Having the right tools in place is imperative to successfully running a business. The right tools and technology allow owners and employees to complete tasks efficiently by automating processes and tracking. Bryan Lopez from Brytemap joins us to explore technology and how it can help your business.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford 0:19 Hey 420 MSP Harry here with Bryan Lopez of Brytemap out of the East Coast. How you doing?
Bryan Lopez 0:25 Good morning, Harry, how are you doing?
Harry Brelsford 0:28 Good. So I’m just having more fun putting together this ecosystem chart and meeting people such as yourself. It’s really cool. We’re gonna play the what’s your story over a Brytemap? Literally?
Bryan Lopez 0:42 What’s my story? Well, the story is that I started the company back in the late part of 2016. And I had finished up nearly two decades with an IBM Business Partner. So a lot of the exposure that I had to enterprise, IT really trained me for what was going to lie ahead for me, and fast forward to 2021. Now five years later, and we have a company that is really beginning to push the innovation curve, with some really unique features and tools for the cannabis industry. And fortunately, I’ve got a great team behind me that’s helping us to achieve that success. Absolutely.
Harry Brelsford 1:29 Yeah, I appreciate the way you’ve grown. It, you started out organically, and you’ve grown strategically, and I can appreciate that. So I’m looking at the the solution set, you say business solution. So talk to me, what are the different solutions, what’s going on here?
Bryan Lopez 1:48 Right, so the solution I’ll start with is the Scout product and the scout product was really custom designed to address the challenge of inventory tracking management and then reconciliation against the metric track and trace system. As you may know, metric is really the kind of universally accepted product they are other state governments will implement to manage their their cannabis programs in each respective state. So metric is in 16, or 17 states. And they use RFID tags as the as the the medium from which to track all of their all these cannabis assets, whether it be a plant or a package, what we’re doing is making operators with with a great amount of ease and efficiency, be able to scan their inventory with the push of a button with an RFID reader that will automatically scan and reconcile against what they see in their metric inventory. So this dramatically reduces the amount of audit time in a in a in a in a cultivation facility or perhaps even in a processing facility. So really, really powerful stuff. The other the other product that we are experiencing a great amount of success with is GreenR and GreenR is a point of sale system. It’s a platform that has been designed, we’re getting organically to bring together not just the point of sale system within the four walls of the dispensary, but to also have a fully integrated, seamless, very customized e commerce experience very much akin to what what a Shopify, like experience would be for cannabis dispensary. So it’s a little bit different in the sense that we’re not bringing out kind of a one size fits all ecommerce system, to the to the operators, this is an opportunity for them to customize their own look and feel, but have that look and feel be totally seamless to what we have one of the point of sale side. So that is adding to again for inventory. We go back to inventory management, a very seamless experience for operators that just make sure that we are 100% accurate all the time on how we do inventory.
Harry Brelsford 4:13 Yeah, so a question. You said, you know, specifically built for the cannabis industry purpose built I really liked that because what we’re seeing too much of I’m seeing that you’re seeing it is I know of a firm and you know super good guys, but essentially they reskin Microsoft Dynamics CRM, right. So it was a reskin. And God bless them, but just curious. You know, your thoughts on that. And it the industry level?
Bryan Lopez 4:44 Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, it’s interesting you bring up that point because I think the one thing that we see in the industry is too much of trying to bring something that is more built for a larger enterprise. It Keep record set up, right. And let’s use Microsoft for for a second as an example, perhaps even SAP or Oracle, these are more one size fits all type of applications that are very broad, extremely broad in and also extremely costly to implement and to manage cannabis operations the industry is growing. But I really don’t think that the industry quite knows what they need yet, right. And one thing that we’re trying to do is to build a system that is more of an MRP or an ERP light, where we have things that we’re trying to address from the very basics of compliance versus compliance is really the thing, the underpinning of everything that the operators need to be worried about in their different states. We’re trying to build a system that from the ground up is focused in on the compliance aspects. First, we can worry about analytics and all the other points around data and manipulating data. But if you don’t have good quality, reliable data that you can believe in, then it’s not worth anything. So we’re going into this with the with the the mindset that if we can solve the compliance aspects first, in the inventory management pieces first, then everything else will kind of lead in from there.
Harry Brelsford 6:32 Yeah, and I’ll end on this on the compliance conversation. So you know, with my analyst hat on, I’ve had a lot of conversations. And what we’re hearing is the the dispensary is just a retail storefront number one, right, it’s just a different industry, with a couple twists, like compliance and so on. I think compliance is important. I’ve double clicked into it, you do other, you know, thought leaders do. But what we’re hearing is, while there is that element of waking up at three in the morning, as a dispensary owner, kind of shaking about Oh, no compliance, but that’s not really what rings their Bell, right? They’re they’re really more into the being a retailer, providing good quality customer service, you know, they don’t walk around and talk compliance, if that makes sense. I agree with you. It’s really important. But in a way, it’s not Top of Mind with the audience, right? They’re going to be more focused on inventory, and what’s in stock and that kind of thing. That’s been my experience so far, I think is we get more mature, they’ll take compliance more serious life. And I yeah, I tried to have it both ways, because I know they worry about it, but they don’t.
Bryan Lopez 7:45 Yeah, well, look, there’s a couple of big things that are happening. You bring up the we talked about compliance and talking about inventory. The other big thing is just system uptime, if you’re if you’re an owner of many dispensers, or even one of these owners that invested their entire life savings and livelihoods into operating, opening and operating a dispensary. So one of the things that becomes super critical is how up how available is my point of sales. We saw some unfortunate things happen on 420, where a couple of large technology companies in our space had very significant outages that costed 10s of millions of dollars in lost sales on the largest pot holiday, the irony. And you know, I think if anything, it’s forcing the operators to look at a couple of very critical areas, the systems that you’re running, how available are they? What type of uptime? What kind of assurances Do they have, that their business will stay up and running at the most critical times. We have a philosophy here of looking at quality of service. So not only are we really focused in on what our cloud instance looks like, we are very focused on on how we protect ourselves from the bad actors out there. We also are very focused in on what happens within the four walls of the dispensary network and firewall and things like that. So we have an offering that’s tailored around managed services for these dispensary. So we want to have we want to promote our accountability. We want to be able to hold ourselves accountable in front of dispensary owners around things like system uptime, cybersecurity, network quality, things like that. These are things that somewhat go overlooked. Everybody wants to run very quickly and look at marketing, texting and e commerce. And those are all things that drive sales, but sales are only going to be as good as when you’re open and you have your doors open.
Harry Brelsford 9:57 Yep. Well there we have it. So Well stay in touch my friend continued success and sure appreciate the the data dump on what you’re doing over there bright map. Thank you, sir.
Bryan Lopez 10:07 Thanks, sir. We appreciate the time today. All right.
