Welcome to Remote Start Podcast!
Jan. 13, 2023

E31: Marketing and Branding your Cannabis Brand with Will Read of CannaPlanners

In this episode, we bring on a special guest, Will Read, the founder and CEO of CannaPlanners. Will shares his expertise on how to normalize the cannabis industry through beautiful design and professional web services. Join us as we dive into the marketing tactics of understanding...
See show notes at: https://www.remotestartpodcast.com/e31-marketing-and-branding-your-cannabis-brand-with-will-read-of-cannaplanners/#show-notes

In this episode, we bring on a special guest, Will Read, the founder and CEO of CannaPlanners. Will shares his expertise on how to normalize the cannabis industry through beautiful design and professional web services. Join us as we dive into the marketing tactics of understanding your customer and targeting your brand. Will and Jim discuss their common interests in branding and brand identity, and learn from each other's unique perspectives. Tune in for an informative and exciting conversation with industry experts.

Learn more about Will Read at: https://cannaplanners.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wpread/

Learn more about Remote Start Podcast at: https://www.remotestartpodcast.com/

Transcript

Jim: What is up Remote Start Nation! I'm Jim Doyon, your host, and I'll welcome you to another episode of Remote Start. Today we have a special episode, especially if you're in the cannabis industry. Today I'm gonna bring on Will Read. Will is the founder and CEO at CannaPlanners. They are working to normalize the cannabis industry through beautiful design and professional web services. Will and I get into the weeds here on some marketing tactics, understanding your why, why it's so important to truly understand your customer and who you're trying to target as a brand, and I'm really excited because Will and I do a lot of the same types of things with branding and brand identity, but we also do it in our own ways. So it's really cool to have a conversation with another expert in the industry and hear his thoughts and kind of go back and forth on what we're seeing working. So with that said, I'd really like to introduce Will to the show, and Remote Start Nation, welcome to another episode of Remote Start. Without further ado, I wanna introduce you to Will Read.

All right Will, I wanna welcome you to the Remote Start Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on board and being a part of it.

Will: My pleasure. Thank you, Jim, for having me, I appreciate it.

Jim: Absolutely, So we have a lot to talk about today, a lot about branding, brand identity, marketing, you know, a lot specifically for the cannabis brand itself, or the cannabis industry itself, which I'm really excited to talk about that with you on. But I also, you know, Remote Start Podcast is about starting a business and building a brand. So, let's start from the beginning, you know, tell me something about yourself, tell me something about your business that you know you've had to overcome in getting to where you are now.

Will: How much time do we have? I feel like it's time, it's most, yeah, it's mostly overcome, especially for me, 'cause I, you know, this is my canna plan was my, real, and I'm air quoting for anybody listening and not seeing me, my first real dive into entrepreneurialism, so there was, you know, the amount of stuff I didn't know could fill, you know, several congressional libraries, full of books. So for me it was throwing myself right in the fire. That was, that was first and foremost. Some of the practical kind of answers to your questions are well, cannabis, you know, cannabis is for sure a difficult business to be in, and we'll get into the whys of that, but, that was, you know, so can planners ostensibly were, you know, we're a marketing agency, we do creative stuff and we, we build websites, and at the beginning, I could have easily just started a website company for bakeries or laundromats or whatever, but cannabis was happening and, you know, it was too much of an opportunity to, you know, say is in balancing out, Hey, is this worth it? Like the answer was a resounding yes. So, you know, when one enters the cannabis industry on whatever you're doing, whether you're growing weed or you're selling it, or you're doing something like what I'm doing and you're doing, which is not professionally touching the plant at all, you make a choice like that's the choice is you're not either in the game and you gotta deal with all this stuff that comes with it, or go build websites for laundromats, you know? We started going through, we started gaining a little bit of traction in 2019 and then in 2020, Covid happened. I don't know if, do you remember this happening, Jim or is this, did I make this up? I think it really happened, right? Cool. It happened. So there was a moment there where I'm sure I was one of a billion entrepreneurs, well, you know how many entrepreneurs are in this country? I was one of a million in this country who said, oh shit, I'm screwed, like there goes my business, you know what I mean? So, that was a hardship, you know, luckily for us, it, we paid attention to it, made a small pivot and it worked out in our favor, but that was for sure a big hardship. So there, I mean, there's so many, like it's a day to day thing, like I just got healthcare for this company and like, that was just like a mental heart, like what an emotional journey like my insurance providers took me on, what a ugh, So there's a lot, I mean, it's every day you're learning something, you know, especially me, because like I said, this was, you know, I didn't have a handbook, yeah, no one said this is, these are the things you need to do to start a company or run a business, or any of those things.

