Got a grow problem? There’s a consultant for that!

A New Type of Cannabis Consulting

As the cannabis industry grows and the consulting market becomes more saturated, it has become easier to pick out the fake consultants and find the real experts. But the problem still remains; most of these experts only excel in one area. Whether its pest management, cultivation techniques, extraction technology, banking or security, it’s extremely rare to find a consultant with experience in all of the above.

That’s why Chip and his good friend and business partner Jim Gerencser came up with Greener Consulting Group, a firm of cannabis consultants with dedicated areas of expertise. Traditionally, a consultant operates alone in a contractor capacity. But Greener Group has evolved the cannabis consultant, and turned it into a team that can solve any problem in-house.

Greener Group aims to remove the hassle of searching the web and asking associates for consultant recommendations for every individual problem. No matter what the issue is, one or more of the consultants from Greener Consulting Group has the skills and industry experience to solve it, guaranteed.

In Part One of this two-part episode, Chip and Jim dive into the real dirt of cannabis consulting and how dirty the industry really gets. Plus, hear about which states are doing regulation right and which got it completely wrong, and what the future holds for medical and legal cannabis states in the aftermath of COVID and plenty of classic ganja talk between a couple stoners.

Roll up another one, sit back or get back in the grow, and enjoy this episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker!

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Transcript

Chip: Today on The Real Dirt, I have my good friend and partner. I mean, I’ve known you all this time and I can’t even pronounce your name correctly. Jim Gerencser.

Jim: My first name is Jim. My last name is Hungarian. It’s Gerencser, the cs is a letter in Hungary. I learned that last year when I went to Budapest.

Chip: Oh, that’s why I can’t pronounce it.

Jim: That’s why you can’t pronounce it. Yeah, you only have 26 letters in your alphabet. They got like, 41 or something like that. But I’m glad to be her.

Chip: I mean, thanks dude. Thanks for joining me. I’m glad we got you on. Me and Jim have been,  we got a bunch of projects the past year or so. We met through a group called Baby Bathwater. It’s a networking, marketing group, entrepreneur group. And we didn’t even meet there though. Did we?

Jim: We didn’t even meet there.

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: I basically was on the island in Croatia, this private island for a week with all these,  150 people. I’ve met one of them before. And I probably became best friends with 30 of them. And I took over Chip’s job on the island.

Chip: And with the Baby Bathwater. I’m usually –

Jim: The cannabis –

Chip: I roll it up. Yeah, I’m the cannabis guy. I roll it up.

Jim: Yeah, they don’t have to hide that does that in Baby Bathwater. They outsource it to Chip. When Chip wasn’t there, it was a break in the supply chain. And, I started two days before I got there trying to create the supply chain. So they probably figured I was the best guy to keep it rolling. Honestly, I’m pretty good at that.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. So the story I hear is after this event, it’s basically like a five-day crash course in advanced entrepreneurism and marketing, mixed with five days of long nights. It’s a pretty incredible place. But after the fact, a couple of days after it came, people called me up and he’s like, “Oh, man, you’ve got to meet Jim. Oh, you got to meet Jim.” Two different people like, sent us friend emails, right? You know, “Chip, meet Jim. Jim meet Chip.”

Jim: That’s the cool thing about the group. Yeah, they kind of mix and match you a little bit and then try to find either like-minded, or opposite-minded people that seem to get along. And honestly, they nailed this one.

Chip: Oh dude, me and Jim get along so well. You’re kind of like an evil older brother.

Jim: Yeah, I’m an evil older brother, but also with the cousin side to it. You know like, you got your cousin that you believe in 100%, because you have to, right? I mean, you’re in there. You’re messing with your parents and your parents are, came from the same family, you know? So it’s not like, you can trick them. Like, you can trick fuck everybody else. So yeah, you learn a lot from cousins. And I only had one brother. I didn’t have any younger brothers. So I think Chip and I have a love hate relationship in terms of we love a lot of things together. And we don’t hate anything, really. I mean, that’s the neatest part about us. We’re not haters.

Chip: Oh, yeah man. Not haters at all.

Jim: We don’t spend lot of time even going there. And anybody that has any of that in them doesn’t seem like they are allowed in what we’re doing. So it’s that simple, which is pretty awesome.

