In March 2020, millions of people worldwide hunkered down at home to contain the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.  

Some of Texas Original Compassionate Cultivation (TOCC)’s 29 employees did the same. Those not critical to the physical daily operations of the vertically integrated medical cannabis company in Manchaca, Texas, supported social distancing recommendations by carrying out their duties from makeshift home offices, making it safer for rest of the team to mask up and press on at the facility. Pandemic or not, everyone at TOCC had an important role—and an essential one, even: to grow, manufacture and deliver cannabis medicine to Texans who need it most.

CEO Morris Denton believes the resolve of TOCC’s team to forge ahead during this chaotic and uncertain period can be directly attributed to the culture the business has fostered since its founding in 2017.  

“Within the company, there is a real purpose-driven nature,” Denton says. “Everyone understands what it is that they do and how what they do contributes to the well-being of the patients that we serve. So there’s this real connective tissue … between what we do in our everyday operations and how it’s changing someone’s life.”

Photo courtesy of Texas Original Compassionate Cultivation
Morris Denton, CEO, Texas Original Compassionate Cultivation

As a result of that carefully crafted culture, TOCC earned the No. 1 ranking in Cannabis Dispensary’s 2021 Best Cannabis Companies to Work For list. 

Striving to Be the Gold Standard

Long before COVID-19 reached its community, the building of TOCC’s small-but-mighty team had been centered around versatility and example setting.

As the first of only a handful of operators in perhaps the country’s most restrictive medical cannabis program—establishing a solid team was imperative to building trust not only within their own walls, but also with the Texas community and state regulators.

RELATED: How Compassionate Cultivation Differentiates Itself in Texas With In-House Breeding Program

“We are headquartered in Texas, but we consist of a bunch of Texans. We’re not an operator that has licenses in other states and has interest in other states. One hundred percent of our focus is on our business in Texas and serving the great people of Texas. As a result, we feel a real responsibility to create a business that can serve the market in an outstanding way,” Denton says. “We know that our future is entirely dependent on our ability to run our business on transparency and integrity in order to create the opportunity for our legislature to expand the program so more people can get safe, legal access to this medicine.”

Therefore, TOCC’s month-long hiring process is rigorous. Candidates are interviewed multiple times and with many members of the team, with questions focused on soft skills just as much, if not more, than the ability to simply do the job. “If we get the right person that demonstrates the right culture that wants to learn, that wants to challenge themselves, that wants to grow and wants to make history, then typically in this type of business we can employ that person anywhere. If we hire for culture as opposed of hiring for skills, we’re going to be a lot better off,” Denton adds.

© Texas Original Compassionate Cultivation
Employees receive training in all aspects of TOCC's business to better understand the company as a whole. 

New employees get a taste of the culture, but they also truly experience all facets of the operation. According to TOCC Chief of Staff & Culture Christina Burke, no matter where their day-to-day job will ultimately be, all employees receive training in cultivation, manufacturing, delivery and retail operations to realize a holistic view of the company and its mission.

“It gives employees a high level of confidence in our processes … especially our dispensary employees. When someone calls and asks about our cultivation techniques and our extraction and testing, they are confident in answering those questions,” Burke says.

That cross-training proved to be critical when 2020 came along. For example, even members of the leadership team, including Denton, Burke and Chief Revenue Officer Kelly Roland became delivery drivers during those critical months to help rotate shifts and keep up with the demand.

“One of the groups that was really high on my radar for concern was the drivers because … they can drive 2,000 miles easily over a couple of days. Texas is a really big state. They’re going door-to-door to patients, so their exposure level was potentially one of the highest,” Roland says, adding that 60% to 70% of their business is done by home delivery, even before the pandemic. Drivers would also frequently stay in hotels, which was deeply concerning, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. TOCC equipped drivers with extra personal protective equipment (PPE), including sanitizer to spray down the rooms. Roland and the team were particularly moved by delivery drivers’ commitment during this time. “They weren’t scared, they took all the proper precautions. They knew this was the last piece: giving the medicine, handing it to a patient,” she says. “Looking back at what the drivers went through and the risk they put themselves [in]. Despite all the PPE in the world, it was pretty incredible dedication.”

