Guides
Operator playbooks.
Long-form articles on the surfaces a working day actually touches. Written by operators, for operators. New articles add to this index as we ship them — no SEO-bait churn.
46 guides published
Recently added
Deep dive · 7m
Cannabis dispensary scaling — what breaks when you go from 1 store to 2 to 3
Deep dive · 7m
Cannabis demand forecasting — the patterns that beat guessing
Playbook · 6m
Cannabis dispensary website conversion — what moves the 1% to 5%+
Deep dive · 8m
Cannabis dispensary lease — the negotiation that decides 10 years of margin
Playbooks (24)
Step-by-step on a specific operator job. Open in a tab + work the list.
WSLCB unannounced inspection — the first 60 seconds
WSLCB enforcement officers don’t announce. They walk in, show the badge, and ask for whoever’s in charge. The first 60 seconds set the tone for the whole visit — measured, prepared, on-the-record beats panicked, scram…
Read →
LeafLink + cannabis vendor invoices — kill manual entry
If you order through LeafLink and your POS doesn’t mirror those orders into a draft PO automatically, somebody is retyping every invoice line by hand. Hours a week. Errors compound. Cost-basis drifts. The fix is struc…
Read →
POS migration: a 4-week playbook for cannabis dispensaries
Switching POS in a dispensary is the kind of project that goes either really clean or really sideways. The difference is almost always in the planning — what you back up, what you test, who owns which surface, and wha…
Read →
Cold outreach to another licensee — operator-to-operator courtesy + the actual rules
We just shipped a 650-prospect outbound campaign on CannAgent itself. Half of the work was writing the email; the other half was making sure we wouldn’t get a complaint filed against the license for sending it. Here’s…
Read →
Cannabis recall — the first four hours
A mold-positive lab result from a vendor you carry. A WSLCB Public Health and Safety Advisory in the regulator’s morning bulletin. A LeafLink notification that a producer is voluntarily pulling a lot. Three different…
Read →
Industry / heroes / medical discounts — verification cadence + audit-trail
Industry discount, heroes discount, medical discount — three programs every WA dispensary runs, all sitting under the same WSLCB scrutiny. The rule: verify per visit, document per transaction, audit per quarter. The f…
Read →
Cannabis data discipline — what to lock down before someone makes you
Cannabis retail isn’t under HIPAA but it sits on top of customer PII no other retailer collects at the same depth: ID scans, dates of birth, medical-card photos, full transaction history, surveillance footage that inc…
Read →
Cannabis vendor diligence — when to fire a vendor, when to keep them
Most operators evaluate cannabis vendors on price + product quality. That’s the visible 30%; the rest — fill rate / COA delivery timing / recall responsiveness / manifest discipline / vendor-portal data hygiene — is w…
Read →
Cannabis staff training — warm path for existing staff, cold path for new hires
Most operators run cannabis staff training as one curriculum: a binder, a 4-hour session, sign-and-done. That treats your 5-year senior budtender like a hire-day-one and bores them out of compliance. The actual operat…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary signage — what the inspector measures, what NOT to post
Signage citations are one of the most common WSLCB findings, and operators routinely fail not because they’re negligent but because the rule is specific. WAC 314-55-079 caps the size, the content, and the location of…
Read →
Cannabis SOPs — write the playbook before the inspector asks for it
WSLCB inspectors increasingly ask for the SOP binder during routine visits. ‘Show me your written procedure for industry-discount verification’ / ‘walk me through your recall response’ / ‘what does the close-of-day ca…
Read →
Cannabis returns + refunds — what’s allowed, what’s not, what to put on the receipt
Most cannabis operators inherit a return policy from generic-retail muscle memory and end up either cited or out-of-pocket. WSLCB has specific return-to-shelf restrictions; the customer expects retail-style refund fle…
Read →
Cannabis budtender hiring — interview rubric, red flags, the questions that surface character
A budtender is a $20/hr employee who is, on any given shift: a state-licensed-product gatekeeper, an ID-verification specialist, a 5-figure-cash handler, the public face of your brand, and the front line if WSLCB walk…
Read →
State traceability reconciliation — the daily, weekly, monthly discipline
Every state with legal cannabis runs a seed-to-sale traceability system — METRC across most legal states, WA-LCB Traceability (formerly Leaf Data Systems) in Washington. Your POS records sales. Your manifest-receiving…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary shrink — where it actually hides, and the discipline that finds it
