Why every brand's main focus should be outpacing the category. As the competition for shelf space intensifies many cannabis brands struggle to maintain their market share. Jason Vegotsky the CEO and Founder of Petalfast, a full spectrum sales and marketing agency for cannabis brands, joins Dan Humiston to share some of the secrets they use to help brands improve sales. He also discusses their plan to expand beyond California. Produced by PodConx MJBulls - https://podconx.com/podcasts/raising-cannabis-capital Dan Humiston - https://podconx.com/guests/dan-humiston Petalfast - https://petalfast.com/ Jason Vegotsky - https://podconx.com/guests/jason-vegotsky Recorded on Squadcast
Why every brand's main focus should be outpacing the category.
As the competition for shelf space intensifies many cannabis brands struggle to maintain their market share. Jason Vegotsky the CEO and Founder of Petalfast, a full spectrum sales and marketing agency for cannabis brands, joins Dan Humiston to share some of the secrets they use to help brands improve sales. He also discusses their plan to expand beyond California.
MJBulls - https://podconx.com/podcasts/raising-cannabis-capital
Dan Humiston - https://podconx.com/guests/dan-humiston
Petalfast - https://petalfast.com/
Jason Vegotsky - https://podconx.com/guests/jason-vegotsky
Dan Humiston: [00:00:00] today at MJ bulls, we are joined by Jason Vygotsky, the co-founder and CEO at pedal fast, Jason, welcome to the.
Jason Vegotsky: Thanks for having me.
Dan Humiston: Well, I appreciate you stopping by, you know, when I ask investors, what type of companies they like to fund, most of them say that they're looking for established brands. And I think the reason
is because there are so few established brands in cannabis, and I think. Because it's really hard to establish a brand and cannabis pedal fast is of first of its kind full spectrum sales and marketing agency that helps cannabis companies build their brand. And I thought what better place to start? Jason, tell us how you do it.
Jason Vegotsky: Yeah, I think, when you look at any other CPG industry and you ask, I don't know, Justin's peanut butter cups, or you ask Casa Migos, or you ask, she's. I was in the jerky space at one point in my life. And you as chefs cut or crave, um, some of the more high profile.[00:01:00] CPG businesses that have been sold.
how did you do this? They're usually going to say, well, I have really good employees and I have really good partners and in cannabis, if you talk to anybody who's been around, they've all been burned by partners and, I think pedal fast is, is the culmination of, of kind of all of our employees and all of our team who has this big CPG background and all the experience to build a partnership with brands to allow them to actually have success.
so pedal fast , is the sales and trade marketing engine. So, we can get into stores and then we can help. These products connect with consumers. And then obviously a consumer at the end of the day is going to determine whether a brand is going to be successful or not. It's our job as a partner to these brands to make sure that our brands have access to retail, uh, which we deal with every retailer in California and getting excited about expansion and then make sure that you have the, the army of individuals to be able to.
Activate brands at scale. I don't think we need Superbowl [00:02:00] ads. I don't know that we need TV commercials, but we better do brand building 1 0 1 in retail, better than anybody else. And that that's what we strive to do at pedal Fest.
Dan Humiston: Yeah. What you're doing is so needed and, you know, you're in the biggest market in the world. So having access to as many retailers as you have, and the relationships that you have with the retailers and in California has to make it really. helpful for the brands that you represent or are in your portfolio. Many companies, get they get hyper-focused on their top line revenue, but I I've heard you talk about the importance of outpacing the category. Can you explain what you mean by outpacing the category?
Jason Vegotsky: Yeah. for us, brand building is about growth. However, not every market condition is going to be a growth market condition, right. And right now, especially in California cannabis, if you're flat, you're growing, I mean, the market is, is consolidating at a rapid pace. There is, uh, retailers that are struggling to pay their bills.
There [00:03:00] are distributors that are struggling to pay their brands. We like to think about growth and phases, right? And ultimately we are always looking at the category that you're in from the brand and we want to beat the category growth. So if the market is going to grow 20%, we've got to grow 30%. The markets can be flat.
