Advice & Tips
Growth
Join us for an eye-opening discussion with industry expert, Jazz Samra President of Sativa Bliss.
Discover a trove of insights on the crucial role of location in the success and expansion of enterprises in the cannabis industry. Jazz dissects the importance of geo-specific demographics and the value of retaining a robust belt of regular clientele in your path to sustainable growth. Cannabis is much like a convenience store model where maximum traffic is steered from the two-kilometer-radius surrounding your store.
Jazz recounts his experiences and emphasizes on having proper business systems that ensure smooth operation, even in the owner's absence. Learn from Jazz as he shares insights on effective time management strategies for dispensary owners. He staunchly believes in the owners focusing more on managing the business rather than doing a budtender's job. This episode teems with discussions on strategies to upscale your business, network with fellow store owners, engage in community activities, understand customer behaviour and much more.
Jazz Samra is the founder of VIP Media Group, a collaborative cannabis retailer network aimed at empowering the industry to strive for excellence and equity by creating opportunities for all cannabis operators. Jazz is passionate about helping independent cannabis businesses succeed.
Jazz is also the President of Sativa Bliss Cannabis Boutique. A chain of licensed cannabis stores with locations throughout Ontario, Canada. Sativa Bliss is an independent, Canadian owned & operated Cannabis Retail Company committed to providing a unique shopping experience that delights the senses and provides customers with the right products they need.
Find out more about Sativa Bliss at:
Jazz Samra: For me, I've learned that like location is king. You have to have a good location regardless of what your business model is. If your location is not good, the chance of you becoming successful is not good. And if you are a bad operator, but you have a great location, you'll still be successful because customers will walk into your door.
Tom Mulhern: Welcome back to the Kaya Cast podcast. I am your host, Tom Mulhern. This is the podcast for cannabis businesses who are looking to launch scale or grow their business. We've had so many great guests on over the past year, and actually it's been a year.
It's been a year that we've been doing this podcast, and I am so thankful for everybody who's been a part of this journey for this past year, and I'm looking forward to the things in the year ahead. Today I have the first part of my two-part conversation with Jazz Samra, who is the owner of Sativa Bliss, a dispensary out of Ontario, Canada, and he is gonna share his
story about how he grew and scaled his dispensary from one location to multiple locations fast. And when I say fast, I mean within months he was building out new locations. Now obviously his advice is that doesn't happen for everybody, but it's an amazing story and also such great insights into how you can scale your business.
So the first part of our conversation is about Sativa Bliss. The next part of our conversation Will, which will be coming out after this, is all about his network that he's built, the VIP Media Group, which has a bunch of conferences, and it really is a community for business owners, independent business owners.
So that's next week. You're gonna want to tune in, but let's jump right into our conversation with Jazz Samra.
Tom Mulhern: Jazz Samra is the founder of VIP Media Group, a collaborative cannabis retailer network aimed at empowering the industry to strive for excellence in equity by creating opportunities for all cannabis operators.
Jazz is passionate about helping independent cannabis businesses succeed. Jazz is also the president of Sativa Bliss Cannabis Boutique, a chain of licensed cannabis stores with locations throughout Ontario, Canada. Sativa Bliss is an independent Canadian owned and operated cannabis retail company committed to providing a unique shopping experience that delights the senses and provides customers with the right products they need.
Well, Jazz, Welcome to the Kaya Cast Podcast.Can we just start by, tell me a bit about yourself and how did you end up in the cannabis industry?
Jazz Samra: I ended up in the cannabis industry a little bit by accident.
I think it was April 1st, 2018, I just went and registered a company and the journey kind of started. Originally it was supposed to be the LP side of the industry, and I tried to get stuff started over there and then all, all of a sudden just when we were ready to launch COVID came and kind of wiped everything out.
And at that time, the opportunity for retail also popped up. And we applied for the license was January 6th of 20 20, I believe.
And I think it was July or something of that year, we ended up getting approval.
Yeah, we got the one location. As soon as the license came, I was like, okay, let's go. Let's start getting one location and another location and another location. I didn't really wanna do something where it's just like a one shop operation. I like to do business big and to the biggest of my ability, right?
