Business View Magazine | October 2019

248 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2019 buildings; and with the type of working assets that we had to buy - things like pots and dirt and grow lights that depreciate faster than used cars off the lot – it became a very, very difficult financing pitch. Back in 2013, when I was making the rounds, everybody wanted to take the meeting, but once I explained to them what the nature of the business was, and the nature of the collateral, and the nature of the loan structure without opportunity for equity, and that cannabis was still Schedule 1, federally, the answer always came back, ‘No.’ “It turned out that I was looking for a very ‘boutique’ type of investor. On the one hand, it probably had to be an individual of very high net worth, who could take that risk and not have to worry too much about it, and, at the same time, and probably more importantly, it had to be an individual who saw over the hill on cannabis, and really believed in the healing powers of medical cannabis, and also believed that there was a future for this industry. And I was very fortunate in finding several of those folks who provided seed funding for the organization. “Nowadays, funding has become much less difficult. It’s still not super easy, but it’s much less difficult than it was back in those days. In 2017, the Massachusetts legislature passed, as part of its adult-use law, a provision that allowed these former medical non-profits to convert to for-profit organizations. So, today, we are a corporation with an equity structure. But those early days were very difficult and it was tenuous for us to get financing.” BVM: I’m curious to know if pilferage is a major problem. How do you protect against it? Dundas: “The state provides a high degree of comprehensive security regulations, the breach of which is punishable by the taking of your license. So, all of us in the regulated cannabis space really pay an extraordinary high amount of attention to our security apparatus – not just video cameras that surveil every inch of the facility, and training programs for onboarding folks, talking about how the penalties for even taking the smallest pictured Sira’s Massachewsetts Brand of Elevated Caramels: Sea Salt Micro THC