Back at the facility, TOCC also came up with a game plan for safety. TOCC leaders established daily, half-hour check-ins; rotated shifts company-wide every two weeks so employees could reduce their risk of exposure from others; created standard operating procedures (SOPs) to let employees know how to keep themselves safe while they were at work and outside of work; provided refills of PPE to employees and their families. “We took it extremely seriously,” Denton says. As a result, more than nine months passed before they had a positive case.   

“We were going to do whatever we had to,” Denton says. “It was just a very impressive period of time…. I’m just blown away by the commitment and passion the team possesses. You can’t train that. People either have it and they bring it with them, and they instill it in others, or they don’t. That kind of culture—it’s been an incredible thing to watch and to be a part of.”

Treating Employees Well & Positioning for Growth

Unlimited sick time is one of the many benefits TOCC offers to full-time employees. Health benefits, including medical, dental and vision, are 100% covered. A 401(k) retirement plan with a “generous match” is offered, as are an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and competitive vacation and personal days.

“Especially in a company this small, sometimes you don’t see health benefits and those sorts of things,” Roland says. “It’s great thing [Denton and the Board of Directors] offer these to employees, even if they don’t have to as a company.”

Roland adds that a more intangible benefit of being a TOCC employee is its overall transparency. “We share how the company is doing financially, where the growth is coming from, what are we worried about, what’s happening in the industry,” she says. “I think we’ve done a good job as a company—and Morris, [as] a leader—in … helping [employees] understand how the business is run and why we make certain decisions. It’s a benefit of being small but something you can hold onto.”

“There’s this real connective tissue … between what we do in our everyday operations and how it’s changing someone’s life.” – Morris Denton, CEO, Texas Original Compassionate Cultivation 

Continuing education is also an important facet to strengthening the company, and so the company regularly sponsors employees to attend virtual classes, trade shows, and other programs so they can expand their cannabis knowledge and become more well-rounded team members. Within the company, TOCC establishes “mini task forces” that can fall beyond the scope of day-to-day operations that anyone with interest in a particular area can join to learn and help solve important issues cross-departmentally.

And when it comes to investing back into the community, TOCC employees volunteer their time to and support the Epilepsy Foundation of Texas, Texas Mothers Advocating Medical Marijuana for Autism (MAMMAs), the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, Any Baby Can (which provides support to children with special health needs), and the Autism Society of Texas.

Roland believes all of these facets of the company directly correlate to employee retention.

The Path Forward

With all that the TOCC has accomplished so far—Denton and his leadership team know they have much more to do to improve the lives of Texas and reward their employees for helping them on that journey.

Burke says she’d like to eliminate the phrase, “You don’t have a qualifying condition,” in the state of Texas. “I’d just like to be able to just say, ‘Yes, we can help you,’” she says.

“There’s really not a worse moment than having a patient calling in and [sharing] an incredibly moving and sometimes tragic story with you about the journey they’re on … and at the end of that having to tell them, ‘I can’t help you.’ And that unfortunately happens every day,” Roland adds. “It’s a horrible thing to have to say to someone at the end of a conversation and not to have to do that would be pretty incredible.”

Denton believes there’s a clear path forward to improve access. “We have a very precise vision, and the vision is to transform Texas through the power and truth of this plant and the medicine it creates,” he says. “And then we’ve got a few operating tenets [which] are to create the highest-quality, best-in-class medicine; to operate with transparency and integrity as a reflection of the values of the state of Texas; and the third is to create a business that is self-sustaining and can return significant value to its investors and to its employees. So that third operating tenet is something that’s really important to me. And in order for that to happen, we need to see legislative expansion. We need more Texans to get safe and legal access to this medicine. So our agenda, which is predominantly, if not exclusively, patient-driven, [is] driving that through our patients to the legislature.”

Denton says that patient stories will help the legislature expand access to medical cannabis to more people, with more conditions being improved, as well as increased levels of THC.

“When that happens, then this business becomes a self-sustaining, valuable business that can provide significant returns to its investors as well as to its employees. So that’s what I wanna do. I want to be able to reward our employees for their hard work, for their commitment, for their passion, for their integrity, with significant value.”

