Hennessy Leilani Shaw has been working in legal cannabis since 2014. She started as an executive assistant at Rhode Island's first medical dispensary and spent the next 12 years building her career through inventory management, buying, and retail leadership. Today she runs sales and marketing for Buds Goods, one of the most respected vertically integrated cannabis companies in Massachusetts, with stores in Worcester, Leominster, and Framingham. She has seen this industry go through every phase it has had.

Matt and Hennessy recorded this episode on location at the Buds Worcester store, one of Matt's favorite dispensaries in Massachusetts and one of the few in the state with a trading card and sports memorabilia theme that matches his own obsession. They ripped a few packs. Nothing spectacular, but a Lamar Jackson variant showed up.

The real conversation is about where Massachusetts cannabis actually is right now and what operators who have been here long enough understand that newer ones do not.

Hennessy breaks the Massachusetts market into three acts. The green rush, where nobody cared about price and everyone was excited to be legal. The middle period, where supply caught up and prices started compressing. And now, act three, where the operators who made good decisions are still standing and the ones who did not are figuring that out. Her take is that this is not a crisis. It is what every mature market looks like. The cannabis industry is just moving through the same evolution that restaurants and retail went through, compressed into a much shorter time frame.

They also get into something that is on every Massachusetts operator's mind right now: the ballot measure that would repeal recreational cannabis in the state. Hennessy is unambiguous. Vote no on Question 8. Register before October 24th. She talks about what Buds is doing inside their stores to drive voter registration, and Matt shares what mello is building at the Haverhill store, including a tablet where customers can register to vote and receive a discount for doing so.

They close on the business itself. Buds is a flower and pre-roll company, same as mello. Their top wholesale SKU is a 28-pack of half gram pre-rolls in a jar that fits in a cupholder. mello now carries Buds products. Two operators who respect each other's work, on the same page about where the market is going and how to survive act three.

Topics covered: Massachusetts cannabis market maturation, the three acts of legal cannabis, Vote No on Question 8, voter registration at dispensaries, dispensary pricing strategy, racing to the bottom, Buds Goods wholesale business, pre-roll pack formats, competition in Worcester, cannabis industry consolidation, Rhode Island cannabis licensing, 12 years building a cannabis career.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Hennessy Leilani Shaw is the director of sales and marketing at Buds Goods, a vertically integrated cannabis company with dispensaries in Worcester, Leominster, and Framingham, Massachusetts. She began her cannabis career in 2014 as an executive assistant at Rhode Island's first medical dispensary and has spent 12 years building her expertise across inventory management, buying, and retail leadership. A recognized industry voice, she has moderated and hosted educational panels at NECANN Boston, Flower Expo Massachusetts, and the Boston Freedom Rally. She has been with Buds Goods for nearly six years.

Learn more: budsgoods.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO & CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public and private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

Connect with Matt:
 linkedin.com/in/matthew-richman-508aa413
 mellocannabis.com

New episodes of The Blunt Boardroom drop twice a month.

#TheBluntBoardroom #MassachusettsCannabis #CannabisIndustry #CannabisMarket #CannabisBusiness #CannabisOperator #CannabisEntrepreneur #DispensaryLife #CannabisAdvocacy #VoteNoCannabis #CannabisBusinessPodcast #CannabisCEO #WomenInCannabis #CannabisRetail #BudsGoods

Every legal cannabis plant and package in Massachusetts carries a state-issued RFID tag from the day it is a seedling to the day it is sold. Most operators treat that tag as a compliance cost and nothing else. Outlaw Technology built an entire business on the idea that it is actually an asset.

Matt sits down with Hans Dietterich, head of sales at Outlaw, and Brie Oaxaca, director of operations, to talk about what cannabis operators are leaving on the table by not leveraging the tracking infrastructure they are already paying for, and what the operators who get it right are doing differently.

Outlaw has been in the RFID space since before cannabis was legal anywhere. Their founder Dave Eaglesen sold Metric its very first RFID equipment before the company even had the cannabis contract. When the state built its compliance system, nobody built the operator-side tools to go with it. That is what Outlaw did.

The conversation covers the full solution stack from cultivation to dispensary: how plant-level tagging works in a grow, how harvest batches convert into package tags, how manifest validation can cut a 90-minute receiving process down to a scan, and why most dispensaries are still counting inventory with spreadsheets and pen and paper when they do not have to be.