Chip : Well, yeah, hate’s a kind of a natural thing people have. I’ve really have had to work it, work with it. Coming from the south, Southerners are typically like, haters of things, right? That’s not Southern.

Jim: That’s sort of default.

Chip: Right?

Jim: Yeah.

Chip: Yeah, that’s their default for good or for bad. It creates a lot of interesting cultural things, that’s good for it. I generally try not to prejudge or, hate, I’ve had to work on it. I’ve had to work on it.

Jim: I think Chip, that’s a good point.  I believe that this entrepreneur group that we met through is a group that works on stuff, and you see that. And when I was there, one of the shows I went to, I think it was a marketing guy that runs all the advertising for Peloton. He started off the conversation with, “Who here is an entrepreneur?” Everybody raised their hand, so it was kind of humbling in the fact that, you brought that many entrepreneurs together. And we were all there to learn more. It was like, yeah, we’re entrepreneurs, but we’re thriving, we thrive for more information. And we’re all there together, not competing. We all could probably be in the same industry, because everybody’s fighting for the almighty dollar, in one way or another. But yeah, well that’s what I liked about it most. And afterwards when I sought out my cannabis, because I’m a medical cannabis guy, I’ve seen cannabis work for curing cancer and fighting cancer and making cancer cells commit suicide. So, my whole goal in this cannabis space was to meet somebody that I think can help me get to that space faster.

Chip: So Jim calls me, to the listeners of the podcast, I’m a very friendly person, but I’m very busy. And I have a lot of different projects. And I don’t really take meetings with people I don’t know. I communicate with people over the phone, or try to email back and forth with people in tool, like there’s a reason to me, and this is all pre-COVID, too. So it was back to my old MO of like, “Hey, would love to chat with you. Let’s get on the phone.” Right? Like, “What do you want?” on an email. And Jim wouldn’t be straight with me. He was like, “Well, I’d rather just come and see. You know, so I keep blowing Jim off. And then one day, he just showed up, right? Just like that. He’s like, “I’m coming tomorrow. I’ll be there at noon.”

Jim: I’m “the shorter the notice, the better” kind of guy.

Chip: Yeah, right. Yeah. He’s like a bill collector. You’re like a bill collector.

Jim: You don’t tell him you’re coming. Yeah.

Chip: Right. So Jim shows up, we meet, we hit it off immediately. Jim smoked more weed than I do. He immediately had some great, great weed. We smoked like, 10 joints in my store, before it was a store, I just rented the facility, my grow store, Cultivate. I just rented the facility. It was empty warehouse and we smoked it out, dreamed of what to be, huh Jim?

Jim: Yeah, I was looking for, I don’t know what I was looking for, Chip. I was looking for somebody like you. I didn’t –

Chip: You wanted to get into the cannabis industry.

Jim: I did. I wanted to be –

Chip: You’re a successful businessperson. And you wanted to get in the cannabis industry and didn’t quite know how, but love weed.

Jim: That’s it. That’s it, I saw all the things happening. I’ve got a bunch of my friends that are either retired or getting ready to retire. Half of them have never smoked a joint in their life, but they know that I have partaken my whole life. So they were reaching out to me like, “What do we do? Who do we invest in? How do we get into the space?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Let me find out.” So I started digging into it and honestly felt like I’ve gone through like a four-year education class in the last 12 months with Chip, because Chip is one of those guys that actually knows business, which I immediately realized that. I was like, “This guy is actually a business guy. And he’s in the cannabis space.” Because what I had experienced on a small scale was that you’re either one of the other. Like, most engineers don’t sell, you know what I mean? And that’s kind of what I consider like oil and water. You’re either an engineer, or you’re a salesperson, no way in hell you’re both. To actually make a certain person that can talk to both people, because they call it a liaison, because they can’t even talk to each other, they’re so far apart. So that’s what I really wanted to do in this space, is learn as much as I possibly could. There’s so much to learn about it, and what I ran into was a [inaudible 8:02]. Chip introduced me to so much crap I don’t even care about, but I was interested in it. I wanted to learn as much as I can and not that I’m a huge education freak, but this space intrigues me. So here we are a year later, we’ve run multiple different deals together. I’ve invested in some of his businesses, he’s given me some direction on some other businesses to invest in or not to invest in, which is probably the most important thing, what not to invest in. You got to –

Chip: Yeah, when to say no.

