Where’s the Cash? Visibility, Inventory & Profitable Growth with Tyler Nielsen

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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, Tyler Nielsen, founder of Vast Insight Partners. Tyler, thanks for taking time. How are you doing today? Tyler Nielsen: I'm doing well, Bryan. Thanks for having me. Excited. Bryan Fields: Excited to have you here. Kellan, how are you doing? Kellan Finney: I'm doing really well, really excited to talk to Tyler, and to dive into the nuances of connecting the front end of the business with operations and all the things that make it tick. And I'm grateful to talk to someone in the Midwest, right? Bryan Fields: Yeah, I'm stoked. I think there's a lot of information that we're going to take off LinkedIn and dive a little deeper into. I think the aspects of what's going on in the industry now are hard — everyone's trying to cut costs. But before looking to cut, we've got to understand what we're currently doing and how we can do better by having a better conversation around data and tracking. And I don't think there's anyone doing it any better than Tyler. So before we dive into the fun stuff and I get ahead of myself, Tyler, we've got a little East Coast, West Coast battle going. I know you've got a particular take on that. So where would you put yourself on the map? Tyler Nielsen: No, it's third coast. It's fresh coast. It's the Midwest. And I don't think we're misrepresenting all the concentration and large representation around Chicago — happy to represent the flyover states, as we've articulated. But no, fresh coast all the way. Bryan Fields: I love it. Very powerful introduction. So for our listeners, can you give a quick background on how you found your way to the cannabis space? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, I've been in manufacturing for the majority of my career — finance and operations. I had a colleague I went to college with, and we'd kept in contact since we graduated. He calls me up one day and says, "Hey, I'm going into this new industry." We were both coming out of large corporations, and he said, "I think I need you to support the growth and scaling of this organization." I never would have thought I'd be having this type of conversation or be in this industry. But yeah, I got into the industry through a connection. It's the most intriguing, confusing, challenging, and enjoyable industry all at the same time. To me, it's a lot of the same problems that standard large corporations are trying to solve, just with a little more agricultural spice to it. So I came in through a non-traditional way, and I'd still call myself a newcomer in the industry, not a legacy person. But manufacturing through and through, and it's exciting to be part of the industry now. Bryan Fields: Before we dive into Vast Insight Partners and some of the work you do, I think we should define the basics, right — get on the same page, and then we can really get into the specifics. So let's define growth, and then how that's different from profitability. Tyler Nielsen: Yeah. Vast Insight Partners is the firm I started to help not only cannabis companies but also other mid-market manufacturing businesses connect financial insights all the way through to operational execution — so they can focus on scaling profitably, not just growing faster. To your point, the growth engine is top-line revenue — it's new SKUs, it's incremental cultivation, it's another state you're going into, it's a state transitioning from med to rec. All of those items are the growth conversation, the top-line conversation. Now, the "how do we scale profitably" conversation is: how do we take the forecast, how do we get visibility to margins and SKU profiles — what mix are we making, and what does the state actually support with product offerings? And how do we make sure we're not just taking a sales action of "we need 10,000 units a month, okay great, we make 10,000 units, move on," and we don't think about it beyond that? It's about connecting the front end to the back end. How do we do it in an effective manner without just piling cash into inventory, but doing it in a way that maintains diversity, maintains the SKU mix? We want to put good product out — in the cannabis space, that's fresh flower, really good strains within concentrates, the right mix in vapes, whatever the customers need at the right time. So it's about how do we grow the top line, grow revenue, but do it in a way that we're conscious of costs — not just creating and manufacturing everything we can, but doing it in a way that we see pull-through, and we're not overburdening retail stores or overburdening the sales team to go sell something that's been sitting on the shelf for two months. Bryan Fields: Let's unpack that, because there's a ton there. For some of the vertically integrated operators who handle all aspects of the supply chain, does that start with an executive at the top who says, "Here's the focus"? And then how does that trickle down through an organization so that each part of the supply chain handles its responsibilities, does it responsibly, and does it within the guidelines that align with growing and scaling profitably? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah. It has to start with executive backing. If the leadership of the organization isn't aligned on how we're going to execute, this doesn't work. Now, contrary to some belief, there also has to be a bottoms-up focus — wanting to get better, and allowing the operator to do exactly what they're good at. To me, this is the conversation around: we have this whole ambition to grow, but our execution isn't necessarily top-notch. So we focus on that execution gap — taking the strategy of a large player, or a craft grower, or an oil producer, who all know where their path is and what they want to grow, and helping them execute it. And when I say execute it, I mean: how many units do you want next month? Are we going into a 4/20 cycle? A 7/10 cycle? Green Wednesday? All of those are going to call for a different product mix. So depending on what we're doing as a business, that's going to dictate the forecast projection, the demand plan, what the sales team is seeing — it's all about the connectivity of making a plan and executing that plan with integration from every single person in the organization, all the way down to the sales rep with feet on the street, so everyone knows what they want and when they want it, and we get that alignment so we can give them the best material at the best time for whatever cycle we're in during the year. Kellan Finney: What does that initial integration process look like — with your firm and a business that's looking to bring this kind of insight into their decision-making? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, it's got to start with an execution analysis. Where are our gaps? What are we roadblocked or hurdled by right now? Are we just not getting enough biomass through? I'll pick some random numbers — say we're projecting 60 grams a square foot and we're only getting 20. That would be detrimental to a cultivation team, and those in the field aren't going to let that slide. So how are we actualizing our forecast, and where do we then adjust the mix? It's really all about benchmarking where we are right now, and then having a true conversation about where we want to be in the next 6, 12, 18 months. What are we trying to do? Do we want to be the best producer of high-potency, high-terp, high-quality flower? Or do we just want a great assortment of vapes, distillate, or rosin-based products? What's our conversation — what do we want to do? That's really where we start: understanding here's where we are, here's where we want to go, and what strategy we need to execute. And then we help fill that execution gap. It's not just handing over a strategy deck and saying good luck — it's us working alongside leadership teams, building the connected processes, making sure we're not overburdening inventory, adjusting the cultivation plans with the diversity we need as we go, and then really just focusing on the continuous cycle of that process. Bryan Fields: So just to make sure I understand correctly — it seems like the first step is like an internal audit, where your team goes through and understands all the cogs in the wheel, speaks to the players, and recognizes where the gaps are, because sometimes an executive might have one perspective, but the operator feels like he's got a different set of challenges, and there's a disconnect between leadership and the team. So how granular do those conversations get? Do you speak to all the people on the ground who are actually trying to figure out how to do their job day to day? Tyler Nielsen: Like I said, it's got to have executive backing, and we talk through — the executive level probably needs more visibility and awareness of what's going on, whether that's dashboarding, live data feeds, or just a weekly report. But then, to your point, it goes all the way down to the operator, the cultivator, the individuals actually executing the plan on the plant. There's a different need for data granularity at each level, and different inflection points for what's connecting the process. The executives might have a gap with the IT group, because of revenue recognition and the timeliness of revenue or inventory reports. But the facility individual is thinking, "How much oil do I have right now, and what do I need next week? I need to start batching to produce it." So it's a matter of granularity throughout the scope. But to your point, it is an absolute audit of the process to see where we stand, and then really focusing on the quick wins we can act on right away — making sure the sales team is communicating not just number of units, but diversity, potency, and what the brand looks like if there are multi-brand states. It can be a chaotic conversation. But if we don't focus on that connected plan, no matter who you're talking to, the signal is based on the same input: what is our demand plan, what is that demand plan signaling, and how many units do we need to execute so the executives know this is what we're driving to and we're confident we'll deliver our revenue projections for the month, the quarter, and the next 12 months. And then we can plan the inventory all the way through that cycle, making sure we're not just parking cash on the balance sheet and burdening the CFO to explain that away, while also making sure we have quick turns, fresh product, and the brand standards the customers expect. Kellan Finney: There's a lot of interaction here — is it more of a coaching basis, where you're working with the executive team and having conversations with every level of technician in the organization and coaching them through achieving the goals they've set out? Or is it more hands-on, where there's an issue with a lower-level situation and you go in and re-emphasize, "Hey, these are the goals we're trying to reach, this is why we need you to do this"? Walk us through some of that execution process. Tyler Nielsen: Yeah. In any organization, cannabis or not, it's not complexity that kills it — it's confusion about what to do next. So it's making sure the teams are aware of what we're executing toward. To answer your question directly, it's about 50% coaching and 50% hands-on execution. There are frameworks we've created or leveraged, not just for cannabis but for any manufacturer, around how we do demand planning, how that demand planning kicks off supply plans, how we forecast demand. Do we just look at what we did last year and say the market's up 3%, so we'll add 3%? Or how do we get better accuracy on forecasting and build a robust enough process that when we're not involved in the engagement, individuals know what they need to do and the questions they need to ask — but also create curiosity around the process? That's part of the coaching, but also the execution. We give frameworks and visibility into how we want and hope the business works after we leave an organization. But the coaching side is really about driving the curiosity in the individual: if I need 10,000 units