Jim: So what you do before you start a can, planners?

Will: So I'm glad you asked this because this ultimately was the original hardship, right? So the original hardship with Canna Planners was being fired from my nine to five job. So in February of 2018, like the beginning of 2018, I walked into work one day and was asked to turn around, right, and not come back basically, and I didn't see it coming and I didn't, and Canna Planners had existed and probably played a role in my being asked to leave, but I didn't, I didn't really plan for this, my thought was Canna Planners will be the deciding factor as to when I quit this job or when, I do whatever. But the universe had a different plan and looking back like that was the best and worst, one of the best and worst days of my life because it was embarrassing, like being fired is like, it fucking sucks, it's the worst, it's the worst feeling. So there were a lot of emotions and there were a lot of practical anxieties that like just took over. It's like, oh, well I have to pay rent these other 20 bills, like in 20 days, what am I gonna do?

Jim: Yeah, so let me, so right now, there's so many people that are getting laid off from their jobs all around the country and you know, people that are probably dealing with the same exact thing you just went through, you know, back in 2018. So, you had already kind of started Canna Planners but you were still focused on your day to day job, but now you had a serious choice to make and like you said, like you gotta think about rent and everything else that comes along with it. So what were the steps, and for anybody that just went through this and, you know, what can you help them to get through right now in the Remote Start Nation of like, Hey, I just suffered this hardship, like I gotta get on my feet and I gotta go and do it. What did you do?

Will: There was a lot of metaphorically metaphorical and actual looking in the mirror and kind of asking these questions to myself. So let me just preface this by saying, all of your listeners are not entrepreneurs, right? Maybe some of them are, and maybe some of them want to be, and maybe some of them think that they should be, but that doesn't make everybody an entrepreneur, right? So the first question, one, if you're in that situation, the first question really needs to be way more simple than, what's my business and how do I start it? It's what kind of life do I need to, wanna live, right? It's how do you know despite being employed or not, like it's almost irrelevant, it's how do I want to live my everyday? Like what is my everyday existence and how, what's gonna make me feel fulfilled? That's a huge heady philosophical, you know, philosophical question that man, human has been asking themselves since they developed a frontal cortex. So like, the question of why, right? Not why are we here, but why am I here? What is my purpose here? And I kept going back to, goddammit, you are the shittiest employee, you are such a, like, you just got fired, like you're a bad employee. And I think that's actually a common and probably good trait amongst entrepreneurs is there's a bit of ego, there's a bit of obviously a lot of ambition, and there's determination, and at that moment, like I just accepted all three of those things, I was like, I think I'm an ambitious person, I at least see the opportunity that's in front of me, I'm determined to make a solution, I don't know what it is yet, but I'm determined I'm gonna figure this out, and for maybe some of those, excuse me, some of your listeners in that case, it's like, you know, work on your resume, go apply for 20 jobs, you know, maybe go get a new job. But for me, I was self-aware enough, or at least at that moment to be like, you can't work for anybody, you suck at that , you're not good at that. So it was, what am I good at and what kind of life do I wanna live? And ultimately I figured out it was like one that I wanted to be in control of. Like, it was as simple as that, You know, it was as simple as that. And then the rest just kind of, okay, if I'm controlling my own life, there's really, you know, I'm either, and I hate to use this phrase, so I'm sorry, but like, you can either be the rise grind dude, or you can be, you know, living in the park, right? And it was really like that because, you know, I got fired on the first, I had to pay rent on the 31st. You know what I mean?

