The COO’s Playbook: Balancing Automation, Quality, and Efficiency Across 14 States at Verano ft. Trip McDermott

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Trip McDermott: We keep our moms fresh and we keep genetics coming in, and we're pheno hunting constantly to increase the genetic library that we have, because the genetic library is going to be the currency of the future, and it'll be a real differentiating factor amongst all of the operators today. 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, Trip McDermott, COO of Verano. Trip, thanks for taking the time, how are you doing today? Trip McDermott: What's happening, happy to be here. Thanks for having me, excited. Kellen Finney: Trip and Bryan, how are you doing? I'm doing good, excited to talk to Trip, excited to jump into everything about Verano, especially with Trip being in Colorado with the West Coast vibes here. How are you doing, Bryan? Bryan Fields: Wow, I love how you slid that in, really nice. We've got a lot to talk about, obviously a company the size of Verano has a lot of inner workings, and as we were talking about before the call, I'm sure Trip doesn't have two days that are the same. But before we get into the fun workings, we're gonna have to figure this out — got all East Coast, West Coast battle here — I think it's really important to understand, you know, when you grow up, where are your roots. So if you had to choose a coast, which one are you choosing? Trip McDermott: Sure, so I grew up in Connecticut, about an hour outside of New York, so I will stay loyal and rep my East Coast roots, even though I've been out in Denver for about a decade now. Bryan Fields: I love it, let the record reflect. Cool, so Trip, for our listeners, can you give a quick background on how you found your way to the cannabis space? Trip McDermott: Sure, so out of school I went to college in Boston and made my way to New York City, where I was working in finance, financing oil and gas companies. So I spent a ton of my time in Texas and Oklahoma, in the oil patch — and a lot of people don't know that there are a lot of oil and gas companies that are headquartered in Denver, for those companies that don't want to live in North Dakota or Oklahoma or Texas. So I would spend a lot of time coming out here meeting with oil and gas clients, and around 2014, when things went adult use in Colorado, I started to see dispensaries popping up, a real movement on the cannabis side, and would have my oil and gas meetings during the day and go into dispensaries and talk to bud tenders at night, buy product, look for any phone number — there were no websites, there was no MJ Factbook, there was nothing like that back in the day. So I would just cold call random numbers on the back of packaging, a lot of it was fake numbers, and ended up connecting with a number of companies. I'd take them out for dinner and drinks just to try to learn anything I could about the industry. Everybody was really cagey back then and wouldn't tell you anything, and I ended up kicking the door in for a company out here in Colorado and made the move out here in 2015 to work with them. Bryan Fields: And then Verano — what interests you about them, and then take us just quick high level for those who may be unfamiliar about Verano. Trip McDermott: Sure, I made the switch over to Verano a little over three years ago. George Archos, the founder of Verano, they had been putting a lot of acquisitions together and really growing the company, and we had been talking for around a year or so, and he felt it was time to bring me in to help organize all of the acquisitions and streamline operations, SOPs, make sure we were doing everything on a consistent basis, and I made the jump. So a little overview for Verano: we are in 14 states, we have 15 cultivation sites, we have over 150 retail locations, about 50% of those are located in Florida and the rest are scattered across the country, but we range from Arizona, Nevada, all the way out to Connecticut and Virginia — all coasts. Bryan Fields: Talk to us about where Verano was day one when you arrived, three and a half years ago, and how your role has changed over those three years and what it's kind of adapted into now. Trip McDermott: Sure, so when I arrived we were in the majority of the states we're in today, but operations were in the process of being assimilated, or we were building out SOPs that we could roll out across the entire country. So it was a real process to build the team to go out and instill all of those processes. We have some facilities that are greenhouses, others that are indoor, we're dealing with temperatures in Arizona all the way to Connecticut or Pennsylvania, so you have all these different environmental factors, all these nuances to each site, and that requires a lot of tweaking to the overall SOP that we're trying to standardize to ensure we're getting consistent product. That was the company I walked into. Today we have very streamlined SOPs built out for literally every single step of the process, from seed and clone all the way out the door on the distribution side, and also through the retail side. We've really organized the company in a way that it wasn't previously, and it's way more streamlined from an organizational chart perspective as well as standard operating procedures. Bryan Fields: The breadth of how challenging that is — I don't know if people can really understand, because you've got certain states that are vertically operated in, others that are not, and if somebody wants to make a change in an SOP somewhere, does it have to get passed up the leadership chain and then passed out across the different states? Is that how it works? Trip