Gregory Dicum of Cultivating Wellness: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a CBD Business

I’m also worried that hemp farmers are being left behind as CBD turns into a commodity crop. Farmers take a great risk in planting and growing hemp and we owe it to them to make it a sustainable livelihood. Right now, there is a glut of CBD out there, and many farmers are suffering because they’re sitting on biomass nobody wants.

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 Greg Dicum.

Cultivating Wellness founder and CEO Greg Dicum leads strategic growth and advises clients on CBD policy, market landscapes, and product strategy. Prior to Cultivating Wellness, Greg was Cofounder of Calyx & Bract, a company that imported organic hemp-derived CBD from Europe. Before CBD, Greg cofounded, ran, and exited MondoWindow, a technology startup. Prior to that he was an award-winning journalist for a decade, writing for the New York Times, The Economist, and other global top tier publications. Greg has degrees from Princeton (Biology) and Yale (Forestry) and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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’ve had a very eclectic career path. I have a degree in Forestry and worked as an environmentalist and a journalist for many years. I’ve written six books and have a couple of patents. Throughout all of this I’ve been a serial entrepreneur, having founded and run import companies, professional services companies, and a tech company.

My tech company exited in 2015 (not very spectacularly) and I was fortunate to have the space to take time and figure out what was next for me carefully and consciously. I soon became aware of the modern cannabis industry, specifically CBD, and the rest is history!

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?

Because the CBD sector is sister to the cannabis world, and because the cannabis world still has one foot in black market, I sometimes find myself in situations that are very different from the bland boardrooms that the idea of “consulting” usually entails.

Earlier this year, before COVID struck, I traveled to Oklahoma to help a new client envision their CBD product strategy. It’s the kind of engagement we do a lot: we help companies figure out if they should enter the CBD market, and if so, how they should do it. Our clients run the gamut from mainstream companies whose products you probably have in your cupboard right now all the way through to cannabis startups.

This client was one of the latter. When I got to their location — a house on the prairie way out in the middle of nowhere — it felt like I was back in the 1990s at the height of the Drug War. The unassuming house was packed to the rafters with marijuana plants in every room: bedrooms, living room, and sunroom were all a sea of green with lights strung from the ceiling and plastic tubing running everywhere. There was an impromptu dab bar in the kitchen and guns lying around all over the place. A scary looking pit bull would lick my face as I tried to sleep on the couch surrounded by weed.

But it turned out to be a really sweet dog who just wanted to snuggle with me. And all the people on the team were really genuinely nice people who wanted to help people with cannabis medicine and help their really poor community with their cannabis business. Even though things looked really sketchy on the surface, I left feeling that this client had their hearts in the right place and was really working to make the world better for everyone.

I already knew not to judge a book by its cover, but this experience really made me understand that sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

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?

The CBD sector is still new, and back in 2015 when I first got started it barely existed. We were all making it up as we went along, and it was common for people — including me — to not really know what we were talking about. I’d be in meetings feeling a little uncomfortable because I was a bit over my skis on some topic when it would dawn on me that nobody in the room knew what was going on.

Now when I don’t know something, I just admit it and ask for the information I am lacking. It works so much better!

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Most of the work we’re doing now is about getting CBD into truly top shelf products, compliant and meeting the standards of the mainstream marketplace. Our job is to raise the bar for the entire CBD sector and ensure that this wonderful compound is available to as many people as possible, in as many formats as possible, so that they can incorporate it effectively into their health journeys.

CBD is a natural and safe solution for many people seeking relief from chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and sleep problems, as well as those seeking to improve recovery and general wellness. We’re working to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to find the CBD product that works for them and fits into their unique 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?

I’ve never been very good at asking for help; that’s something that has probably hindered me over the years. Having said that, I am very grateful to have had some tremendous partners in my work. People like Joe Fanelli, my COO at Cultivating Wellness, have helped me to see that an effective team is truly more than the sum of the individuals who make it up. I have a really gratifying sense of safety and certainty when I had things over to people like Joe because I know they will get done, and usually much more elegantly and quickly than I could do them myself!