Jim: So once you make that decision, once you change your mindset, and you realize like this, I have to do this. Like, I'm not, I am that shit, I might have been a shitty employee, it might have been whatever else, but like now I'm on this and I have to go forward and I have to do whatever I can to pay rent. What was the first step that you did to start getting your name out there, start building a community around your brand?

Will: Yeah, well, luckily for me, like I said, like Canna planners may have played a role in my termination because I had been working on it for, at that point, you know, at least a full year, but maybe a year and a half or something like that, and in that year and a half, I had faked it until I make it, ight? And I had established what I wanted to, so in Burlington, as we were talking about in the pre-interview, there's this weird little tech bubble that exists, and it's existed since the tech bubble existed, since the late 90’s. So there's a couple companies here that do what Cannabis that do what we do, which is, digital marketing, pretty simple. It's been around forever, it's nothing sec. It's, you know, it's not a unicorn, it's not an original thing, there's a billion companies that do it, but there are companies in this town that do it on a scale that's insane and do it spec for specific verticals. So I would watch a company down the road called dealer.com, get bought for 998 Million dollars, and they're doing what? You know, they're focused on the automotive industry and they've got it cornered and they've been doing it for 25 years. There's another one that did it for grocery stores, there's one that does it for the real estate industry, there's one that, you know, does it for plumbers and HVACs, and they're in this town and they employ dozens if not hundreds of people, like they're huge employers. So I was aware of this business model, I worked at one of those companies, and at that point, Vermont was slightly ahead of the rest of the country. Vermont, which is where my company's located, where I am. It was slightly ahead of the rest of the company in terms of the CBD industry, so we, yeah, we were ahead of the farm bill by, you know, three years or something like that. So in those three years we had a boom and a bust that the rest of the country saw three years later.

Yeah. in the CBD industry, so, I used that as the means to basically validate the business idea, it was, can I create marketable brands for some of these farm Vermont farmers who are growing hemp in their field as opposed to mowing it for, you know, cow feed basically. And that's exactly what we did, we booked a bunch of projects, not a bunch in the first year and a half we booked maybe like five projects. We built like three websites, but we used those projects to validate the business idea and fund the bigger kind of build out that we needed to do for our web development product. So by the time I was fired, I already had a validated idea, we already had a dozen or so clients in on whatever spectrum of active, and yeah, because I was, you know, thrown into the fire, I had to figure it out, so I basically gave myself two hours to be bummed and I sold a pretty big project like the next day or something like that, it was like that, it was like, okay, enough, you know, enough emotions, like let's go do this, because now you have to.

Jim: And did you pick up a phone to call that client and say, Hey, I let me come help you, or was it already in the works, or How'd that happen?

Will: I don't remember, I don't remember the exact sale, but I do probably it was something that was like in the pipeline, you know, that I had been working and I just like slammed it down and closed it. I don't remember the specific sale. I do remember hanging up the phone after they said, send me a contract, and kind of that feeling of, you know, looking back in the mirror and being like, hell yeah dude.

Jim: Do you jump up and down and celebrate?

Will: I would've, it was in my car and I was driving, I do remember that, but it was like, there was a moment where like my eyes like filled with tears and I was like, you know, I was like, okay, like this is…

Jim: I'm gonna be alright.

Will: Yeah, I can pay my rent now, and that was February of 2018 and here we are and I don't even, what is it? December of 2022 and 13 employees, hundreds and hundreds of clients like I was right.

Jim: That's awesome man.

Will: But that's part of the entrepreneur, like, you have to, like, you have to be motivated, ambitious, determined, because there's gonna be, you know, to go to your original question, you're gonna be hit, you're gonna be punched a thousand times a day with hardships, and the easiest thing to do would be like, you know, I'm done, but you know, then you're just back where you started. So I don't mean to sound arrogant, I'm just all I'm trying to articulate is that there's like, it can be done. You just have to like, not give up, I feel like the Gary V is like playing in my brain, like, don't give up, don't give up, don't give up, you know what I mean?