Industry-wide cannabis shrink is reported at 2-4% of cost of goods. At Green Life + SCC, ours runs ~0.6%. The delta isn’t mystical operator skill — it’s the discipline of knowing where shrink hides + having the surfac…
Read →
Edibles at the register — the 60-second customer-education the budtender owes
More cannabis-related ER visits trace to first-time edibles customers than to every other product category combined. The cause isn’t product strength — it’s onset-time confusion + stacking the dose. Customer takes a 1…
Read →
Reading a cannabis Certificate of Analysis — what to verify before product hits the floor
A Certificate of Analysis (CoA) is the lab-test document every cannabis product ships with — potency, pesticides, heavy metals, microbial, residual solvents, mycotoxins. It’s also the document a WSLCB inspector pulls…
Read →
4/20, Black Friday, Greenwednesday — the operations playbook for cannabis rush days
Cannabis dispensary holiday-rush days do 3-5x normal volume in the same physical store with the same staff. 4/20, Black Friday (the cannabis-industry ‘Greenwednesday’ the day before Thanksgiving), Christmas Eve, the d…
Read →
ADA compliance for cannabis dispensaries — the federal exposure most operators forget
The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to cannabis dispensaries even though cannabis remains federally illegal. Title III — the public-accommodations title — runs against your physical premises AND your website,…
Read →
Google Business Profile for cannabis dispensaries — what to fill in, what WAC 314-55-155 won’t let you say
Google Business Profile is the highest-leverage marketing surface a cannabis dispensary has — the local-pack + Maps + reviews flow drives 40-60% of new-customer traffic at Green Life + SCC. Most generic ‘optimize your…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary opening day — the first 30 days that decide whether you survive year one
Opening a cannabis dispensary is a high-stakes low-experience event for the operator. WSLCB issued the license; the build-out is done; the inventory shipped; staff is hired; signs are up. Day 1 hits and you discover t…
Read →
Cannabis menu + case-card discipline — the merchandising decisions that move margin
Most operators treat the cannabis case-card layout as a one-time setup. The result: products that sat 90 days are still at eye level, the new-cultivar drops nobody knows about, and budtenders default to recommending w…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary security — the robbery-prevention playbook beyond cameras
Cannabis dispensaries combine three risk multipliers: heavy cash on premises (most are still cash-only), high-margin product that resells trivially, and federally-uninsurable cannabis inventory if it’s lost. Combined…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary website conversion — what moves the 1% to 5%+
Most cannabis dispensary websites convert browsing-customer to walk-in-or-pickup at 1-2% — that’s the industry baseline + most operators don’t measure it. Better-run sites hit 4-6%. At 1,000 monthly visits, the delta…
Read →
Deep dives (20)
Longer-form on the topics that don’t fit a checklist. Read with coffee.
Cannabis surveillance — retention monitoring and incident timelines
Two surveillance problems sit on top of every cannabis dispensary. First: nobody actually knows their DVR retention is meeting WAC 314-55-082 until inspection day, when the answer matters most. Second: when something…
Read →
Cannabis loyalty data — without losing a single point
Cannabis customers don’t check most of the data the operator obsesses over. They notice loyalty. Points balance off by 50, tier-history vanished, sign-up-date showing yesterday on a 4-year customer — they hit the budt…
Read →
Cannabis pickup flow — stop babysitting the online-orders queue
The online-orders queue at most cannabis dispensaries is somebody's job — usually a lead's, sometimes a budtender's, occasionally the GM's when no one else can babysit it. The customer drove to the parking lot expecti…
Read →
Cannabis payroll inside the POS — Form 941 next to till data
Most cannabis dispensaries run payroll across three systems that don't talk to each other. Hours come out of the POS. Payroll runs in Gusto / ADP / Comploy. Filings — Form 941, W-2 batch, state-specific stuff — get do…
Read →
Vendor reliability and the math of reorder
Most dispensaries pick vendors on vibes — Brent's been flaky lately, NWCS is solid, that one we tried last year never delivered on time. Run that long enough and you're losing margin to stockouts you could have predic…
Read →
Manager write-ups that survive labor-law review
Cannabis retail has high turnover. That means cannabis retail also has high write-up volume — and a write-up that doesn't survive an arbitrator's review costs the operator a separation that should have been cleaner. H…
Read →
Cash discipline at a cannabis dispensary: variance, escalation, audit
