Biome Grow Interim CEO Khurram Malik outlines the company’s plan to win the east coast market despite being a relatively new entry to the cannabis field. The company’s leadership has considerable institutional knowledge in the cannabis industry as well as significant corporate management experience, which gives Biome an advantage over other cannabis start-ups. Biome will capitalize on strong consumer loyalty in Atlantic Canada by producing province-specific branded products. Malik believes Biome’s unique corporate strategy will allow the company to thrive when the cannabis market stabilizes in 2020. With Biome investors get “the valuation of a newbie license, with a very credible, done-it-before team.”
Transcript:
James West: Welcome back. My guest this segment is Khurram Malik. He’s the CEO of Biome Grow. It says interim CEO here, Khurram. What is with ‘interim’?
Khurram Malik: Well, yeah, I mean, my background is investment banking, and, you know, building companies or telling other people what to do.
Khurram Malik: So you know, we don’t have what we call, affectionately, founder’s syndrome. So we have a really credible management team coming on board to run this, and also a Board of Directors which I think will be second to none in the industry.
Khurram Malik: Because, at the end of the day, look: we’ve been forecasting and selling in the sector for a while, so there are a lot of things lacking. So the two things that lack there, just to go into it: lack corporate governance on the Board side of things, and then on the management side of things, you don’t have a lot of managers running these cannabis companies that have run large, complicated businesses before, right? You’ve got people that have run 20, 30-person businesses, or high growth to a certain point. But yeah, running companies where you’ve got a couple hundred employees, a variety of distribution platforms and production assets, different jurisdictions – it’s quite an ask.
So having a credible team is key, which is why the interim fellow has brought it to the point that we could, and now we’re going to have an entire team come in and sort of run it, which we’ll announce very shortly.
James West: Oh, okay. Tell us what BIOME Grow does, because nobody knows at this point.
Khurram Malik: Yeah, it’s sort of our cannabis project we’ve sort of kept under covers for the last two years, we’ve been working on just releasing product out, because we weren’t public. So I think the world should know what we’ve been up to.
Khurram Malik: Basically what it came down to was, you know, we looked at the Canadian market and we looked at the international market, and Canada’s looked at as a global leader right now in terms of at least one thing, you know: producing cannabis at industrial scale. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what we’re looked at. That’s a narrow window of opportunity there where we can leverage that and sort of establish our Canadian way of doing things, elsewhere. That’s a very large market out there.
But you know, to do it properly, you’ve got to have a beachhead in C