Page 23 - BusinessWest November 24, 2021

“I went to a Springfield public high school, where, if somebody dropped a dime bag, they were going to in-house suspension or being arrested in the middle of the school day because you had police officers present in the building with you. So, when you start to peel back the lay- ers and realize this is going to be a billion-dollar industry, how can you get people in your com- munity to benefit from that?”
The answer is 6 Brick’s, an adult-use retail cannabis shop expected to open early in 2022 on Main Street in Springfield, in the Republican complex.
“We are what most would describe as a mom- and-pop shop, which I tend to agree with since both my parents are on the executive team,” she told BusinessWest.
She thought her biggest hurdle would be get- ting her father on board. “Saying I wanted to be a lawyer has a certain level of prestige around
it. Saying I wanted to be a legal drug dealer and own a cannabis dispensary ... not so much. How do you make that business case and get Dad to switch gears?”
But not only has Fred become her biggest supporter, he’s also chief procurement officer at 6 Brick’s — a name that echoes the family name, Shubrick. Payton is CEO, while her mother, Dawn, is executive secretary, and her sister, Tay- lor, is head of community responsibility and quality assurance. Two younger siblings — who aren’t currently old enough to work in cannabis — round out the ‘6’ in the company name.
Once she decided to wade into this burgeon- ing industry, Payton knew she wanted to do it in Springfield.
“There’s this idea that, to be a star, you have
to leave the area and go to Boston or New York.
I heard, ‘you have so much potential; go some- where.’ That was frustrating because I’ve always seen the potential Springfield has, and this industry, in many ways, allows me to prove peo- ple wrong; I can stay here, and I can be success- ful in my own right, and I don’t have to move out of the city of Springfield to do that.”
“
has a certain level of prestige around it. Saying I wanted to be a legal drug dealer and own a cannabis dispensary ... not so much.”
Furthermore, she said, “I can participate in an industry that previously caused so many people’s lives to be disrupted and negatively impacted, and I can try my hand at something I had always been interested in, which is entrepreneurship.”
It hasn’t been easy, and the journey is far from over — and the cannabis landscape in Massa- chusetts is still a difficult one for minority entre- preneurs, despite the state’s establishment of a social-equity program (more on that later). In a wide-ranging interview, Shubrick talked about why that’s the case, and what can be done to improve the prospects of business owners who lack the resources of large, established compa-
Saying I wanted to be a lawyer
The Shubrick family hopes to have 6 Brick’s open by early 2022.
ing and other aspects of legalization. And Shu- brick was intrigued — so much that, when the councilor she was interning for lost a re-election bid, she kept attending meetings anyway.
“I was hearing so much conversation about how these businesses were going to make mil- lions,” she recalled. “Honestly speaking, they made it sound so easy.”
But as Shubrick thought about her own poten- tial in this new industry, she had something else in mind besides dollar signs. She’d read Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and gained an understanding of how the failed war on drugs had impacted urban communities like Spring- field. And she saw the cannabis industry as a way to engage with that community, succeed in busi- ness there, and pay it forward.
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