We better grow 10%. there were times where the market was doubling. And that was when we had some great tailwinds in 2018 and 2019. right now the market is, is kind of taking just a, a minor step back, that I think it will take one step back to take two steps forward.
So when we look at building brands, not only are we looking for certainly growth, but that doesn't mean we're just going to go to the moon overnight. We have to recognize the market conditions and play within them. And I always tell our brand partners margin doesn't mean. Kill brands and cannabis cashflow does.
Okay. We are not going to outgrow our own wallets and we're going to try to be prudent. And every single brand has a different story and a different cap table and the different ability to raise or not raise [00:04:00] capital. So the strategy and how we grow these brands have to be not only aligned within the category and within, in their own growth fundamentals and what they're looking to accomplish for their business, but it has to be aligned with what their bank account can actually handle because growth as a brand.
You know, it takes capital and right now, certainly a challenging time to go get it. If you're.
Dan Humiston: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I know you partner with, you, you mentioned earlier the importance of, of finding the right partners. And I think I heard you in one of your interviews, talk about your partnership with herbal distribution or herbal distribution, and they, and you mentioned that there they cover most of your day to day stuff.
Is that still the case?
Jason Vegotsky: Funny you bring that up. , we actually had a breakup with our role in March of last year. , we decided that Navis was a better partner for us. you know, herbal is a great business. they have unbelievable. Team, um, their operation is as good as anybody in the state, but how we align and how we think about growing [00:05:00] sales.
There's a little bit different. And we decided that , for our logistics and operations partner, Mabus made the most sense. And when you think about, and you think about distribution, there's two sides to a distribution company, right? You've got the front of the house doing all the sales. All the customer service, all of the customer maintenance, all of the, just, business development, all of the sales analysis and the data and all those things I would consider front of the house activity.
The back of the house is going to be legit. It's going to be warehousing, right? It's going to be technology. It's going to be transportation. It's going to be invoicing. it's going to be a lot of the manifest and the compliance within the cannabis industry. so when we looked at it, that's what Navis does and that's all they do.
Right. So there was a kind of a natural overlay when you looked at pedal fast and novice. So the beauty of cannabis, within , the scope that we play in is. Success is driven by focus. In my opinion, and Navis is focused on building the best technology, distribution logistical platform. [00:06:00] We are solely focused on building the best sales team, the best relationships at retail, the press brand portfolio, and the best field marketing team.
And when you have those two businesses separated on two balance sheets, given the craziness of cannabis, it allows for more focus and we've been able to have a lot of success in that.
Dan Humiston: Talk about , the sales team that you have that sort of an overlay,
you just touched on some of the things that they're responsible for, but maybe you can go a little deeper on some of the things that your team is responsible for.
Jason Vegotsky: First off, the way that we hire salespeople is that we go to the top retailers in the state and we say, who's the best salesperson. And then we go get them. And we will stop at nothing to get the best people, because what we have seen in this space is that there is very few people that. Have the buyer's attention when they walk into that door and our sales team, when they walk in, people know that pedal fast is here.
They know that they're going to be taken care of whether they're the janitor or the owner. They know that[00:07:00] we're going to be professionals. And we know that we have the best brand portfolio in the state of California. so it starts with getting the best people, you know, what do they do?
Our sales team looks through the customer lens. They are focused on building the best relationships at retail retail ultimately is why brands are going to come to us. Okay. So our salespeople are, yes, they have to go in and manage a portfolio and the placements and all the things that come with running a distribution company.
but ultimately their number one goal is to make the retailer. Feel the most special out of any customer or any, relationship that they possibly could have our sales management. And this is one of the things that separates us. We have a brand management and alcohol beverage, sometime they call it trade development, our planning process and how we do quarterly planning and how we track our goals within our systems.
we take groups. And the brand managers that we have that are working with our brand portfolio to [00:08:00] strategize and execute are some of our most highest paid people. Some of our most experienced people, And some of the people that if I'm starting a brand, I'm calling them number one to start that brand, we have them as brand managers in our industry.