It may be small for other people. For, for me, it has to feel like it's a challenge that I'm like pushing myself and always kind of growing. So one location wouldn't wouldn't work out for me that well.
Tom Mulhern: You guys opened in a really difficult time during Covid, so, so how did you kind of survive that slow growth at the beginning of Sativa Bliss with your first location?
were there specific things that you did to, to stay profitable and then expand and grow?
Jazz Samra: Well, to be honest, the first five locations were back to back to back. Like we opened up our Kitchner or location in 2021.And even the store wasn't even properly built out inside, but it was like, okay, we were ready. We have product, and we could start selling at the door. And then in March, the Guelph store opened, and before it opened, I was in Belleville doing construction on that store.
And then in April, that store opened and again, curbside pickup. And by the time that store opened, I was in St. Catherine's doing renovations for that store. Within like the, I think the first five, six months, we opened up five stores. So literally almost one a month.
My goal was I need to open up these locations fast because we were paying rent on every single one of them. It was like it's no use keeping a spot empty and still continue to pay rent.
Now the expansion plan is a lot more calm. I'm not afraid to miss out on something. I know the industry been around. I know it's not like a pot of gold that everyone kind of envisioned it to be.
It's a real business and things have to make sense. And if I have a new location opportunity, I have much, much different criteria now that I look for than like just two, two and a half years ago.
Tom Mulhern: Can I ask you, what is some of the criteria that you specifically look for when you're thinking of expanding? Likeeither the analytics or the criteria, like you said that yougo through and you say, okay, now's the time to open this new location.
Jazz Samra: For me, I've learned that like location is king. You have to have a good location regardless of what your business model is. If your location is not good, the chance of you becoming successful is not good. And if you are a bad operator, but you have a great location, you'll still be successful because customers will walk into your door.
So now I look for, I look for a plaza that might have a Tim Horton or grocery store, has some traffic. Parking is important. Being close to residential neighborhoods is important. I realize now that cannabis is kind of like a convenience store model where you target the two kilometer radius around your store, and the more the people that live there, the more chances that you have of success.
Especially with the regular clients. You may be able to get a, a store and a plaza that is busy, but honestly, If it's not regulars coming there, you're always relying on new people to come to your store. And I believe like for a store to be successful, you need a good 70, 75% of your customers to be regulars and supporting your store.
And I believe that community role model is what I find works best for us.
Tom Mulhern: As a independent retailer what strategies have worked best for you when it comes to creating kind of a distinct brand identity for Sativa Bliss, but also kind of that consistent customer experience for those regulars that are coming in to your various locations. 'cause you know you have different budtenders, different staff at each location.
So how have you created your brand identity and then created that customer experience that is key to your success as Sativa Bliss.
Jazz Samra: So initially what I did was almost the opposite of every other store. Everybody in the news back then was going to a iPads Apple store model, all this kind of stuff. I did the exact opposite. I said, we're just gonna put the products on the shelves and let people see it.
So I still wanted to go and do shopping the old school way where you walk into a store and you can actually see all the products. Many of our products, we actually have open. For people to see inside what they look like as well too, and all our price tags. Everything's kind of like, it's a lot more work to be like manually done.
I think that provides a unique experience that most other stores don't actually put the effort into putting all their products on display, making sure they have proper price tags, having them in all, you know, different categories. We have like separate shell for flowers, separate shell for pre-rolls, and.
Edibles and vapes and concentrates, and even the accessories, right? So the store is well organized that way we try to make them look very beautiful as well too.
And also like product selection, I think is ultimately the, the biggest key.
You can have the nicest store in the world, but if you don't offer a great selection of products at like reasonable prices, the customers will go somewhere else. So we are always focused on having a large selection of products and always bringing in new products all the time.
What are some specific ways that you help your staff at, at your various locations know what new products are coming in? How do you do education with your budtenders to have that consistentbrand experience from store to store?
One thing that I do with all my managers, I do a weekly zoom call, so they all get to know each other. We do our buying centralized through one location. Everything comes to the one location, and from there we distribute the products to all the other locations.