McDermott: Great point. I cannot stress enough how our national team are unsung heroes. People see the end product, and just like a normal consumer packaged good, you pull it off the shelf, you don't think about the factory, the people, the ingredients, the supply chain, the delivery — all those steps that happen in between. The national team travels around and visits all of the sites, and our national team is composed of team members who specialize in all these different things — clone and mom care, veg and flower, labeling, joint manufacturing, extraction, the list goes on. They're all experts in those fields, and if we're making a tweak to SOPs that goes up through our national team, we always want to hear from the front lines. We love being in the facilities — I spend 50 weeks a year on the road, people ask me where I live, I live on United flight, whatever, seat 12C, and I'm bouncing around to multiple sites a week. But we love hearing from the front lines because they're doing these processes day in and day out, and there are nuances to each site, and we want to incorporate their input if it aligns with everything we're doing. Bryan Fields: I guess the challenge then is how do you balance what someone on the front lines thinks is such a small change, but understand from a high level that it has to be cascaded across, and communication needs to be shared. How do you balance that from a time efficiency standpoint, knowing which changes get approved and which ones have to wait? Trip McDermott: Great question. Some changes might be specific to that site because we have a lot of automation and it's different at certain sites, based on scale and capacity — we might not need equipment as big as, say, Florida for Connecticut or West Virginia. So changes to SOPs can be site specific. Things we consider: what is this change for — is it to speed up a process at the cost of quality, or is it improving quality but slowing down capacity and output? A lot of people are talking about automation, and we are big on automation at Verano, but we always want to make sure quality comes first. As we've all evolved through the last ten years of cannabis, which feels like 150, you've seen automated trimmers go through massive changes in how the bud is handled and treated. In earlier years it looked like people were taking scissors and chopping it up, now you have a more refined product. So is automation helping or hurting quality? Certain automation might not be the right fit because it's damaging the product or creating a lower quality product for consumers, and at that point it might improve output, but we have to say hold on, there's got to be a different way — maybe we handle that material on a more personal basis to get to that end product and make sure we're confident in what we're putting out. Kellen Finney: Does it start by working backwards in terms of specific core product SKUs you have for a specific state market? For instance, if you're using automated trimmers and that trim is being used for pre-rolls, but it's not the quality you require — is that kind of how you guys back into a lot of those decisions? Trip McDermott: That's right. We look at what our goal is, what product we're trying to create, and that specific piece of automation might work for pre-rolls but not for the flower, or it might work for a certain grade of flower. We have a plethora of brands — you have Reserve, which is our hand-trimmed, hand-packaged high-end product, you have Essence, which is that middle tier, and so we use more automation when working on Essence and our Savvy brand for flower, which is that more value product where we're also using a lot of automation. Certain things work for certain brands and products within those. Kellen Finney: From a high level perspective, would you say most of your day is being proactive with objectives, or is it being reactive, putting out fires? Trip McDermott: It's a beautiful mix of both. For everybody listening who's involved in operations, there are always little fires everywhere, and then you multiply that across 14 sites and multiple environments and different products — lab, kitchen, distribution, the whole cultivation side. I try to spend as much of my time being proactive. I'm lucky enough to have an extremely talented, committed, solid team that takes a lot of the daily problem solving off my plate. Bryan Fields: That's such a unique, challenging balance. As I was doing my background on you and recognizing how big the states are that your team oversees, there's probably things that always can be passed up the chain of command for you to see, and if you spent all day every day on it, you'd essentially be a full-time firefighter putting out all these issues. Is it that you worked in each state to develop those relationships, or do you have sub-step managers managing certain regions to communicate back, because 14 states is massive? Trip McDermott: Great question. Yes, we're divided — we have a national team, and under that national team we have regional directors who go around, each assigned to a specific region, usually three to four states. They're always in contact with each of the cultivation and production managers at each site, getting real time feedback on what's working and what's not. The only way this works is when you have people with in-depth knowledge over what they're covering — you can't just pull people from outside the industry in because they have a good cultivation background from vegetables or CPG packaging. There's a lot of nuances to cannabis, and a big pillar for me is promoting within and elevating high quality individuals who have the drive and commitment. We coach those team members up, and they eventually