Stephen Stearman of Elevate Holistics: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis or CBD Business
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
I have an extremely strong culture at my company, and I have invested in my employees and paid them bonuses since I started. When I say that I invest in my employees, we do monthly employee development workshops, we have a book club, and I recently brought on a performance coach to help with mental health. What we do is hard, and starting a company is hard, but I know it’s worth it because we almost quadrupled the business from 2020 to 2021.
As part of my series about “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis Business” I had the pleasure of interviewing Stephen Stearman.
Stephen Stearman is the founder of Elevate Holistics, a cannabis tech company looking to increase access to medical cannabis.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share with us the story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I feel like I meandered about for several years before landing where I am now. I grew up and went to college in Kentucky, where I did door-to-door sales for 4 years, then moved to Austin in 2014 for a graduate program in entrepreneurship, ground my teeth in tech sales, pivoted to non-profit development work and then started a cannabis technology company — Elevate Holistics — in June of 2019, which I am building to this day.
When I look back at my experiences, I think there are several that have made me the man I am today. Those key moments were when I was selling books door to door and then my graduate program.
My first summer in the book field, I moved to Minnesota to live with a host family for the 13-week selling period. Literally 50% of the students that start the summer do not finish it. We sell for 13 hours each day, 6 days each week. When I first got to Minnesota, I was seriously underprepared and after one week of not selling a single book, I found myself crying on a curb wishing to the high heavens I was back home. I called my father and he said, “You made this bed, now lie in it.” I was not allowed to call it quits. By the end of the summer, I was producing enough sales to NET $3,000 for the summer. It was miserable, but the lessons of grit, responsibility, work ethic, and positive attitude have stayed with me to this day.
My experience selling books propelled me to acceptance into the Acton School of Business in Austin. That was a grueling program that taught me how to make money, how to understand my ethical framework, and how to learn. The men and women in that program gave me the confidence I needed to take on the workforce. It took 4 years post grad school to start my first company, but when I did, I used that group as a resource regularly, and I still do. Accountability and votes of confidence make a massive difference in any entrepreneur’s journey.
Starting my first company in cannabis has been a wild ride. When I got the call in June 2019, I didn’t have any experience in cannabis, but I believed in the science behind plant medicine because of how much better my grandmother’s life got when she was battling cancer and medicating with cannabinoids. My business partner owned a medical practice and we felt confident we could make the business work. Originally, we started Elevate to learn the value chain of medical marijuana and find where we wanted to place ourselves, but once we got into it, we decided to stick with the medical marijuana card business.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
We experienced a large jump in business during Covid-19 because Elevate is a telemedicine business. That gave us confidence that we could pull the trigger on developing a new e-signature platform to support the company and simultaneously increase our marketing spend. But over the span of 30 days, sales fell by 30% and invoices came due. I couldn’t make the payroll and almost drove the company into the ground because we failed to stick to a more modest budget. It was truly a brutal time in the company’s history and every person connected to the company took a pay cut: staff, vendors, doctors, you name it. The amazing part was that everyone stayed on board, and within 60 days, I returned everyone to their former pay schedule. It was incredibly humbling and a lesson I will never forget about budgeting and taking more calculated risks.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
There was a small dispensary in a small town in Oklahoma that I had a really good relationship with. We used iPads out in the field to help dispensaries see our doctors, and I gave this dispensary an iPad to use, but in my haste to move on I synced it with my iCloud.
I turned off picture syncing, but low and behold some of them did, and one was a picture of me in tiny boxers that I sent to my girlfriend. I found out because I randomly received a picture of the three dispensary staff members holding the iPad with the picture on it asking when I would deliver them donuts (the boxers had donuts on them). I immediately wanted to crawl into a hole and wither away into non-existence.
Luckily, they had a sense of humor and everything was fine, and I did indeed take them donuts about a month later. The lesson is: don’t make decisions that expose you to liability out of the desire to act with haste. I didn’t want to take the time to reset the Apple ID because I was wanting to get my contacts in, typical sales person, but I paid for that mistake
Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes, we are working on adding a mental health component to the business. We are treating people every day for various conditions, and we are of the mind that while cannabis is amazing for so many things, it can become a band-aid solution or a crutch for some. We want to provide additional services that will fulfill our mission of helping people live better, more natural lives.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
One person who was a big help to us is a guy named Jack Mitchell, who owns BesaMe Wellness in Kansas City. Jack gave us a shot when we were a tiny company, truly just a tiny team with a big dream. He opened up his resources to us and helped us see the opportunity that was right in front of our faces to integrate our clinic with dispensary marketing systems. We are where we are today because he helped us develop the technology and served as our first test partner.
This industry is young dynamic and creative. Do you use any clever and innovative marketing strategies that you think large legacy companies should consider adopting?
Facebook community groups. We’ve had great success with those and I don’t think they get utilized enough. It depends on the audience though, however, because cannabis happens to be an industry with young and old patrons alike.
Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the Cannabis industry? Can you share 3 things that most concern you?
The three things I find most exciting are: the health benefits that are still being discovered, watching states legalize cannabis left and right, and seeing that Boomers are the fastest growing demographic for the industry.
My concerns are: the current monetary restrictions with banking, the corruption at the state level with who can get licenses, and the mental health impacts of people consuming cannabis in an unhealthy way.
Can you share your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis Business”? Please share a story or example for each.
- Don’t try paid marketing until you have an enormous budget.
-We wasted $18,000 onboarding, and thousands of dollars in paid ads, only to have our ad accounts shut down.
-Invest in OWNED and EARNED media. Build your email list, build your text list, and get the community involved. - Invest heavily in the things that allow you to communicate with customers easily.
-We got shut down by Twilio multiple times because of the fact we support the cannabis industry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that 50% of our communication is done via texting, because this crushed us.
Spend the money to use systems that allow you to contact your customers, such as:
-Effective texting & email platforms
-Developing an app for young people - Have a backup bank account on LOCK.
-Square shut us down and we couldn’t take payments. It happened out of nowhere and we were like chickens with our heads cut off. - Capital is hard to come by in certain markets, so garner quality relationships with banks and private funding sources.
-We tried to raise money and it takes a special kind of investor or fund for the appetite. Network HARD. Treat people right. Find the opportunities. We found that we had to use private investors and angel investors who support the industry. - Government regulation comes hard and fast. Always be on your toes.
-We can be killed by changes in texting regulations, how we can interact with dispensaries, how we can connect with patients, & telemedicine concerns.
-For people in dispensaries or cultivations, I have seen packaging laws change overnight.
What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?
I have an extremely strong culture at my company, and I have invested in my employees and paid them bonuses since I started. When I say that I invest in my employees, we do monthly employee development workshops, we have a book club, and I recently brought on a performance coach to help with mental health. What we do is hard, and starting a company is hard, but I know it’s worth it because we almost quadrupled the business from 2020 to 2021.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The movement I’d inspire is to encourage kids to start entrepreneurial projects. I think business is the best way people ascend through class stratas and having confidence to do that when they get out of high school can be life changing.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
Linkedin, IG: @sstearman11 @elevate.holistics
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Stephen Stearman of Elevate Holistics: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.