What happens after an acquisition?
We have a whole team that’s dedicated to working on this. There’s always [that] beautiful [bit of] corporate speak called “post-integration.” What [this] means is: how do we all work together now? What can we learn from you? What can you learn from us? And it’s really about bringing [the] best practices [and] also about finding more efficient ways of working.
What’s the most misunderstood thing about Jushi Holding?
I think the thing to keep in mind with us is [that] a lot of what we’ve done is […] very medium and long-term focused. [With] Virginia, […] we’ve been investing for two years.
If you’re looking for immediate kind of results, we didn’t put that kind of money into Virginia because it’s just a medical market that’s small. [But] we did that because we’re looking at January 1st, 2024. We’re going to be the only operator in an area of two and a half million people.
2023 is a hugely transformative year for us [in which] those investments should pay off. That comes in a number of ways. One is [that] when we didn’t have any growers [or] processors, we weren’t selling any of our products in our stores because we didn’t have any of our products. I think now [that] we’re somewhere around 20% of retail sales [being] from our brand of product.
Olivier Blechner, EVP of Business Development at Jushi Holding
Early Jushi Strategy Days
It started when I moved here. We had a meeting at Jim’s home. The entire company could actually fit around the dining table. We had sessions where we discussed, “Hey, which states do we want to be in? Where do we […] want to focus? What should the strategy be? Then you kind of go along, and then, you adjust. I think that’s just the nature of entrepreneurship. It’s the nature of decision making, and you learn more, and you adapt, stuff happens, and stuff changes.
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