The meteoric rise of the cannabis industry is well documented. A 2020 industry report from Leafly shows job growth in the cannabis industry rising by roughly 15% through the year to about 240,700 jobs in the U.S. alone, which follows 2019’s staggering increase of more the 40%.
However, an often-overlooked dynamic in this process of rapid-fire decision making is the question of who is being empowered to make these decisions. Finding leaders and staff who understand enough about a nascent industry to find success in it is difficult enough, let alone an industry with as many unknowns and pitfalls as cannabis that threaten to kneecap a business before it even gets off the ground.
It’s a lacuna all too familiar to cannabis companies, and one that cannabis staffing firm FlowerHire and its CEO David Belsky have attempted to fill. In a recent interview with Benzinga, Belsky explained his own realization around the dormant potential of building an industry ecosystem for cannabis, a realization that led to the creation of FlowerHire.
“I saw a tipping point where the cannabis industry had the potential to be the biggest job creator in the United States over an entire decade, an opportunity for an entire workforce to be recalibrated for a modern growth industry that couldn’t be outsourced,” said Belsky.
Now, with the Beta launch of its FlowerHire X application platform, FlowerHire and its partners throughout the cannabis industry are looking to add further definition to the human capital that is propelling the growth of a surging international industry.
Seth Yakatan
Known for solutions that yield results, Seth Yakatan has completed or advised on acquisitions and corporate finance transactions totaling over $3 billion. He is CEO of Katan Associates International—a financial strategy and merchant banking firm specializing in commercialization and asset monetization—especially those within life-science and e-commerce sectors.