rise through the ranks at the cultivation facilities and end up on the national team leading others. Just because they understand their department or craft really well doesn't mean they're great managers, so we work hard to build them as managers. One thing I'm always preaching is manage through your managers — when our national team is on site and sees something that should be tweaked, tell the manager on site to relay that message to their team, don't address the team directly as a national team member. Let the manager have that interaction, good or bad, and revisit it afterward and ask what we could have done better. You build through experience, but going around telling people what to do all the time as a national team member creates confusion about who team members should be listening to. We want that chain of communication streamlined. Bryan Fields: It's a great point — someone who's incredible at growing some of the best flower might not necessarily be a good leader based on communication style or personality fit, and I think that's one of the unique challenges in this industry as companies like yours scale so fast. Trip McDermott: Yeah, and it's a balance because some people who are the best at a certain job don't want to manage, they want to do their thing and be left alone, and that's fine. But when you have the blend of talent, personality, and desire to work with or lead a team, we identify that and we're always on the hunt for talented individuals interested in taking on more and elevating, making sure they have that career path and ability to excel. Kellen Finney: Do your managers allow, in essence, resource balancing — like if you have one individual who's excellent at Task A at Site A but Task A is struggling at Site B, do you guys allow managers to kind of manipulate the starting lineup? Trip McDermott: Yeah, we want to move people around, and as we're coaching people up we bring them to other sites so they can show their tips and tricks. It's a great way to get people out of their specific facility and meet new team members, show what they're good at, and lend those processes to another facility so we can all be efficient together. A big thing for us is time trials, understanding whether it's a piece of equipment or a buy-and process, understanding output, and making sure we're running as optimally as we can without jeopardizing quality. If we see certain sites operating faster than others, it might be a legacy site with employees who've been there a while versus a newer site — we just did an acquisition where we acquired operations in Virginia as well as two dispensaries, and a lab and cultivation site in Arizona. Making sure those team members get aligned with our processes and learn the tips and tricks we've spent years developing, so they're not reinventing the wheel — we bring down team members, get them out of their site, show them a new site, and work with the team members so they're brought up to speed as quickly as possible. Bryan Fields: Operational efficiencies and quality — how is quality defined, is it a metric internally to quantify it, and how is operational efficiency defined? Trip McDermott: Quality is defined depending on the specific product category. For flower, we're looking at potency, terpene profile, nug structure, trichome structure — some of those come from the lab. For gummies, making sure they're consistently produced, that the coating is within reason, that there are no sugar tails on the gummies, or that the chocolate isn't blooming with bubbles or discoloration. Each department and product category has its own set of KPIs and quality checks that we review daily, in line throughout the process, not just right before it goes into the bag — there are many stop gates across the process. Bryan Fields: Those are helpful, but they can also bleed into operational efficiencies, where you could have someone very rigorous saying this doesn't meet quality, but then operational efficiency starts to suffer. Do you guys have checks as a team to say, hey, something's slowing us down? Trip McDermott: Quality is the ultimate decider. Example: I can have you hand packing joints and the goal is 150 an hour, but if the necks are loose and they break, or the paper's ripping, it's not doing anybody any good, and we're going to take half of what you produced away — so it went from 150 to 75. I'd rather slow the process down to make sure we're doing it correctly and have the quality going out the door, because when you can trick someone once on the retail side — we've all bought something we thought was good and it was a piece of junk, and you're not going back. To get you to go back really takes somebody to move mountains, and as a manufacturer it's so costly to try to get you to buy that product again. The saying goes, when you have a bad experience you tell 10 people, when you have a good experience you tell three. So we need to be careful about what we're putting out and make sure it's the highest quality, because slowing down and making sure we're putting out solid quality product is more efficient and cheaper than winning back a bunch of annoyed customers who have no interest in revisiting our product. If what we're putting out is subpar, we can't do it — it's not how we build a brand, especially when launching a new brand or product category. We might be shooting ourselves in the foot to hit a certain inventory level or get it out to as many dispensaries as we can, but all we've done is create a big problem we have to go fix. Kellen Finney: Let's talk about launching a new product with those stringent quality requirements in place — especially with vapes, which can leak a lot. Walk us through that balancing