So when we're able to say. you're going to be paired with Matt Epilito. Made-up Alito has been at Gallo for 18 years. He was at the parent company for four years. He's going to be running your brand. They go, oh, okay. All right. When Adam, Bankie another one of our brand managers out of bank. He was 15 years at Miller cores.
Four years at Legion of bloom knows Canada's inside and out crystal McLean, 15 years. I read the book. She's been through, you know, five or six years in cannabis. So these people are highly sought after, and we have them as brand strategists. I want people that think they know how to grow a brand. I want them to come to pedal fast and be brand strategists for us.
Dan Humiston: It's a great strategy We mentioned partnerships a couple of times, and I think it's really important for our listeners to just get a [00:09:00] flavor of the type of horsepower you have as portfolio companies.
Can you share some of the names of the companies that you work with?
Jason Vegotsky: Sure. You know, I think you talked about partnerships, A lot of times, it's the partnerships that you don't make. and the things that you say no to, I always tell our team no is the most powerful word in the English language. And we say no to more brands than we say yes to.
and we are looking for a specific criteria of what brands we're going to bring in. Number one, you better be. a founder that is in this thing to win it. you don't have to be the biggest brand. You don't have to be your sights set on being the largest brand, but you better be a founder that knows how to build brands from CPG principles.
Okay. We're going to talk about distribution. We're going to talk about new placements. We're going to talk about ski rationalization. we are not here to do. Throw out any skews we possibly can to get top line revenue. That's not how you build brand. We were looking to go deep, not necessarily wide. so number one, we're looking at founders.
Can they manage and build a [00:10:00] brand? Do we believe in them as, as people? number two. Do you have the balance sheet to be able to. Or do you have the ability to raise capital, right? You don't necessarily have to have all the money in the world from day one to work with us, but we're going to want to see, do you have the ability to then go and raise capital if we have success and you're, you're able to quickly figure that out when you're talking to, a brand builder, number three, I just asked myself, do we need this product?
Uh, I can't. Stress enough to people. Is this a need in the marketplace? And is there an actual market for it? Um, there's a lot of really cool innovation, but I don't know that we need the THC string beads. Right? Like there are going to be out there someday because we will just want to put THC in everything.
We're looking for product market fit. We're looking for brands and products that can grow within a category. but ultimately we're looking at with people that want to fit within our culture and be a part of a team. Because one thing I've noticed in cannabis is I can't do it by myself. You can't do [00:11:00] it by yourself.
Nobody can do it by yourself. So we're looking for a team mentality when we mess up, when they mess up, are we going to be working through problems together? When you talk about specific brands that fits that, , I got two that come to mind in the portfolio of number one is yada yada probably our largest success story.
If you look through all the numbers in California, you'll go, how the hell did this brand show up? in, in seven months we went from zero to the seventh largest brand in the flower category in the state of California, nobody in the history of California cannabis has ever done that except for yada yada and.
kudos to them for number one, listening for building a great product for having a great price, and having a great brand that that really shows off on the shelf. number two would be space coyote, space coyote, as far as I'm concerned, is founded by the smartest guy I've ever met in cannabis.
Scott Sambor, probably the best looking guy I've ever met in canvas to. I don't even like the guy around me. why I'm in love with this brand, that. I'm from Philadelphia. And when I think about cannabis in [00:12:00] Philly, I believe that consumers are gonna want to live that California dream.
Right. I always thought we'd California. Right? I always like the movie below. Like that was what I thought weed was like in California. You know, you go to Manhattan beach, it's the beach, it's the sun, that's the surf, it's all that kind of stuff. And when you meet Scott and you meet his co-founder Libby and you meet the brand, you think, and like it's real life, California dreaming.
And I believe that that brand is going to resonate not only in California where they're there, they're one of the most profitable brands and they're one of , the best businesses that I have seen in California. But I believe that that product, as they move across the country is going to be amazing.