Jim: When to say no, you got to love what you’re doing, and I did love it. And like I said, now I’ve run the course of a year of investing, finding out that yeah, everybody in the space is cool, but I’m not sure I love everybody in the space. I don’t hate anybody, but I’m not sure I love everybody.

Chip: Well, many people just, they’re on a wing and a prayer, or they have like this idea, or this thing they want to do, and it might not have anything to do with the business of cannabis actually making a profit, which can be cool, man, right? Like those guys that are doing RSO for a penny a gram. Man, coolest thing possible right? But it’s a nonprofit business in the truest sense.

Jim: It really is. They don’t even let you expense your labor. What the hell, man? I mean, what kind of business,  it’s just such a federal, this is a federal fucking. it’s literally at the point, it sets a epitome of getting fucked.

Chip: Right, right. And Jim, speaking of the taxes, the 280 East Tax System. And basically, we in the cannabis industry get taxed at gross profit instead of net profit. And you guys can all go look that up, but it’s basically profit before expenses as gross profit. And cannabis industry generally can’t take off. Expenses only cost a good soul.

Jim: Which is ridiculous. So everyone is forced to kind of you know, still remain outlaws, right? I mean, we’ve talked about that from the beginning, Chip, we’re guaranteed outlaws. I mean, we were forced into it. We’re at different levels, but we’re definitely considered, you definitely would look at stuff out of the dictionary, and you would see pictures of us as an outlaw. Sure, no doubt.

Chip: Not criminals.

Jim: Not criminal.

Chip: But outside the law.

Jim: We’re forced to be outside the law.

Chip: Yeah, forced. Forced, not even like by choice. It’s like, oh, man, we can’t have normal banking. And since then, like Jim said, we’ve set up several cannabis businesses together and joined some other businesses. I previously had a hemp seed distribution company, that was more of just like a brokerage. We’ve taken that and we’re turned it into certified seeds. And we’ll launch that later on this year. It’ll be an online marketplace for certified hemp seeds.

Jim: The one stop shop.

Chip: One stop shop, multiple vendors. We’re not making any of the seeds. They’re all from the highest and most reputable vendors in the country associated with this.

Jim: Yeah so we started, we spent our time going through it, sure we have the best vendors instead of trying to grow the best seed.

Chip: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve gotten a bank account for that and how long did that take?

Jim: It took six months.

Chip: It took six months to get a bank account.

Jim: For hemp seeds, hemp seeds. And by the way, they’re legal. Interesting thing. And that’s what, this brought us to our most recent venture, right, Chip? I mean –

Chip: Oh, yeah, yeah, Greener Group.

Jim: Greener Group, yeah.

Chip: Greener Group.

Jim: Something I think that we’re both more excited about than anything else that we’ve got going. I mean, in terms of our deals, Chip has a lot of stuff going on, and so do I individually. But together, Greener Group is our baby. We’re nurturing it to a point, we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with, what space but we’re kind of dialing it in.

Chip: Just totally hit the ground running, that’s for sure, man. So you can check it out at greenerconsultinggroup.com. It’s a new website, you might have to like, look for it a little bit. You can find us on LinkedIn, on well, Facebook’s already kicked us out, but Instagram. What I realized was for years, people have been asking me for consulting, and I’ve done it sparingly over time. A big part of it was because I’ve just got so many other businesses, it’s hard to like, dedicate the time to somebody when they need to solve a cultivation problem. So over the years, we developed a lot of technical consultation that was just free of service at Cultivate Colorado, and it still remains true, right? If you want to light design or dehumidifier design, you just tell us the square footage and we’ll tell you immediately how many lights or dehumidifiers you need. I’ve shied away from all the other consultation, but what I realized was Jim had this really great business in the automotive industry. And one of the things that I really consider one of my assets, I look at what everybody’s doing, and I try to bring in great stuff from it. And Jim has this great business that he operates nationally. And I thought to myself, “Man, this is a great way to do this with cannabis as well.” Jim, tell me about Nationwide.