act — it's an exciting product, you want to flood it, increase sales growth, but you also need to balance how much you can produce at that specific quality. Trip McDermott: It's always a push and pull from corporate, marketing, and production, but everybody works well together. You always need to launch a product yesterday and have a ton of product ready to go to all the stores. When we're innovating a new vape, for example, we work on hardware testing with a number of manufacturers to ensure the viscosity works with whatever type of input — solventless, resin, or distillate — and we want that hardware to be bulletproof, because things leak and you really need to battle test the hardware. Hardware has come light years, forget the last ten years, over just the last two years — you're starting to have hardware specific for solventless and BHO versus distillate, and temperatures on the vapes that create a solid user experience, a lower temp for resin and rosin so you're not charring the terpenes and burning your throat. We do a lot of product testing, working with hardware manufacturers to make sure we've got the right hardware in place, and then marketing and packaging innovation — what differentiates this product, what does the label do to tell the story? A big issue in the space is people constantly putting out new products without doing a great job at storytelling and connecting with the customer. Packaging and bud tender education can help with that — if bud tenders know the differentiating reasons for a product, they can sell it better, which generates more revenue and gets it into more hands. We're working on some exciting stuff right now with all-in-one vapes that have an NFC chip, so you can tap your phone to the vape and it takes you to a landing page, letting us continue to tell the story of the product and what's in the hardware, connecting with the consumer directly, not just through the dispensary touchpoint. Bryan Fields: We have our own dispensaries so we can do that when customers come into our store, but this innovation lets us really connect with the customer, give them updates on the product, COAs, what's coming down the pipeline, discounts, as we continue to launch new products in that category. We approach innovation from multiple departments — lab, supply chain, hardware procurement, marketing, packaging, and educating at the retail level. We've spent a lot of time over the last eight months increasing our in-market team so we can do more trainings and pop-ups and make sure cannabis advisors and bud tenders are really educated on the product. Kellen Finney: That's really crazy, I can only imagine Uber Eats is dying to position their ads on that landing page. Trip McDermott: Yeah, our marketing team has done some awesome things with that, really excited for it to launch to market and for everybody to experience it, but we've got a fantastic marketing team that's done a lot of really great out-of-the-box thinking. Bryan Fields: I have a bit of a philosophical question — super cool technology, but it's going to get used and then tossed. There have been regulations on the amount of concentrate that can go into a vape pen, limiting reusability. I know you guys have recently launched some two-gram vape pens, extending the lifeline of that technology. Do you think there's a time when vaping could be a 10-gram or refillable format? The reusable cartridge thing doesn't really seem to have taken off — I'm just curious for your thoughts. Trip McDermott: We've joked around — you started out at half grams, you got threes, one grams, two grams, nine grams — where does this stop? The reality is, if you're looking at it from a supply standpoint, each market is finite in the cultivation sites that can supply distillate, or what people are willing to sell at a price that makes sense. That's one part of the equation. The other is quality and user experience — if you've smoked certain vapes that have been left over time, you see terpene separation, or it starts to burn halfway through because the terpenes are aggregating. There is a limit to how many grams you put in a vape and have real quality. Some people will throw it in their nightstand and hit it once a week or month and be fine with it not tasting as good, but once that bad pull happens for others, they're going to get a new one. I think when you get into these larger formats where the vape is hanging around longer, being hit more times, it's just not going to be that great of a user experience — but we'll see, that's my thought. Kellen Finney: This is one of the interesting aspects of the industry — it's unknown, could go any direction, and I don't even know if users themselves know exactly what they want, it's probably a blend of all of them. So when you're modeling out the two-gram, is it an understanding that you want to make it a little different, that the unit economics work? Take us through that, and feel free to drop the brand name. Trip McDermott: Yeah, the brand is Savvy, and you'll see the two-gram Savvy in market. When we're looking at this, we look at the economics, and we also look at our supply chain to make sure we can produce it, keep it in inventory, and keep it in the market so it's a constant fixture on shelves. Regarding economics, we're first and foremost focused on creating a solid user experience, because we can have a product with amazing economics that isn't a good product, and it's not going to do anything for us. We can fine-tune the backend economics, but we want that concept to be bulletproof before it launches. We know a lot of other brands are launching two-grams — it seems to be what consumers want, and it makes sense for us in a number of states where we