in two months, what do I need to do today? I've got to get the distillate, formulate it, get it all ready to go — because if demand changes next week and I don't know what I'm doing, I can't support that sales plan. So there's a lot of awareness in connecting the strategy to the execution on the coaching side, but also creating curiosity and driving people to ask the right questions and engage with more than one function. If you're a cultivation leader in the facility and you're not talking weekly about what demand changes are shifting, or having weekly harvest walks about how the material we expected last week compares to what's changed week over week, and how that material flow may change going into finished goods — that's a gap. So it's about building the framework of what questions to ask, what data we need, and how to benchmark it — a lot of hands-on data conversation, because at the end of the day, we're talking about a plant here. It's not going to execute exactly to our expectations, and that variability is unknown — we have to put a framework in place to allow for that variability down the path. Bryan Fields: It must be such a difficult conversation to have with these individuals who are juggling so many different things at the same time. On one side, you have to ask people for numbers, but you also have to verify that the numbers going into this are accurate and represent the correct inputs, so it flows all the way through the system. So how do you approach that delicate balance — asking for specific information while also feeling comfortable verifying that the information provided is accurate and represents the true story behind it? Tyler Nielsen: It's a great question. We have to build trust and transparency up front — that we're here to help, there's a reason this is happening, and there's a reason we're here. Even before you get to those conversations, there's a lot of "why is this guy here, is he going to take my job?" No — it's about how we partner with organizations. That's the reason I named the business Vast Insight Partners — we bring insights via partnerships, that's what we do. And I can't operate if the business can't provide transparent, trusting insight into the data we're trying to talk about. Let's talk about forecasting for a second — whether it's revenue or demand forecasting, there's a belief out there that forecasting will eliminate uncertainty. "If we just forecast it, it's going to happen." No, that's not forecasting. All forecasting does is make you ready for potential uncertainty — here's what we think is going to happen, and we consistently have conversations around market dynamic changes, mix changes, state regulation impacts. Forecasting is just making sure that what we can control as a team is documented, and that's the number the team is going forward with — a vape plan, SKU diversity, size diversity, flavorings potentially. How do we make sure the sales team is giving us the right input to execute all the way through to supply? Now there are supply constraints, material constraints — "oh shoot, we forgot to order enough hardware" — but all of this process ties back to the input, and that's what we work to correct. Over time the data becomes clear — it's not a light-switch moment where you give us the inputs and we flip a switch and it's magically fixed. It's an iterative process where we implement frameworks so the outliers become clear, and then we can manage those outliers as exceptions while the process still runs in the background. Now we can focus on the things that keep distracting us and get those out of the way, and keep the process more accurate as we go forward. So it starts with trust and transparency, and visibility into what we're currently doing, or what data we don't have — and if we don't have the data, we're going to go find it. How do we look at harvest planning, demand planning, capacities within a manufacturing space? We've got to dig into all of that and get it on the table so we can talk about what we can and can't do. Then we bring those insights to the executive team and say, "Hey, you wanted to do 25,000 units of vape — well, your manufacturing can only do 15,000. Here are the gaps you need to solve: where there's a machine, where there's more labor, where there's more biomass needed." And then they make that decision. We're not going to solve the world's problems — we're bringing the problems to light so we can solve them and make proactive decisions. Kellan Finney: Is there a specific problem that plagues all of these companies you interact with? Tyler Nielsen: Yes, and it's usually inventory. It's probably broader than just "do we or don't we have the finished good to sell." Sales doesn't have the diversity mix they expect — making sure sales gets the full indica-sativa-hybrid mix, depending on the SKU. Or there's aged inventory, and as you both know, the longer it sits, the less valuable it gets — unless we're willing to pay for it. As long as we can manage the inventory, we can manage and support the firm's cash, because the cost of capital in this industry is tremendously high. If we can turn inventory one more time per month, that's a massive cash unlock for an organization — they can invest that in new brands, state acquisitions, new material for production, rather than signing away their life on the cost of capital. So inventory is a lot of the time the symptom we see within organizations, but underneath it there are usually teams working in silos that cause the gaps that show up as inventory problems. Usually we get the conversation started around inventory, and we go fix all the other pieces we uncover during that analysis and gap audit. Bryan Fields: Let's unpack the inventory piece a little further. Say they've got 100 units of vapes and they should have only had 50 — is that because manufacturing is just producing at a continued rate, producing as much as they can, and it's a downstream effect? Or is there another element missing? Because it seems like you guys are putting together a puzzle, and you have to figure out first where the biggest hole in the puzzle is, and then where the gaps are in communication so the feedback loop can work — where the sales rep is saying "we need more indicas" and manufacturing is saying "we are making indicas," and it's about communicating in a way that's proactive instead of reactive. Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, you hit on a lot of little pieces there. The conversation is: how do we get really proactive about what we intend to produce? I like to throw around a concept I call "Cultivate with Intent." How do we give six-to-eight-to-twelve-month visibility into the demand needed and the finished-good items, and then let the cultivators go execute what they're really good at — growing good biomass at the right potencies in whatever rooms they have, whether indoor or greenhouse — and deliver it in the timeframe the finished good is needed? That takes a lot more than I'm making it sound like — I'm dramatically oversimplifying, let's be transparent here. But it's about the right signal — how do we get the team to focus on what they're really good at? I don't think I answered your question, though — go ahead and rearticulate it, Bryan. Bryan Fields: The challenge, it seems, is you're putting together a puzzle, and Cultivate with Intent is a great approach because you start with the raw material and it carries all the way through to inventory. But how does the cycle loop work in unison, where everything is humming at the right speed — say production is producing 10 units a day, but they need to hit 15 or 20, so they can speed up or slow down. How do all those pieces get interconnected in a way that makes sense for a business, so they can feel like they're growing at the right speed without hindering other parts of the operation? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, so let's talk about supply execution. Manufacturing — what's their signal on the input? The supply plan says, "I need 100 units," and that supply plan is factored off what sales needs in the next couple of weeks or months, how much material and current inventory is on hand, and how much material we can operate with — how much is coming through the pipeline for biomass. It's usually not a binary conversation of "sales didn't sell enough" or "manufacturing didn't produce enough" or "produced too much" — it's a balance of making sure your inventory is within a reasonable window of supply. What we usually focus on: let's say that hundred units equates to 30 days of finished-good material. We might have a plus-or-minus 10-day window on that — we could be anywhere from 20 to 40 days of supply. As long as we're within that window, hitting the potency targets and diversity targets, we're okay, as long as we have agreement from the executive team on that plus-or-minus window and we're comfortable with the impact it has on material coming down and inventory on the balance sheet — because you know you're going to over- or under-produce. It's manufacturing, the plan never goes exactly as expected. Same thing with sales — we never sell the exact amount we expected, because some wholesaler might have moved a lot of product the previous week, or it was 4/20 and we got a bigger pull-through than expected and couldn't react in time because of capacity. All of those factors come into play. Inventory is the biggest problem, but it's also the biggest opportunity — making sure we balance it properly so the variability in demand is managed by the inventory we have, and we know what lever to pull from a supply-capacity or sales perspective. When you get up the maturity scale and you're executing the process more effectively, the supply team can go to the sales team and say, "Six weeks from now we've got this material coming — what do you want to do with it? Put it here, put it there, run a promo?" That's when you really start to see the value of the process, as long as each function is accountable for their step and the data feeds the downstream action. Kellan Finney: So what's your rule of thumb here? A lot of this sounds like internal POs — manufacturing saying, "Here's a menu of the ten strains we're making these next 12 weeks, you pick what you want to do with it as a sales team, if you want to put these strains into vape because they're popular." But there's a dynamic there too — say you have a lead grower with KPIs he's trying to hit from a yield perspective. He knows if he grows only OG he'll hit his KPIs. The sales team has their own KPIs, and they say, "I'm not going to sell any of this OG — excuse my language, sorry — but why are we growing OG?" So how do you balance manufacturing hitting optimal yields, like hitting the 60 grams per square foot they know they can do, against the fact that strains sell sometimes and not other times, and the whole industry is super volatile from a marketing perspective? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, if the KPIs aren't aligned, it's not going to work. Sixty grams per square foot, sure, we'll hit that — but there's got to be a diversity-mix KPI against that, and a "how much material" component. You could hit 60 grams per square foot and get 6,000 grams out of a room, or 600,000 grams out of a room — it's about size, capacity, and connected execution. The KPI can't be siloed within any one function. Sixty grams per square foot sounds great on the cultivation side, but does it translate to the finished-good numbers I need out of that process? If I need 80 grams per square foot to actually hit my finished-good numbers based on the square footage I have, and cultivation's target is 60, we're not aligned. What we do with this process is bring that misalignment to light before it becomes a problem — before the plants even go into the ground. What's the historical analysis on this strain in this room? A strain might perform well in one room and not in another because of the environmentals — but that's for the cultivator to be the expert on. We take their estimates, run harvest comparisons and data analytics to help identify whether we're over- or under-forecasting, and call that out before we even get