Jim: It's like, you know, I like to put it, first of all, congrats on overcoming what you did and being what you are now as a brand and you know, I know there's a lot of great stories along the way too, I want to go back to something you said earlier in the episode, and I've had an episode on this and, talk to other entrepreneurs about this, but it, I'm so passionate about understanding your why and understanding, I feel like as a business owner, the first thing you need to do, or if you haven't done this already and you have a good business, like if you understand why you're doing something, you understand the reason behind your, you know, call it your brand identity, call it your vision, your mission, call it what you want, right? But if you understand your personal why, then the rest comes a lot easier, the decisions become easier to be made, the direction you take the company becomes easier, and one thing I see people get caught up on is they're like, well, I don't know exactly why, well, that's okay because you can always change it, you can always alter it. It's something that through each stage, having that, you know, that plan, that why, and really understanding deep inside why you're doing something, it really goes throughout your whole company.

Will: 100%. Jim. And I would say that there's like, not only is it normal for your why to evolve, but like you can have multiple why's, right? So for me, in those in early months after being fired, the why was survivalism, like it was just, I need to survive, I got a wife and two dogs and you know, we all the thing that people have, like, we have that and there's I need to be able to take care of that, and then you have to make sure that there's, and again, I hate using like cliches and entrepreneurialism, but like being purpose driven is important, like it's okay to have selfish motivations, you're humans, like you have to take care of yourself, but none of that is fun unless there's a purpose in what you're doing, so like surviving is, you gotta survive or else you're dead, right? And the how you survive is something different, and the why there, I mean, they're two totally different why for me, so the personal why is survival and autonomy, although that's not quite the right word, but self sufficiency, right? I like taking care of myself, right? And I can, who's gonna do better job at taking care of myself than myself? Nobody. So that's my selfish motivation, my professional motivation is, you know, you gotta put on your superman costume, like, why are you in this industry? So I'm in this industry for a couple reasons, the professional, you know, the, the personal reasons are I enjoyed cannabis, I and probably a capitalist who saw an opportunity and wanted to be in it, those are also okay things, but the superhero cape I wear is normalization, like we do have a true purpose and a value driven purpose and the work we do. So, like I said before, we're not a unicorn, we're not doing anything groundbreaking really, we're awesome at what we do, but we're not doing anything that hasn't been done before, we are doing something that has been done before, but not really in the cannabis industry. Like now there's, you know, we have a couple competitors but who are all doing great work, but like, that's relatively new. So normalization is our why on the, you know, our mission statement, like so having your why reasons for yourself are one thing, draw a parallel in that to your mission statement for the company you start.

Jim: So let's talk about, you know, brand and marketing and really get into, you know, how it ties into cannabis and I know there's a lot of things in the cannabis industry that, you know, dispensaries and grow can't do, they can't, you know, go on, uh, to Facebook and advertise, they can't go onto Google and try to get clients that way, what are some of the ways that, you've, first of all, you start with brand identity for your company, right? Like, making sure that you help with logos and everything else for brands, and you build websites and focus on SEO. But, you know, let's talk about the marketing side a little bit and tell me what you've seen with brands being successful and on the digital marketing side.

Will: Well, let, can I bring it back even a little higher than that is absolutely, one thing I've noticed, and this is one thing that, you know, I didn't know to do for Canna Planners in the very beginning, but I did maybe two or three years after, it was understand who I'm talking to. Like first and foremost, like who's your customer, right? So for dispensaries it's really easy to say, well, everybody who smokes weed is my customer. No, they're not, no, they're not. So you have to figure out who is that messaging, you know, before you even understand what your logo's gonna be like or what even your products are gonna be or what the messaging is, you have to understand who you're talking to, and that's not gonna be, you know, in the example of the dispensary, it is in everybody who smokes weed, it's a very small subsection of people that smoke weed, and if we're being, you know, if we're being more real than that, it should be all of the people who don't smoke weed yet who maybe would align with your brand if you knew how to talk to them, right. So in the very beginning it's trying to understand like, who do these people hope walk in their store, and we would define them, we'd give them silly names like Dispensary Dan or something, producer Paul, Frank, you know, and then tried to tailor a message, and by message I don't necessarily mean like an email, I mean, you know, an ideal, a vibe, vibes is the right word, you know, help them flesh out what the vibe is based on who they hope to talk to. That's pretty heady especially in terms of like the, you know, most of that happens on the creative side, before we even build anything digitally, but those are important questions to understand, you're not gonna wanna open a store and have it be, you know, a bright blue square when your customers are, you know, soft green circles, you know what I mean?

