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If people do not know recognize your brand or know who you are, how can they buy your product?  Brand awareness is one of the most important aspects of growing your business.  If you are looking to recapture lost leads, increase customer loyalty, and or grow your business, increasing your brand awareness is key.  Brand Awareness refers to the recognition of your brand by potential customers for providing a particular product or service.   Harry Brelsford of The CannaTech Group sits down with Steve Gutterman of Falcon Brands to discuss the importance of branding.

 

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Okay, welcome back to the Cannatech podcast. We’re with Steve Gutterman, how are you? How you doing?

Steve Gutterman 

Great. Thanks for having me.

Harry Brelsford 

All right, well, I’m agreeing with St. Patty’s Day. How about you?

Steve Gutterman 

Well, I do have a little green shirt on, I can’t really see it in this light. But trust me.

Harry Brelsford 

All right, so what’s your story in the cannabis space Falcon brands? What do you do?

Steve Gutterman 

Well, we’re one of the largest cannabis companies in California, we have, I would say that we are in the beginnings of being vertically integrated. We have a little bit of cultivation, but we’re adding more, we have massive manufacturing capabilities, we have one of the largest distribution networks in the state, although we only distribute our own products, we have a couple of retail stores, and we’re opening more, what we’re most known for is our brands. We have five brands, three of which have been consistently in the top 10 In California, year after year after year. And as you know, Harry, it’s hard enough to get a brand into the top 10. It’s even harder to keep it there. So we’re very proud of that. And we those brands have generated over $100 million in revenue per year for each of the last three years. So here we are. And we’re actually now poised to expand even more in California and in other states. So we are excited about what we’ve been able to do the products we’ve been able to produce for customers and the future in front of us. Yeah,

Harry Brelsford 

yeah. Let’s talk about brands. And let me give you the context. This week. I am attending SXSW here in Austin, Texas, where I relocated to, and the Monday Tuesday were the cannabis summit days, right. Those were the core days. And there was a lot of discussion with the panelists about brands, you know, they had the CEO of Weedmaps. You know, they brought in some high profile people, I got to give it to them. But they talked to brands, brands brands, and it’s not necessarily my domain expertise. But you’re you’re spot on with the conversation, how hard it is to get a brand get the following the loyalty that consists. They went on for hours, if that makes sense.

Steve Gutterman 

Yeah. Well, it makes a lot of sense. CPG is sorry, cannabis is not dissimilar from any other kind of CPG. And Uber product group. That’s right. Yeah. And so the, the thing about fulfilling a brand promise is that you got to do a lot of things, right? First, you got to make products that really resonate with customers, right, you got to develop them with a passion and authenticity, and with people who really care about the product and love it and are passionate about it. So you need that that’s a baseline. And then on top of that, you have to do hundreds of small things really well, you need to be able to, if you say to a dispensary, you’re going to arrive at 10am on a Thursday with a pallet of goods, you need to be there at 958 with a pallet of goods, or it doesn’t really do much good that you’ve got a really cool logo. So we’ve been able to deliver on both parts of that because we’ve got a team. And this is pretty unique in the industry. We’ve got a team that blends some real OG street cred people that have been in the industry for 1015 20 years long before it was legal, I have to say, right. And then we’ve also got people like me and who I mean I’m I’m from financial services, and we have people from Ford and Pepsi and Nordstroms and Kohl’s. And so blending that street cred with that world class professionalism allows us to create things that are authentic, and actually get them to people on time and under budget. Yeah.

Harry Brelsford 

So let’s, let’s talk about technology. Any thoughts? You know, that’s my domain expertise, right? Is cat attack? What how does technology help you? Let’s make it a simple question. What are what are a couple use cases of tech?

