I'm very aware of the war on drugs. I'm very aware on how challenging it's been for minorities and people around the world in general. I’m also very aware that a strong domestic & local illicit/grey/black market exists no matter where you go in the globe- from Cannabis, to cocaine, to money changing and more.

For a very long time, cannabis was illegal and it still is in most places. But that doesn't stop the fact that people are still selling it illicitly.  Everywhere in the world you look, people are selling cannabis in some shape, way or form. 

Believe it or not, Western University in my second year, was where I got my first look at what it’s like to operate & sell medicine in an illicit market (sorry mom, stop reading now).

This is the story and and in true Polaris Fashion, what I learned. The fact that I even get to write this shows how much our world has learned/grown.

⌛ Reading time 5 minutes, 13 seconds

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In my second year at Western, I was working part-time at Winners. Most mornings, I’d be unloading boxes from the truck and organizing them in the warehouse. After that, my day typically followed one of a few patterns:

At the time, I'm not sure I realized how broke I truly was & how big my OSAP (AKA my student loan) was but I had a feeling. Looking back, seems strange that I didn’t have a grasp of this. Either way, I had been working since the age of 16 but I knew the income I was making just wasn’t enough to suit my lavish, student lifestyle.

Early in second year, I met a friend, let’s call him Jake, who had access to small (but steady) quantities of cannabis. Like a lot of guys in university, especially living in a house full of other university guys, I was consuming regularly. Eventually I realized something:

So I asked myself a basic question: Could I turn this into a business?

My logic was if I could sell cannabis, even at a small scale, I could consume for free. I’d live off the “shake,” the leftover product after sales. I could build my ability to smoke or consume cannabis into my model.

That meant I had to figure out how to run a business. 

Selling “weed” required real planning. Here's what I needed to understand before I started:

Buying weed back then was usually a sketchy experience. You’d get into a stranger’s car and hope you weren’t getting ripped off. It was inconvenient, uncertain, and borderline scary for a lot of people (similar to how it is in 99.8% of the world today!)

That’s when I saw the opportunity:
I could make the whole thing feel safer and easier.

I was a straight-laced guy.
I played soccer, ran for student politics (and won with bad ass speeches), got decent grades, came from a respectable family.

People seemed to trust me.

So I leaned into that. I bought a digital scale. I built a spreadsheet to run numbers. I thought through who I wanted to serve.

I settled on two groups:

If you don’t know your costs and unit economic, you can’t make a dollar. I wasn’t buying a large enough quantity to make a lot of money within the margins. I was picking up one ounce at a time which is 28 grams.

If I bought for $100 and sold the whole ounce for $140, I’d make $40 total. Not bad, but not great.

But if I sold each gram individually and made $3–$4 on each one, I could walk away with a lot more money.

That was the first time I truly understood to study unit economics and find better solutions within your numbers.

I dealt with a lot of jocks, and people who weren't necessarily positioned as people who were consuming cannabis. 

But those people had stress, wanted to party, wanted to try, but they just didn’t know how. The buying experience was super challenging for those individuals. It was scary to get into a car with someone random and not know exactly what you were getting.

Most of my customers didn’t want to meet a random guy in a parking lot.
They wanted:

So I positioned myself as a “friendly plug.” They’d come to my place, sit in my bedroom, drink water or pineapple juice, and feel like they were just chilling with a friend. Not making a drug deal.

That shift in framing made all the difference:

It was my first real taste of relationship-based sales.

Let’s be honest: I was doing a bad thing at the time.

I was driving around with product in my car.
I was delivering it.
I was exposed.

If I had gotten caught, if someone tipped off campus security or the police, I would’ve been screwed and my life genuinely would have taken a different turn. Safe to say I probably wouldn’t be writing this newsletter (thank you lord).

But I had a specific goal: run it for one semester.

I wanted to make just enough to pay for my food, cover some nights out, and avoid using the money I made at Winners. That money went straight toward OSAP repayment.

After that semester, I shut it down.

I had made my money.
I’d consumed for “free”
And I got out before timing caught up to me.

When was the last time you took a risk? What did it consist of and what did you learn in the process?

~ SKV

What a time.

The latest edition of the Cannabis Collective Summer Retreat brought together 150 leaders under the sun for a powerful blend of:

There was something special in the air this year, you could feel it.

Huge thanks to the community, organizers, sponsors, our chefs, Soda (of course) and everyone who made it five-star worthy ⭐️

🎥 Watch the short recap below and I’m glad this retreat served as a recharge moment before the next challenging 6 months ahead. Let's go.

Have you enjoyed this newsletter? Is it providing value? Do you know somebody that would find it useful? Send them this newsletter and if you refer 5 people your next coffee run will be on me. (3 referrals = $15 Starbucks)

As the world becomes more complex, it becomes more and more challenging to stay grounded, focused and aligned. Stay ahead by fostering unity, innovation, and trust across your teams and yourself. Don’t miss out on upcoming events and insights that will help shape your success in the months to come.

- SKV