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#10YearsofNCIA with Debby Goldsberry and Bryan Passman

Tune in to this look-back episode as we wrap up the year 2020 and reflect on #10YearsofNCIA.

Tune in to this throwback episode Debby Goldsberry And Bryan Passman join us for our 10 Years Of NCIA episode series talking about Community And Cannabis and talent acquisition.

Debby Goldsberry, CEO of Magnolia Wellness, has nearly 30 years of experience as a leader in the medical and adult-use marijuana industry. Magnolia Wellness, an award-winning dispensary in Oakland, CA, and also co-founded the Berkeley Patients Group (BPG) medical cannabis collective in 1999, directing its growth for over 10 years, from 1999 – 2010. Goldsberry is the author of Starting and Running a Marijuana Business (Idiot’s Guide), a well-known industry guide, and was also a top-rated mentor at Gateway Incubator in Oakland, CA, and is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs succeed. She is a former board member at California NORML and the Marijuana Policy Project and is a Professor Emeritus at Oaksterdam University. We brought Debby on the show, partially, because her dispensary is one of several stories we heard about being impacted by civil unrest and protests. We wanted to check-in and see how everyone is doing and what they have been doing to recover as well as deal with damage to her dispensary. Typically Oakland is a very competitive sport for dispensaries, even though hers has been around a very long time. Adult-use means lots of new spots have popped up in the neighborhood that was also impacted by property damage in recent months. Outside of what she’s doing with her specific business, she’s also very involved in the community in general. We talk about what she and her team are doing as far as conversations with the city and law enforcement.

Bryan Passman is the founder of the cannabis industry talent acquisition firm Hunter Esquire and has more than 18 years of experience in executive search and recruitment. Founded in 2017, the experienced team is dedicated to providing a full-service, white-glove approach to every one of our clients. We are happy that “Cannabis Is Essential” during these tough times and we’re hopefully coming out of the tight restrictions here slowly and safely. We talk about if Bryan is seeing impacts from COVID-19 on the hiring world as some companies perhaps had to scale down to save their budgets. Looking at the pace of how quickly our industry has moved in just the last few years as laws change so rapidly and licenses roll out, companies have been established, grown, and scaled up so incredibly fast on time. With that sort of growth, it means they perhaps had to hire handfuls or dozens of people in a short amount of time. Bryan explains how one carefully hires a team so rapidly while still getting the right people.