to harvest, so we build in that variability and can make decisions with the awareness that things won't play out exactly as expected. There has to be variability built in so we can adjust — that's material in process. If we're continually hand-to-mouth on material, we can't be ready for that variability. So it's about processing the right way, connecting the processes, and giving the signal early so we know what decision risk we're willing to take and live with downstream, before we get there. It's all proactive decision-making. Bryan Fields: The KPI conversation is such an interesting dilemma when you have an interconnected supply chain like this. If a vertically integrated company isn't aligned and everyone isn't swimming in the same direction, they end up counterintuitive to each other. For example, if sales says "we need vape units now" and manufacturing turns them over as fast as they can, quality might suffer, efficiency might suffer, and because of that the cost of goods sold changes. So tracking all of that becomes more complex and more difficult — because if your COGS is getting inflated, meaning your costs are going higher, the margin on that step is being decreased. So sure, maybe you're selling more units in a faster turnaround, but if you're not making enough margin on it, that's where growth versus profitability becomes such a challenge. Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, you're spot on. We haven't talked much about the financial side of it, but you have to have financial integration tied into that whole process too. I like to talk about tying sales, finance, and sales-and-operations together — those are the broad categories, but you've got to have your costing dialed in. Do you know whether you're doing average weighted costing or month-to-month costing? You've got to know what your sales team is incentivized on — that's another KPI. How does your sales team get compensated? Are they measured on mix, or just on sales revenue targets? How's your operations team incentivized — how much biomass do they get out of the facility, or do they hit revenue targets? So we're talking about back-of-office or operationally-sided KPIs on execution. But let's zoom out even further and talk about the KPIs that track overall business performance — at the end of the day we're all a little selfish, right? I want to make money, you want to make money, I'm here to help you make more money, that's what my business does. And if I'm not incentivized to help you do that, then we're on different paths — and that has to run all the way through the organization too. In manufacturing, this is articulated as integrated business planning — sales and operations planning, sales-inventory-and-operations planning, there are multiple ways to describe the concept we're talking about here. But if it's not tied together all the way through — all KPIs, all metrics, how we grade the business — it doesn't allow for those feedback loops to occur. The worst thing we see is when we go into a business and they say, "Yeah, we have an end-to-end process," and it's like, okay, how does this end tie to that end? How do we create that feedback loop? That's a lot of the conversation in the audit up front — realizing that if this person just talked to that person, it would solve half our issues. And now it's about creating a process so it's not just people having to remember to press a button — it's someone going through their normal cycle: forecasting, talking about production, having the right people in place. How many people do I need in three months to produce? If we're growing and going up and to the right, do I need more people, and how do I trigger HR to go hire? All of this is part of an integrated business plan that starts with strategy and ends with finished-good execution — all of it tied together. Bryan Fields: That's where those numbers can be so — let's call them creative — in the way they're reported and communicated throughout the organization, because you can hit certain KPIs, but if they're not accurately describing the health of the business — and for manufacturing specifically — if you're not communicating what your actual costs are, your margins are being misrepresented. So when the money comes through the chain, it looks like "we sold X, we made Y, that's the difference, that's our profitability," but there could be other hidden elements causing downstream effects. Do you see that as a leak in the business? And how bad can those leaks be, when there are a million things going on in these organizations — how do companies prioritize fixing these problems given the speed of the industry and everything they're juggling just to survive? Tyler Nielsen: That's an even more impactful statement right now, given what we're dealing with — tariffs coming off Chinese New Year, and orders that had to be placed for hardware back in late November, early December of last year. Nobody can predict how a plant is going to grow, and nobody can predict how this administration is going to change the landscape of business and cannabis in general. Because of the cost of capital in this space, we have to focus on cash. We have to focus on cash, and we have to stay close to what customers want. To do that, we have to build a repeatable habit of execution, so we can take the strategy, execute the strategy, see the cash come in, and then make the right next decision about how we deploy that cash. If we're not staying close to our customers and focused on cash, it's not going to be beneficial. We need to get better at saying no to the wrong opportunities faster, so we can make the next right decision. We're not going to make all the right decisions — whether it was a good or bad decision is about the outcome, not the decision itself, and we need to disconnect those two things. But it starts with cash, staying close to customers, and building repeatable execution. It's a risky business, a risky environment — things are happening week to week, day to day, and we're all seeing that. But cash is king, or queen, depending on who's at the top of the business, and we've got to keep a focus on that. Kellan Finney: How do you prioritize the deployment of that cash — say we could spend it on something that increases revenue, or deploy it toward something that helps with budget and costs and decreases the monthly burn? How do you help businesses navigate that? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, great question, and it ties back to long-term execution planning. A budget is a point in time we want to hit. When we look at that, how do we translate revenue into units? We know there's going to be price compression, so how do we bake that in, and translate it all the way through to say we need to make X amount of units by this timeline? Based on that budget and that planning, the better our process is integrated into the conversation, the more we can raise red flags — "Q3, we've got a capacity gap, you don't have enough Thompson Duke capacity, you need another one of those machines, or five more people, or a second shift." It lets us flag a mismatch between demand and supply, or a mismatch in capacity that we then need to figure out how to solve — where do we deploy that cash, where do we focus? Based on our long-range plan and the cultivation estimates, we might see a mismatch — is it on potency, do we need better indoor environmentals so we can focus on really high-potency flower? Or do we just need more biomass to put into food-grade distillate? Having those conversations and making sure the strategy is aligned lets us do capital planning, people planning, and really execute that strategy — which goes back to the beginning of this: if we can't identify where we want to be in six to twelve months, we're already behind. Bryan Fields: And it seems like tools that provide visibility throughout the process can be paramount to removing those gaps, because it's one thing to have a plan, but the reality is there are human beings handling various elements, and if you don't have tools for visibility across the supply chain, you risk falling back into the old process, which causes turmoil and more challenges, and it becomes a repeated cycle. So does your team help deploy visibility tools? How else do you help with that? Tyler Nielsen: Yes, for sure. We focus on people and process first — that has to be foundational, because if you don't have the right people in the right spot, or you're missing people, no process is going to execute. Similarly, if the process isn't in place, the person can be dynamite, but they'll just be spinning their wheels. So that's the majority of our focus — identifying the people and processes that need to be adjusted, improved, or changed, and providing frameworks that let the right people and process move forward. On a maturity scale, that's step one and two. Everyone wants to get to step ten — you're talking about AI tools and all this IT infrastructure — those are the solutions further down the path. But if we don't have people and process handled at the early maturity stage, we're not going to get past that. It's the execution gap — taking strategy to execution and making sure cross-functional alignment occurs. So we'll put early frameworks in place around visibility tools: age of finished-good material, days of supply on hand, how long our work-in-process takes — how long does it take to dry versus what we expected, how long is our grow cycle. All of the KPIs that are connected, we give early visibility into. And honestly, a lot of it is just math — here's what our expectation was, here's what we did, and tracking that through the process and connecting it all. That's where we start. As you go up the maturity scale, you can talk about data warehousing tools, data visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI, or some AI forecasting tools. But if we don't focus on people and process up front, we can't get to that point. We usually find ourselves focusing on people and process first, building frameworks so it can become an automated tool in the future, and then giving scope and support as the business progresses up that maturity scale. Bryan Fields: I'd assume, Tyler, when you're having conversations with these operators, they're telling you, "There's a million things going on, cash is super strapped — do I even have a problem?" So why is it worth someone spending their time and effort on the changes that come with knowing this? Why is it worth investing with your team? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, so when we start with that audit, the execution-gap analysis, we're going to give you a dollar figure that's an estimate of what you're leaving on the table. Ninety-nine percent of the time it's going to be much larger than that, but we're conservative — we build fact-based conversations around units, costing, how many people are working on your business right now, what your current cost of capital is, and we can give you a pretty good scenario for how much money you're leaving on the table by not executing on these pillars. If I can't articulate a five-times ROI on engaging with my team, it's not worth my time or yours. And that's where cash flow really matters, because we're going to help unlock it, increase your revenue, improve your margins. At the end of the day, we want people doing more value-add work. I don't need somebody taking a number from one spreadsheet and plugging it into another spreadsheet — that's not helpful. It's about having the data translate. Kellan Finney: Keeps them busy, though. I said it keeps them busy — I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, it does, but — Bryan Fields: That's the way we've always done it, Tyler. Tyler Nielsen: That's the way we've always done it. The teams I've been part of will chuckle at this if they listen — if I can get a monkey to do it, it's not worth our time. If I can train my four-year-old to type a number in over here, that's not value-add. We need less of that, and more human-based analytical curiosity, connecting the insight — that's the value. And if it's not a five-times ROI on what we're going to return, it's not worth it to anybody. So we