And that really spawns into, okay. Now, if you want to build a national brand, you can only do it if you're in a national landscape and thinking about how we take these brands across the country, a lot of what I've been doing lately.
Dan Humiston: Well, that's the next thing I was going to ask you to do something like that scaling to that level will [00:13:00] probably cost quite a bit of money in not sure if you'll be able to do it on a cashflow. Are you going to be raising any money to do that, what are your plans?
Jason Vegotsky: certainly need money to do it. I believe we have the best cap table in cannabis. , we have, uh, Meredith capital has been my VC throughout my multiple ventures. Uh, Meredith capital, I believe is the best venture capital firm in cannabis. Um, the reason why I say that is because I, uh, like many business operators, I have had a lot of good times and I've had a lot of bad times and, during the good they write.
During the bed, they also write checks and stand behind their company. So, for anybody out there starting, a brand or you think you have a differentiated opportunity, Meredith capital's the number one group, as far as I'm concerned that I've come across and I've come across pretty much all of them.
so Meredith capital is behind us. Um, we have one of the large MSLs behind us, and we have one of the top three alcohol beverage distributor. as our largest investor and our partner in thinking about how we go about building this thing, I will tell you that, we will be [00:14:00] launching in Michigan.
In the fall, um, likely around October, um, we're already building out a portfolio. We believe we'll have the first and most premier portfolio in the state of Michigan come October. We will be hiring a 13 person selling and trade-marketing organization starting August 1st to launch October 1st. So that's all in the works already funded for that.
we are launching, Massachusetts, same timeline. same thing building out the portfolio right now, already have the capital for that. Um, and then we'll be launching Arizona shortly after that. So those three states are already right in the pipeline. you know, we're not currently raising capital.
Um, we have great backers that have, backed us upon every raise. And one of the things that I love about our business. We're not super cash intensive. The reason why I don't want to be in the warehousing and logistics and distribution and inventory business is because that's a massive, you know, suck on your cashflow and your balance sheet.
I let my friends at Navis handle that one. We have a very, uh, nice service business. That's [00:15:00] continuing to grow and we're looking at all kinds of, tech platforms that we can weave into, the platform that.
Dan Humiston: And that's a really exciting, well, we'll have all the information about pedal fast in the show notes. So. If you think you have what it takes to be a brand in their portfolio, I'm sure somebody from Jason's team would be happy to talk to you. But, uh, I think this is, you know, one of those businesses that is really needed and I it'll be really exciting to watch you roll this thing out across the nation and help brands get established.
, Jason. I appreciate you being on the show.
Jason Vegotsky: Thanks a lot for having me.Dan Humiston: [00:00:00] today at MJ bulls, we are joined by Jason Vygotsky, the co-founder and CEO at pedal fast, Jason, welcome to the.
Jason Vegotsky: Thanks for having me.
Dan Humiston: Well, I appreciate you stopping by, you know, when I ask investors, what type of companies they like to fund, most of them say that they're looking for established brands. And I think the reason
is because there are so few established brands in cannabis, and I think. Because it's really hard to establish a brand and cannabis pedal fast is of first of its kind full spectrum sales and marketing agency that helps cannabis companies build their brand. And I thought what better place to start? Jason, tell us how you do it.
Jason Vegotsky: Yeah, I think, when you look at any other CPG industry and you ask, I don't know, Justin's peanut butter cups, or you ask Casa Migos, or you ask, she's. I was in the jerky space at one point in my life. And you as chefs cut or crave, um, some of the more high profile.[00:01:00] CPG businesses that have been sold.
how did you do this? They're usually going to say, well, I have really good employees and I have really good partners and in cannabis, if you talk to anybody who's been around, they've all been burned by partners and, I think pedal fast is, is the culmination of, of kind of all of our employees and all of our team who has this big CPG background and all the experience to build a partnership with brands to allow them to actually have success.
so pedal fast , is the sales and trade marketing engine. So, we can get into stores and then we can help. These products connect with consumers. And then obviously a consumer at the end of the day is going to determine whether a brand is going to be successful or not. It's our job as a partner to these brands to make sure that our brands have access to retail, uh, which we deal with every retailer in California and getting excited about expansion and then make sure that you have the, the army of individuals to be able to.