Jim: And to that point too, just before we go on with the, the marketing side, we do the same thing for the merchandise, when we go into a client and, oh, I want a, I just want a shirt to give away, it's like, no, you don't, you really don't, because if you understood who your customer was, who you want your customer to be, who you want to walk through that door, it's either by your shirt or to, you know, tell their friends about your brand because they're wearing a product of yours, like you have to make sure that your brand matches that product that it's on. And a lot of times, you know, brands and not even just in the cannabis industry, a lot of times brands for they don't realize that, they just think, you know, I have a budget of X amount. I want to get as much for my budget as I can and throw it out there. It's like you're just pissing away money. You have to find out who your audience is and you know, it starts with your why, right? Like, why are you doing this? Okay, who are you doing this for? Who do you want in? And then coming up with a product for it.

Will: Yeah, totally, it's hard to do, it's hard to do. It's hard to back into that, especially when someone comes to you saying, take my money, I want a t-shirt, and you're like, Okay. And so prior to Canna Planners, prior to being fired from my previous employer, I worked at Apple and that's some Kool-Aid I drank big time, and that's, you know, that's where I really cut my teeth in terms of sales and asking that, those kinds of questions because a person will walk in the door of an Apple store and be like, I want, you know, the biggest, baddest, fastest thing you sell, and you ask a few questions and it turns out they need an ipod, which don't, they don't exist anymore, but you get my point. You know what I mean? You don't need any of those thing, but here's what I would like, I'll sell you that, but here's what you actually want, right? So it's understanding and I think having the confidence to kind of see through the bullshit that people's, you know, clients say to their vendors, you know ‘cause there's a, you know, there's a controlling always, there's just some sort of, you know, desire to lead, even though you're paying someone to lead you, right, so, you know, you gotta be able to cut through that bullshit and say, this is, you know, this is what we do and here's what you need.

Jim: Exactly.

Will: Take it or don't I, you know, that's up to you. But this is what you need.

Jim: That's a good point. So back, and I kind of derailed it there, but back to the original question on the marketing side of things, right? Like the digital marketing and, you know, how are you seeing cannabis brands being successful right now in getting the word out there, you know, through what you're doing and helping them to do?

Wil: Yeah, well, like I said, so our main digital services is our website development, right? Which is you know, well, I'll make my analogies, there's website development and then there's kind of the stuff you do after you develop a website, and an analogy I often make is the website is your brick and mortar, right. And we build beautiful brick and mortars, but you gotta have like, signs and streets and lights and a parking lot, and that's what drives value to this cool brick and mortar I build you, so building a website is cool. Good for you, like maybe someone will find it and that'd be awesome, but it's a tool to get people into your store and all of the things that we do post launch, add more value to that, so it's simple, it's creating that cohesive, good looking, which sounds, you know, subjective, but a good UX is very important, especially because most people, you know, a lot of people who use cannabis and shop at, you know, dispensaries are medical patients. So we wanna create an you know, an experience that is, tailored to just being used easily, right? Yeah, just good user experience, that's simple stuff. But the postlaunch stuff also pretty straightforward, again, it's not like, you know, groundbreaking, but it's understanding. After we've developed this look and feel, it's really like hitting it home through understanding, what these people like, what kind of content these people are looking for, or how they would find a website like this, and then creating content around it so that the SEO factor and like, you know, people going to Google, like when I drive down to Massachusetts and I'm staying at whatever hotel in Boston, I'm doing a dispensary near me search, so we capitalize on all that stuff. We wanna make sure that people are finding the brands that we're building, organically. That's basically all we got, and we can get into that because that's not exactly the case anymore. But we we're using organic solutions to capture, you know, an audience online and turning those people into customers. It just in terms of the marketing of it's keyword research and then applying that in a specific voice, and that's what we've sorted it out in the creative stage because we know who the customer is and we understand who this business wants to be. And then because of social right, people aren't getting locked out of mail chip accounts, they're not getting kicked out of the Clavio platform because they're talking about cannabis. So these are platforms that end users can really have ownership over and don't need to use cloaked language and you know, innuendo and stuff like that I can talk to directly to customers, and drive a actual ROI because we can, you know, we can now track how many people have clicked through from welcome messages or whatever, but it's the consistency, it's the consistency, it's really what it is for all the content, you know, clients, we'll pitch an SEO strategy and clients will be like, well, can I just do this for three months? And we say, Sure, like you could also just like throw that money away because like what we do now isn't impacted for nine months or 12 months. So like these are, these are just things you do, you know, it's just putting gasoline in the car, you know, the website's, the car, and all these other things we do are just the gas that we fill it with.

