Cannabis Ecommerce will be ~$9 Billion Dollars in 2023 ft. Jeremy Johnson

Cannabis Ecommerce will be ~$9 Billion Dollars in 2023 ft. Jeremy Johnson

Jeremy Johnson: There are about 12 million searches per month for 'dispensary near me' related terms — whether it's 'near me,' or in-state, or in a specific city, or whatever. The second type of search people are doing online is what I call product-related searches. Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to an episode of Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellen Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Jeremy Johnson, business development for Dispense. Jeremy, thanks for taking the time — how are you doing today? Jeremy Johnson: Thank you, I'm doing real well. Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen Finney: I'm doing really well. I'm really excited to talk to Jeremy — kind of bushy-tailed, bright-eyed, ready to learn everything I can about the marketing and e-commerce space in the cannabis industry. How are you doing, Bryan? Bryan Fields: I'm excited to talk marketing, as you're probably imagining, Kellen — and I think even more excited to talk to Jeremy about some of the insights he's been posting on social media to help others who may be intrigued about expanding into some of these topics. So Jeremy, unfortunately before we get started, we've got an East Coast/West Coast battle — if you had to pick a coast, which one would you choose? Jeremy Johnson: Midwest, bro. I live on Lake Superior — there's nothing better than fresh water. Lake Superior is the greatest of all the Great Lakes. So no East Coast, no West Coast — I'm good right here. Kellen Finney: I got it — the greatest of all the lakes, I really like that one. So before we get into it, Jeremy, can you give a little background on yourself and how you got into the cannabis space? Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, so my journey in cannabis has been a lifelong one, if you will. My parents were both in the legacy space, as we call it now — the politically correct term. But I was fortunate that when I turned 18, in '08, we were just getting ready to legalize here in Michigan. We voted to go medical, and I got my med card in 2008, and that's how I got started — as a caregiver. I was a caregiver in the space for quite a few years. Then I moved out to California, got involved there — I actually got to vote in three different states on cannabis. Caregiver in Michigan, got to vote in California on one of the laws there, got to vote in Oregon when I was living there, and got to be part of the recreational movement there when it was first starting. Then, around 2017, I moved back home to Michigan full-time after working in tech for quite a few years and really started to focus on transitioning into cannabis full-time. It was clear we were going to be voting, and I had confidence Michigan would pass recreational legalization, so I wanted to get in. In 2018 I worked with a group up here applying for a retail license — I also had some business on the real estate side, so I helped get their second location up and running, and helped a lot with licensing and real estate for additional locations. But really, where I saw the opportunity was combining my tech experience with cannabis. We opened our first door in November of 2019, and as you guys are aware, COVID was right around the corner. So for me, in like March of 2020, there was this moment where the website went from a couple hundred visitors a day to 10,000-plus visitors a day, and we had to build a new website basically overnight. Ninety-five percent of our orders were online and the other five percent were people calling in. That was it for me — once that clicked, I was like, all right, I'm selling weed online for the rest of my life. Kellen Finney: I think that's the perfect transition. So talking about your role at Dispense and some of the things currently happening in the space — high-level overview, how are cannabis companies currently doing e-commerce for cannabis sales, and let's take it from there? Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, I still think e-commerce is really underrated and underutilized in cannabis, but it's a huge part of the business for the people doing it. There's an interesting pattern I've noticed where, depending on where a state was in the legalization pipeline when COVID hit, that influences how big that state or region is on e-commerce today. Bryan Fields: What do you mean by that? Jeremy Johnson: Michigan was right there — November 2019 was when the first rec store opened in Michigan, and right around the corner was COVID. So if you wanted to survive in Michigan, you had to sell online. Illinois had a similar timeline, a little earlier though; Massachusetts very similar. Everything after that — states like New Jersey — had this trickle effect, where these East Coast states legalizing now saw how well Illinois, Michigan, and Massachusetts did with online sales, and they adopted it. But if you go back and look at states like Colorado, Washington, and California, a lot of them, their only online presence is Weedmaps or Leafly — they might not even have a website. So you're kind of stuck in this in-between. Some of the larger companies, like Embarc or whoever in California, might have an online presence and be selling online — I think Airfield Supply Company in California probably does the most online sales — but other than that, there's really this divide, and it almost ends up being West Coast versus the rest of the country. West Coast is kind of stuck in the past right now; Midwest, I'd