Marijuana Business Magazine - Issue 09, Oct 2017

to Macias so she could get her doors open.That allowed National Holistic to launch in September 2015. Locating product remained a prob- lem, however.The next vertical operator who offered Macias product demanded she buy a minimum of 10 pounds at a whopping $6,500 per pound. Most pounds at that time fetched about $4,000. Today, prices range from about $2,400 to $4,000 per pound. Macias didn’t have ready access to $65,000. But turning down the offer carried the risk of running out of product and perhaps closing.Weighing that risk, Macias and her husband - part-owner Michael Bobo - took took out a second mortgage and bought the 10 pounds. Over the course of that first year, however, supply eased up, more growers came online and the market became one 100 new clients per month.Macias started contacting area doctors she knew who wrote recommendations for MMJ cards, and one connected her with Shawnta Hopkins-Greene, an African-American woman who owned MyCannX.The firm oversees a network of physicians in Washington DC and Maryland who are certified to recommend medical cannabis, and it connects patients and dispensaries to those doctors. The move paid off. National Holis- tic now gets about 100 new patients per month, and through early August, it had more than 1,600 patients. Even more important, National Holistic has a patient retention rate of 98%. Keeping Costs Under Control Macias’ business smarts have allowed her to keep a lid on costs. Because where dispensary operators and growers buy and sell product from one another. “I have the gamut of everyone’s strains now,” Macias said. Building a Patient Base Macias didn’t raise prices to compen- sate for the high wholesale product price; instead, she instead focused on building her patient base.When patients visited, Macias and her staff would talk with them, gauge their illnesses and needs and then use the strain-ailment alignment methodology to find a variety that suited their condition.That scientific approach appealed to patients, especially new ones unfamiliar with marijuana’s therapeutic benefits and leery of its stigma. National Holistic grew its patient base, but only moderately – and not enough to reach Macias’ patient growth goal of about 66 • Marijuana Business Magazine • October 2017