Jim: Yes, so what we do is we manage vendors across the country for recalls before they get to the dealer. So auto manufacturer –

Chip: Automobile recalls.

Jim: Automobile recalls. So a car that normally gets sold at a dealer has a recall, you go back to the dealer, they fix it. What we do is we manage these projects for the cars that have not been sold to the dealers, and they’re normally by the thousands. We go out there and bring whatever crews necessary. So they might need engines replaced, or they might need a light bulb replaced. So you don’t have the same people doing it. So I don’t hire these people until I need them. And when Chip was telling me he’s got this database of consultants that do from seed to sale, I was like, “Why don’t we just incorporate that into what we’re doing at Nationwide, and manage these vendors on an as needed basis?”

Chip: Yeah, Jim started like, listening to my phone calls basically. I was, you know, are hearing me complain about or talk or about like, my life or schedule, and he realized this, right? He was like, “Wow, man, your network is incredible.” I mean, I think you were the first person to really bring it up, Jimmy.

Jim: Yeah, well, everybody else has took it for granted. Because Chip, they don’t want to tell you anything, because they wanted you to keep giving them free information for the rest of their life. And that’s my biggest challenge is to get you to quit, we don’t want to quit giving free information, but we got to draw the line somewhere, right? It’s a bit, people take advantage of it. And well –

Chip: I definitely agree with that. But I’ll also say that by my unconditional giving, it’s brought me my network that I have.

Jim: I agree.

Chip: And what you have made me understand is there is a way that we can make business out of this information, and I’ll still be able to unconditionally give. Because like this podcast, we unconditionally give to people, right? Like yeah, I do this podcast to lead gen for all my other businesses and tell you about cultivatecolorado.com, and tell you about cultivateokc.com, and tell you about growerscoco.com, all my potting soil, and now Growers, and now Greener Group, too. We’re telling you about Greener Group but really like, I started this podcast because I wanted good information to go out to people about ganja, hemp, medical marijuana. I don’t use the laws, destroy the misconceptions and myths. And that’s all unconditional, mind conditional giving on the spot.

Jim: It’s a show of your unconditional love for the for the cannabis plant. I’s simple as getting people educated. I didn’t know that cannabis was both hemp and marijuana. It’s a very simple thing, but I’ve been around it my whole life, didn’t know that. Basically starting with that, it makes you realize that all these things, hemp is legal. It’s the same plant as cannabis as marijuana, or high THC cannabis is what they refer to it as, and low THC cannabis is hemp. One’s legal, one’s not, what the hell, man? So I want to talk a little bit about my project I’ve got going right now that we’re working through your grow in Oklahoma.

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s talk about The Health Camp and Eric and all of that.

Jim: Yeah, The Health Camp is one of the big projects that I’ve got going right now. It’s an app that’s going all out. One of the programs I’m working with currently, it’s called Cannabis Oil Success Stories. And it’s 175,000 people on a Facebook private group that share these stories about how cannabis has helped them fight cancer. And I’ve been looking at this page for a year and a half or two years. And when I met Chip, my intention was to make the best oil and share it with everybody. But then I realized that there’s a lot of good oils out there, and that I could probably be better spent using my passion to create a place to have everybody share their information. And then we can go through, and aggregate the data, and be able to find out the best way to use what product on what cancer for what type of person, and be able to get that information to the general public. Right now, it’s kind of hidden. It’s there, but it’s hidden. So I’m creating an app called Health Camp Buddy. Health Camp has THC in it. And it starts with the word Health, heal. Heal is a really big part of our world. And we’re creating this app, it’s a social media type of crowdsourcing platform that allows people that have used cannabis successfully, to be able to enter their information and we’ll aggregate it into a result that will be able to give a person that’s dealing with cancer the information easily generated for them. So they can either have access to the oil, and know what kind of oil to get, what oils work best for what type of cancers, certain body types work better with different types of FECO oils. We’re talking about fully extracted cannabis oil is what I’m focusing on. There’s a lot of other things that you can put with it, but I think my reason I’m on earth is to be able to focus on the FECO oil itself. So I’m going to be giving this app together, we’ve actually got phase one done. I expect it to be completely finished within the next month. I’m excited as hell about it. I think it’s going to save lives. It’s all ties to this charity that I run, it’s called Early Recognition is Critical. I want to talk to about my son, I could talk about Eric forever. He’s an awesome kid. He’s a three time cancer survivor since he was age eight. And anybody that has kids can relate to the fact of being a parent and being a caretaker of an eight year old son that’s very athletic and loving, and dealing with this kind of shit. So I’ve been dealing with it my whole life. I’m trying to give back. I believe cancer fights cancer, naturally. I don’t think that chemo is the, if it takes chemo, do chemo but also use cannabis. That’s my –

