MJBulls: Cannabis investing and cannabis fundraising

Michael Kiehn | 365 Cannabis

Episode Summary

Data experts says COVID-19 caused a surge of former black market cannabis customers to the legal market. The COVID-19 crisis has magnified the need for cannabis businesses to upgrade their information management tools. Michael Kiehn from 365 Cannabis a global Enterprise Resource Planning software with Microsoft based technology joins Dan Humiston to explain how cannabis companies are using ERP software to help them manage their operation through the global crisis. Produced by PodCONX 

Episode Notes

 Data experts says COVID-19 caused a surge of former black market cannabis customers to the legal market.

The COVID-19 crisis has magnified the need for cannabis businesses to upgrade their information management tools.  Michael Kiehn from 365 Cannabis a global Enterprise Resource Planning software with Microsoft based technology joins Dan Humiston to explain how cannabis companies are using ERP software to help them manage their operation through the global crisis.

Produced by PodCONX 

Episode Transcription

Dan Humiston: [00:00:00] Today Show is brought to you by Helix Bio Trac, the largest seed to sale tracking and dispensary point of sale software solution in the industry since 2010. Cannabis dispensaries, cultivation facilities and manufacturers have trusted biotech to securely and confidently keep them in compliance while managing their businesses with flexible solutions for both THC and Hemp Industries, customizable workflows built in machine learning and data analytics that deliver actual insights to the right people at the right time. It's clear why cannabis companies in 37 states and nine countries depend on biotech for comprehensive Cannabis software and business solutions that cover the requirements of compliance seed to sale tracking and data reporting in every state. There's really only one choice. Biotech. Go to biotech dot com today for secure Cannabis software solutions that you can count on and retail.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:01:04] The first witness this was announced or as this was picking up, there was a whole lot of new customers that came into the retail stores worldwide. So they were talking to some of their customers. There's some people that have come from traditionally buying from the black market, but are now wanting to go in stock up from the legal market.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:01:23] And it's because they're they're not trusting their original supply chain or the original supplier from MJBulls Media.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:01:34] It's the Raising Cannabis Capital show.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:01:40] I'm Dan Humiston. And on today's show, how working from home and the need for Cannabis companies to have real time comprehensive information has led to a surge in this company's sales.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:01:58] Than Raising Cannabis Capital, we are joined by Michael Kiehn, the vise president of 365 Cannabis.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:02:05] Michael, welcome to the show.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:02:06] Thanks for having me.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:02:08] I appreciate you taking time out to speak with us today with all the economic doom and gloom. It's super encouraging to speak with a Cannabis company whose business is doing well. And, you know, I don't know if iton has as much to do with the crisis or just that you have such a solid company. 365 Cannabis is a global enterprise resource planning software with Microsoft based technology. And before we begin, because going to get e-mails on this, we don't do this before we begin. Can you explain to our listeners what an enterprise resource planning or ERP software is?

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:02:42] Yeah, absolutely. So ERP is, as you mentioned, enterprise resource planning. So it touches everything from financials, inventory, cultivation, production, distribution and retail. It's essentially every system that your your business needs to run all in one. Most Cannabis companies would be probably familiar with the term sheet to sale or traceability software. That's an element of what we do. But if you look at the major, major manufacturers around the world, the food and beverage pharmaceuticals, they all use ERP to help track their supply chain. So we're essentially an augmented empowered version of seed to sale with financials involved.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:03:23] Ok. So in other words, it would connect to if I was using Quicken for my accounting and I was using biotech for my seed to sale software, you would connect to those. And I worked with both of those from one interface versus using toggling back and forth between the two.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:03:41] Yeah, exactly. It could actually help replace those and put you on one Microsoft platform. Exactly.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:03:47] Okay. Okay. And I also saw that you work with a lot of third party softwares like Leif Link or we'd map and can connect with those companies as well.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:03:56] Yeah. And that's that's really where we've been to find the best of breed software out there where we're not trying to go and take every segment of the market. We always describe ERP as the plumbing of the house. We know that we're not going to go and do it all the interior design and everything else. We partner with the other companies that do those pieces really well or the the unsexy software that sits behind the scenes.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:04:20] So Plummer's, that's that's great. Well, the crisis is forcing companies to manage their operations differently. And I see the advantages to having 365 Cannabis ERP software in just about every operation. Is that one of the things that's really sort of caught fire right now because people have to work remotely that they're relying more and more on on your software?