say, is leading the way, oddly enough; and East Coast is right behind it, at least in my experience — and that's very anecdotal. Bryan Fields: Is that because the West Coast operators — just making assumptions here — didn't need it, since most of their traffic came from foot traffic, and then when COVID happened, everyone else had to build that infrastructure from scratch? What's the theory behind it? Jeremy Johnson: My theory is that in the Midwest, you had to do it — Michigan and Illinois shut down stores and weren't letting anybody in. Whereas in California, you already had such a gray area with cannabis, people were just like, 'if it's not broken, we're not fixing it, we're not investing more money.' So it was a timing thing. But it's also been crazy to see — I think Michigan and the Midwest have a really high adoption rate for technology; everybody does everything on their phone. And you have a lot of illegal states bordering the Midwest too, so people are ordering online ahead of time before they drive three to eight hours to pick stuff up — they want to see what's in stock, reserve it before making that huge round trip, because they don't want to get there and not be able to pick up the one product they love. Kellen Finney: So it's probably hyper-competitive — how do you separate yourself when someone's just Googling 'I want some weed near me'? Jeremy Johnson: It is pretty competitive. I think there's still a ton of opportunity in the space, especially depending on the region, because a lot of people aren't taking advantage of it. There are kind of two main types of searches. There's your 'dispensary near me' type searches — where people are like, 'what's the closest dispensary to me,' or maybe I'm in Wisconsin, where there are no legal dispensaries, and I'm searching for the closest dispensary to Green Bay, and I'm finding stores in the Upper Peninsula. If I'm in Milwaukee, I'm finding stores in Illinois soon; if I'm in Eau Claire, I'll see stores in Minnesota as they come online. Wisconsin is just this island of no cannabis, unfortunately — I like to pick on them. One type of search that's probably the most competitive — there are about 12 million searches per month for 'dispensary near me' related terms. The second type is what I call product-related searches — any combination of a brand, a strain, and/or a category. Something like, 'I'm looking for Jeeter pre-rolls' — my buddy gave me one at a party, it was fire, where can I buy Jeeter pre-rolls near me. Those actually outnumber dispensary searches. It's hard to get accurate numbers because there's such a wide range of combinations, but strain searches alone are over 11 million per month. A lot of people think these aren't high-intent searches, that they're just people looking for information, but when you get into combinations like 'Jeeter pre-rolls near me' or 'Bubba Kush near me,' those are people looking to buy cannabis — really. I don't know the exact total for product-related searches, but I'd say it's well above dispensary-related searches, and there's very little competition for them. That's one of the biggest opportunities for cannabis retailers right now. Bryan Fields: So stepping back — what does 'high intent' mean, and what are the opportunities? What can brands do currently to take advantage of them? Jeremy Johnson: High intent means intent to purchase. You have different types of search intent — informational, navigational, purchasing intent. In this case, since we're selling cannabis, if someone's Googling 'where can I find Jeeter pre-rolls near me,' 'Wana gummies near me,' 'Kiva chocolates,' whatever — you can bet they're looking to buy it, and probably soon. Those are high-intent searches, and the easiest way to take advantage of that right now is to make sure you have a website with an up-to-date, accurate menu — but also a menu that's crawlable and indexable by Google. And that brings up a convoluted but important topic: we're one of the only industries in the world where most online content is in an iframe. Google has a really hard time crawling and reading iframes, so when you Google a product, nine times out of ten you'll get a result for a marketplace — whether it's Dutchie, I Heart Jane, Weedmaps, or Leafly — not a local dispensary, even though their menus are online, because most of them use iframe menus that Google can't crawl and index properly. Kellen Finney: What does crawling and indexing mean? Jeremy Johnson: Google is a search engine, and it compiles its listings by crawling the internet — little Google robots that go through and read every website and every page. You have to be crawlable — you can actually tell Google not to crawl your site at all — but even if you are crawlable, you have to be indexable too. Indexable means Google has to be able to understand your content and categorize it. The unfortunate thing about iframes is that they're 25-plus-year-old technology, and it's really just JavaScript reloading on the same page over and over, which Google struggles to read — it prefers HTML. Because it's the same page reloading, Google can't track the user journey or the individual products. The good news is Google provides tools to help — like Google Search Console, where you can put in a URL and see whether it's been indexed, and request indexing. Bryan Fields: I'd encourage everyone to understand that while Jeremy's breaking down exactly how this works, Google is here to facilitate the ability to play in their ecosystem — because who's the king here, and they want everyone to play nicely with them, since that's where most searches come from. So Jeremy, my