It has been a while since I posted anything about our progress and I am sitting around in a hotel in Seattle and can't sleep so I thought I would give an update. I came up to deliver product and attend a couple of days of CannaCon which is a bit boring but a good place to network. I spent last evening at a VIP party with Tommy Chong which was OK but then I woke up and could not go back to sleep as usual thinking about everything I should be doing instead of hanging around in Seattle:-/
WA recreational system has been "interesting" and that is for sure. W.O.W. Weed is doing pretty well all in all but that does not mean we do not have challenges almost every day. We keep up good sales mainly because we started with a good strategy and adjust to the situations as they unfold. We are averaging between $35000.00-$60,000.00 per month in sales with a couple of months over $100,000.00. Our product is well received and most of the shops we sell to have lots of great feedback about our bud so that is really wonderful although the disconnect between being a grower that never see's the customers that like your product is demoralizing and it would be a much better system if we could sell our own product.....less than 1/2 as expensive too. We sell our bud for $6 a gram to retailers and if we could sell it ourselves we would be in direct competition with the black market and medical in the state. On the east side of the state we do not have many retail customers because weed is cheaper over there and we will not go lower than the $6 per gram pricing right now. On the west side retailers still say it is a little higher than they can get it from some other growers but they like the quality....many customers ask for W.O.W. Weed now because our bud tastes and smokes really nice and that is of course what it is all about in the end. It is all dry trimmed by hand, slow cured and of course lab tested, hand packaged and labeled. Retailers sell it for a minimum of %200 mark up so $18 a gram which I just cannot understand but still that is how it rolls out. Our most popular strains are the old school ones......Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, ATF, Northern Lights, Pineapple Express, White Widow, and some newer strains with great name recognition like Girl Scout Cookies and of course all our high CBD strains. My marketing strategy has been to work predominantly with smaller shops in small communities because we like smaller sales. Easier to package and deliver and I like selling 20 different strains to one shop in smaller quantities so maybe 10 single grams, 5 two grams, 3 eigths, perhaps some kief and we have had another processor make shatter for us so we can have that in the same strain as the bud too. I had to buy an oil rig just so we could try our own shatter and it really does taste wonderful. Our pre-rolls are really our most popular item though and many of our orders are for nothing but pre-rolls. We sell 1/2 gram cone for $3.50 and a full gram cone for $7 and it is all top bud, never shake. We are making blends now of different strains that taste wonderful and smoke great and they are really well received. My favorite is "Susy's Sweet Blend" and it is Jack Frost, Eve and Skywalker and it really has the sweetness of the Jack Frost, the skunkiness of the Eve and the smoothness of the Skywalker and we sell tons of them. Our Jack Frost is my favorite strain because of the sweetness of the taste but we have White Lavender, Jack Herer, Dream Queen, Afgooey and Eve that are all close favorites as well.
Taxes are going to break the system unless we get some relief on that front from the state but that remains to be seen with legislation going down in Olympia as I type. Their is a possibility that we will see a reduced taxation or perhaps the tax will be made into a "sin sales tax" at the purchase point and then growers will not have to pay 25% of each sale to the state monthly which of course would be a big help. Right now we pay the 25% to the state but the feds count that tax as income....as though we get to keep it in our pocket so we also pay 39% tax to the feds on the 25% that goes directly to the state. Changing the 25% tax we pay to some other sort of "fee" that is not taxable by the feds is another option being bantered about by the WA state legislature but no one really knows how anything there will turn out until it is signed and in effect because any piece of legislation there changes so much in the process you cannot really know how it will end up. The legal marijuana industry is taxed higher than any other industry in the country to my knowledge.
We just finished our second indoor crop and I cannot wait for summer. The difference between well grown weed from outdoor to indoor is just phenomenal and the only reason anyone would think indoor is preferable to outdoor is because they have not had the opportunity to grow outdoors or their climate just is not adequate to do so because the difference is night and day quite honestly. We see a THC level of up to 7% points higher with outdoor over indoor and our indoor is really nice this run but it really cannot compete with a quality outdoor product. Our outdoor Crazy Train was 27.9% THC and our indoor that looked great was 20.3% THC. All of our strains had reduced THC indoors....most not as much as the Crazy Train but across the board lower. When the large outdoor harvests from the east side of the state come in next year I would think that many indoor operations will fold here but that remains to be seen and who knows what weather will do....? It could be a rainy fall or early freeze or who knows what but barring any negative weather the east side of the state will demolish the west side in production and quality of product and that I do know for sure.
