Multistate cannabis operator Cresco Labs announced last week that it had hired Greg Butler, a former marketing executive for Molson Coors, to fill the newly created position of Chief Commercial Officer and to help scale the company’s U.S. market presence.

Butler, who has a background in driving brand growth for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Walgreens, will be responsible for commercial strategic planning, bolstering Cresco’s sales and marketing teams with new talent, leading the launch of new products, and M&A strategies and integration.

Here, Butler discusses how his CPG experience will benefit him in this new role, as well as what he hopes to achieve as Cresco’s first chief commercial officer.

Cannabis Business Times: What does the new Chief Commercial Officer position entail, and what are some of your key responsibilities in this new role?

Photo courtesy of Cresco Labs

Greg Butler: [This position is responsible for] scaling how we operate, but also building the right teams [and] the right go-to-market strategy to compete in the different regions we operate in.

I oversee all of our own brands—Cresco, Mindy’s, Remedi, Reserve—and how those brands not only start to build at a national level, but also [how they] operate locally. Our retail brand, Sunnyside*, [recently launched] here in Illinois [when] Illinois went adult-use, and that brand will be rolling across our footprint, as well. [I will be] managing that brand and how that brand comes to life across all our retail stores and across states. For my team, we think about partner brands, so M&A integration, whether it’s acquiring companies, which we just concluded with Origin House in California, or other potential assets we may want to acquire. That all now sits within my team, as well as the review of what we’ve acquired and how we integrate them into Cresco Labs.

Then, it’s also commercial planning. Commercial planning is the lifeline of all big CPG [companies]. It’s the thing that tells you, what brands should you be selling? How much of those brands? How much supply is necessary to support those brands? That commercial planning function is a key component of this role, as well.

CBT: How will your background as a marketing executive with Molson Coors and other consumer packaged goods companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Walgreens benefit you in this new role with Cresco Labs?

GB: I always joke that [cannabis is] probably the one industry that I think all of my previous experiences are applicable to. Starting my career at Pfizer, I was very focused on medical marketing. How do you drive patient education and patient trust and healthcare professional trust within your brand? And in cannabis today, a big chunk of the market across multiple states is a medical patient. How medical patients and the healthcare market engage with brands is [different from] how consumers want to engage with brands when it’s for personal or recreational use.

Then, I moved into capital markets and did a lot of work advising private equity-owned companies [on] how to scale or restructure, which also is at play at Cresco Labs. We’re thinking about scale and building our business for the future.

At Molson Coors, it’s the experience of, how do you build brands that consumers love?

Cannabis is a fascinating product where, if you think about it, it’s one of the very few products where the same product is used for a medical use but also can be used by an everyday consumer for personal use. How [do] you build brands to connect with those two very different consumers who have very different needs?

CBT: How is the cannabis industry different from the other industries you’ve worked in? Is there anything that is particularly unique?

GB: The state-by-state regulations are fairly unique. The challenges we have in cannabis [are] to build not only national brands but also a national company operating within the unique specifics of state regulations. That’s different, I think, from traditional CPG. While it’s probably the most extreme version of state-by-state [regulations], it’s not that different from how states regulate the three-tier system in alcohol or how you have to think about messaging and what you can and can’t say in medical markets. So, it is unique in that we’re operating in a collection of states but adhering to the regulations of each state is not a huge challenge that CPG companies don’t see.

The second thing is that we have to constantly remind ourselves about the different consumers of cannabis. How we’ve structured our portfolio strategy is we build the occasion-based segmentation, which looks at, what are the different occasions in which cannabis is being used? What are the unique needs of those occasions, and who is the consumer of those occasions? Unlike pharmaceuticals, where it’s a prescription-led product which is being [prescribed] for a specific medical condition, cannabis can be used for a medical condition, for supporting general health and wellness, [but] cannabis can [also] be used as a personal escape—same product, very different occasions, very different consumer needs. Our jobs as marketers is to make sure these brands are designed with an understanding of who the consumer is and what they’re looking for.

CBT: What are you most excited about as you take on this new role?

GB: I think [another] component of cannabis, which I think is probably the most unique, is we’re at the very beginning of this industry. We’re thinking about where the industry needs to go, but also starting to focus on education and building trust with consumers, patients, stakeholders and customers. I think you can’t take any of that for granted. This is the very beginning. This industry is already large, it has many facets to it, but we are at the very beginning of new consumers entering cannabis, trying to understand how to use the product [and] what product is right for them. We have regulators understanding how the industry needs to be regulated. We have business stakeholders trying to figure out, how do the financials of cannabis work? So, with that level of newness comes a real impetus for us to really focus on education, transparency of our operations and building trust with all stakeholders that we engage with in a much more emphasized way than in perhaps traditional CPG where the ways of working, how to evaluate a company and how to rethink a product are already down.

Most people who consume a Miller Lite know how a Miller Lite impacts them and they know how many Miller Lites they can consume before they’re impaired, and that doesn’t exist for many consumers in cannabis today. So, how do we educate people to become more comfortable, more aware and more informed about what goes into their products is something I’m very excited about as we pioneer the next chapter of this industry.

CBT: What are some of your shorter- and longer-term goals in this new position?

GB: In the short-term, as we are scaling across states, [one goal is] ensuring that we are building the commercial backbone here at Cresco Labs to ensure that our patients and our customers have access to quality products. [We are] building that infrastructure now, as we enter California through Origin House, to ensure that we have our cars and trucks and [that our] sales teams have the right portfolio to service those customers. Here in Illinois, we are scaling our operational footprint to ensure that we are supplying the demands of this market, which is pretty unique. How do we ensure that all of our medical patients have access to products? And then how do we offer the right products to consumers who might be trying adult-use cannabis for the first time? There’s quite a big lift that we are currently undertaking to make sure that we have those operating structures and standards to ensure we are meeting those needs.

The second [goal] is to continue to build our brands. We have a portfolio of incredible brands that have all been uniquely designed for unique occasions. We’ll continue to scale those brands across the states we’re operating in.

The third [goal], now that we’re building a national retail brand under Sunnyside*, is ensuring the locations in which we rebrand [or] build a Sunnyside* deliver on the promise we made on what Sunnyside* stands for in every market where we operate.

Longer-term, I think it’s continuing to ensure that as we look at our geographical footprint, we have the most strategic footprint of any cannabis operator—that’s access to consumers and access to patients. [We are focused on] building the right infrastructure of our operations to ensure that we’re delivering products of the highest quality that are consistent and are standard across our footprint.

I think long-term, anyone who’s taking a leadership position in cannabis has to be focused on our collective goal, which is to help normalize this industry and professionalize how we operate in this industry. There are a lot of things that we’re going to be bringing to market which either help to continue to normalize cannabis use for those who want to use cannabis, and then also [to] professionalize how cannabis operators must engage with customers, consumers, government stakeholders and all community groups that are connected to the industry.

There is so much opportunity that exists for cannabis. I think so many patients and consumers are just starting to understand how this could fit into their life. I hope my addition to this industry also [offers] even more confidence to those who are looking for a career in cannabis, that it makes them really believe in where this industry can go and how exciting a job or career in this industry can be. We’ve never seen anything quite like what this industry has the potential to be. I think that the smart minds and creative minds that we can bring into this space is what’s going to drive this industry to its full potential. I’m hoping that they come to Cresco, that many more join in what we can build.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.