A POWERHOUSE ADDITION | When Alyssa Lloyd joined the DADiRRi team as the Nevada franchise owner and CEO, she immediately demanded the local industry’s attention.
A POWERHOUSE ADDITION | When Alyssa Lloyd joined the DADiRRi team as the Nevada franchise owner and CEO, she immediately demanded the local industry’s attention.DADiRRi Extracts CEO Ashley Schriener vividly remembers her first phone call with Alyssa Lloyd.
“She was asking questions no one had ever asked,” Schriener says.
Lloyd and her husband had been researching a number of franchising opportunities, from well-known restaurants to hair salons to gyms, so they had clearly done their homework when they first met Schriener and began considering opportunities within cannabis.
Lloyd spent months talking with Schriener, as well as other cannabis companies, weighing the risks and rewards of each possibility.
One thing she realized early on was that most cannabis industry employees hated where they worked. But when she took a close look at DADiRRi, that simply wasn’t the case. During the vetting process, Lloyd visited the DADiRRi headquarters in Colorado on two separate occasions.
“When we visited them the second time, they had the same staff and they were just as happy to be there as they were on the first visit,” Lloyd says. “To me, that said a lot.
“DADiRRi had die-hard employees that were proud of what they were doing and they were proud of the brand. They were happy to be putting out a quality product, and they enjoyed each other’s company, and we wanted to recreate that.”
So, in 2023, the two women signed a franchising agreement that would expand the company into a new market and make Lloyd the CEO and owner of DADiRRi Nevada.
“She’s a powerhouse addition,” Schriener says of Lloyd. “Any room she walks into, any business conversation she’s having, she completely demands the attention of the room and is able to close deals.”
But Lloyd admits she faced a steep learning curve initially. She was launching a brand in a new market, one dominated by some of the biggest companies in the space, and she had essentially no experience with cannabis to speak of.
“I don’t even want to say it was a double-edged sword,” she says. “It was more like a quadruple-edged sword: I’m Black, I’m a woman, I did not consume, and I was trying to enter Nevada. It was a quadruple whammy, if you will. And to this day, I’m still learning things from the corporate team, and I’m also teaching myself a lot of things by trial and error along the way.”
Once the franchising agreement was in place, the DADiRRi team leapt into action to get the Nevada brand up and running.
“We started from an empty room, and we got them fully staffed, fully trained, full inventory and their first order within six weeks,” Schriener says.
Today, DADiRRi products are sold in about half the cannabis retail shops in Nevada, and the company is exploring additional expansion opportunities as part of a long-term vision of distributing the brand in a dozen or more states.
“In cannabis, the world is limitless,” Lloyd says. “We’re at the tip of the iceberg on cannabis. Who knows what can happen in this space. Obviously, that’s a bigger risk, but it could also be the biggest reward.”