As the CEO and principal analyst of Global Go Analytics, a cannabinoid research and consulting firm, Tom Adams is mining data to help businesses invest responsibly in the industry and mitigate risks, such as the capital markets collapse in 2019.
“In 2019 everyone’s plan was detonated,” Adams says, recalling the huge losses investors suffered when values for publicly traded cannabis companies dropped by 90% in late 2019, while he was working as an analyst for BDSA.
But it wasn’t the first time he witnessed that kind of boom-and-bust cycle. Adams got his start in analytics for the home video industry in the ‘90s, helping businesses like Blockbuster, as well as smaller, regional chains, understand how the video rental industry was going to work.
“Back then nobody knew what the economics of video rental business were,” he says. “It’s very similar to what all these cannabis companies are going to go through.”
Adams says cannabis businesses will see similar booms and busts as the video business as it transitions into a modern commodity.
“We have already seen one: the idea that the product was flower has already shown to be a limited view of what cannabis will be,” he says.
But Adams says cannabis businesses are in an advantageous spot when it comes to analyzing the market, in part because of government reporting requirements: “There has never been an industry as data rich as cannabis,” Adams says.
— Patrick Wagner