While cultivation and farming currently dominate the cannabis industry, the shift toward extraction equipment and heavy machinery will be swift and substantial. Before that happens the success of the cannabis industry will depend on the service that has made–and continues to make–its best companies productive, efficient, and effective.
By knowing where to go to, and whom to turn to, companies will have the know-how to know what when (or if) challenges arise. These things must be a matter of the highest priority. Indeed, what matters most is excellence, period. Or: Great success is the result of great service. Expressing that fact requires advocacy and advocates who are as vocal, in their commitment to serving others, as they are vociferous, about helping others.
The solution starts here: It starts with entrepreneurs who seek to educate the public about this issue. It echoes among companies large and small, until it becomes too impressive to dismiss and too visible to deny.
We need to do this for ourselves, because awareness––the ability to call upon experts from a variety of disciplines––is a gateway to success. That is, when companies have a turnkey solution at their disposal, when they have technicians who can fix their machines and marketers who can translate technical language into everyday speech, when they have business consultants who can monetize products and customer service managers who can maximize sales, everyone prospers.
My definition, then, of service is all-inclusive: It features scientists and software specialists. It extends to branding experts, environmentalists and economists, in addition to thermal dynamics engineers, architects, and inorganic chemists. These are the people who can convert a startup into a startling good example of not only success, but strength––whose greatest strength is serving the needs of companies, so these organizations can fill a need by the marketplace and position their products to consumers who need them most.
If the cannabis industry achieves a reputation for great service, it will have a commodity as valuable as the one it sells. The word-of-mouth marketing alone will reverberate on- and offline, spreading from the world of social media to the real world, where companies can operate more confidently and consumers can shop with the utmost confidence. We owe it to ourselves to join this mission, so we can accomplish the ultimate mission––a reputation so good that it makes the goods we manufacture a success, thanks to great service and best practices.