Jim: Right. And a lot of people I know, not even in the cannabis industry, but they think, you know, everybody's looking for that short term fix, right? Like, what am I gonna do now to, to drive a media impact? Thank a lot the social for that but you know, but SEO is such a powerful, that organic traffic is so important and so powerful and so many people, like, I think they neglect it because they're not, they don't get excited about that long term solution and they don't realize it does take longer than three months, it takes what, like up to a year in cases?

Will: Yeah, definitely. But also like go back to what we were talking about earlier, which is who's the customer? I'm gonna make up a bunch of numbers, I'm just gonna make up numbers, okay. In Burlington, let's say there's, you know, there's a hundred people who live in town and 10 of them smoke weed, right? So there's 90 people who don't smoke pot, right? So you're battling between the other dispensaries for those 10 people, meanwhile, you should all be focusing on those 90 people and you know, speaking to them, educating them on medicinal uses of cannabis or like what the difference between, you know, whatever it is, like we're doing the research on like what kinds of information these people are looking for, but there's a whole sector of people that you know, were affected by the war on drugs or are now reaching an age where they're considering maybe they just didn't consider cannabis in their life, you know, but now they're older and they're like, ah, I can't sleep, or my knee hurts, or whatever. That’s the target market, right? There's way more people that don't smoke cannabis than do, and a lot of, you know, through some education you can capture some of that market share.

Jim: That's a great point. That's a really good point.

Will: Which, and that brings me to the Paids thing. So like, here's the loophole and paid, so we can't put, you know, willsdispensary.com on Google Ads, but we can put Wills education, you know, willsdispensary education.com on Google ads. And as long as we're so, you're conflating the funnel, so to speak, you're adding more layers to the funnel, which is counterintuitive, but those are the, you know, those are the hardships that working in the cannabis industry, you gotta learn how to like, you know, roll with the dice.

Jim: Yeah. And in this case, it makes sense ‘cause you're educating and then you're every touch point and you're getting that email and then doing the email, you know, reach out, outreach, like you talked about and it all comes back, it's a big cycle.

Will: Yeah. So that's kind of a loophole we're working on, you know, it's a whole other website, but then a campaign, an educational campaign or a Google Ads campaign pushing educational bits of content.

Jim: That's great. I love that. We've been able to see through our agency a lot of you know, connecting on social and connecting with the community through the merchandise, and, you know, like we talked about earlier, it's a lot about making sure that that product you put out, that you spend your money on is the right product, otherwise it doesn't do any good, it actually has a, a different, when you have a premium brand and you're putting out a, a garbage product just for a budget, doesn't usually work well.

Will: Right. And tell me what you think of this, ‘cause this is something, you know, again, this is a common thing, but I wonder how you pitch it so you have those people who do, they are a premium brand, but maybe they wanna cut corners, do you ever encourage them to create an alternate brand? Right, so, okay, you want, you wanna cut corners, why don't you create a not premium brand, a generic brand or whatever, but that you can talk to these people, but you have a premium brand here you should be spending premium dollars to capture that audience.

