mephisto
AFN Authorized Vendor
Mitch,
There is the argument to consider also of Boutique Strains VS Commercial Strains. What I "see" happening is that there will be a distinct market for super high boutique cannabis as well as other levels. People who can afford the best, will always be there for the best. Then you have the other levels of consumers that want only a perceived value. That last customer will come and go looking here and there while that top tier customer is loyal. If it were me, I'd go for the loyal one.
Ok you can send my Marketing fee in seeds. Thanks!
Good luck and your seeds are hitting the water tonight or tomorrow.
I agree with you, I appreciate and enjoy satisfying customers time and again. It's like with many services, you find a company or person that you like dealing with, they look after you, and the next time you need said service they're the first person to pop into your head.
The boutique angle, actually, as time progresses I had it in mind to release the next gen mephisto strains, the bx-lines and so forth at a slightly higher price, after all our intention has always been to bring conoisseur automatics to the market place. But we also appreciate times are tight for a lot of people, and so want to have a pricepoint and have offers to suit everyone's wallet. Of course, that's still a lot of time away, as we are at ground zero/f1/f2 with those works.
Thanks anyway!
Well we have seedsman as our only distributor at present, however we bumped into another big UK based distributor at the fair, we explained briefly we have a loyalty to seedsman, after all, his business basically kept us here in spain and our project alive when we had a very rocky period late 2013 early 2014.
I will broach the subject with him and if there's no conflict that gets us into more shops.
And that's one of the benefits also to option 3, that everything aside from the brand, growing and breeding is taken care of.
Awesome read Mitch.
I'd go with option 2 for the short term. I foresee more offers or options coming up in the near future that may serve both your personal and professional lives better than what option 3 may present. You'll get your strange lol
I agree with this too, I think the more contacts we make and people we meet ourselves that spend 5 minutes with us, see we have a drive and a good product. I also like the fact that we're fully independant and have taken and mostly conquered the hard road so far.
Monkeys get peanuts..or is it bananas? Really if we find good people, we look after them as much as we can, maybe we're too soft, but If people put the work in, then there's a definite reward to be had.
Also agreed, once we go through that door and contracts are signed, we are tied. But we are still relatively young to start over again if needs be.
It seems a recurrent theme that 50% is too much.
Mitch,
I've "mojinated" on this some more...the first thing that comes to mind is that
there is NO way you should be spending time packing orders, getting to town,
and getting them shipped out. That's a ton of time....opportunity cost. What is the
cost of that time in things you could otherwise be doing.
There are a ton of "administrative" objectives that could easily be handled by
an administrative assistant/lackey/go-fer. And all the job requires is that one
be trustable, efficient and organized. I would imagine they wouldn't even have
to live on-site. Keep them loaded with stock and have them handle all your
orders and shipping. How much time in a given week would that buy you?
A lot, I'm guessing.
It would be a mini distributor that was in-house. No loss of control and
more time freed up.
It's just a matter of whether you can pay for that time or not.
I guess my point is, remove all the items from your to-do list that can
be done without the fear that it will be done improperly or that requires
a skill set that's hard to find.
my 4 cents now, I suppose...
The problem is trap, out of us three at present, I'm the only one that can (legally) drive.
Option 2) which before the offer of option 3), it was our idea to get an office in the city, and have someone there to handle orders, shipment and packaging.
Packaging bulk orders for distributors, when we have to do it here, working around everything else we have going, it can take 3-4 days to complete one and get it sent, so if we are out of stock with our distributors, they don't notify us straight away, and then it takes 2 weeks to get them re-stocked.. that's potentially a lot of business lost, as for a lot of people sometimes their window to obtain the next seeds for the next grow is small. We might be their first choice, but if we aren't available they'll pick their next brand and company.
We just have to go over our direct orders, and see if it covers the cost of another employee and the rental of an office space in the city.
We would still like packaging to be an on-going task in order to cut downtime - as mentioned above.
However my sneaky/dreamy plan for summer was to do the post office run, followed by an hour on the beach
nuestro espanol es un disastre amigo!
viviendo en las montanitas y trabajando con otros ingleses...es muy dificil para aprender.
Tengo un poquito, tambien para hablar con las mujeres
pero tim y bill tienen nada mas o menos.
La nivel de ingles aqui es muy basico.
Con mejor castellano hay menos problemas creo.
The problem is being isolated, and having a very busy schedule I've not had time to find a tutor or classes. When I have a minute I watch dora the explorer or spongebob on tv.
Thanks mossy, really appreciate you popping by!
Basically they have been around for a few decades in business here, and also have a big contact list which includes south america which is a very big emerging market, they would get our products into the grow shops here and take care of making our brand appeal to the spanish.
They would also be able to sort our website and I think get credit card processing for us.
And until revenue from the expansion of production starts to come back in, would front the costs of that, which could stack up very quickly indeed.
And provide us with an office/base there.
I can ask, and certainly we've had a few offers, but, and I mean absolutely no disrespect at all to anyone here!, but I'd for certain have to meet and spend time with someone face to face to talk anything like that over with. People can be flakey.. it's the internet after all.
Hey Mephisto, it was a pleasure to read this story, I read tons of positive feedback on your seeds, I'll try for sure in the future, I'm new to this forum and a new grower, but I've some management skills, IMHO knwledge, skills and love for this plant are the keys, and you have all three for your sake, what you lack is management, but it doesn't worth a 50%, or 30% or 20%, it should be bringed up by just 1 person that can handle it and grow up building relations and so on, it's your choice if this person has to be an employee that costs you a salary, or take an associate buying a 20% (for example) that brings you fresh money to be invested, then you can use your forum contacts to have 1 person in each country helping with mothertongues and advertising your wonderful strains (if you find MJ lovers this may costs only a few seeds for free).
See you
G.
PS I'll apply for italian market
It's always cool to have friends in different places! And hopefully like I planned we will be able to travel and meet cool people. I love the idea of our strains being grown in all these different gardens, environments and countries!
I hear what you're saying, the problem is, because we have been established for such little time, It's hard to put a value on our company. We could well go it alone with a new location and expanding the brand, it's possible, but it may be tight financially.
Thanks mate!
And thanks everyone for their input, it's really appreciated.
Good minds, good suggestions, and good people as ever!
It seems people are pretty torn too!
Either way, we will figure it out I'm sure. We've all been a bit stressed here, but maybe just a mini break would remedy that.
Cheers, mitch
