How does your garden grow?
Perlite is a critical component in modern agriculture. You’ve definitely encountered it before – It’s the small, lightweight, white popcorn-esque material often seen in pre-made soil mixtures, to add air to the soil and increase drainage.
When our perlite manufacturing client came to us inquiring about the prospects of cannabis legalization, we were understandably surprised. But the business rationale was compelling – perlite manufacturing, because it’s so light, is highly regionalized because the final product is cost prohibitive to ship long distances.
Our client had observed that, as cannabis legalization and industrialization swept the west coast, their regional counterparts rode that wave to new customers and higher profits.
They had three key questions for us:
What kind of timelines might we expect for legalization in the midwest?
How can we best position ourselves as an industrial cannabis grow medium?
How can we start laying the strategic groundwork now?
Two months and many odd search histories later, I shared the below presentation to their executive leadership as part of a three hour, pun-filled strategic workshop. They were so thrilled with the outcome that they decided to launch a new cannabis-focused sub-brand, and I later flew with them to Denver to attend a cannabis industry expo as their SME.