follow-up: these cannabis companies leveraging iframes, which Google doesn't like — wouldn't it be advantageous for them to build their websites and tools without iframes? Jeremy Johnson: A hundred percent. At the beginning it was a convenience thing — 'this is the easiest way to display this content.' But now we're beyond convenience; it should be an efficiency and revenue-driving thing. Early on, very few people were doing this outside of an iframe — the two big ones being Trulieve and Cresco, and they were building it from scratch, connecting to their POS APIs and building their own platforms. Early on, you didn't have out-of-the-box native solutions. I break it down into native online content versus iframe online content. There was a company called Timber, which recently got purchased by Blaze and is now part of Blaze's e-commerce solution — they were one of the only ones doing it, mostly Oregon and a little Northern California. There was also a company called Pola that went out of business back in April this year. And Olo was very Washington-focused, limited reach overall. It really wasn't until about 2021 that more native, out-of-the-box, user-friendly solutions started coming online. Kellen Finney: I think the craziest part for our listeners is that cannabis e-commerce isn't small at all — I think one of the stats you posted said the top ten largest cannabis retailers each average 400 million dollars a year in online sales, totaling around four billion dollars total online. Is that right? Jeremy Johnson: Yeah. The only two we have public data on are GTI and Cresco, both around 400 million a year — in online sales alone. I have pretty good insight into some of the other top MSOs, and I know they're in that range too, so I feel pretty confident in that estimate. My personal estimate is there's probably a minimum of nine billion dollars a year in online sales across the industry, which accounts for about 30 percent of total U.S. retail cannabis sales. That's not a small number. Bryan Fields: I know a lot of people are hearing for the first time that there's no true out-of-the-box solution, which creates real challenges — and some California retailers don't even have websites — yet you're saying up to nine billion dollars in sales happen online. Jeremy Johnson: And a big part of the problem is that we, as an industry, can't use standard platforms — you can't use Square POS, you can't use Shopify e-commerce, you can't use the solutions everybody else in the world uses. That's where these custom iframe solutions came from, before native cannabis solutions started coming out. Bryan Fields: It just layers onto the challenges — as a digital marketer coming into one of these companies, all the tools you'd normally use just aren't available. Jeremy Johnson: I have ten years in tech, building websites and mobile apps for all sorts of businesses, and when I got into cannabis and realized I could sell online, I wanted to apply that experience — but I couldn't, because the software wasn't there. So when I saw the opportunity to catch up to mainstream technology, I said, let's make this work and bring real e-commerce technology to cannabis. Kellen Finney: I think the most surprising part is that some companies have looked at this and said the challenge is too big, so they've leaned on third-party companies to bring them a website or menu — as you said, your website is your largest footprint. It can reach far beyond a physical storefront. Jeremy Johnson: After the first dispensary chain I worked for, I went to 3Fifteen here in Michigan — at one time the largest non-vertically-integrated retailer, which got purchased by Skymint, a whole other conversation. In our marketing department we had a saying that our website was our largest store. We had a dozen-plus stores, and over 60 percent of our sales came from online. No single retail store came close to comprising even 50 percent of total sales — most were maybe 10 to 20 percent — but the website outweighed all the stores combined, and individually as well. We were driving traffic not just from where we had stores, but from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois — places where, without the internet, we'd have had no reach at all. Bryan Fields: It'd be really hard for someone in a different state to just randomly show up at your store and have that be anything more than pure luck. Jeremy Johnson: Or a billboard, if you're lucky enough to put one up — but a lot of illegal states won't allow that either. Ah, cannabis. Kellen Finney: So when you're talking with clients at Dispense, what's their current situation, and what are they leaning on you for? Jeremy Johnson: It depends so much regionally. A good example right now is Maryland — an interesting one, because they had a medical program, and a lot of Maryland operators were on Weedmaps or Leafly because sales were lower and they wanted to save costs, so a website wasn't a priority. Now, as they transition to recreational and see the opportunity to open up to new customers — not just within Maryland but in bordering towns — they're saying, 'we've got to step our website game up.' There's a lot more awareness today, in the middle of 2023, than there was at the start of 2020 about product-related searches. People don't necessarily understand the technical stuff we covered, but they understand: when somebody Googles the hottest brand in my state, I want to be the dispensary that shows up. That's how a lot of these conversations start. Bryan Fields: Have you noticed a trend where, over the last three years, more product searches have emerged based on