Page 9 - BusinessWest June 10, 2024

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“The business is definitely competitive, and prices continue to compress, but I’m extremely grateful for the team that I lead and the customer base we’ve been able to grow, and hopefully will continue to grow.”
Inspired by this desire to challenge what could
be considered the status quo, and further inspired
by entrepreneurial family members — and espe- cially her grandfather, Hercules Shubrick, who got into the recycling business long before that became meanstream and also owned two convenience stores — she launched Six Brick’s in some of the underused space in the Springfield Republican building nearly two years ago.
“Perhaps it was through complaints and the sup- port of my family or a combination of the two, but I found myself in the process of starting up an adult- use dispensary,” she went on, “wanting to set the tone that those in the community could participate in the legal cannabis community and have authentic representation from the community, as opposed to some performative notion of hiring someone who
is a person of color, but isn’t actually an owner/ operator.”
Since opening, there has been success and recog- nition, for both Shubrick and her venture. She has been named to another 40 Under Forty list, this one compiled by Marijuana Venture, and was also named Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the New England Cannabis Assoc. Six Brick’s, meanwhile, was named
Shubrick
Best Adult Use Dispensary in the state by that same agency.
But there have been challenges as well as the industry has retreated from its strong start of a few years ago.
“Ignorance is definitely bliss; I did not know nor fully understand all that I was getting myself into,” she said. “The business is definitely competitive, and prices continue to compress, but I’m extremely grate- ful for the team that I lead and the customer base we’ve been able to grow, and hopefully will continue to grow.”
In other words, and to recall those answers from her questionnaire five years ago, nothing is easy, nor is life in this industry anything approaching comfort- able. But she is determined and, yes, tenacious, in her quest for both continued success in this business and opportunities to help people victimized by old cannabis laws and non-violent convictions — crimes that are no longer crimes under current state law. Indeed, she has helped many get professional legal guidance to expunge their records and clean their CORI records so they can move on in life.
To sum up her accomplishments to date and her outlook on the future, we return to that questionnaire one more time, and Shubrick’s answer to the ques- tion ‘what goal do you set for yourself at the start of each day?’
“I remind myself of the words of Maya Angelou,” she replied. “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
She has certainly done all that, and this helps explain why she is not only a success in an extremely challenging business, but why she is a finalist for another honor — the Alumni Achievement Award. BW
—George O’Brien
Continued from page 9
out of business over the past few years.
“The days of ‘if you build it, they will come’ are
long gone,” Shubrick said simply when asked to describe the current state of the industry, casting new light and reflection on the answers to those questions five years ago and references to being innovative and visionary, and also hard times, brave decisions, courageous actions, and, yes, challenging the status quo.
In many ways, that’s what she was doing when she desired to take a leap, leave the relative comfort of corporate America and Mother Mutual, and not just start a business, but a cannabis dispensary — becoming a “legal drug dealer,” as she put it — at
a time when many large multi-state operators, or MSOs, as they’re called, were eyeing Springfield, in a way that Shubrick, who had seen them come to the City Council first-hand while she was interning for that body, found more than a little disturbing.
“Hearing these multi-state operators talk about Springfield more as a profit center rather than as a place with people really became a catalyst for me wanting to get involved in this industry, especially acknowledging that I was a political science major and African studies major, so I understood and knew first-hand the horror that cannabis had done prior to its legalization in communities like Springfield,” she told BusinessWest. “And I really didn’t like the idea of having dispensaries owned and controlled only by wealthy white men who had no real community ties to Springfield or any real desire to see Springfield be able to leverage this industry and do better and pro- vide not just jobs, but career paths for people.”
Congratulations 2024 Alumni Achievement Award Finalist
Payton Shubrick
333 Bridge Street, Springfield, MA 01103 413-732-2858 | communityfoundation.org
BusinessWest
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