Steve Gutterman 

Well, for us technology is the backbone of everything we do. We’ve put over $20 million dollars into our technology backbone over the past several years. And that’s a real luxury that we have been able to afford that almost none of our competitors have. And so and it’s one of the reasons that we’re one of the winners. In California, when I say that technology undergirds everything that we do, I really, let’s talk about that maybe in two categories. First, we automate wherever we can in the manufacturing process. And so we have machines that are running machines, we automate places where other companies, smaller companies don’t even think about automating, for example, we have a really fancy, fancy, automated stickering machine that costs us several $100,000, that allows us to sticker because you got to put the stickers on in every state that say exactly what the product is. And then there’s a bunch of other things. And those regulations are always changing. So we can do just in time stickering, where everybody else has to go through this really arduous labor intensive process. So category one, all of the processes that we can automate, we have automated, Category Two is really thinking about an ERP, a system for the enterprise that ties all of our information together. What do I tell you is that there, we looked at everything in the cannabis industry, all of the all of the point of sale systems, all the backend systems, and frankly, none of them were great. None of them will

Harry Brelsford 

weigh in, let me interrupt you there. I was just on a call with a gentleman in the space who tracks KPIs, you know, coming at it from a CFO kind of point of view. Yeah, literally just got a call. And we both concluded no one’s happy.

Steve Gutterman 

Right? I mean, it’s like, you know, that old expression in the land of the blind, or the one eyed man shall be king. That’s the way that I feel allowed feel about a lot of these point of sale systems, right. I mean, who can see the best in like a weird squinty way? But, um, so we weren’t, we weren’t satisfied with any of them. And so what we did actually, is we took salesforce.com. And we modified it over the course of years, and we actually became a certified Salesforce developer. And we’ve worked with their team and our team. And we’ve created a bespoke system that integrates everything that we do, right? From cultivation, to manufacturing, to distribution runs through accounting. I mean, it’s really incredible. And so it gives us the kinds of data rich insights that really to be honest, very few people in this industry have and that creates real advantage for us.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, here in here, again, the gentleman I had a chat with earlier today has helped out kind of a gun for hire inside cannabis entities primarily in manufacturing. And they took sage three, he said, and they did the same kind of thing. They modified sage x three, and he seemed conclusion, they looked at what they could see out there and none of it quite fit. Yeah, it’s

Steve Gutterman 

I hate that that was our answer, in some ways, right? Because actually, you know, I’m gonna put a little differently. I think we hated that answer when we were first looking. And because we thought, why, why do we have to bought Why do we have to build we’d rather buy. But now that we’ve kind of come through that process, and we’ve created this customized, bespoke platform that really only we have. Now we’re not quite as unhappy.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So what’s what’s next? You know, I’m assuming Well, where are you today? Let’s start. I’ll rephrase the question. Where are you located?

Steve Gutterman 

Well, I happen to be today in Denver, but our headquarters is in Irvine in the OC. And then we’ve got facilities all up and down the state.

Harry Brelsford 

Okay, and the reason ask is gonna have a little fun with Yes. SXSW ends in two days. So we probably won’t see you at this event. The question is this. What events might we see you at in the industry? People always like to know, where can they meet you?

Steve Gutterman 

Well, we do more of the capital oriented. There’s really two kinds of things we do we do more of the capital oriented conferences. So earlier this week, I was at the Roth capital conference during South by Southwest we made a decision there will be at Ben Zynga in April, which is another one of the larger capital and investor oriented conferences. So we do Those also do industry events, like we had a really large presence at Hala flowers. And we’ll do that again. And we had a massive area, which was great. It was really a lot of fun. We had all we had product samples, we had our salespeople, and people who really love and understand our products. And so it was, as my kids would say, it was it was hype. Here, it was hype. Hiring.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah. Now it’s a lot of fun. Well, I’ll tell you what, if you don’t mind, maybe we can get you back in the fall, get get you in a little rotation to check in with you on the industry and what you’ve seen the last six months so I’ll have Jenny and the radio control room reach out to you but be good to check in with you a couple times a year. Thank you.

Steve Gutterman 

I’d love to