Every other Friday, in the weeks when Velvet isn’t providing its employees their bi-weekly pay, the Martinez, Calif., dispensary provides them with samples of new products to try out before they start selling them.

“We like to say that we’re not a sales organization—we’re an organization of ‘consultationists,’” says company President and Chief Operating Officer Matt Morea. “It’s our job to listen, to ask follow-up questions and be able to make … recommendations on products in different categories that might be a bit more to that consumer’s needs. If you haven’t experienced it and you’re not aware of the taste, the smell, the effect, the onset time, it’s really difficult to effectively make recommendations.”

Velvet's dispensary in Martinez, Calif.
Photo by Justin Bowers

Handing out these product samples to employees not only helps Velvet, No. 2 on Cannabis Dispensary’s 2021 Best Cannabis Companies to Work For – Dispensaries list. It represents one way the company is dedicated to offering an inviting and supportive company culture for its majority-women team and, in turn, doing the same for its patients and customers.

“You never know what culture’s going to be like until you put a bunch of people into a building,” says Velvet Chairman and CEO Farid Harrison. “We put a lot of time and energy into making that right and making sure everybody gets along. I think we really view that as a top-down process, so we’re very involved, we’re very available for our team.”

Velvet circulates a monthly employee newsletter that Morea says recognizes various aspects of employees’ work and lives: hiring and promotional announcements, birthdays, anniversaries and times when staff have worked well together and received positive reviews from patients and customers. (The newsletter also shares information about company performance milestones, products entering the inventory and new marketing initiatives.)

Out of Velvet’s 46 employees, roughly 63% are women. “From a leadership standpoint, we created six internal positions or promotions [in 2020],” Morea says. “Five out of those six … have gone to qualifying females on the team.” The company announced three more promotions in 2021, two of which went to women. And when evaluating job candidates, Morea says managers form panels to incorporate a variety of perspectives in the hiring process and better “identify different strengths and potential red flags.”

Prior to founding Velvet in 2018 and opening its doors in 2019, Harrison and Morea had become well-acquainted with the industry. Morea previously worked at CannaCraft and Privateer Holdings, and Harrison, who has largely a finance and real-estate background, had become good friends with a Colorado cannabis operator. “We both saw an industry evolving early on, and we said, ‘We’re going to do this,” Harrison says.

“As we went down this path, we saw it as an amalgamation of a bunch of other, different retail customer-service-type businesses,” he says. “We tried to take best practices from a lot of different industries, so to speak. I think one of the key things that happened for us from the very jump was we brought a leadership group that had significant experience in high-throughput business, specifically coffee.” The group consists of people who worked at Philz Coffee, a chain based in nearby San Francisco.

In addition to being led by experienced retail professionals, Morea says budtenders are motivated in the form of being able to participate in an incentive plan, through which they can earn up to $850 per month, or $10,200 annually. And, listing other perks, he says, “We’ve got paid training; paid time off; we offer healthcare benefits for anybody who’s working full time, which at Velvet, we consider 30 hours a week or more, on average.”

The Velvet leadership team prioritizes giving staff a healthy work-life balance.
Photo courtesy of Velvet

The dispensary is committed to providing employees a healthy work-life balance, says its Head of People and Places Victoria Long: “I think we’ve also been especially focused on that with COVID—making sure folks have the time off that they need in case they need to get a test or they feel they’ve been potentially exposed; being really sensitive to what’s happening in the world and allowing that time to feel like they’ve got boundaries to work out of the office where they can; and for our retail staff, [we] give them the time off, paid time off where it’s applicable, give them what they need to in this time of craziness.”

Also on the topic of work-life balance, the company offers 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave to both full- and part-time employees, the latter of whom Morea says receive a 90-day average of earnings. Long says she’s excited because Velvet's team currently has two expecting mothers. “In addition to that, we’re doing some good stuff, like flexible options, making sure the employee has the appropriate schedule when they return back to work, not feeling overwhelmed,” she says.

Morea says this benefit not only helps employees and their families, but also gives them an edge in an increasingly competitive market.

“Part of that, when you're in the Bay Area, is competing with the technology companies,” Morea says. “We felt like it was really important to have not just a maternity leave, but … a parental leave policy that gives our employees flexibility to go spend time they need with new children, to bond—and at the same time, not be sacrificing other income.”