I have a buyer, Allie O'Donnell. She's very knowledgeable. She's like, probably the most knowledgeable person on our team when it comes to cannabis, and she's been a consumer for a long, long time and knows the legacy market, knows the strains, has a real passion for it. So typically when we wanna bring in products, we normally will get samples for her to try, and then if it's good, she gives it a thumbs up, then we get samples for all the managers and the budtenders as well too.
Every week when we have our meeting for a half an hour, we will invite a different LP on board to our call to spend a half an hour with us, teaching our managers about their products, but also hearing the story of the brand and who these people are. We like to support the little guys, right?
So knowing them on a personal basis makes a huge difference for us. And I think you always have to sell through stories. So when you get to know the story of the people it makes a big difference for us.
Then I get samples for all the budtenders. budtenders are always given samples to try.
I'm actually coming out with with an app that we're building that's actually gonna start reviewing our cannabis products. So when I have like 50 budtenders trying products, I'm gonna actually get them to fill out their experience on an app. That app will actually create a report and give the feedback back to the producers as well too, so that they actually aren't just throwing samples around like crazy.
They're getting proper feedback from the people that are actually selling their products as well too.
Tom Mulhern: Now looking over, you know this, this amazing story of you scaling this business so quickly. What is the most important thing to get right when a cannabis business is trying to scale? Maybe they're one location and they're like, jazz, you got me jazzed up. I want to, I wanna scale my business. What's the most important thing to get right?
Jazz Samra: I've actually told this to a couple of friends of mine that have one location and now they're expanding into two or three. You have to have proper business systems. Managing one store. And if you're there, like you can put out, fire is no problem. But to, for a business to operate efficiently and effectively without you physically being present there requires proper systems, right?
So they have to have certain logs every morning you come in, this is what you gotta do, everything's gotta be in writing. So there's no misunderstandings. Between the managers and the budtenders and whenever we are doing something, if we find something is not working, we write an SOP for it, right?
We're just like SOP junkies on it. And that SOP goes to all the managers and then they pass it on to, to the staff. So systems, I think is the most important thing that you have to have for the operations.
And obviously having good leadership training skills and then having good management skills of people managing people is a big challenge in this industry with the high turnover as well.
But if, if you don't have those systems in place, everything else is gonna fall apart.
Tom Mulhern: Now for those dispensary owners, what is the best way that they should be using their time?
I think they should spend most of their time actually managing Many store owners I found are actually working in the stores and they're doing the job of a bud tender and they say they can't afford to hire a budtender. So essentially they've kind of brought them down to a level where they're now not owners anymore and they're budtenders where they should focus on managing the business and then hiring the right people to run that business so they can actually focus on either growing the business dealing with LPs and building better relationships and actually getting, getting out there in the community and showing up at events and networking with other store owners to learn best practices and all these types of things.
Tom Mulhern: Location is king. That's what really stood out from Jazz's story of, having all of these different dispensaries open these multiple locations open one right after another is finding the right location and also setting up a good customer experience. If customers are walking into your store and they're having a shitty experience when they're in there with bud tenders who don't know what they're talking about, or technology, if they have to look and try and figure out what they're trying to buy, and yet it's not clear they're not coming back.
And so I wanna thank Jazz for this first part of the interview where he really shared so many great insights into. What it takes to scale to multiple locations. And I know so many business owners out there who are looking to scale their operations. They've got one operation, they've got one dispensary, and they're like, ah, how do I grow?
How do I get going? And, And really at the end of the day it's planning. It's having those good SOPs in place and then activating that and bringing it into reality by stepping out and opening another location. So I want you to come back next week for the second part of our interview where I'm gonna talk to Jazz about his network that he's built of independent retailers.
And you're not gonna wanna miss out, especially if you feel excited from this first part where we're talking about multiple occasions. You're definitely gonna want to tune in next week where he gives even more. Insights into how you as a business owner can grow and scale your business. So stay tuned for our conversation next week, and thanks again for listening to the Kaya Cast podcast.