look at improving revenue, increasing margin, reducing complexity, and making proactive decisions — when am I out of canopy space, when do I need more canopy space or better environmental controls because I'm not getting the material I need, when do I need to hire five more operators, when do I need a new machine? That takes a long-term vision, but we execute that process to give short-term actions and quick wins, and also give longer-term visibility so we make the right decisions on how we deploy cash. Bryan Fields: Is there a point in the conversation where — say you've done the audit, laid out the plan and potential improvements, and you're talking to a manager and saying, "This entry-level operator or employee needs to do this step instead of that step," and the manager says, "Listen, I can't get them to do that, they do what they do, it is what it is"? Do you have those conversations? Tyler Nielsen: Every once in a while, not too often. In manufacturing, you want standard operating procedures, and if we can guide and help correct that, that's a win, but it's not something we heavily focus on. Any facility leader — whether it's a craft grower, an oil producer, or a fully vertically integrated business — you're going to have hiccups like that, where the human aspect of business comes into play. I'd love to say I can solve it, but we zoom out and say, "Here's what we need to deliver, however we get there." I can give visibility into where our gaps are, but I can't correct the human element directly — I can lead a horse to water, but I can't force it to drink. I can give people guidance, the questions to ask, the data to execute on, and awareness of how we'd get better. That's really where the humanistic side of a facility becomes much more complex than just saying "I need five units." Kellan Finney: Is that where it turns into a coaching role for you — sorry, didn't mean to interrupt — where it's like, "This is how you want to shape this culture, here's an issue," and then you go up a level and communicate with a higher-level representative at that point? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, again, if I don't have executive buy-in, this process doesn't work — whether it's me supporting it, or the organization after my team departs. Trust and transparency, we've said it before. I ask for every-other-week or weekly conversations with the executive sponsor of an engagement, because I want to give visibility and keep them on pace — because we move quick. It's not just "this week we looked at some data and we'll tell you what to do." We're talking deep-dive, deeper conversations, executing frameworks, getting calendarized processes in place, and there's a lot to do and connect week to week. As Bryan said earlier, there are a lot of puzzle pieces we're trying to put together at the same time — and we're not talking about a Mickey Mouse ten-piece puzzle, this is a thousand-piece puzzle and the image is literally just blue. It's a complex situation, but that's where the humanistic side, the coaching, the leadership, understanding — in some instances that person may just be annoyed that day, and maybe it's not the day to talk to them. That's part of my engagement — getting on site, getting visibility into the facility, seeing the complexities they're dealing with. One, it's a fascinating industry to be in. Two, at the end of the day, we're manufacturing a product, and there are variables we can and can't predict — it's how we respond to those variables that really matters. Bryan Fields: I love that you have those weekly engagements, because it's one thing to provide all the information, but if you don't have the executive team's ear and attention, it's easy for things to slide back into the old routine, and you can't implement all of those intuitive changes. You can provide the greatest plan in the world and detail every little problem, but if they're not there with you saying, "Okay, here's the problem, here's how we solve it, let me talk to my team," there's a misalignment. We talked about inventory as a major problem — are there two others, just to give our listeners a sense of where else they should be looking for issues? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah. The continuity between teams is usually another big issue — how do we get cross-functional engagement, to use the corporate speak, how do we get teams talking the same language and working together? That's a little more of a coaching conversation, plus data and execution frameworks. It usually comes with a bit of a culture conversation — you might uncover that up front. It's about culture, but also visibility — how do we get the people in sales to understand the process gaps or opportunities within operations, and vice versa? I don't need a salesperson to be an expert on how we operate machinery or get distillate to a finished good, but the more aware they are, the better off we're going to be — the more awareness they have of the complexities and the cycle of changes we can get visibility into. Kellan Finney: Is that like a Slack channel, or a WhatsApp group chat — is that how you kick that off? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, it's usually some type of transparent communication, whether that's Teams, Slack, text messages, or phone calls. But it's also building a repeatable process — say, Monday at two o'clock in the afternoon, we bring all the situations that occurred last week and what we're dealing with today to the table. Let's get it all out, let's talk about it — where are we hitting, where are we missing, what gaps do we need to solve now, is there a commercial data gap, did we oversell last week and need to adjust the production plan this week? Again, it's setting the framework for what we're shooting for, but allowing that conversation to adjust over time, because sales might oversell or undersell, production might miss something, a machine breaks down, someone calls off — there's going to be that variability. That's where you have to have transparent communication and visibility into the issues you're dealing with — that's where trust and transparency come to light, and you have to get the issues on the table to talk through them. So inventory, like we said, is the symptom of the process — we know there's a problem, we've got to dig in. Cross-functional visibility is another big issue. But really it's about alignment — here's what we said we're going to do, here's how we did, we grade ourselves, and we adjust going forward. Bryan Fields: I'd imagine there are some smaller organizations listening who aspire to be way bigger and are thinking, "Tyler, what you're saying sounds amazing, but I'm not sure it applies to me because of my size." Do you work with smaller teams? Is there a rough framework so listeners understand the type of services available — say, if you're doing $100,000 a month, would your services still apply, and is it worth considering? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, we focus on two pillars for an organization. One is that execution-gap analysis — showing you what you're leaving on the table and giving you some quick wins, which we can usually provide in about a week or two based on interviews and conversations. Bryan Fields: Is there a ballpark cost you're comfortable sharing? Tyler Nielsen: For a two-to-three-week gap analysis, it's usually around $7,500 to $10,000. Bryan Fields: I asked because people's minds will go anywhere — they might think it's going to cost $200,000 to have Tyler do this, or $2,000. There's no normal range for this, so I wanted a ballpark, depending on the scope. Tyler Nielsen: Right, a two-week gap analysis based on time spent is going to be around $10,000. We'll give you visibility into what you're leaving on the table, the opportunities, and a bit of an execution scope — you could unlock X, Y, or Z. We usually try to position that so it leads into an engagement to build out either an early-maturity process or a long-term one — standing up an integrated business planning process is a long cycle, it can be a couple of years. But what we focus on is doing it quicker and more cost-effectively, and we're the ones sitting by your side doing it with you. I'm not hiring junior consultants, and I'm not hiring people who haven't been in the cannabis space — I'm hiring people who have done it, been there, and either built it with me or I've seen them build it elsewhere. That's the value we bring. But it's that execution-gap audit up front that shows you what you're leaving on the table, and honestly, if it's not a five-times ROI, it's not going to be worth it for us to engage long term. We know the actions we can help with on a month-to-month or week-to-week basis, and we'll give you that visibility. It depends on what "long-term" looks like — we could engage for three months and increase your margins and revenue, or engage for six months for a more in-depth process. We have to figure out where that potential client sits and what their desires are — again, going back to the strategy of here's where you are, where do you want to be. So to rearticulate your comment, Bryan: the execution-gap audit is a quick-win, short-term visibility exercise into what you have the opportunity to go get. Then it's a long-term strategy for how we help you execute that, usually over a three-to-six-month engagement, depending on the scale and complexity of the business. A vertically integrated organization is usually six-plus months. A smaller craft grower, oil producer, or brand business doing contract manufacturing can be shorter, because the signaling and respective ownership of that process is less. Bryan Fields: I think the audit is fairly priced, because you get visibility into your performance — and if you have a leak you sort of know about, but you're not sure how bad it is because you tell yourself "I'll get to it when I get to it," your team comes in, runs the numbers, and you realize, "Okay, if we fix this problem, then next month we don't have this problem," and it compounds quickly. That's where I think people need to stop looking at cash as just something to preserve, and start figuring out how to plug the holes so they're not putting duct tape on it every day — which is expensive and causes worse damage long term. You see strong companies investing in fortifying their operations and recognizing where those gaps are, and other companies saying, "We're doing fine, we'll just keep growing and outgrow our problems" — which, as we all know, is not the right answer. Tyler Nielsen: Yeah. And we usually find high-six-figure to low-seven-figure opportunities, which is why I'm comfortable saying a five-times ROI — it's usually closer to ten. If we can help businesses see that value and deploy cash to see what hole they need to plug to stop the leak, that's what we're here to do. We thrive in that kind of chaos, because we know it's a challenge, and executives and leaders making decisions are dealing with a lot of "what fire do I need to fight now." We try to take that off the table and give them actionable insights and proactive-decision awareness, so we can help get them where they want to be faster through execution. Bryan Fields: Money well spent. I think it's perfect. So Tyler, for our listeners who want to get in touch and learn more, where can they find you? Tyler Nielsen: Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn — one, to keep thought leadership going, and two, to have awareness of the market. I read everything that goes out there, and if people have questions they can shoot me a message. They can also reach us at our website, vastinsightpartners.com — there's a contact page in the upper right-hand corner — or just email me directly, tyler@vastinsightpartners.com. It's not an AI robotic inbox, it's not a monkey running the inbox — it's me behind the screen. I love having conversations and understanding what's going on in the industry, and frankly, how we can stay top of mind with organizations to help them improve, scale, and grow profitably. Bryan Fields: All that will be up in the show notes. Thanks for taking the time — this was a lot of fun. Tyler Nielsen: Thanks, guys.