I like to orient around core values. When you are moving with velocity (speed + direction), it is important to know which direction you are heading. (We are not pulling donuts in the school car park.)

A challenge to delivering stakeholder value – one of our core values – is that you have different stakeholders with different, sometimes divergent, demands.

We have the pressures of working at start-up / scaling mode every day. The company only founded as Zenabis in January. Colleagues want to feel a part of something special but there is so much work to do there is not much time to reflect and balance. We are looking for pathways to connect and align.

The cannabis finance sector has been hammered recently and investors are wary and pointing fingers. Within the finance function there are so many moving parts, public disclosures, materiality, intricate financing vehicles, the daily grind of invoicing processing…being transparent and supportive to investors, especially when the share price is in decline, takes a huge part of the collective effort.

Meanwhile, hello! We are cultivating, processing and packaging larger and larger volumes of product every day. The operations teams continue to grow in order to hit the challenging production goals. Will the product deliver value to customers? Well, each Province operates differently, with differing processes and restrictions…and customers. In New Brunswick, consumers seem to love our Re-up brand. In BC, consumers generally are tightly tied to the legacy market; in QC, they just raised the age of cannabis consumption to 21!

Can we deliver that value to these groups who are only tentatively connected and not necessarily aligned? I see the intelligence and operational will around the organization to bring the brand together to make it work for everyone.

Maybe one day we need to pull towards one stakeholder group; the next day we circle back to another who feels overlooked. This is the hard graft of organizational life, to avoid inertia, to slow chicken-running-with-head-cut-offness, and instead leverage the creative tension that exists to break through in our collective thinking and doing. To be excellent.

This Much We Know.