Activate brands at scale. I don't think we need Superbowl [00:02:00] ads. I don't know that we need TV commercials, but we better do brand building 1 0 1 in retail, better than anybody else. And that that's what we strive to do at pedal Fest.
Dan Humiston: Yeah. What you're doing is so needed and, you know, you're in the biggest market in the world. So having access to as many retailers as you have, and the relationships that you have with the retailers and in California has to make it really. helpful for the brands that you represent or are in your portfolio. Many companies, get they get hyper-focused on their top line revenue, but I I've heard you talk about the importance of outpacing the category. Can you explain what you mean by outpacing the category?
Jason Vegotsky: Yeah. for us, brand building is about growth. However, not every market condition is going to be a growth market condition, right. And right now, especially in California cannabis, if you're flat, you're growing, I mean, the market is, is consolidating at a rapid pace. There is, uh, retailers that are struggling to pay their bills.
There [00:03:00] are distributors that are struggling to pay their brands. We like to think about growth and phases, right? And ultimately we are always looking at the category that you're in from the brand and we want to beat the category growth. So if the market is going to grow 20%, we've got to grow 30%. The markets can be flat.
We better grow 10%. there were times where the market was doubling. And that was when we had some great tailwinds in 2018 and 2019. right now the market is, is kind of taking just a, a minor step back, that I think it will take one step back to take two steps forward.
So when we look at building brands, not only are we looking for certainly growth, but that doesn't mean we're just going to go to the moon overnight. We have to recognize the market conditions and play within them. And I always tell our brand partners margin doesn't mean. Kill brands and cannabis cashflow does.
Okay. We are not going to outgrow our own wallets and we're going to try to be prudent. And every single brand has a different story and a different cap table and the different ability to raise or not raise [00:04:00] capital. So the strategy and how we grow these brands have to be not only aligned within the category and within, in their own growth fundamentals and what they're looking to accomplish for their business, but it has to be aligned with what their bank account can actually handle because growth as a brand.
You know, it takes capital and right now, certainly a challenging time to go get it. If you're.
Dan Humiston: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I know you partner with, you, you mentioned earlier the importance of, of finding the right partners. And I think I heard you in one of your interviews, talk about your partnership with herbal distribution or herbal distribution, and they, and you mentioned that there they cover most of your day to day stuff.
Is that still the case?
Jason Vegotsky: Funny you bring that up. , we actually had a breakup with our role in March of last year. , we decided that Navis was a better partner for us. you know, herbal is a great business. they have unbelievable. Team, um, their operation is as good as anybody in the state, but how we align and how we think about growing [00:05:00] sales.
There's a little bit different. And we decided that , for our logistics and operations partner, Mabus made the most sense. And when you think about, and you think about distribution, there's two sides to a distribution company, right? You've got the front of the house doing all the sales. All the customer service, all of the customer maintenance, all of the, just, business development, all of the sales analysis and the data and all those things I would consider front of the house activity.
The back of the house is going to be legit. It's going to be warehousing, right? It's going to be technology. It's going to be transportation. It's going to be invoicing. it's going to be a lot of the manifest and the compliance within the cannabis industry. so when we looked at it, that's what Navis does and that's all they do.
Right. So there was a kind of a natural overlay when you looked at pedal fast and novice. So the beauty of cannabis, within , the scope that we play in is. Success is driven by focus. In my opinion, and Navis is focused on building the best technology, distribution logistical platform. [00:06:00] We are solely focused on building the best sales team, the best relationships at retail, the press brand portfolio, and the best field marketing team.
And when you have those two businesses separated on two balance sheets, given the craziness of cannabis, it allows for more focus and we've been able to have a lot of success in that.