Matt walks through what Outlaw costs in practice, which is a few hundred dollars a month per location, and why operators consistently assume it is three to four times more expensive than it actually is. He also shares what happened when regulators walked into the mello store and saw Outlaw tools in use. They checked one thing and moved on.

They get into the future of cannabis inventory technology and where AI fits into it. Matt talks about building tools on top of the Dutchie API using Claude, why he thinks cannabis operators are spending too much time building their own tech when their job is to grow and sell great product, and what the Canack group, a curated stack of best-in-class cannabis tech partners, is trying to solve for the industry as a whole.

Brie explains what it looks like to operate in a state with no compliance tracking system at all, why that sounds easier and is actually a data nightmare, and how operators who experience both sides understand immediately what a well-built RFID system is worth.

If you run a cannabis operation and your inventory process still involves someone walking the floor with a clipboard, this episode is for you.

Topics covered: Cannabis RFID technology, Metric tag system, seed-to-sale compliance tracking, cannabis inventory automation, manifest validation, dispensary inventory counting, cannabis compliance audits, AI in cannabis operations, Dutchie API integration, cannabis tech stack, Outlaw Technology, cost per audit, cannabis operator efficiency, the Canack partner group.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Hans Dietterich is the head of sales at Outlaw Technology and one of the founding team members. He has been in RFID technology since before cannabis legalization and has helped build Outlaw's presence across all Metric states and several non-Metric markets.

Brie Oaxaca is the director of operations at Outlaw Technology. Also a founding team member, she has led implementation and onboarding across cultivations, production facilities, and dispensaries in multiple states including extensive work in Virginia's medical market before it transitioned to Metric.

Learn more: outlawtechnologies.net

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO & CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public and private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

He is both the CEO & CFO, and the difference comes through in every conversation.

Connect with Matt:
linkedin.com/in/matthew-richman-508aa413
mellocannabis.com

New episodes of The Blunt Boardroom drop twice a month.

#TheBluntBoardroom #CannabisCompliance #CannabisInventory #CannabisOperator #RFIDTechnology #CannabisAutomation #MassachusettsCannabis #CannabisBusiness #CannabisTech #CannabisCEO #CannabisBusinessPodcast #MetricTracking #DispensaryOperations #CannabisEntrepreneur #SeedToSale

In this episode, Matt sits down with Jonathan McFarlane, Chief Marketing Officer of RollPros, and Maddie Bailey, mello's post-production supervisor and the person responsible for every pre-roll that comes off the Blackbird. Together they get into what it actually takes to produce award-winning pre-rolls at commercial scale, consistently, and at a cost per unit that makes the business work.

Maddie came to mello from a car dealership. No pre-roll background. No cannabis experience. She was handed the Blackbird and told to figure it out. She hit 160,000 pre-rolls in a single month on one machine. Her team is now tracking every strain in a database, categorizing which ones roll well, which ones need adjustments, and which ones get rerouted entirely based on how they behave at 11 and 12 percent moisture.

Jonathan explains why the Blackbird produces a fundamentally better joint than a cone-based machine and why it comes down to one thing: moisture. Higher moisture flower tastes better, burns cleaner, and preserves the cannabinoids and terpenes that actually make a good joint. Cone machines require operators to dry the material down so far that by the time the product reaches the shelf, the test result it was grown to achieve means very little.

They also get into the pre-roll market itself. Pre-rolls are now the largest category of sales at the mello retail store, ahead of flower. Jonathan explains why he expects pre-rolls to overtake flower in most US markets the same way they already have in Canada. And why the brands that treated pre-rolls as a place to send their leftover material five years ago are now watching the brands that invested in quality automation pull away from them.

Matt talks through the cost per unit math that most operators never discuss publicly, including how dropping from 1.1 grams to 1.04 grams per joint adds up to 6 percent more pre-rolls from the same material, and why every razor blade swap, every torn end, and every bad roll is money leaving the business.

And they close on what is coming next from RollPros, including a banding mechanism for the Blackbird that adds a cigar-style wrap to every joint, hash hole capability on the XXL running at 200 units per hour, and why the cigar manufacturing industry refused to work with them because they are cannabis.

Direct, specific, and the most technically detailed episode of The Blunt Boardroom yet.

