Free Big Weed by Christian Hageseth Page B

why your start-up costs allow for a few months of low or nonexistent earnings. But still—the clock was ticking. Mr. Pink’s money was not going to float us forever. When was I going to see some fat profits?
    Looking back, I can see that the handwriting was on the wall the whole time. I was just too blind to see it.
    Entrepreneurs are fond of talking about the mistakes businesses make. One of the classics is the business that grew too fast. Its owners pump too much of their capital into growth, the organization doesn’t know how to absorb the new paradigm, the system becomes top-heavy and then crumbles. But there is also the phenomenon of not sizing your start-up appropriately. In our case, starting out small wasn’t our only problem. We started out small, inefficient, naive, and paranoid.
    Adam and I were both naive. As the boss, I should have known to ask better questions. Show me a sample of your weed, for starters. But there were others: What’s the biggest grow you’ve ever run? How would you size a facility to grow 1,800 plants? What would you do differently when dealing with so many plants?
    We were sizing ourselves out of the market from the very beginning. For example, a modern, state-of-the-art indoor grow does indeed divide its space into smaller rooms, but not as small as Adam had done. And because we had simply moved into those existingrooms in our facility, we hadn’t started a large grow per se but several very small grows. That was a huge mistake out of the gate.
    Instead of hiring an electrician to come install a new electrical system that would allow us to switch on the lights and equipment in each room from a central box, we relied on Adam’s labyrinthine system of running cheap lights and extension cords connected to lightweight consumer lighting timers. Our electrical outlets looked like the ones fire departments warn everyone about at Christmas time, when foolish people stuff eighteen plugs into the same outlet to keep their holiday decorations going.
    Because we were doing things cheap and small-minded, we had unwittingly introduced glaring inefficiencies into the system. Four small grow rooms meant needing four different air conditioners, each running at the same time. Had we designed the warehouse to have one large grow room, we could have gotten by using the one large, efficient AC unit already situated on the roof. But we didn’t know better at the time.
    If your equipment is redundant, then you’ve introduced too many moving parts to your simple ecosystem. You know the old rule: Too many parts equals that many more breakdowns. Adam wasn’t so much a grower or master gardener as he was a handyman. Much of his time and energy was spent running around trying to fix broken equipment. At that point, you’re just killing plants because your system is getting in the way of the product’s growth cycle.
    To be fair to both of us, the looming disaster wasn’t all our fault. As our second harvest was coming close to fruition, our roof sprang a leak. The landlord summoned a roofer who swooped in to patch the leak with tar and pebble. But the blowtorch he used to seal the tar set fire to the roof’s insulation.
    Smoke started pouring into our workspace.
    Other than the roofer, no one was on site at the time. Even though they managed to suppress the fire, the smoke damage was extensive.
    Plants breathe through their leaves. Too many of ours got a lungful of smoke. They were goners in a matter of days. Our second harvest was as disappointing as the first.
    I had private talks with Mr. Pink where I’d express my frustrations, and he was always a good listener, a true mensch to deal with. He’d let me go off on tangents, and then he’d bring me down to earth. “Okay,” he’d say, “you’ve been fucking this up, so how are we going to turn it around? Here’s what I’d do . . .”
    I have always appreciated his