Dan Humiston: Talk about , the sales team that you have that sort of an overlay,
you just touched on some of the things that they're responsible for, but maybe you can go a little deeper on some of the things that your team is responsible for.
Jason Vegotsky: First off, the way that we hire salespeople is that we go to the top retailers in the state and we say, who's the best salesperson. And then we go get them. And we will stop at nothing to get the best people, because what we have seen in this space is that there is very few people that. Have the buyer's attention when they walk into that door and our sales team, when they walk in, people know that pedal fast is here.
They know that they're going to be taken care of whether they're the janitor or the owner. They know that[00:07:00] we're going to be professionals. And we know that we have the best brand portfolio in the state of California. so it starts with getting the best people, you know, what do they do?
Our sales team looks through the customer lens. They are focused on building the best relationships at retail retail ultimately is why brands are going to come to us. Okay. So our salespeople are, yes, they have to go in and manage a portfolio and the placements and all the things that come with running a distribution company.
but ultimately their number one goal is to make the retailer. Feel the most special out of any customer or any, relationship that they possibly could have our sales management. And this is one of the things that separates us. We have a brand management and alcohol beverage, sometime they call it trade development, our planning process and how we do quarterly planning and how we track our goals within our systems.
we take groups. And the brand managers that we have that are working with our brand portfolio to [00:08:00] strategize and execute are some of our most highest paid people. Some of our most experienced people, And some of the people that if I'm starting a brand, I'm calling them number one to start that brand, we have them as brand managers in our industry.
So when we're able to say. you're going to be paired with Matt Epilito. Made-up Alito has been at Gallo for 18 years. He was at the parent company for four years. He's going to be running your brand. They go, oh, okay. All right. When Adam, Bankie another one of our brand managers out of bank. He was 15 years at Miller cores.
Four years at Legion of bloom knows Canada's inside and out crystal McLean, 15 years. I read the book. She's been through, you know, five or six years in cannabis. So these people are highly sought after, and we have them as brand strategists. I want people that think they know how to grow a brand. I want them to come to pedal fast and be brand strategists for us.
Dan Humiston: It's a great strategy We mentioned partnerships a couple of times, and I think it's really important for our listeners to just get a [00:09:00] flavor of the type of horsepower you have as portfolio companies.
Can you share some of the names of the companies that you work with?
Jason Vegotsky: Sure. You know, I think you talked about partnerships, A lot of times, it's the partnerships that you don't make. and the things that you say no to, I always tell our team no is the most powerful word in the English language. And we say no to more brands than we say yes to.
and we are looking for a specific criteria of what brands we're going to bring in. Number one, you better be. a founder that is in this thing to win it. you don't have to be the biggest brand. You don't have to be your sights set on being the largest brand, but you better be a founder that knows how to build brands from CPG principles.
Okay. We're going to talk about distribution. We're going to talk about new placements. We're going to talk about ski rationalization. we are not here to do. Throw out any skews we possibly can to get top line revenue. That's not how you build brand. We were looking to go deep, not necessarily wide. so number one, we're looking at founders.
Can they manage and build a [00:10:00] brand? Do we believe in them as, as people? number two. Do you have the balance sheet to be able to. Or do you have the ability to raise capital, right? You don't necessarily have to have all the money in the world from day one to work with us, but we're going to want to see, do you have the ability to then go and raise capital if we have success and you're, you're able to quickly figure that out when you're talking to, a brand builder, number three, I just asked myself, do we need this product?
Uh, I can't. Stress enough to people. Is this a need in the marketplace? And is there an actual market for it? Um, there's a lot of really cool innovation, but I don't know that we need the THC string beads. Right? Like there are going to be out there someday because we will just want to put THC in everything.
We're looking for product market fit. We're looking for brands and products that can grow within a category. but ultimately we're looking at with people that want to fit within our culture and be a part of a team. Because one thing I've noticed in cannabis is I can't do it by myself. You can't do [00:11:00] it by yourself.