have the supply to do so. Bryan Fields: Do you do a coordinated launch across all states on the same day, and is that exciting? Walk us through that process. Trip McDermott: Yes, we do, and it's not necessarily all states at once — time zones differentiate things a little bit — but we will launch products in a number of states on the same day. We'll have all the product in on a Thursday night for a Friday launch, and that'll be the kickoff with messaging, advertising, promos, and we'll get it into as many cannabis advisors' and bud tenders' hands as we can prior. We also do launch events — our marketing team has done phenomenal, very cool launch events. We had one in New Jersey and Illinois with a terpene bar, where you could fill up a bottle and inhale it to understand the terpene profile for the vape — a really cool event. We create the buzz, hand out samples, and we're also launching barrel-style pre-rolls, something we've been working on for the last six or seven months, optimizing the machine and fine-tuning the grind size so there's no fallout, minimizing gunking up when infusing the flower. There's a lot of R&D that goes into this, and while we're pushed to hit certain launch dates, we want to make sure we're putting out quality and have the quality story to tell. The barrel-style launch has been going really well in New Jersey and Illinois, and I think it's a real differentiated product from the cones typically seen in the market. Bryan Fields: Kind of like an orchestra where you're the conductor and everyone funnels back to you between marketing, distribution, and manufacturing, all centered back to your responsibility, making sure the numbers work out with the quality intended. Trip McDermott: Yeah, I take the trash out too. Bryan Fields: Amazing. Let's talk about some of the operational and manufacturing efficiencies, cutting-edge manufacturing — I saw it littered all over some of the 2025 goals. Curious to know what that entails and if there's anything you can share. Trip McDermott: For operational efficiencies, we're always looking at how we can incorporate automation to improve quality and streamline processes — what are we doing by hand that doesn't need to be done by hand. This is an interesting plant, and all of the equipment that's come into the space has generally come from manufacturers that work with food or drink, but it has to be tweaked — moisture content and things like that. We're always working with manufacturers, giving them advice from our national team; a number of our national team members work on advisory boards with manufacturers to help improve the machines, not just for ourselves but for the industry as a whole. We also set KPIs — moving away from the equipment side and more towards how our managers are managing. We have time trials that we're always updating, making sure people are held accountable on an individual basis, making sure everyone's in the right seat on the right bus. If they're not meeting the KPI or time trial, we need to move them somewhere else — they might be really good at a different job function. We also do this on the cultivation side, understanding how many pots we can move, how many clones we can transplant, emitters put in, making sure we're deleafing plants uniformly, taller, shorter, thinner, wider — but rough numbers, what can we expect from each individual, so we're at an optimal headcount at each site. It's also very empowering to employees, because if we're working on the same task and I'm telling stories and you're grinding, there's tension building because we're getting paid the same and you're doing a lot more work. It improves culture — some might see it as trying to keep everyone running full speed all the time, but that's not the intent, because we know there are peaks and valleys and you can't sprint a marathon, so we look at that average pace. People are willing to lend hands and give tips and tricks, and it builds camaraderie and culture, whereas people might think it's divisive — it's actually the opposite. Bryan Fields: No one's shared that with us so far on the podcast, so I appreciate you opening up on that. We have a lot of entrepreneurs who listen — are there any problems you're currently facing that you wish there was a technology or software solution for? Trip McDermott: On the cultivation side, you have a wide range of potencies from the same strain, and if we had a crystal ball to really dial in each strain across different environments, that would help, because you're going to have genetic drift — we keep our moms fresh, keep genetics coming in, and we're pheno hunting constantly to increase our genetic library, because the genetic library is going to be the currency of the future and a real differentiating factor among operators. On the cultivation side, improving the level of environmental controls with a number of different manufactured HVAC units — the logic within those units, whether the heat turns on, the dehumidifier, the humidifier, going colder or warmer — seems simplistic, but when you start adding different units and different logic it becomes a thousand-piece puzzle. There are companies working on this, and we're working with a number of them to really streamline that and ensure we have as much control over each room and site as possible, because temperature and humidity need to be consistent from clone to veg to flower to cure to packaging, so all the material transpires at the same rate and you're not reintroducing humidity or drying it out too much before it reaches the end consumer. Kellen Finney: How does your team vet practicality versus fantasy? In this space there's a lot of pie-in-the-sky technology that changes the industry, and you're