Marijuana Business Magazine September 2019

Marijuana Business Magazine | September 2019 106 Haupt estimates that he hires one out of every three workers. He either must buy them out of their contracts with the temp agency, or the temps must buy themselves out of their contracts if they’re going to work for Medicine Man. “I look out for passion, and I look out for people who care about what they’re doing,” Haupt said. “We’re big on top- shelf, and I need to have that product really cared for the whole way through.” Tapping Temps Seasonally Sweet Grass Kitchen, a Denver-based bakery that produces and distributes cannabis-infused edibles, uses temporary workers if someone leaves the company and during the busy times of year— typically spring, summer, ski season and the unofficial marijuana holiday known as 4/20, said Lauren Finesilver, the company’s director of operations and executive chef. Temp workers help with packaging, harvest and operational work. Finesilver’s agency of choice is Shear Solutions, which is based in Denver and Portland, Oregon. “We don’t have a whole harvest staff, so we bring them in when we need them,” she said. “They understand our business and try to send us the same people over and over.” Sweet Grass has specific tasks it allows temporary workers to do. “They wouldn’t be mixing our cookies, but they might help us put products into packages and put labels on packages. So they would actually be handling the product,” Finesilver said. Like Medicine Man, Sweet Grass also has a do-not-return list to prevent Shear Solutions from sending a worker who didn’t work out the first time back to the company. “We’ve had people cutting branches off (plants) that don’t need to be cut off, people being rude,” Finesilver said. “They’re just not part of your culture.” Using Skilled Temps San Diego-based Mankind Dispensary is more likely to hire a temporary office worker such as an accountant or a human resources director than it is a lower-level staffer to work in its dispensary, Chief Operating Officer Vera Levitt said. Mankind typically hires temporary office workers when a full- time employee is out on medical leave. The extra help alleviates the additional workload the rest of the staff assumes when someone is out. Mankind also goes through temporary agencies such as CannabizTemp, a San Diego-based company specializing in providing cannabis-focused consulting and on-demand access to temporary workers. “They provided me with an excellent temp who hit the ground running,” Levitt said. “They did all the preliminary inter- viewing and found someone who could jump right in and handle every task.” The recently launched CannabizTemp is an offshoot of the cannabis-focused executive search and staffing firm CannabizTeam. The companies are currently focused on serving California cannabis companies but plan to expand across the United States. “As the industry matured, more and more clients were looking for people to work on a project basis,” said Liesl Bernard, chief executive of CannabizTeam and CannabizTemp. “We saw the need in the industry to also provide our clients with temporary workers.” CannabizTemp focuses on working with cannabis companies looking for people to perform tasks on a contract or consulting basis. Many of those types of workers want the flexibility to work on projects for a specific amount of time. They range from senior-level professionals who want to select the a good gig Services such as Uber Eats have changed how many companies and employees view staffing. Photo by Robert Anasch Vera Levitt. Courtesy Photo