the maturity of these markets? Jeremy Johnson: Yes, very much so. Early on, when a market first opens, or is still illegal, a majority of searches are for 'dispensary near me,' because people are just trying to find where to get product. In Michigan, when we opened in November 2019, nobody was Googling 'where do I get Jeeter pre-rolls' — there were no brands yet, and I don't even think Jeeter existed in Michigan at that point. They're just searching 'where do I get weed,' probably buying bulk ounces. But as markets mature, brands become a thing, people become loyal to those brands — sometimes the store's own brand — and searches shift from 'dispensary near me' to searching the specific dispensary or brand name they love, like Jeeter pre-rolls, Wana gummies, or Kiva chocolates. There's actually a strawberry Wana gummy my partner and I love that we can't find anywhere up here, and because so few stores near us have native menus, searching for it online doesn't help. I think that trend will continue, especially as things get more connoisseur-esque — like searching for certain strains the way you'd search for a type of wine — 'where can I get this GG4 that just came out from this one breeder.' Bryan Fields: One challenging aspect for smaller companies is understanding that this isn't a one-time cost — you need to build the architecture around it, from an SEO standpoint. Early on, someone might search 'dispensaries near me' for proximity, but later they search 'edibles near me' or 'edibles in New York,' and those brands want to build loyalty. How would you build a strategy for, say, an edible brand trying to build loyalty with a consumer like me? Jeremy Johnson: There are really two schools of thought. One is that the brand wants to own those search terms — if I'm searching 'Wana gummies,' Wana wants to be the top result. The other is that retailers should be the top result, so people just buy the product wherever it's sold. I don't know which is 'right,' but personally I prefer the retail side — I don't want to Google 'Wana gummies near me,' go to the Wana website, use a product finder, and go through ten or fifteen steps. I just want to Google 'Wana gummies' and have the first result be the dispensary that carries them, and be out the door. That's what I want as a consumer. Bryan Fields: What are the benefits of each, and the downsides? Jeremy Johnson: The straightforward benefit of retailer-ranking is an easier consumer experience. On the brand side, people want to own their traffic and their data — it's really hard for brands to have a direct connection with customers in cannabis. Jeeter is a great example of a brand that owns their search results everywhere they operate — Michigan, Arizona, California — even though they might not have the same brand awareness as Wana or Kiva. I think they invest in SEO for two reasons: they want a direct line of communication with customers, and in California, they can sell direct-to-consumer, which they can't do in Michigan or Arizona. So there's this battle between retailers and brands over who owns the customer. I personally think retailers should own that relationship — I look at it like beer: I don't have a relationship with Budweiser, but I do with my local grocery store. Consumer relationships in cannabis were historically with the dealer, not the grower, and that's the world I feel more in tune with — but Bryan, I think you might see it differently. Bryan Fields: It's very flattering that you're so trusting, Jeremy. I think what happens, maybe not in all cases, is if I'm looking for a Kiva product and get sent to a local dispensary, the menu can advertise other edible brands in front of me before I even see what I searched for — maybe with an aggressive discount that pulls me toward trying something new. That's just marketing, but it's why some brands want to protect that funnel, so no one gets 'thiefed' along the way, so to speak. Jeremy Johnson: That's a legitimate concern, and I see a little of that happening now with things like digital shelving — I Heart Jane offers this now. I don't love it either, honestly — it's the same Google Ads game, just transferred directly into that high-intent purchase moment, the menu. I don't love that as a strategy; I think you should build relationships with vendors and be loyal to them. But people are doing it, and it's getting easier to do. There are also retailers and brands fighting back against it — that's a decision we've made at Dispense: we don't allow digital shelf ads on menus. You could technically do it manually, but it's not a built-in feature, because it tends to create problems. Kellen Finney: I think the other sticky part is that a lot of retail locations, depending on the state, are vertically integrated too — so they might get bigger margins on their own products, which biases what they push to customers. It's not as clean as other CPG industries. Bryan Fields: Go to Sunnyside.shop, and guess what shows up first — their own product. I'd probably do the same thing, though — it's a cutthroat industry, and the scariest part is your SEO strategy sometimes has to be defensive, not just offensive — understanding what your competitors are doing. That's where a lot of retailers and brands just turn their heads off, because they're already stretched thin without an in-house expert. Kellen Finney: So for smaller companies looking for help — are they outsourcing it, doing it internally? What are the best approaches? Jeremy Johnson: I'll focus mainly on the retail side, since that's where I live. There are a few ways to do it. You can hire internally and build a team — that's more of a bigger-company strategy, like Trulieve, Cresco, or GTI, who have a CTO, engineers, database architects, data analysts. Not everyone can afford a twelve-person team running their online infrastructure. For small-to-medium businesses, the traditional route is: maybe at the beginning you're just listed on a marketplace like Weedmaps or Leafly, and that's your whole online presence. To take it up a notch, you could use a basic website builder like WordPress or Wix and attach a menu company like Dispense onto it, or hire an agency to build the website and handle integrations if you don't have internal resources. On average, agency packages start around eight grand to get up and running — there are cheaper solutions in the one-to-two-thousand-dollar range that attract some startups, but honestly, it's pretty hard to get a decent website up and running these days for under ten grand. Bryan Fields: I'll let that sit — some people hope to get a multi-million-dollar website for less than ten grand, and they're competing over a market worth up to nine billion dollars a year. That's not a small opportunity, especially since we're still so early, and search intent can be so regionally targeted, which can actually favor smaller brands competing locally. Jeremy Johnson: It's a crazy opportunity. Some people balk at the cost, but when you think about return on investment — the opportunity cost — it changes. I remember talking to somebody in Michigan early on who said, 'I'm never going to have a website because I don't want competitors seeing my prices.' And I said, 'Your competitors are doing 80 percent of their sales online, and you're missing all of that, because your customers can't see your inventory or your prices.' Some of these stores are doing a million a month right next door to you online, while you're doing half of that. You can absolutely do a million a month from one store if you're in the right area with the right online presence. Kellen Finney: So the central message is: instead of obsessing over competitors, double down on what your customers need, and provide a frictionless experience that gets them the product they want as fast as possible. Jeremy Johnson: Totally. Cannabis is living in a true omnichannel world right now, and I think COVID really brought that on. You can order online and pick up in-store, order for delivery where that's legal, or call in through a call center. It's about meeting the customer where they are and making it frictionless. Bryan Fields: What does Dispense do better than anyone else? Jeremy Johnson: The biggest thing is we're 100 percent focused on e-commerce. Like the rest of the industry, we've seen a lot of M&A on the software side — other companies doing e-commerce, POS, marketplace, and now advertising too. We're just focused on making the best e-commerce experience for retailers. You're not going to see us roll out a point-of-sale system anytime soon or spread our resources horizontally — we're here to help sell cannabis online. We also don't have a marketplace side of the business, unlike a lot of these menu providers. Weedmaps, for example, is a marketplace and a menu service — to me that's an inherent conflict of interest, because they're in the business of selling cannabis just like the retailer is. I've seen what happens in that world in mainstream tech — with Amazon, Uber Eats, GrubHub — the marketplace conflict of interest rarely ends well. So we are strictly a SaaS platform — more Shopify than Amazon. Kellen Finney: So if you're a small retail location looking to expand your e-commerce footprint, is this something Dispense brings you into directly, and is it smart to have someone on staff continually managing it alongside your team? Jeremy Johnson: I think it's smart to have somebody focused on digital marketing generally — maybe your website admin, maybe placing programmatic ads, whatever. One interesting thing about cannabis e-commerce is how much of it has been automated through services like Dispense. If you have an inventory manager doing their job right, your menu should automatically translate from your POS system to your website. If you're accurately entering brand name, product name, weight, and so on, we're pulling that directly from your POS — whether it's Treez, Flowhub, or LeafLogix — and automatically organizing it into your online menu. So you can get away with a digital marketing generalist plus an inventory manager on a shoestring budget. But if you've got five to ten stores counting on online sales, you should have somebody dedicated just to the menu — updating deals, making sure pricing and photos are accurate, writing custom descriptions. The more unique you make that online experience, the better — for customers and for Google. Bryan Fields: Marketing always gets pigeonholed into one role and expected to do everything at once. Jeremy Johnson: I agree, and the more custom you can make it, the better — though even in mainstream e-commerce, not every POS connects to every e-commerce platform, so you often end up uploading inventory twice. That's one area we're ahead of the game in cannabis — we've built these direct cannabis-specific connections. Kellen Finney: Dream smoking session, three people, dead or alive — go. Jeremy Johnson: Oh man, this wasn't in the show notes — surprise. This is a hard one. I'd probably go with musicians — Mac Miller comes to mind. Bas, if anybody knows who he is, would be a great person to just chill and get high with. I don't know if I can come up with a third, but if I could, it'd be another musician. Another part of my career was building