Having recently completed another Interchange event, I often wonder why some businesses stick to a failing model
Having recently completed another Interchange event, I often wonder why some businesses stick to a failing modelWe just finished producing another super successful Interchange Remix event in Seattle. If my calculations are correct, it was number 32. That’s a lot of cannabis business events in the past decade, and I still regularly hear lots of comments during and after the events — most of which is overwhelmingly positive.
Sure, there are some who would prefer more vegan food choices, longer meetings (or shorter meetings), on-site consumption or free beer, etc. etc., but overall our business events have been a huge success. The reason is simple: When you put 60-plus important buyers in one room for two days meeting with 60-plus sellers (mostly growers and cannabis manufacturers) and promote an environment that is focused on business rather than partying, the results are predictable. In other words, business gets done and sales are made.
I had one remarkable chat toward the end of the show with a grower who told me that the event saved him from bankruptcy. He’d made no less than 18 sales in two days to new stores. Pretty cool, and it’s the type of conversation that makes you feel rewarded for all the hard work that goes into planning and producing a successful business event.
What still surprises me in this day and age of cannabis, where margins are crappy, profits are low, oversupply is prominent and operations are difficult, is that some company leaders continue to persist in riding a bad model into the dust without any signs that they are desperate of looking to alter course. Leafly is a perfect example. Once valued at over $100 million, it’s a Seattle-based company with a market cap now of about $230,000. Its stock is so bad it was delisted from the Nasdaq in 2025 and now trades on the OTC market. The company has been in decline for years and was originally part of the big Privateer Holdings mess, which included Tilray (another company with a tanking stock).
Leafly can’t seem to come up with anything resembling a decent business model or leadership that possesses the ability to come up with solutions. But here’s the really weird thing to me: I’ve reached out to their senior team (a rotating mess) numerous times over the past decade to see if they’d like to come and check out Interchange. It would be an easy opportunity to mingle with well over a hundred potential clients. I’ve mostly gotten crickets.
If I were a shareholder who lost his shirt with Leafly stock, I’d be angry (or broke). And there are plenty of incompetent companies within the cannabis space, crappy businesses with dumb models that stick with clown car leadership. Many of these failing businesses seem to be too lazy (or clueless) to reach out to us and ask if they can attend one of our business events as a guest so they can see how it works. It’s a big head scratcher for me. In another life, I used to run one of the largest consumer CD ROM publishers, and we went to great lengths to get into any trade show or business event we could. Beg, barter or borrow was the order of the day when it came to figuring out how we could get to the buyers and retailers we depended on.
It seems to me there are a lot of people in this industry, especially at publicly traded companies, who are content to ride a business down while shareholders lose their shirts. Maybe cannabis was seen as the ultimate “pump and dump” opportunity by the folks who knew they could sell their pie-in-the-sky business models to unsuspecting (and unsophisticated) investors?