Topics covered: RollPros Blackbird 2, pre-roll automation, whole flower pre-roll production, moisture science in cannabis processing, RollPros certification program, cost per unit optimization, pre-roll market growth, hash holes at scale, Blackbird vs. cone machine comparison, cannabis equipment customer service, pre-roll pack formats, mello farm operations.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Jonathan McFarlane is the Chief Marketing Officer of RollPros, the manufacturer of the Blackbird pre-roll machine. He has been with RollPros for four years and previously served as head of marketing at Mobius Trimmer and spent four years at a cannabis-focused marketing agency in Denver. He started his career in documentary film and content production for professional athletes before entering the cannabis industry in 2016.

Maddie Bailey is the post-production supervisor at mello Cannabis and leads all pre-roll operations at mello farms. She came to mello from a mechanical background in the automotive industry and was tasked with learning and scaling the RollPros Blackbird from day one. She has since built the production system that consistently produces some of the top-awarded pre-rolls in Massachusetts.

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO & CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public and private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

He is both the CEO & CFO, and the difference comes through in every conversation.

Connect with Matt:
linkedin.com/in/matthew-richman-508aa413
mellocannabis.com

New episodes of The Blunt Boardroom drop twice a month.

#TheBluntBoardroom #RollPros #PreRoll #CannabisAutomation #CannabisManufacturing #CannabisIndustry #MassachusettsCannabis #CannabisBusiness #PreRollMachine #CannabisProduction #CannabisOperator #CannabisFarm #CannabisEntrepreneur #BlackbirdMachine #CannabisBusinessPodcast

Bridgette Cruz moved to Massachusetts on 18 days of Airbnb money and a job offer with no relocation package. She had a vision for a cannabis brand, a DJ alias, a background in restaurant management and photography, and no funding. She took the chance anyway.

Today she is the founder and CEO of Ultra Premium Gas, a self-funded, LGBTQ-owned cannabis brand rooted in Latino and Caribbean culture. She goes by DJ Gasolina. The brand name is not an accident.

Matt and Bridgette recorded this conversation at the mello dispensary in Haverhill. They have crossed paths since 2023, when Bridgette first displayed Ultra Premium Gas at a mello event. They have both been building in the same market, watching the same industry, and drawing on the same conviction that brand loyalty comes from culture, not from price.

They talk about what it actually takes to build a cannabis brand when your only capital is hustle and relationships. How Bridgette got her first placement at Nudia through a connection made at Boston Cannabis Week in 2022. How Rob DiFazio at CNA saw the vision, took charge, and helped bring Ultra Premium Gas to market the right way, protecting her intellectual property in a market where copying is rampant. How the Whitaker Group played a role in getting the brand off the ground before it had any real revenue to speak of.

And they talk about the communities Ultra Premium Gas is actually built for. Latino and Caribbean consumers in Haverhill and Lawrence. The LGBTQ community. People who have historically felt like the cannabis industry was not making anything with them in mind. Bridgette named the flavors in Spanish. That was intentional. So was everything else.

Worth your time if you are building a brand in cannabis, building a brand with no money, or trying to understand what cultural authenticity actually looks like as a business strategy rather than a marketing phrase.

Topics covered: Building a cannabis brand from zero, self-funded cannabis business, LGBTQ cannabis entrepreneurship, Latino cannabis market, celebrity brand scaling strategy, bud tender relationships and wholesale brand building, apparel as brand extension, cannabis industry collaboration, cultural branding, community-rooted business growth.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Bridgette Cruz is the founder and CEO of Ultra Premium Gas, a self-funded LGBTQ-owned cannabis brand rooted in Latino and Caribbean culture and based in Massachusetts. Also known as DJ Gasolina, Bridgette brings a background in restaurant management, photography, and brand building to an industry she has been studying since 2013. She started Ultra Premium Gas after years of working across the Massachusetts cannabis market and launched her first placements in late 2024.

Connect with Bridgette:
ultrapremiumgas.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO & CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public and private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

Connect with Matt:
linkedin.com/in/matthew-richman-508aa413
mellocannabis.com

Rob DiFazio served in the US Navy's nuclear power program, and he went from operating submarines to running cannabis dispensaries. The discipline transferred. The stakes changed.

Today he is the founder and CEO of CNA Stores, a veteran-owned, vertically integrated cannabis company with dispensaries in Haverhill and Amesbury and a cultivation facility down the street from mello's farm. His business partners are all Navy veterans, all nuclear program. They have been building something in Massachusetts cannabis that most operators cannot replicate: loyalty among veterans and their communities that no discount program can touch.

