for all of us. I appreciate the time. Bryan Fields: Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Richie Proud: Appreciate it, guys. Kellan: Thanks for the time.