Nobody can do it by yourself. So we're looking for a team mentality when we mess up, when they mess up, are we going to be working through problems together? When you talk about specific brands that fits that, , I got two that come to mind in the portfolio of number one is yada yada probably our largest success story.
If you look through all the numbers in California, you'll go, how the hell did this brand show up? in, in seven months we went from zero to the seventh largest brand in the flower category in the state of California, nobody in the history of California cannabis has ever done that except for yada yada and.
kudos to them for number one, listening for building a great product for having a great price, and having a great brand that that really shows off on the shelf. number two would be space coyote, space coyote, as far as I'm concerned, is founded by the smartest guy I've ever met in cannabis.
Scott Sambor, probably the best looking guy I've ever met in canvas to. I don't even like the guy around me. why I'm in love with this brand, that. I'm from Philadelphia. And when I think about cannabis in [00:12:00] Philly, I believe that consumers are gonna want to live that California dream.
Right. I always thought we'd California. Right? I always like the movie below. Like that was what I thought weed was like in California. You know, you go to Manhattan beach, it's the beach, it's the sun, that's the surf, it's all that kind of stuff. And when you meet Scott and you meet his co-founder Libby and you meet the brand, you think, and like it's real life, California dreaming.
And I believe that that brand is going to resonate not only in California where they're there, they're one of the most profitable brands and they're one of , the best businesses that I have seen in California. But I believe that that product, as they move across the country is going to be amazing.
And that really spawns into, okay. Now, if you want to build a national brand, you can only do it if you're in a national landscape and thinking about how we take these brands across the country, a lot of what I've been doing lately.
Dan Humiston: Well, that's the next thing I was going to ask you to do something like that scaling to that level will [00:13:00] probably cost quite a bit of money in not sure if you'll be able to do it on a cashflow. Are you going to be raising any money to do that, what are your plans?
Jason Vegotsky: certainly need money to do it. I believe we have the best cap table in cannabis. , we have, uh, Meredith capital has been my VC throughout my multiple ventures. Uh, Meredith capital, I believe is the best venture capital firm in cannabis. Um, the reason why I say that is because I, uh, like many business operators, I have had a lot of good times and I've had a lot of bad times and, during the good they write.
During the bed, they also write checks and stand behind their company. So, for anybody out there starting, a brand or you think you have a differentiated opportunity, Meredith capital's the number one group, as far as I'm concerned that I've come across and I've come across pretty much all of them.
so Meredith capital is behind us. Um, we have one of the large MSLs behind us, and we have one of the top three alcohol beverage distributor. as our largest investor and our partner in thinking about how we go about building this thing, I will tell you that, we will be [00:14:00] launching in Michigan.
In the fall, um, likely around October, um, we're already building out a portfolio. We believe we'll have the first and most premier portfolio in the state of Michigan come October. We will be hiring a 13 person selling and trade-marketing organization starting August 1st to launch October 1st. So that's all in the works already funded for that.
we are launching, Massachusetts, same timeline. same thing building out the portfolio right now, already have the capital for that. Um, and then we'll be launching Arizona shortly after that. So those three states are already right in the pipeline. you know, we're not currently raising capital.
Um, we have great backers that have, backed us upon every raise. And one of the things that I love about our business. We're not super cash intensive. The reason why I don't want to be in the warehousing and logistics and distribution and inventory business is because that's a massive, you know, suck on your cashflow and your balance sheet.
I let my friends at Navis handle that one. We have a very, uh, nice service business. That's [00:15:00] continuing to grow and we're looking at all kinds of, tech platforms that we can weave into, the platform that.
Dan Humiston: And that's a really exciting, well, we'll have all the information about pedal fast in the show notes. So. If you think you have what it takes to be a brand in their portfolio, I'm sure somebody from Jason's team would be happy to talk to you. But, uh, I think this is, you know, one of those businesses that is really needed and I it'll be really exciting to watch you roll this thing out across the nation and help brands get established.
, Jason. I appreciate you being on the show.
Jason Vegotsky: Thanks a lot for having me.