Matt and Rob recorded this conversation at the mello dispensary in Haverhill. They have been working together for four years across two companies. Their stores sell each other's products, their farms share equipment, and one of them owns a scissor lift that the other one borrows when needed. That is the relationship.

They get into what it actually means to be a veteran-owned business versus a business that just offers a military discount. Rob raises $20,000 to $25,000 per month for a different community organization every single month, including Mass Fallen Heroes, the Jordan Sha Foundation, Tough Warrior Princesses, and a Snow Angels program where Rob and his team go out personally and shovel out elderly residents and veterans after storms. This is not a marketing strategy. It is an operating philosophy that started on a submarine and never stopped.

They also talk about the financial realities of cannabis M&A, including why operators who are not adequately capitalized are the most vulnerable when the consolidation wave hits, what happens when one senior debt holder gets a judgment and 150 people lose their jobs overnight, and why the operators who survive long term are the ones whose investors are people they have known for twenty years rather than institutions with monthly debt payments hanging over every decision.

They close on something both of them believe and operate by. The dispensaries that build real loyalty are not the ones running the best promotions. They are the ones where the bud tender already knows what you drink before you say a word, where the connection is real, and where the customer keeps coming back because of it.

Direct, specific, and worth your time whether you are building a cannabis business, investing in one, or trying to understand what separates the operators who last from the ones who do not.

Topics covered: Veteran-owned cannabis business, military culture applied to operations, community giving in cannabis, cannabis M&A and debt risk, vertical integration margin math, competitor collaboration, dispensary floor culture, capital structure and financial survival, brand loyalty versus promotional discounting, cannabis industry consolidation.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Rob DiFazio is the founder and CEO of CNA Stores, a veteran-owned vertically integrated cannabis company with dispensaries in Haverhill and Amesbury, Massachusetts. A US Navy nuclear power program veteran, Rob built CNA with his partners around a simple principle: stronger together. CNA raises $20,000 to $25,000 per month for community organizations and runs programs including Snow Angels, which sends their team out to shovel for elderly and veteran residents across the North Shore.

Connect with Rob: cnastores.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO & CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public and private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

He is both the CEO & CFO, and the difference comes through in every conversation.

Connect with Matt:
linkedin.com/in/matthew-richman-508aa413
mellocannabis.com

New episodes of The Blunt Boardroom drop twice a month.

#TheBluntBoardroom #CannabisBusinessPodcast #VeteranOwnedBusiness #MassachusettsCannabis #CannabisCEO #CannabisOperator #VeteranEntrepreneur #CannabisIndustry #CommunityGiving #CannabisBusiness #MilitaryVeteran #Dispensary #CannabisMarketing #SmallBusiness #VeteranOwned

Most dispensaries are spending money to drive traffic to their website. Varun Patel thinks that is not the primary problem to solve.

In this episode, Matt sits down with Varun Patel and Lauren Laplante-Rottman from Spokes Digital to talk about what AI is actually doing to cannabis marketing right now, why the conversion problem is more important than the traffic problem, and what operators who are not paying attention are about to miss.

They get into why most cannabis marketing still operates like a traffic problem when it is actually a conversion problem. Why sending ten thousand people to a dispensary website does not mean anything if fifty percent of them cannot figure out what to buy. How AI budtender tools are evolving from basic product recommendation engines into something that could replicate the best consultation your floor staff has ever given, at eleven-thirty at night, to someone sitting on their couch.

Varun explains why cannabis AI has to operate differently from every other industry. You cannot pull training data from outside the store. The compliance constraints are real and the consequences of getting it wrong are serious. Today, the machine learning has to come from your own data, your own menu, your own customers. That encapsulation seems like a can be a limitation, but can also be a competitive advantage for operators who understand it.

They also cover what the relaxation of Massachusetts advertising restrictions actually means in practice, why the platform policies of Google and Meta matter as much as the state rules, and why 280(e) tax treatment has been quietly shaping every marketing spend decision in this industry for years and what federal rescheduling might do to that math.

And Lauren closes with something worth writing down: the dispensaries that win long term are not the ones with the lowest prices. They are the ones that are known outside their four walls. In the community. At local events. On the merch people wear in public. That is the brand that survives.

Direct, specific, and useful for any cannabis operator thinking about where marketing is going in 2026 and beyond.