stages for music festivals, so I got to smoke weed with people from all over the industry — smoking with metal bands is probably the most interesting, because they just live a different life than everybody else. Bryan Fields: What's one factor or statistic about marketing in the cannabis industry that would surprise or shock others? Jeremy Johnson: Traffic. Leafly and Weedmaps both peaked in June of 2021. Since then, organic search traffic — not direct traffic, not app traffic, specifically organic through Google — Leafly is down 60 percent, and Weedmaps is down 70 percent. Bryan Fields: Is that down relative to its peak, or relative to the overall trend line? Jeremy Johnson: Looking at the graph right now, it's actually a little lower than pre-COVID levels — trending down overall, and I think that's because that traffic is shifting to retailers' own websites. Bryan Fields: I think that's a good sign for the industry. Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, I think so too. Kellen Finney: When you started your journey in cannabis, what did you get right, and what did you get wrong? Jeremy Johnson: I didn't really have a choice to get anything right or wrong, since my entrance was through my parents. For me personally, the War on Drugs is what was wrong — I witnessed both my parents being incarcerated for long periods of my childhood. It was very tough, and there was a period where, through DARE programs and school counselors, I was constantly told cannabis was bad and that I'd end up dead or in jail just like my parents. What I got right was continuing to stick with it and not listening to the naysayers — even my mom at one point questioned what I was doing, just out of worry from the old stigma. What I got wrong, on a personal level, was not always vetting who I was working with — a lot of us get that wrong. I have friends who are dead because of this industry, no longer with us. So it's important to figure out who you're working with, even now in a more legitimate business sense — I've definitely lost out on deals because I worked with the wrong people. Kellen Finney: Powerful, thanks for sharing. Before we do predictions, we ask all our guests: if you could distill your experience into one main takeaway or lesson for the next generation, what would it be? Jeremy Johnson: I'll try to end on a positive note — keep fighting. In fifth grade I wrote a paper in DARE class on why not all drugs should be illegal and why abstinence isn't the answer, and I got to read it in front of my whole class. I wrote papers all the way through college on why cannabis should be legal and why the broader War on Drugs was detrimental to society. After college I gave up talking about it for a while and went into tech, because that's how I could get paid — until the opportunity came up to do this in Michigan. So: don't give up. Sometimes it's hard, you might have to pivot, but keep fighting for what you feel is right. Bryan Fields: Prediction time. Jeremy, money is at a premium and limitations are everywhere — how do cannabis companies improve their marketing efforts today to set themselves up for future success? Jeremy Johnson: If you're a retailer, number one is owning your online presence. You can either own it or rent it from other people — renting would be paying a marketplace tens of thousands a month to be the top spot, versus investing in SEO, which compounds — you invest once over a three-month period and it pays off for a long time. The other thing is overall efficiency — the average SKU count for a cannabis retailer right now is something crazy like 1,500 SKUs. You don't need to carry that many products. Figure out what sells best and what your customers want, narrow it down, and focus on efficiency. Kellen Finney: I'll second the efficiency point — there are a lot of inefficiencies in cannabis retail. You can see it in the constant massive sales, which are usually a product of carrying too many products that don't sell and trying to move stale inventory. Following the 80/20 rule — 20 percent of your products probably generate 80 percent of your revenue — if you focus on those, you'll be a lot stronger. Bryan Fields: For me, it's understanding that marketing investment might not see a direct return in sales right away, but it's critical to your foundation and infrastructure. We spend millions building out retail footprints, then try to spend as little as possible online, when really it should be the reverse — the digital footprint is likely more valuable than the physical one, and can attract a far wider audience. Once people recognize that, they can invest accordingly, and even without a full team, using tools like ChatGPT and platforms like Dispense, you can slowly improve and compete with the bigger players, who are largely just outspending everyone. Jeremy Johnson: If I were building a new retail footprint in a newly legal state, I'd focus on location above everything, set a budget of maybe 250,000 dollars per store for a remodel — not counting real estate — and put everything else into marketing, with a heavy portion online and very little outside of it. Bryan Fields: Jeremy, for our listeners who want to get in touch, learn more about your writing, and reach you at Dispense — where can they find you? Jeremy Johnson: I'm on LinkedIn all day long — if you type in Jeremy, Dispense, you'll find me. You can also email me at jeremy@dispense.com. That's pretty much it — I'm on email and LinkedIn. Bryan Fields: We'll link all the channels. Thanks for taking the time. Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, thank you guys — fun conversation.