Leafly recently polled existing cannabis businesses in an effort to ferret out what it's like to open shop. We asked about what worked well in the initial stages of the venture, which aspects were a little bumpy, and what was most important to remember. If you’re a budding ganjapreneur hoping to break into the cannabiz, here’s what you need to keep an eye on.

Are you a business owner with some tips or tricks you’d like to pass along? Take our poll and let us know what issues you found most crucial while opening your business.

After selling off unprofitable divisions of the Babcock Lumber Company, the Babcock family began exploring new industries to invest in. Their search ultimately led them to an unexpected destination: the fledgling marijuana industry.

“The 2014 ballot initiative in Florida spurred our interest in medical marijuana,” said James Clifton Whatmore, president of MAB Investments in Sarasota, Fla. “Legal medical marijuana was so hyped up, it was hard to ignore.”

MAB Investments made its first direct investment in a marijuana company just one year ago.
 
“I was drawn to the newness and growth of the cannabis industry,” Whatmore told Private Wealth.

For an entrepreneur aggressively growing a business, much of the time is spent raising equity, taking on debt, creating infrastructure, working with shareholders, and forging new partnerships. There is always the quest to do deals at market. Believe me, I understand that if I were in a business that manufactured electronics, sold cars, or leased construction equipment, there would be a clearly established market norm for just about everything, including cost of capital, terms for partnerships, and expectations from clients would all generally be taken care of by looking at the marketplace.

But for me, there is no norm. Why? Because there is no truly established market for the marijuana industry yet.

Wednesday is an important date in the state’s long process of licensing commercial cannabis in Alaska: The deadline for the state to have a permit application up and running.

“From the stand-point of somebody that wants to go into the industry, February 24th is actually the starting point, it’s not a deadline at all, it’s really just the first date,” said Bruce Schulte, Chair of the state’s Marijuana Control Board.

For anyone expecting to start buying cannabis products in stores, there are still many months to go before the start of legal sales.

As a judge in Washington, D.C. in the ’80s and ’90s, Eric Holder says it didn’t take much to tell that the nation’s criminal justice system – especially when it came to low-level drug offenses – was “fundamentally unfair.”

“I had these mandatory minimum sentences that I had to impose on people who had drug problems who were selling, you know, relatively small amount of drugs in a nonviolent way to support a drug habit that they had, and who had to to go to jail for a five-year mandatory minimum, or a 10-year mandatory,” Holder remembers. “I didn’t feel comfortable doing it.”

Just 10 years ago, who would have imagined that by 2016 some form of medical marijuana would be legal in the most states in America, recreational marijuana would be legal in a handful of others, and the legalization of marijuana would be a viable issue in the presidential campaign?

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Wyoming lawmakers are struggling with how to craft legislation regulating marijuana brownies and other foods and beverages containing the drug.

The Wyoming Senate on Monday voted to advance a bill making possession of more than 3 ounces of marijuana edibles a felony. However, senators continue to argue about how to measure the concentration of marijuana in the substances, and its potency.

The debate was prompted after a state district court judge ruled last year that the law outlawing marijuana refers specifically to pot in plant form and does not cover the extract found in edibles.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is pushing for the legalization of cannabis and other personal drugs.

However, he said regulations must be put in place by governments to curtail abuse.

“And therefore, the fourth and final step is to recognize that drugs must be regulated precisely because they are risky. It is time to acknowledge that drugs are infinitely more dangerous if they are left solely in the hands of criminals who have no concerns about health and safety.

The main political campaign to legalize recreational marijuana in California spent months negotiating before finally unveiling its proposal last fall.

The high-stakes talks between deep-pocketed donors, drug-policy reformers, medical doctors, labor unions, environmentalists and many other groups representing professions with an interest in the process were so exhaustive that one observer, only in jest, compared the discussions to the Treaty of Versailles.

By Mike Bologna

Want to know the most important factor for being a respected professional in today’s legal cannabis industry? Reputation. This fledgling industry has a diverse range of market entrants and it is bringing together a unique mix of potential leaders, entering from unrelated sectors as well as the prohibition-era market. Regardless of a person’s background, everyone is coveting legitimacy and clout as the opportunities continue to expand.