Cannabis dispensaries run cash-heavy by design — federal banking is a long story. That means cash variance happens daily, and the only thing standing between $5 over the threshold and $500 walking out the back door is…
Read →
When the register goes offline — what survives, what doesn’t
Internet drops happen — Comcast outage, router reboot, ISP migration, the building’s power blip that took the modem with it. A cannabis dispensary running cash sales should not stop selling because the link to the clo…
Read →
Cannabis banking — keeping the account open, not finding one
Most operators talk about cannabis banking as ‘finding a bank that takes us.’ That’s the easy part — Salal Credit Union (WA), MAPS / Dama (OR), Numerica, a few national CDFI options. The hard part is staying with them…
Read →
Cannabis loyalty program — earn rates that don’t bankrupt the margin
Most cannabis loyalty programs leak margin because the earn rate was set by feel (‘1 point per $’) and the redemption math was never modeled. The customer earns points at retail prices, redeems against retail prices,…
Read →
Multi-state vs. multi-store same-state — the actual decision
Most operators frame expansion as ‘more stores.’ That’s the surface-level question. The real fork is multi-store-same-state vs. multi-state — those are different unit economics, different compliance overhead, differen…
Read →
Pickup-only vs. storefront-mix — what the operator decision actually looks like
Post-2020 most cannabis dispensaries added pickup as a sidecar to the storefront. Some operators eventually pivoted entirely to pickup-only (smaller footprint, simpler ops, cash-discipline cleaner). Others kept storef…
Read →
Cannabis customer-acquisition cost — what to spend, what NOT to spend
Most cannabis operators don’t model customer-acquisition cost (CAC) vs lifetime value (LTV) because (a) the advertising rules are restrictive enough that ‘Google Ads + Facebook’ isn’t even an option, and (b) the data…
Read →
Cannabis customer SMS — what carriers actually filter, what gets you blocked
Cannabis customer SMS is harder than regular retail SMS for three reasons stacked: (1) carrier filters (T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T) block cannabis-keyword content aggressively under their A2P 10DLC enforcement; (2) WAC 3…
Read →
Cannabis insurance — what coverage actually triggers, what gets denied
Cannabis-business insurance reads like normal commercial coverage on paper. The gaps are wider, the triggers are narrower, the carriers are fewer, and the renewal price climbs ~15-25% per year against zero claim histo…
Read →
Cannabis pricing — when to discount, when to hold, when to feature
WA cannabis prices have compressed 35% since 2020 — supply-side oversupply + the WSLCB social-equity rollout adding 38 new licensees in 2026 only deepens the pressure. Most operators react with reflexive discounting +…
Read →
IRC 280E for cannabis operators — what it costs you, what 471 + CHAMP buy back
IRC 280E is the line item on a cannabis dispensary’s P&L that doesn’t exist on any other retail business. Federal income tax computes against gross profit instead of net — payroll, rent, marketing, software, secur…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary lease — the negotiation that decides 10 years of margin
Cannabis dispensary leases are the single highest-stakes contract a dispensary owner signs. The lease is signed before the WSLCB license issues, before staff is hired, before product is on the floor — and it’s the con…
Read →
Cannabis demand forecasting — the patterns that beat guessing
Most cannabis dispensary demand forecasting is ‘look at last week, order the same.’ That works in steady-state — but cannabis demand is anything but steady-state. Demand follows 4 distinct patterns: weekly cycle (Frid…
Read →
Cannabis dispensary scaling — what breaks when you go from 1 store to 2 to 3
The first store taught you how to run a dispensary. The second store teaches you how to run a dispensary OPERATOR. They’re different jobs — and most single-store operators learn this 60-90 days into the second store,…
Read →
Explainers (2)
Why-it-matters reads on regulatory + market dynamics that compound.
WSLCB compliance: coded gates vs operator-handed
WSLCB compliance is the term every cannabis-POS website uses. It means two different things depending on who's saying it. Either the platform refuses the action when the rule is broken — or the platform documents the…
Read →
Picking a cannabis POS: the 7-question scorecard
Every cannabis-POS sales call sounds the same — same buzzwords, same enterprise-grade everything. The questions below cut through that. Ask each vendor the same seven and score the answers. The one who can answer all…
Read →
What guide should we write next?
We pick topics from real operator questions, not keyword research. If there’s a problem you’d want a step-by-step on, the demo call is the right place to flag it.
Request a demo →