Chip: Oh, absolutely, man. Absolutely,

Jim: So it’s been awesome. Chip’s got a lot of experience with a lot of people. I’m using his network. We’re growing some marijuana in Oklahoma specifically to be able to be made into the best FECO oil, and different types of strains because each strain is different. I mean,  you want indica for cancer, if you’re fighting cancer you don’t use CBD. You might use CBG,  you might use CBA, but you need THC. And you need high THC indica, which is a very sedative cannabis compared to the sativa, which is a little more of a head high. It’s more medicinal, yeah kicks your ass. When you’re sick, you need to rest. So yeah, that’s what I got going on. And with the help of what Chip’s got going on, we’re working together to, we give back. It’s one thing that I love about Chip is the first day we talked about the Eric Charity and Chip wanted to, I could see in his eyes, he was a giver. And I learned at a late age that you giving back feels really good. I was selfish I guess, growing up. I’m a unique individual, I actually got divorced 12 years ago, and I’m back with my ex-wife so I don’t give up easy. So beware.

Chip: Alright, let’s not turn this into tilling the ball now. Come on, this is The Real Dirt podcast about cannabis, mostly.

Jim: Let’s do it. Alright, I’ll smoke it.

Chip: What are you smoking on today, Jim?

Jim: Some Humboldt. The same.

Chip: Oh, okay. Yeah, I got you. I’m on the porch this morning, this is a Friday morning porch session. And we got a tractor driving by.

Jim: Chip’s got the best porch, on the best thousand foot view in Oklahoma.

Chip: We’re a thousand foot high here in Oklahoma.

Jim: The weed is just okay, basically. So

Chip: t’s okay, kush okay. Yeah, Oklahoma has been a really great place for growing ganja. I mean, it has its set of circumstantial issues. But every place does, and yeah, Northern California has the best climate, when the climates right there to any place in the world probably. South Africa aand here also has similar type of climate. Maybe Argentina.

Jim: Is that the same longitude, latitude? I mean –

Chip: It is, except those on the southern hemisphere. And but it’s similar coastal mountain type environment.  Lots of indicator species, and wine, and grapes. And that’s kind of how I relate it, but hey, look. In Northern California in Oregon, the West Coast man, forest fires, dude.

Jim: Oh my god.

Chip: Right? Like, devastating the smoke. And like, sometimes it’s okay, but other times, it’s just totally ruined. And even if you don’t get burned out, it can be difficult there too. And last year here in Oklahoma, it was just hot, dry and windy. And this year, it hasn’t been as hot. But it’s definitely been more humid and with less wind. It’s definitely has its challenges, and we have been challenged, you know what I mean? We keep pushing the envelope, and COVID, and the employment shortage, all that caused us problems. I mean, I’ve been doing this my whole life. There’s no sure homeruns.

Jim: That’s why if anybody needs any help in Oklahoma specifically or Colorado or California, Chip’s the guy. He’s already been there, done that. He’ll wear a suit coat, I think. I probably won’t.

Chip: A suit coat. Man, I look fresh and clean. Jim, however, he’s gonna come right off the frisbee golf course, and pull off his visor, right? And go into the board meeting.

Jim: You may be right. Maybe that would be [inaudible 23:41]. But yeah, so we got a killer deal work –

Chip: Hey, Greener Group, man I mean, yeah. Yeah, let’s talk about Greener Group.

Jim: Let’s talk about Greener Group, yeah.

