Big Weed by Christian Hageseth Page B

preferred to drive to their buddy’s house and buy their weed the old-fashioned way, even if they had to patronize known drug dealers to do so.
    Mr. Pink listened.
    Whenever we talked about this at his home, his wife would be half listening to our discussion. She looked at me as if I were nuts. “Even if the state has voted for it, it’s against federal law,” she would say.
    â€œI’m just listening,” her husband said. And then he added absently, “That’s the thing—it’s not illegal anymore . . .”
    â€œIt’s not,” I echoed.
    We talked about it a few times, just kicking the idea around. Mr. Pink would get so passionate about the possibilities. Our conversations still ended with him saying “We should do this!”
    One week, I promised to meet him at the Tavern Lowry so we could talk over some of the numbers I had pulled together. Mr. Pink was already there when I arrived. I walked in with a spreadsheet I’d generated and laid it facedown on the table in front of me. We slowly gravitated from small talk to talking about the business. I ran through the numbers from memory, never deigning to flip over the spreadsheet. This is why I like business guys, or guys like Mr. Pink who spend their lives thinking about numbers. Mr. Pink could see that if what I was telling him was true, we could see a profit in six to twelve months. And we’d have the advantage of throwing ourselves into a business that was utterly, wonderfully new. That probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is. The rarest thing in the world is the growth industry. Some people know just how to maximize its potential. Other people sabotage their own chances of success.
    â€œI want in,” he said suddenly. “If you put in the time, I could see putting in some of the money.”
    We shook on it. Mr. Pink had to get going. It wasn’t until he’d left that I realized that I’d never shown him my spreadsheet. It was as if the real numbers hadn’t mattered. He trusted me enough to see where we were going.
    A few days later, Mr. Pink opened a business checking account at a bank where he had some connections. And then proceeded to wire in $125,000.
    We were unlike any of the other ganjapreneurs I had met. The former treasury agent and the tall, square-jawed businessman.
    Congrats to us. We were drug dealers.

3
    First Grow, First Blood
    My weed wasn’t going to grow itself.
    I needed a grower. An expert. A master. Someone who could hit the ground running, help me buy and install equipment, and see me safely through my first harvest. Hopefully, this person would like working for me and want to stay on. He or she would want to grow with the business.
    I needed expertise. Desperately. If you forced me to tell you all I knew about plants, I’d probably opine that plants came from seeds. You stuck a seed in dirt and watered it, and voila! —before you knew it, you had anything from a houseplant to a 50-foot banana tree growing out of your little clay pot. Hell, my front lawn was made of tiny little plants. I watered my lawn, and it grew and stayed green. How different could that grass be from the grass you smoked? I had no idea. I didn’t take care of my lawn. Landscapers did.
    So basically, I was clueless about the world of plants.
    But I was not a stranger to hiring people. I’d done it before, countless times, for all my other companies. At my last firm, I had a person who screened applicants for us and flagged ones that merited a look.
    Somehow, though, I didn’t think a corporate headhunter was going to be of much help in this talent search. So one morning after breakfast I sat at my computer and cranked out a want ad that I planned to upload to Denver’s Craigslist.
    master grower for medical marijuana caregiver needed
    I talked about the kind of business I was hoping to start, the kind of person I was looking for, and asked for