Living the Dream: Helen Cho

Aloha Green was the first medical dispensary to open in Honolulu. The company held its grand opening in August 2017.

We made history in Hawaii! A few months ago, Aloha Green was the first medical cannabis dispensary to open in Honolulu. Patients camped out the night before we opened our doors to be among the first in the state to buy legal “pakalolo.” We had chilled champagne waiting in the office fridge — but things went sideways pretty quickly and we didn’t get a chance to touch that bubbly until three weeks later.

Our BioTrack system, the seed-to-sale software mandated by the state, went down an hour after we opened, only validating patients born after 1975. I had to break the bad news to patients who had been waiting in line under the sweltering Hawaiian sun for hours. And those who managed to get in were surprised at the prices — roughly $23 a gram. One outraged individual made memes of our chief operating officer, Tai Cheng, likening him to Martin Shkreli, the “Pharma Bro” who raised prices on HIV/AIDS drugs by 5,000%.

Within hours of opening, we found out that many patients were filling out the patient intake forms incorrectly. Then we ran out of patient intake forms. Then the Department of Health said we couldn’t let people smell the product. Then one of our dispensary supervisors broke her kneecap in a freak accident (not on site).

But we sold out in three days. It was both a maddening time and the most fun we’d ever had, despite sleeping only a couple hours a night.

Over the next month, we fixed nearly every issue. We set up a strict scheduling process for all vendors, built a system for updating menus, and hired two “safety net” operations employees. Intake forms were redesigned to minimize errors. The check-in process was streamlined. We got BioTrack working again and personally called back each patient who was turned away.

Every employee was encouraged to take ownership of the problem in front of them. Leadership trusted staff members to handle the problems they knew intimately and the staff trusted leadership to set up procedures and provide resources. The executive team’s priority was to keep communication lines open, so all employees would be informed of changes — no matter how small or big. We became a well-oiled machine.

Those beginning days taught us patience. We were forced to trust the vision of our company and each other. There wasn’t anything we could do in those moments of chaos, we just had to take it and trust that the company would get past the growing pains. It taught us to not be reactive to the market, to stay on course with the long-term plans we knew were right. As the only operating dispensary on the island, we suddenly realized competition wasn’t the problem; we had bigger beasts to tame, namely community education, compliance and improving quality.

Today, we are not alone in the Honolulu cannabis space. A dispensary opened directly behind our building and by the time this goes to print, a third licensee will have opened. But we’re wiser now, calmer and standing tall as a leader in this fledgling industry. Aloha Green Apothecary brought together all eight licensees across the state to form a trade alliance in the understanding that while competition is real, the health of our industry is the priority. Our focus has shifted to things like scaling production, spearheading legislative and regulatory changes and growing brand awareness.

We’ve had our struggles, but it’s definitely helped us build a stronger, more productive company.