This article originally appeared in the May/June issue of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.
Brooke Gehring sat behind a desk at her corporate banking job as the foreclosures piled higher. It was 2009 and, with a background in loan compliance, her days were unenviably spent handling dashed dreams and financial ruin during the saddest days of the Great Recession.
But the economic collapse seemed to have a silver lining as her downtown Denver phone rang repeatedly with inquiries about large, bank-owned properties that could be used for cannabis businesses.
“Marijuana wasn’t on my mind. I hadn’t even been in a dispensary,” she recalls. “It wasn’t like my goal that year was to leave an opportunity where I could climb the corporate ladder and get into marijuana.”
But the inquiries set off a light bulb. As Colorado prepared to regulate its medical marijuana market, she decided to leave the corporate gig and create her own job description.
To read the full article in our May/June edition, click here.
