With the cannabis industry evolving quickly, some business owners are struggling to keep up with regulations and data. Did you know that the cannabis industry is the first industry ever where data collection is mandated? Even though data collection is mandatory many businesses are not taking advantage of this data, and instead are doing only what they are required to by law. Little secret…. The data many cannabis businesses are required to obtain is a very powerful tool that can be used to answer questions within their business, grow their business, increase profits and improve efficiency. Join Henry Finkelstein from Cannabis Big Data has he goes over the importance of data and how you can use it to elevate your business.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford 0:09
Hey 420MSP Harry here and I am with Henry over CannabisBigData. Hello, sir. How are you?
Henry Finkelstein 0:17
Hi there, Harry. Pleasure to be here today.
Harry Brelsford 0:21
Great. Well, you know, and our discovery call, we were able to trade life stories. And some of the readers and viewers know I did two years and a predictive analytics startup. And then I came over to cannabis. And essentially, you’ve merged the two fields of analytics and in the serious side of cannabis, so we’re gonna play the game. What is your story? Just take it from the top. It’s that easy?
Henry Finkelstein 0:47
Yeah, absolutely. I’m a data guy through and through, I’ve been doing enterprise data. For a while I worked in e commerce, I worked in government contracting in healthcare. And the thing that was really remarkable to me was how data can be used as a tool to inform business decisions. And in 20, I guess that was 2015. Now, I moved to Colorado to be with my now wife, and saw that there was this emerging market of cannabis where it’s the first industry ever, first industry ever where data collection is mandated. But people weren’t doing much with it. They do. They were doing what they were required to by law, but they weren’t gonna use that information to inform and inspire their business decisions. And so we took myself and my co founders, Jason and Levi, we took the lessons that we learned in enterprise data and apply that to the cannabis industry and cannabis, big data was born.
Harry Brelsford 1:56
Great. If you do you do five or six things. So for the purposes of this podcast, and future podcast, we’ll double click down into a couple of them. But what what what’s your business model? What are the pillars that your company?
Henry Finkelstein 2:10
Yeah, so we’ve got five core product offer five core offerings from the business. And I’ll speak to each of these here in a moment data pipes, data tools, data coaching, data skills, and data resources. Data pipes are our integrations and our data modeling our data normalizing. So we plug into pls is like green bits and flow, we plug into C to sales like metric and biotech. We plug into accounting software like QuickBooks, and so on and so on. We plug into MailChimp, we plug into HubSpot, we plug it I mean all the different pieces of the ecosystem, we have built out integrations to pull out the data and put it into a central data warehouse into a normal environment where there can be coherent reporting across all the different pieces of the business. So that’s the data pipes, the integrations and the normalizing of the data. And that feeds into the data tools, data tools, our reports, analytics dashboards and predictive models that live on top of the data pipes. So these are pre baked, answers. You know, we found that so often, the similar companies are asking the same questions, profit margins, inventory analysis, cultivation, yield, and so on. These are very basic questions that the industry is asking day in and day out. And so we pre built a number of modules that answer these questions in a robust, rigorous way. And those are our data tools, then the data coaching is related to that for the organizations that need some support, and understanding how to use the data tools. I always joke that if someone doesn’t know the business end of a hammer, they’ll be sorely disappointed when they take a swing. And the data coaching is all about training teams in the cannabis industry around what is the business end of the hammer of that data tool that is in your hand? And how can you use it to build a better business?
Our data skills, our custom consulting customer engagements where where the workhorse development team or management consulting team coming in, to ask the questions and build the presentations build the strategy for what’s the direction the data landscape and the direction for how to use that data in the organization. And then finally, data resources are free tools free reports. Resource round ups on our website. We publish on our blog and otherwise. So just to zoom out, we’ve got data pipes, tools, coaching, skills, and resources that we offer in the industry.
Harry Brelsford 5:14
Man, and you did that as a one man company, I’m impressed.
Henry Finkelstein 5:19
I’m not a one company. So I’ve got a couple of co founders, and we work with other individuals as well. So I’m far from a one man company. But yeah, I mean, the the beautiful thing about data in this day and age is that it’s scalable. And so when an organization when a team knows how to work with data very effectively, it’s a very similar answer, regardless of the business in the same vertical. So yeah, we can take a lot of what we’ve learned over the years, and apply it in a very efficient manner, both both time efficient and cost efficient for our clients.
Harry Brelsford 5:58
Yeah, and I’ll end on this. And first of all, thank you for not only doing a Hello World podcast, but playing ball with us to kind of double click down into some of the areas that you support in future podcast. I’m, I’m really into it.When you and I had a rehearsal call.I really liked what you said. And I saw this when I was at lead scorz with the letter Z in downtown Seattle, that all businesses probably have, I believe you said about 80% commonality in terms of the data. And then there’s some specific specificity to cannabis. But I concur. I was over in higher ed online higher ed. And when I went and approached other businesses, I’m like, Oh, yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah, I’ve seen that.
Henry Finkelstein 6:52
Well, it’s everyone’s got their own language. So there we are, Henry. Thanks for your time, my friend. We’ll catch you on the flip side. Wonderful. Thank you.