Chip: So what we’ve done is we have compiled a large group of experts in the field of cannabis that are already working as consultants in the cannabis space. And here’s what we realized, is even the best of the people, they started out just being best in their fields, right? And they know how to grow cannabis and scale it, or they know how to do financial assessments of cannabis businesses, or they know how to operate cannabis businesses. And they kind of just got like, through opportunity. They got moved in the consultant space, which is more of an entrepreneurial space, right? But in their heart, they’re tradesmen and experts in their exact field. And they have a hard time running business, because business is hard to run. So what we’ve done is we’ve aligned these guys, right? Right now, we’ve got 12 people that are official lead consultants for us. But I mean, the network is endless. If you call us in any state, pretty much I’ve got someone close to you that we can work with. We’ve built this network of consultants now. You call us up, we have a conversation about what your problems are, what your goals are, what you want to solve, whether you’re buying a cannabis business, or you’re building a cannabis business.

Jim: Or you want to invest in a cannabis business,

Chip: You want to invest in a cannabis business. I mean, we’ve talked to all of those types of people. We’ve talked to government agents, we’ve talked to investment groups,

Jim: Money laundering specialists.

Chip: Money, yeah, I hate that term. So deceiving, but it’s bank relationship specialist, we’ll just go ahead and explain that right now, so we don’t get off topic. Which is, hey man, if you are a bank, and you want to open a business to cannabis people, you have to do it in a certain way. So you bring on someone to help you do that. And our guy is one of the leaders in doing this. So you call us up, we chat with you about what your goals are, your problems are, we’ve got this list of consultants. We pull out our consultants, send them on the task, and they’re usually I mean, it’s usually accomplished, like, quickly. We’ve got a couple of projects that seem to last a little long, but like, they’ve almost, that’s the beauty of our network, right, Jim? Is we solve some problems immediately.

Jim: We’ve already seen them all.

Chip: Famous story about Picasso is – I don’t know if it’s real or not, maybe it’s not Picasso, but I think it is. A lady walked up and was like, “Oh, hey, Picasso, could you sign this paper, sign this napkin?” And so he does a little doodle, signs it and says, “That’ll be $30,000.”  Like, “Wait a minute. That only took you 15 seconds.” He was like, “No that took me 30 years.” It’s just kind of an example of how it works with us, too. It’s like, we’ve already heard all the problems, right? Just like our call yesterday with a bug problem the guy had, like, we immediately know how to solve that. But many other consultants or groups of people, they want to hook you in for a year-long contract, and we just want to solve your problem, walk away, right? And that’s really been our success is that like in just a matter of a day or two, we can solve most people’s problems.

Jim: The thing about this project with Chip and I is that we already have our livelihood covered. So we’re not desperate for like, paying overhead with –

Chip: Business, right?

Jim: It’s not a hobby, but it’s like a passion for us. I like to claim we bring the culture. I’m not sure Chip’s a big lover of that, because he’s been in, he’s been that guy for so long. And I haven’t been, so it’s kind of fresh to me. But I believe it’s important to bring that. I mean, Chip and his group have helped me make smart decisions on investments going forward. I highly recommend, if you’re 60 years old, and you want to invest in cannabis call Greener Group. I mean, we’ll go over stuff with you that you never have thought about. We can look at your books, we have a CFO that works for us, that works for multiple cannabis companies across the board. We’ve got people that –

Chip: Right, we can in one hour decide, like tell you literally if some investment opportunity is is full of shit, or worth investigating. And we’ve done that a couple of different times, it’s really amazing. Because we have so much experience in the cannabis industry, we can immediately look at operational costs and expenses, and tell if it’s real or not.

Jim: You can’t hide from our group because we have, we’re not one dimensional. We’re multi-dimensional. We’re like full spectrum. We’re full spectrum consultants. It is not us our way or the highway, when you call us and talk to us, you’ll realize that right away. We’ve got a great team together. One of the good things we do with our consultants is we support their back end too. We take that loosely, we support their business side of it that the stuff that they’re not good at. It’s like a doctor, a doctor doesn’t –

Chip: All the reports –

Jim: All the crap that they don’t get.

Chip: All the office support like, it’s really turned the consulting industry into a more professional organization. Because in the past and hey man, no offense to you consultants, you guys know what’s going on. You guys are growers or extractors or businesspeople, and you all need better back end offices. If you got a great back end then yeah, you’re gonna do great.

Jim: It all starts with that, and we’re getting better at it. We’re gonna have all of our guys with an app that can really communicate well with the customer. Like I said, we’re not looking at a full-time gig. We’re in and out. We’re in to fix your problem, get out. We’re problem solvers.

