Liz Connors

At Headset, a cannabis-focused data analytics provider, Liz Connors heads the team responsible for creating the data visualizations in the company’s more than 100 dashboards and the company’s real-time, SKU-level forecasts of cannabis sales across 1,700 retail stores in 11 legal markets in North America.

“We manage the robots that create those,” she says. “We just kind of make sure there’s no uprising.”

Connors did financial and economic consulting right out of college. She then worked at the Federal Reserve and was recruited to Capital One. Next, she joined the consumer insights team at H-E-B, a grocer in Texas, where she fell in love with retail analytics.

A side hustle consulting for direct-to-consumer businesses led to some work for Headset, after which she went back to get her Ph.D. But she realized academic life was no longer for her when a full-time position at Headset opened up.

“I saw what they were building, and it was really cool,” she says.

As an analyst, Connors says the cannabis industry presents not only exciting challenges, such as trying to forecast potential markets that do not yet exist, but also has a great sense of community that makes it rewarding to be a part of.

“This is the scrappiest industry I’ve ever met,” she says. “It’s a ton of fun.”

And while she may have a fancy title in a job that is itself a buzzword, the Indiana native with a “boring old accounting degree” and an MBA in information systems still thinks of herself as the “statistician” from her first job.

“Really, I was a data scientist, they just hadn’t rebranded it to that,” she says with a laugh. “Same job, just everyone thought we were nerds and we didn’t get paid as well.”