Page 24 - BusinessWest November 24, 2021

Payton Shubrick and Marcus Williams, president of the Block, which seeks opportunity for minority- owned cannabis businesses, share a few words at a recent mixer.
nies and, ultimately, create a more level playing field.
No Easy Road
Shubrick and her family officially launched 6 Brick’s in 2019, and the road since has been a thornier one than she had imagined.
Back in 2017, “I thought if I did
my homework and put together a really strong application, I would get the license. I didn’t expect an RFP,
27 groups applying, only four being selected. That’s when your heart starts to do many palpitations — what if we don’t get picked? What happens next? I didn’t have a plan B.”
But she did fight through to become one of the four entities chosen in Springfield’s first round of permits.
“The running joke in the industry
is they never ask when are you going to open, they say where are you in the process,” Shubrick said, noting that
it’s a two-pronged process. At the city level, it involves a special permit and a host-community agreement, while the state’s Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) requires a provisional license, post-provisional-license inspections, and other steps, including a certificate of occupancy (back to the city for that), which is required by the state for the final license.
Shubrick described it all as a long sequence of queues, of getting on meeting agenda after meeting agenda. “It’s a very layered process with two entities that don’t talk to each other, and you need a series of documents from each. It’s a series of waiting rooms in some capacities.”
On top of that, 6 Brick’s has had to deal with supply-chain issues during the pandemic to get its space — now 90% built out — up and running. It even had to wait for doors that were stuck in shipping containers. “There’s not a lot in your control as you think about moving through this process. So
“I didn’t look to start as
a business model that was going to be rinse and repeat in any city.”
patience is key.”
All along, a Springfield-based busi-
ness was the only goal, she noted, as opposed to, say, Northampton, which never capped the number of cannabis permits.
“I didn’t look to start as a business model that was going to be rinse and repeat in any city,” she explained. “I looked at it as, ‘I can be the hometown hero because, when I hire people, I’m going to hire them from the commu- nity, and I’m going to hire those who were impacted by cannabis prohibi- tion.’ And that doesn’t just mean who did jail time — it could be their daugh- ter, their niece, their nephew, because, let’s be honest, when someone is removed from the home and incarcer- ated, that whole family is impacted.”
In short, “for me, this was aligned to social-justice elements of my home- town and less aligned to me becoming a millionaire overnight.”
She found tht the road to being profitable at all begins with a lot of money up front — between $1 million and $2.5 million, typically, depending on the state of the building, its HVAC requirements, and other costs.
That has been a roadblock for many applicants that have gone through the
6 Brick’s
Continued on page 73
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24 NOVEMBER 24, 2021
CANNABIS
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