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?

Well these days, in the midst of a global pandemic, we all have to be dynamic and creative to get our message heard in this drastically altered landscape. A lot of our marketing has revolved around in-person events like conferences, but now we’ve gone totally digital.

Our biggest new strategy is that we’re beginning to market research reports. Our first one, an in-depth review of the CBD Topicals market in the US, is just about to be released and we’re very excited about it.

This approach lets us provide value to potential customers even before we meet them. It reverses the traditional way of doing business, in which value follows engagement. I think a lot of companies could learn to do something similar if they look at their offerings from the point of view of value, rather than transactionally.

Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the Cannabis industry?

I’m tremendously excited that we’re bringing a safe, healthful wellness solution to millions of people who really need it. Just 15% of Americans use CBD today, so there are literally hundreds of millions of people out there whose lives are going to be changed for the better in the near future. People who are trapped by opioids or benzos and don’t know where to turn. I meet people whose lives have been turned around by CBD all the time, and more than anything else that is what inspires me to do this work.

I’m very excited about the demographic expansion we’re seeing now in cannabis use. When I see people like my 85-year-old mom who would never have gone near cannabis in the past truly benefitting from its healing powers, I know that I’m doing the right thing.

And I’m also proud to be among the people who are dismantling the failed War on Drugs. Taking a beautiful, helpful, and safe plant and turning it into the lynchpin for a racist police state is one of the biggest crimes perpetrated on the American people over the past century. We have a long way to go before justice is served but restoring CBD to its rightful place in people’s lives is one of many steps in the right direction.

Can you share 3 things that most concern you?

I’m concerned that CBD is becoming a fad; something that people are sprinkling into products in order to jump on a marketing bandwagon, rather than to provide people with wellness support. There are tons of shoddy products out there; the FDA recently found that many CBD products on the shelves don’t even contain CBD!

I’m also worried that hemp farmers are being left behind as CBD turns into a commodity crop. Farmers take a great risk in planting and growing hemp and we owe it to them to make it a sustainable livelihood. Right now, there is a glut of CBD out there, and many farmers are suffering because they’re sitting on biomass nobody wants.

And finally, I’m concerned that when (not if) the biggest corporate brands enter the CBD space they will lose sight of the magic and history of CBD and cannabis and treat it like just another goji berry.

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.

I wish someone had told me how hard it is to surf the constantly changing regulatory landscape. I’ve watched CBD move from being illegal to sort-of legal, to legal but unregulated, to partially regulated but still filled with grey areas. Every quarter at least we’ve had to adjust compliance, sales, and marketing strategies to navigate dynamic changes from many directions.

I wish I had known that just because it’s clear to me how important this compound is, it can take a very long time for that knowledge to spread through society and government. We’re still not close to where I thought we would be by this point when I got started.

I wish someone had told me that despite the allure of cannabis, it can be a pretty cutthroat business, with competitors pulling dirty tricks against each other. For example, a few years back when credit card processors didn’t allow CBD transactions, brands would frequently rat one another out to their banks and get them dropped. At one point, even my personal bank account was shut down when the bank found out what I do for a living.

I wish someone had told me that, glamorous though CBD and cannabis can be, I would be spending a lot of time on paperwork and compliance. I’m still not over that one.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

A team is made of people, and the team won’t work effectively if the people aren’t happy. It’s important to understand that different things make different people happy, and to craft your team dynamics so that team members support one another in the specific ways each needs to be supported.

The flip side is that if there is a team member who is making other team members unhappy, then you have a toxic workplace and you need to fix the problem — most likely by separating from the problematic team member.

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. :-)

I’ve always believed that if people could just be kind to one another, virtually all of the problems on this planet would vanish overnight. This isn’t my idea — people have understood it for thousands of years. But we’ve never been able to do it on the scale that is needed to bring about paradise on Earth. I’m trying to do my part by being kind to those around me; won’t you join me?

What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?

You can follow Cultivating Wellness on Twitter @CultivatingWel

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Thanks for having me!