Topics covered: AI in cannabis marketing, conversion rate optimization, AI budtender tools, customer segmentation, Google Ads AI optimization, GEO and generative engine optimization, Massachusetts advertising restrictions, 280(e) and marketing spend, wholesale brand strategy, community presence and brand loyalty.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Varun Patel is the CEO and founder of Spokes Digital, the number one cannabis AI and performance marketing agency in the United States. A former IBM executive with six years of international business experience across digital, energy, and e-commerce, Varun has helped over 200 cannabis and CBD brands build data-driven growth strategies. Connect with Varun: linkedin.com/in/varunpatel-spokes

Lauren Laplante-Rottman is the Chief Growth Officer at Spokes Digital and a Carnegie Mellon graduate with deep experience in strategic marketing, business planning, and cannabis industry growth. Based in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Connect with Lauren: linkedin.com/in/laurenlaplante

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO and CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public and private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

He rebuilt mello on one operating principle: run it like a real business. Financial discipline, compliance rigor, and a team culture that develops people rather than burns through them. Under his leadership, mello has grown into a multi-award-winning cannabis company with a dispensary serving the North Shore, a licensed delivery operation, and a valued wholesale partner to dispensaries across Massachusetts.

New episodes of The Blunt Boardroom drop twice a month.

#cannabispodcast #cannabismarketing #cannabisbusiness #AImarketing #cannabisindustry

Chris Fevry built two cannabis companies from scratch during COVID. No funding. No connections. Just a research rabbit hole and a co-founder willing to bet on an idea nobody had proven in Massachusetts yet.

Today he is the CEO and co-founder of Your Green Package, one of the only third-party cannabis transporters in the state with its own proprietary logistics software, and Dris, a licensed home delivery operator serving the Boston metro area. He is also a Massachusetts Social Equity Cannabis Advisory Board member, appointed by State Treasurer Debra Goldberg.

Matt and Chris recorded this conversation live at NECANN 2026 from the mello booth, one week after Massachusetts dropped two of the most significant regulatory changes the delivery market has seen: the move from a two-driver to a one-driver rule (which changed in November 2024), and the increase in the purchasing limit from one ounce to two.

They cover what those changes actually mean for delivery unit economics, why the average delivery basket is already double the in-store average and what the two-ounce limit does to that number, and how operators who built their businesses around the old cost structure need to think about what comes next.

They also get into the threat nobody in cannabis delivery wants to say out loud: Door Dash and Uber are watching. Chris explains why owning your customer data is the only real moat, and why companies that have been focused on brand loyalty are better positioned than the ones that competed on price.

And he tells the story of what it actually cost to build YGP from two cars and six drivers with no customers, why the social equity framework is real support and a harder road simultaneously, and what he would tell any founder standing at the point where the bills are due and the customers have not shown up yet.

Direct, specific, and useful for anyone operating in or adjacent to the Massachusetts cannabis market.

Topics covered: Cannabis delivery economics, the one-driver rule change, two-ounce purchasing limit, B2B cannabis transport, social equity in practice, Door Dash and the delivery threat, proprietary logistics technology, unit economics, building a cannabis brand from zero.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Christopher Fevry is the CEO and co-founder of Your Green Package and Dris Cannabis, and a Massachusetts Social Equity Cannabis Advisory Board member appointed by State Treasurer Debra Goldberg.

Connect with Christopher: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherfevry/

ABOUT THE HOST

Matt Richman is the CEO & CFO of mello Cannabis, an award-winning vertically integrated cannabis company based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former Deloitte auditor, he entered the cannabis industry in 2017 after two decades in corporate finance, public/private company CFO and COO roles, and M&A advisory.

He rebuilt mello on one operating principle: run it like a real business. Financial discipline, compliance rigor, and a team culture that develops people rather than burns through them. Under his leadership, mello has grown into a multi-award-winning cannabis company with a dispensary serving the North Shore, a licensed delivery operation, and a valued wholesale partner to dispensaries across Massachusetts.

On The Blunt Boardroom, Matt brings that same perspective to his guests. He asks the questions that operators actually need answered. The unit economics of delivery. The real impact of 280(e) on marketing spend decisions. What everybody wants to know about the new MA laws and pending federal rescheduling. What social equity actually looks like in practice, versus what the marketing materials suggest. How technology and AI are and will be impacting the cannabis operator.

He is both the CEO & CFO, and the difference comes through in every conversation.

Connect with Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-richman-508aa413/ https://mellocannabis.com/

New episodes of The Blunt Boardroom drop twice a month.