not really sure — what's your process for vetting practical solutions versus something like the hydrogen water situation, you know what I mean? Trip McDermott: I don't know if you drink hydrogen water — I have, actually. From an equipment standpoint, if we're hearing pie-in-the-sky numbers, like a machine that's going to give you X amount of joints an hour, great, bring it in, let's try it, we'll work with you. What's the number without jams or stops, what's the built-in breakdown time? If it's doing 100 an hour on the sticker and we're getting 80, and the manufacturer says there's about 10 minutes of downtime, that's the delta I try to incorporate every time we buy a piece of equipment — what were we promised versus what is reality, and we want to get reality as close to what we were promised as possible. But I hold the team to that reality, not the number on the sticker, because that just discourages our employees when they're not hitting an unrealistic goal, and it screws up the projections and headcount from those time trials. On the cultivation side, going from Arizona to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, or Ohio, we have an ideal number of plants per bench, but if there's high humidity we'll pull some plants off. If 100 plants is the target for a room and we put 100 in, it's all going to the lab, not getting packaged into flower, so we're growing to that pie-in-the-sky number but not getting output from it — that's where the nuances come into play, and I'm more focused on reality. Our teams aren't held accountable for environmentals in a room that force us to pull 25 plants out — their job is to take care of the plants, not deal with the HVAC. We work with maintenance and facilities teams, but certain environmentals just can't be achieved in certain states and locations. Bryan Fields: Well said. Slightly switching gears — what do you think is most misunderstood about Verano? Trip McDermott: I think there's a stigma that MSOs can't put out quality product because they're too big — though it can just be across certain states that makes you an MSO, you don't have to be the biggest. I think there's a stigma that MSOs are corporate cannabis operating at scale and quality isn't front of mind. I can't speak for other MSOs, but I can speak to Verano — we're on this eternal quest to maximize the quality we're putting out, consistently innovating existing product categories. For example, we have a lot of gummy lines — Bits, our five-milligram pieces with adaptogens for focus, sleep, relaxing, or energy — innovating for maybe a different demographic than someone who wants our Savvy 50-milligram single-piece gummy. Those are two very different consumers, but we're trying to innovate for new demographics and existing loyal consumers. On the retail side, we're always figuring out new ways to deliver a cool consumer experience — we launched Cabbage Club about six months ago, one of the first of its kind, a loyalty program where you buy in and get access to free product each month, new product drops before they go to the public, parties, and things like that. We're also putting kiosks in all our dispensaries to increase accessibility and get through the line faster if you know what you want. When you get too big, you can lose sight of quality, and that's why we've implemented our national team and standardized SOPs to ensure consistency, and why we're so focused on the retail customer experience. Bryan Fields: Dream smoking session, three people, dead or alive? Trip McDermott: Chappelle, Tracy Morgan — I'm a standup comedy guy — and I'll throw in Chris Andersen, Birdman, he was an NBA player years ago, seemed like an interesting guy. Bryan Fields: Three people alive though, huh — good for you, good for you. What question do you wish more people asked you, besides how fast you can run in your new sneakers? Trip McDermott: I would say, how can I help them. I'm always curious — I don't think people necessarily go up to others and ask how they can make their life easier, but I would love to hear that, it gives me insight into what issues they're running into day to day, whether it's people at headquarters or at the facility. Selfishly it gives me a lot of insight, but I also want to help them solve that problem so they don't have to live with it. Bryan Fields: Great answer. All right, last question, Trip — one year from now, what has changed for Verano? Trip McDermott: I think we'll have launched a number of new products — more barrel-style pre-rolls, a number of vape products, refined and implemented new extraction processes to get better resin and rosin products. Maybe we'll have expanded into other states, I don't know, but we're always looking at opportunities on the M&A front, always open to hearing what's going on in other states and seeing where the opportunity is. Bryan Fields: Is there a state you have in mind? Trip McDermott: Not right now, but we kick a lot of tires — I look at a lot of dispensaries, cultivation sites, and brands. That's becoming a bit more prevalent — you saw Wana with the Canopy deal, you've seen some brands getting bought out and purchased, and it's something we're always looking at, cool brands, partnerships — it doesn't always have to be an acquisition, it can be a partnership too. Bryan Fields: Awesome. So for our listeners who want to get in touch and learn more about Verano, where can they find you? Trip McDermott: Sure, so verano.com will show you all of our products, all of our dispensaries, our Zen Leaf locations, which is the Verano dispensary brand, and Muv in Florida. I'm on LinkedIn as well. Bryan Fields: Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun, we'll link it all in the show notes.