Derek RossDerek Ross built a successful cannabis company doing something many people thought impossible: growing high-quality cannabis outdoors in New England.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” Ross says. “But after we did it, that’s when the offers started coming in.”
Ross has rejected every attempt to buy his company, Nova Farms, electing instead to keep building and expanding. Nova Farms is now the largest cannabis producer in the Northeast, harvesting more than 200,000 pounds of cannabis in 2024, in addition to shops in five states: one in Maine, three in Massachusetts, two in Connecticut, one in New Jersey and one in Rhode Island.
“It’s a group of guys that have been selling weed together for over 20 years, and we’ve traveled the world doing it,” Ross says. “We all wanted to go indoors, but the future of cannabis, we thought, was gonna be outdoors because of consolidation and consumers wanting cheaper price points. So we went outdoors. We wrote the legislation. We pioneered that space and acquired some of the first outdoor licenses ever on the East Coast.”
The company went from one employee to 500 in a matter of a few years, scaling back now to between 300 and 450 depending on the season.
Ross says the key to scaling successfully has been building leadership and empowering operators to be part of the team.
“Give an opportunity to opportunists and that drives loyalty,” he says. “It was a lot of fucking it up until we figured it out because of different regulations, different packaging, different compliance in every state. But that really galvanized the team. We built a company on culture and people love this company because of that. They’ll go they’ll wear five different hats in multiple states to help us and keep moving forward.”