Velvet also grants new fathers up to 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave. “… We do grant them the same amount of time off and help them identify any potential resources that exist in California to recover their missed earnings,” Morea says.

During the next two to three years, Velvet hopes to expand from one location to up to a dozen stores across California.

In the nearer term, Velvet has plans for a second location in Los Angeles’ Eagle Rock neighborhood—which it tentatively expects to open in summer 2021. It would double the company’s retail space from about 2,400 to 4,800 square feet. That location would first bring in about 30 new hires, then, Morea expects, Velvet would increase that team to about 45.

Just as this expanding business strives to treat its employees well, those employees exude positivity in the store. “From the time you pull in our parking lot to the time you walk out the door, every single person is going to greet you with a smile on their face,” Morea says. “They’re going to say ‘Hello,’ they’re going to thank you for coming in, they’re obviously going to help identify the products that might fit whatever it is you’re looking for.” And they may have recently tried those product themselves.

Beth Thuna, managing member and CEO of the woman- and Latinx-owned HPC Dispensary in Port Hueneme, Calif., is keenly aware of the nurturing effect that her leadership has on her team.

“The whole ‘family feeling’ is very important,” Thuna says. “It’s also highly competitive out here. You’re working against the big boys. … Having this great team that is there to support you … helps to continue our growth as a female-owned brand.”

To help support her staff, which has rapidly grown from eight employees to 52 since its founding in 2017, Thuna puts in significant effort to make them feel appreciated.

While HPC Dispensary offers its employees health benefits, continuing education opportunities and also expanded its paid time off (PTO) offering in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic—Thuna stepped up this year to also offer cash bonuses to her team, including an extra $100 per week for the first eight weeks of the pandemic, as well as additional cash bonuses over the holiday to say thank you for toughing out this unprecedented year.

© HPC Dispensary

As an essential business, HPC Dispensary still sees as many as 500 to 700 customers on its busiest days. The high-volume traffic can create a stressful environment, especially with new capacity restrictions and other pandemic-related adjustments. Thuna is a firm believer that when her team is happy, customers see and appreciate that, too. Therefore, it’s always been important for Thuna to also create camaraderie through both individual employee recognition efforts as well as team-building activities.

Some of those efforts may be small—such as catering lunch for the team two times per month. Others are a bit outside the box. For example, every month HPC Dispensary conducts a high-end photoshoot with partner brands for use in marketing materials both in-store and on digital platforms. Instead of hiring models, HPC Dispensary budtenders get in front of the camera themselves. “They get paid as models with a totally separate model fee. We go to different locations, it’s a really fun, morale-boosting [activity],” Thuna says.

HPC Dispensary also has dedicated a “Zen Room”—which boasts comfy couches, dim lighting, coloring books, local art, and more—that employees are free to use (one at a time during the pandemic) whenever they feel a bit stressed out or have a tense customer interaction—even if it’s not during a scheduled break.

“We have a very talented staff, and many of them are musicians. One in particular brought his guitar—so any tools they need in order to help with their relaxation, they’re more than welcome to come in and bring them to the Zen Room,” Thuna adds.

© HPC Dispensary

Employees also band together for common causes within their Port Hueneme community. HPC Dispensary team members donate their time, as well as monetary contributions, to Hueneme Beach to help clean the coastline, as well as clean and re-stock the beach’s public restrooms. This year, the team also made 30 pet blankets to donate to a local animal hospital. HPC also partners with California nonprofit Love Earth WEC to evaluate their own practices to reduce their carbon footprint. They’re scored by the nonprofit based on the practices they already have in place and make efforts to improve that score. Recently, they’ve switched to compostable consumer exit bags and utensils in their kitchen.

Establishing this strong, family-oriented culture at HPC Dispensary’s first location is paramount to the company’s success. “Even during COVID, we still wanted to be a really fun, happy experience to shop. And I feel that we’ve achieved that even during these difficult times,” Thuna says. “We want to bring that environment to our future location, and with this management team we have here at this initial location, we know that our culture will extend to any other location we’re in.”