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:04:45] Yeah, that's one of the biggest immediate drivers was because everybody's now working from home. Everyone's asking for something that's based in the cloud and not needing to or in some states and even in Canada, mandatory work from home and they're not able to go into facilities. But that was initially the big push to get people to look at ERP. What came after that was actually even more interesting, which was everybody wanted to make decisions. Right. You're seeing these major companies laying off big portions of their business. And it happened within a day. And it's all because they had data to go off them. They knew likely what was going to happen and the impacts on their business. And unfortunately, without the right systems, a lot of our Cannabis company and our industry was making decisions off of what they felt was going to happen.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:05:33] Understanding what that data means, their business is kind of now this new initiative, whatever one's trying to get to,. 

 

Dan Humiston: [00:05:39] Especially like you said with this, if you understand your supply chain and where there could be some bottlenecks, it helps you anticipate what changes you need to make within your organization versus having it on Excel spreadsheets or in your head. I mean, this is so much more responsible approach to running a company. Absolutely. You know, while while I was preparing for today's show, I read something I hadn't thought about, but I'm afraid may become a serious issue. And that's if an employee is infected in a company. How would you know if, you know, other employees have been contaminated? And I think when we were talking, you said, did you have some features within your software that can help you with this?

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:06:20] Yeah, we do. And it's come up a couple of times. And essentially what ERP allows you to do is track down to get to the exact quantity price. Who touched the specific product? It's what most of probably the listeners know as seed to sale and the traceability the state or the Health Canada requires you to look at. But this now allows you as an individual to go and say, you know, which of my employees are most productive? And still, it's used as a great tool to do incentive based pay to say my trimmer. Jill does five grams more per hour than the average. Let's incentivize that now is being repurposed to go in very carefully, look at if an employee calls out sick. The worst case scenario were to happen and they get infected. You can actually go and look and say which batches and lots to Jills specifically work on because she has her own unique I.D. within 365 candidates. So we don't know necessarily yet how a government might handle a recall or any forced closings, but this at least gives you the data to go and say we can take care of it. We can isolate it.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:07:27] Man, that would be so helpful. I mean, it gives a peace of mind to the owner of the company. And I think it also gives peace of mind to consumers. And again, when we were talking early here, you had a great story for me about consumer confidence.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:07:42] Yeah. So we've seen some interesting changes and feedback from our customers. We try to stay close with them to figure out what's going on in their business and retail as this was picking up. There was a whole lot of new customers that came into the retail stores worldwide, and a lot of them actually came from the black market the first day these retailers are going. We'll take anyone who's coming in the door and then they're trying to understand what's the trend? So as they were talking to some of their customers, there's some people that have come from traditionally buying from the black market that are now wanting to go and stock up from the legal market. And it's because they're not trusting their original supply chain or the original supplier. So rather than going and buying something from someone that you really don't know and packaging that isn't either childproof or it hasn't been tested, people are now looking at this as a safe place to go and shop. The other thing that came from it was there's a lot of companies that actually aren't drug testing because they either don't have the capacity. And the medical system is it's obviously over capacity. So people that are originally not able to because they're not able to consume for their work, they're not going to be tested. So it allows you to go and experiment with things like CBD.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:08:54] Yeah. Without the fear of losing their job. Oh, my gosh. Couple of unintended consequences is actually positive unintended consequences.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:09:04] I want to take a quick break to play a preview of a special Cannabis and Corona report.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:09:09] But first, I'd like to thank one of our sponsors, Senient Pixel Cannabis and CBD Hemp industry's leading marketing and design agency. After three years of working with CBD Hemp companies, Senient Pixel has developed a strategy to improve your Instagram marketing. They figured out how to grow a real audience that engages and converts to sales.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:09:29] At the end of the day, go to a Senient pixel dot com or click on the link in the show notes to learn how Senient pixels hirable all in one marketing and design department can amplify your company's communications.

