Marijuana Business Magazine March 2020

Marijuana Business Magazine | March 2020 88 NAME Kris Krane POSITION President COMPANY 4Front Ventures, doing business as Mission LOCATION Chicago What was your biggest win on opening day? Not running out of flower. What could have gone better? Throughput. We put systems in place that we thought were going to help with throughput, but we’d never lived that kind of crushing volume before. Some of the things we thought were going to help actually wound up hurting and slowing the process down—online orders in particular, little things that you don’t realize how big of an impact they have until you see that kind of volume. Over the next week and a half, we tinkered with the way we do ordering; we stopped online orders entirely, and it made a big difference. (Jan. 24) was our biggest day ever, and we saw 75 people more than we saw on opening day—and opening day we were open for an additional five hours. If we knew then what we know now, we probably would have done another 300- 400 sales on opening day. But if we did that, we might have run out of flower. What advice would you give other retailers to help opening day go as smoothly as possible? Staff up. Order lunch ahead of time. And make sure the menus are perfect so there’s no confusion for your customers. The more questions you have to answer, the longer it takes to get people through, and when you have a line of several hundred people outside in the cold, the less questions the better. Have a food truck outside for your customers. If you have an opportunity to spend some time in a high-volume, adult-use shop, do it. What should retailers be wary of as potential problems on opening day? Online ordering was a big issue. There was an expectation that was going to help speed things along, but in actuality, it backed us up a lot. Because what happens with online ordering is, someone places that order, but you don’t know when they’re going to show up. They may be there in half an hour, or it may be four hours. That creates a few issues: One, by and large, you’re not actually taking that order out of inventory until they show up and pay for it, so they may order it and then show up four hours later, and when you’ve got such heavy volume and such a small (inventory), there’s a decent chance that by the time they get there, something they ordered is out of stock. Then you have to make time to find a replacement product. Online ordering on the whole in most instances is a really good thing—and it does help—but when you’re facing that kind of massive volume, it hurts more than helps. Do you have any tips on what types of products to stock—or howmuch—to avoid shortages? As much as you can. The problem with the first day—and this has been the case in pretty much every adult-use market—is there’s not enough inventory to meet demand. My advice would be to buy up every bit of product you can find in the wholesale market in the months leading up to the rec launch, because you’ll sell all of it. Mission Dispensary in Chicago was open for an extra five hours on Jan. 1 to serve adult-use consumers. Courtesy Photo OPENING DAY LESSONS