We would like to find a "master grower" that knows outdoor as well as indoor cultivation that we could rent for a day or two to help us tune up our growing practices. I have no delusions that I am a master anything except firefighter because I do seem to put out fires daily. We could pay about $1000 for a day or two of someones time if there is anyone out there that actually has such experience and would be interested in helping us out. You may think our sales would allow for more money but we are still not seeing any profit to speak of. I thought I would start getting a real salary but not yet. Basically we make enough to pay taxes each month, pay our 2 five day a week trimmers under the table $15 an hour and our night watchman who is so much more than that $15 an hour under the table as well as about $3000-$4000 to my daughter and her boy friend monthly for living costs. Otherwise everything else goes into packaging, deliveries, and all the infrastructure, utilities, and products necessary for growing. No one here is getting rich doing this. We have paid back all our 100% interest loans except part of the money I borrowed from my mom and we are paying monthly on that. All the rest just finally got paid back so that should give us a bit of profit monthly now but still.....I will believe it when I see it:-/
We are also looking for an investor/partner that will buy out our third partner who we have not even seen for nearly 4 weeks now. I think $50,000 would buy him out but we are looking for someone with $100,000 to invest so they could buy out his partnership and invest the other $50,000 into the company in bulk packaging and climate control for inside so we could be better placed moving forward. To get a decent deal on packaging you have to buy sooooo much of it and we never have enough money at one time to do that so we are buying packaging every couple of weeks for more than we should be paying which is not cost effective for us unfortunately. We are hoping to find a new partner that wants to work with us....actually help physically because it is just a damn lot of work. I still work 7 day weeks, 10 hour days with many 12 hour days thrown in and another pair of hands that actually wanted to be here would help a lot I think. Especially if it were a family that is involved and many extra hands like mine does. We are just putting it out there but I do expect to see some interest since there are lots of people still wanting to invest and be a part of this industry. If we were able to actually focus on each aspect of this business with the time necessary I think we could do very well building on what we have accomplished so far. We need to expound on our "brand" to make people know who we are. We want to start Weed and Wine tours in the next couple of months where we bring in groups to see how we grow and then take them to a retail shop that sells our weed as well as a few local great wineries or breweries and I think that would really drive sales. We are talking to a local eclectic little hotel to try to work out lodging and a weed friendly location where people taking tours could actually consume their weed and I think that could be a great side business here in our particular location where there are about 10 wine tours a day moving around our area. We need to beef up our social media and our physical presence in each of the retail shops that we sell product to. I think the more personal we make the connection between our weed and us would be beneficial as far as branding our product.
We are still using predatory mites in our indoor grow and have not sprayed a single chemical on anything indoors which is a great relief. I hate using even innocuous chemicals on my weed so we pretty much love predatory mites:-) I am getting a good enough name in the field here that companies with various feeding techniques are asking us to try their products so we are using about 4 different nutrient lines along with our Jacks but I have to say.....we are not seeing better results so far and Jacks is so much less expensive than anything else we have come across so if it works don't try to fix it is how I feel. Our largest power bill so far has been $1890.00 and that is with 55 thousand watt HPS going in the flower room and about 15 MH in the veg room along with a whole bunch of fluorescent's and fans all over the place and dehumidifier and air con going in the storage area which was a very pleasant surprise since I was anticipating about 3-4 times that. We have some of the cheapest power in the nation as it turns out which is great for us.
Starting the second week of March we plan on physically moving about 800 plants outside daily on pallets for 11 hours of sunlight and moving them inside for 13 hours of darkness and we will see how that goes. We are hopeful and I will report back how it turns out. If all goes to plan we will do that for 3 crops along with the plants that will go directly into the ground in early May.
Whatever happens in Oregon we want to be a part of it. To be able to sell your own weed....to be able to see that people actually like it....that will be worth more than making a profit to us I think but hopefully taxation won't kill us there. The feds still are an unknown. Until we figure out our taxes for April 15th everything is still a bit vague on that issue and I spend nights worrying about that as well. If hard work and determination count for anything then we will be successful. If not then I guess we will at least have all this experience under our belt and after doing this any normal business would probably seem like a piece of cake:-)
So....W.O.W. Weed is making a name for itself.....slowly....not overnight but daily with good products and as good of a marketing strategy as I can come up with. We are now in 14 different cities/communities across the state and will be in another 4 in the coming weeks as those retailers open. We offer bud, kief, pre-rolls and shatter so far and sell baby buds/shake in some stores as well which actually flies off the shelves. I am just trying to stay relevant and keep up the quality and to give the best customer service we possibly can to our retailers which is pretty important when they are all inundated every day by growers trying to get them to sell them their products. On paper I think we look like a very viable company. In reality we just work hard to keep the doors open every day like most businesses but we do see at least the possibility of a future and hopefully it is a rosy one:-)
Thanks for all the positive thoughts and as always if anyone is ever in our neck of the woods and wants to check us out everyone is always welcome! I am sure there were many other things I was going to report on but I can't think of them now and I am going to try to get a bit more sleep before I have to get up and face the hordes of folks at CannaCom today:-)