 

Jason Levin: [00:09:45] It's a lot of fun. It's rewarding emotionally and it's rewarding at the end when you get to harvest your stash. It's really nice when you finally you harvest dry your buds.

 

Jason Levin: [00:09:56] You've got these beautiful homegrown buds that you can smoke and share with your friends. And it's just your own house label that you can be really proud of.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:10:04] Tune in on Thursday to hear Jason Levin from a pot for pot. And now let's get back to today's show.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:10:12] Jumping ahead.You've clearly had a big demand for your services or your software. How are you managing the demand? Do you intend to be raising capital in the future to help you take advantage of this newfound growth?

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:10:26] Yeah, yeah, really? Good question. For the first part of that question, one of the things we're seeing on retail is in certain states like Nevada, you're only allowed to either do online orders or pickup up store. So some dispensaries, oddly enough here actually have a drive thru, which is a unique advantage in this time. But other customers who didn't do online orders before it really focused on the customer interaction store are now scrambling to go and say we need an e-commerce solution. We need to be able to show people the products that we have on hand, what they do give them enough of an education. But really, it's that we want to keep selling to keep the lights on. So we're trying to focus on areas like that, which most retailers call it click and collect. We call it unified commerce, but it's allowing your customer to shop in any aspect that they want. And right now, legally, that's all you can do. So anywhere we can, we're focusing on our efforts to help our customers and prioritize getting the minimal viable product out to each person. To then we'll continue to scale and keep our businesses going.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:11:31] Hemp makes a lot of sense and makes a lot of sense to focus on the things that are really, really pressing right now. Like I said, you're going to need a lot of developers to add all these extra features and to grow this company taking advantage of the changes that the virus is going to create. And that puts you in a position maybe to raise some capital.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:11:51] Yeah, it does. So we were fortunate in the way that we're built on a Microsoft platform. So anything that any business has ever done. Microsoft's basically adding into the products constantly. So it already has a delivery module. And while we're able to do is take it and tailor it to Cannabis. But SharePoint, that does still take effort and time and specific skill set. So we've raised capital in the past, which helped accelerate a lot of gross revenue, helped us scale to new countries international. We're now at the point where we're looking at the market again and we're seeing Hemp continuing to accelerate CBD being adopted worldwide. And we've got customers that have national retail deals going into all name brands, stores. So we're working with them and we're seeing this big acceleration period where with additional capital, we think we're in a great position with a Microsoft platform already with a global presence to go in and dominate the market. So it's something that we're positioning ourselves to do. And any additional capital in our business, we feel is going to take us a long way.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:12:56] Well, definitely, when you start the race, we definitely will need to let us know so we can get you back on the show. And I'm going to have all of Michaels in 365 contact information in the show, notes and Adam MJBulls.com.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:13:09] So keep track of this opportunity because another great company that's as we say. So thriving in the content sharing the crisis. Michael, thank you for being on the show today.

 

Michael Kiehn: [00:13:22] Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:13:25] Today's show is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors, like all 36. The country's premiere blockchain payment processing platform that's providing dispensaries and its customers with a safe and secure payment option other than cash. To learn more, go to all 36 dot com. Today's podcast was produced by MJ Bulls Media, the industry's premier Cannabis podcast network with original music produced in part by Jamie Humiston.

 

Dan Humiston: [00:13:52] I'm Dan Humiston and you've been listening to the Raising Cannabis Capital podcast.

 

*IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER*

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT AND THERE MAY BE INACCURATE AND OR INCORRECT COMPUTER TRANSLATIONS.  DO NOT RELY ON THIS OR ANY TRANSCRIPT ON THE MJBULLS MEDIA WEBSITE.