Chip: Yeah. And you know, our consultants also, they’re independent consultants. And so if you’re a cannabis consultant from hemp to extraction, from genetics to banking, IT, whatever, right? Give us an email, man. We want to increase our network and we might have some business for you. And you’re an independent contractor, we’re just helping you guys too, man. Sure, it’s business and I enjoy business, and this is a good, good business to be in. We saw there was a problem in the industry on both the consultant side and on the consumer side.

Jim: And like I said, I’m pushing that investment side guys. Anybody that wants to invest in the cannabis?

Chip: Yeah, absolutely.

Jim: Give us a call. We’ll go through the pros and cons with you. We’re gonna think of stuff that you’ll never think of, I promise you that. Because we have people coming to us on a regular, we’re still learning every day. And what we do is we learn every day, and then we share it with you. It’s a fun business to be part of, being part of Chip’s network has been amazing. All you gotta do is call Greener Group and you’re part of it, man. So it’s that easy. If you have –

Chip: It has been fun though, man. We’ve talked to like, we just launched this business a couple of months ago. We’ve talked to like, so many cool people about projects they’re doing. And working with so many cool people right now on projects, man without naming names or specific locations, like what’s the favorite call that we’ve been on?

Jim: I like the one that came from Tennessee, and they overgrew hemp. Because it was one of the first ones that we had. And these guys were like, “Man, we really don’t know what to do. We basically have thousands of pounds of hemp. We don’t know how to get rid of it. We don’t even know where to start. We don’t know what to do now, because we got so screwed this year. What do we do next year?” They were just completely at end, at wit’s end, you know?

Chip: They were real typical of what was going on in the hemp industry this year for sure.

Jim: Yeah, supply and demand. And –

Chip: I mean, they’re smart people, they were in the agricultural industry. They already had like, success doing other stuff. They’ve already got like, products on the shelves in the oil, ag space, like not cannabis-related at all, or hemp-related at all. They were successful businesspeople and had problems.

Jim: Which is very common. They thought, “Oh, it’ll just be like growing strawberries.” It’s not.

Chip: Yeah, we just grow it and somebody will buy it. And strawberries aren’t like that either, man. And nothing is. It has to have that sales channel.

Jim: I think personally from a business side, that’s the first channel that you should create before you grow anything.

Chip: Oh, yeah. Hey, you know, I mean, one of the things that we do a lot of is branding and marketing.  And it just naturally do all of our businesses. And the thing that both of us realized is, you can have the best brand, the best design, the best content, the best advertising, the best product placement of any of your competitors. But the only thing that’s going to drive your brand is sales, right? You have to sell. And honestly, that’s the first channel you should work on, instead of the last. People who try to get work on the opposite side, right? They work on the brand first and –

Jim: The easy stuff. Yeah, they work on the easy stuff. And one thing we’re finding out at Greener is that marketing is tough. Like I said, we got kicked off Facebook. I mean, both Chip and Travis, Travis is one of our partners. And they were like, “It’s not if we’re gonna get kicked off, but how long?”  And it’s like, “We got to work around this crap.” There’s constant contact won’t let you send out cannabis stuff.

Chip: Cannabis emails, right.

Jim: So at Greener, we’re figuring this out. We have our own CRM, and we’ll work with you if you need help with anything like that. If you’re starting a dispensary, if you’re getting ready to think about doing a grow, call us first. Let’s talk about a supply chain before you grow them. Yeah, don’t call us after.

Chip: I just realized we were starting to sound like an infomercial, which is totally cool, ’cause it’s my podcast and I can do whatever what I want.

Jim: Yeah, exactly.

Chip: But no, it’s exciting. It’s so exciting to talk to all of these different people. Man, I think my favorite conversation was also a hemp comp. I’ve had two conversations that were my favorite, I think. The cannabis farm on the west coast that wanted to relocate to another state. It was just, it’s difficult with the environment, the fires, the remoteness, the taxes, the state and local taxes over in California are just ridiculous. And they wanted to move, and I really liked this conversation, because they were cannabis, successful cannabis people.  They’ve been doing it for a moment. And they realized like, they needed a little help and reached out to us. They were interested in other states that they can move and operate in, because previously California for many, many years was the only place to operate. And now, it’s just not the case. So I really liked that conversation. And man, I also liked that hemp technologies conversation we’ve had. These guys are trying to develop some hemp technologies, and were really approaching in a different manner. And that was really inspiring, because the hemp textile industry is just growing so much, growing so quick.