Jim: You know, we have a lot, yeah, that's a great channel that you just said, and we've seen a lot of our grow partners that their, they do, that they have multiple brands that they're selling because they do have their premium brand and their, you know their brands that they would say are mid grade or you know, even lower, but, you know, really for me, when it comes to that conversation, it's about, it does, if they were thinking a t-shirt and they had a $5 per item budget and they wanted to do a thousand of them, it's getting away from the idea that it t-shirts the product and it's getting it into an idea that what is a product that fits within that budget, that's premium, that actually really speaks to your customer, that speaks to the community that you're trying to get in front of, and it's different for every brand, and that's why it's, you know, it's not a priceless, like, hey, let's just do these products, it's like, who is the customer you're trying to get in your store, who do you want to be in front of? And then figuring out that product that works within that price point, and so you can be premium and figure out a premium product that doesn't cost a lot, but it's the other things and the delivery, and then, you know, the follow up on the delivery, all those things that, that make a difference, and I feel a lot of brands aren't understanding the importance of.

Will: I agree. . I agree. it's, you know, just there's a bit of you know, practicing what we preach for sure, like most of the content we create for ourselves is educational marketing, 1 0 1 stuff, because we constantly find ourselves having those conversations, you know, and it's not that it gets old there's a constant uphill battle in terms of like, you know, I guess that's the nature of any company is you have to establish your value and be able to persuade other people to see it too, but, we're always educating people.

Jim: Education's huge, especially in the cannabis industry. I mean, it's something new, it's something that people need to be educated on, it's something that, you know, there's a lot of people that are good at what they do in the industry, but they're not good at everything. So it's good for, to have different partners that can educate on the ways to grow and the ways to build a brand and whatever it might be, and let them really focus on what they're good at.

Will: And there's people like me, younger than me, but like me in that like, it's their first, you know, venture and it's in cannabis, so not everybody has that, you know, maybe seasoned business acumen to even like, know what to ask, you know what I mean? That's how it was for me, for sure.

Jim: Yeah. Will, it's been awesome. I'm so stoked to be able to spend this time together and Remote Start Nation, I hope you take some of what Will used here and we talked about and put that into what you're doing and, you know, before we go, would you let the Remote Start Nation know where they can find you and, you know how to contact you if they're interested in, you know, some of what you've talked about today and how they can get a hold to you.

Will: Yeah, absolutely. I'm fairly active on LinkedIn, so if you guys search on LinkedIn, which by the way, a great social network for cannabis companies, like LinkedIn does not care that you work in cannabis, they're pretty cool about it, So the way you can talk about your companies on LinkedIn is different than how you would talk about it on Instagram, but you can find us at all of those places, @CannaPlanners except for Facebook for some reason, which is at four 20 Web, and my apologies to the Company four 20Web. If you'd like that URL, it's yours. Just call me. I'll get it to, I don't care. You can find me for sure on my website, cannaplanners.com, hit me up through the form there, I'd love to talk to all you. I also have a podcast, it's called Common Sensimilla. so search for that on YouTube, if you just search Canna Planners on YouTube, it'll come up. But I also interview entrepreneurs to try to demystify some of this craziness that we all go through every day, so yeah, you can check that out.

Jim: Awesome. Thank you so much and hope you have a great rest of your day and Remote Start Nation, take what you heard today and put it into action and go start something. We'll talk to you soon!

Jim DoyonProfile Photo

Jim Doyon

Entrepreneur

My name is Jim Doyon. I'm a father to three awesome kids, husband to an incredible wife and the oldest sibling to a large split family.I'm currently on a mission and I can't wait to share with you. We sold our house back in 2020, and we've been traveling this beautiful country in a 42-foot Travel trailer ever since. We visited 34 states, and are about to embark on our second loop around the country, stopping at some of our favorite spots again, but also getting to see new areas that the US has to offer.We are trying to experience this life to its fullest spending quality time together. I'm running a business and building brands along the road. We've been fortunate enough on this journey to meet new friends, catch up with old friends and family on many of our stops. We love exploring each City from downtown's to the natural resources it has to offer. I'm passionate about mountain biking and it's not only in my way to get out and explore but to exercise, clear my head, think, and strategize.

Will ReadProfile Photo

Will Read

CEO/Founder

Will Read is the CEO and founder of CannaPlanners. They are working to normalize the cannabis industry through beautiful design and professional web services. His team of expert web designers, developers, marketers and creative minds can help your canna-business create a powerful brand based on a story, imagery, and a strong digital presence. CannaPlanners' goal is to help new brands make an impact in the fast-growing industry.