Jim: It is, and we’ve got a great by the way, we’ve got a excellent connection with textiles, and hemp.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely man. Engineers…

Jim: Hey, we also have the ability to, we’re a specialist at building any kind of app or website in the cannabis space. So let us know, we’ve got all that covered.

Chip: I know it sounds like a one, not a one stop shop. But like, literally, through all of my years of business, I’ve had to do all this stuff for my businesses. And mostly I set up with my own employees or networks of people that now understand cannabis. And so I’m basically opening up my network. Jim has got a huge IT section and programming section to his business right? Like, we can pretty much design or modify any software, build any app or website through in-house means, that’s what you’re saying, Jim, right?

Jim: Yep, yep. We got the capacity, we’ve got people that, the team that’s building Health Camp Buddy. And what they do is, like I said, we can put you on a CRM that you don’t have any restrictions whatsoever. So yeah, give us a call. I’m a marketing, branding guy, I love talking about that. Chip and I dream shit up every morning, I kind of look forward to those calls, because it fires me up. It’s like, it’s better than exercise, that’s for damn sure. It does, it puts us on the same page. And it’s like, we don’t have to, I’ve never had a partner with, I gotta say, Chip, I got it. And he’s like, he hangs up. We don’t waste each other’s time at all. And if you’re going to get a partner, find somebody like that.

Chip: I couldn’t say enough about how much I’ve learned in the past year and a half that we’ve been working together. And I know you said you’ve learned but man, I’ve learned just as much. So that is the beauty of a good working partner relationship, is that you learn from each other. And me and Jim have both have poor partners in the past, and we’ve had exits from businesses that worked out or didn’t work out. And we’ve had a significant amount of experience of working with people. And having an active partner in your relationship, versus an investor is a completely different scenario. We should do a whole podcast about that. How to partner, how just specifically how to partner with people.

Jim: How to get along. It’s a hard thing, man. Get along, I’d start by get a bong, right?

Chip: Get a bong, yeah.

Jim: Yeah. I mean, I totally believe that you’ve got to have something in common with somebody and Chip and I, we found out our common denominator immediately. And we’ve never broken off of that. I mean, we’ve stuck with it, we stayed in course, we pivot left and right. But it always comes back to the, we’re business partners that have become friends. I highly recommend. Don’t partner up with a friend.

Chip: Yeah. That’ s a better way to do it, that’s for sure.

Jim: Become a friend after you become business. That’s my free information I give you.  Some of the other things that Chip has brought up that are pretty awesome are that we’re both businesspeople. We believe that entrepreneurship is awesome, I’ve been selling cinnamon toothpicks since I was eight years old. But the number one thing is that we support cannabis. We really believe in it and Chip more than me, he lives it. His goal is to grow more weed than people can smoke. And my goal is aid people’s lives with cannabis. So we got, if you want to participate in this mission, give us a call, man. Follow us. Follow us, Eric is a big mission actually, Chip and I were gonna talk about this and I want to bring it up is that I’m getting ready to –

Chip: Hey, let’s pause for one second breathe. Because Jim will just start talking and get so excited about stuff. But hey, let’s just break for one second and say, this The Real Dirt podcast. Thank you for joining and listening. Please join us on iTunes or Spotify. Hey, and if you’re out in the world, and you need some equipment of some sort, lights, soil nutrients, cultivateokc.com, cultivatecolorado.com. We ship all over the country. Call us if you’re in Colorado. Call us if you’re in Denver. Call us if you’re in Oklahoma. We’ll ship to you. We have commercial accounts. We’re one of the largest purchasers in the country of rock wall general hydroponics, botanic care, pure blend, growers soil, tuber. We ship all over the country. We support cannabis farmers all over the country, specifically in east of the Rockies. But coming to the west coast soon, and look for all of our products in the west coast, 2021. This is The Real Dirt.