‘Happy, Humble and Hardworking:’ Q&A With Kris Krane

The president and founder of 4Front Ventures, which operates Mission dispensaries in six states, shares tips on how to hire the right people and the lessons learned from expanding to the adult-use market.

4Front ventures President and Founder Kris Krane will be speaking at the 2020 Cannabis Conference, which takes place April 21-23 at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino.
4Front ventures President and Founder Kris Krane will be speaking at the 2020 Cannabis Conference, which takes place April 21-23 at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino.
Krane photo courtesy of 4Front Ventures.

4Front Ventures operates about a dozen dispensaries across six states and has its origins in medical markets. As more state adult-use programs go online, 4Front has transitioned its Mission brand of stores to serve that new segment, most recently in Illinois and at the Om of Medicine store in Ann Arbor. Adjusting to a new culture and customer base has its challenges, says Kris Krane, president and founder of 4Front. We spoke with Krane about how the company had adapted to new markets and what he has learned in the process. 

Cannabis Dispensary: When reflecting on the most important lessons you’ve learned when developing Mission dispensaries, what is one that comes to mind first as being the most significant?

Kris Krane: One of the biggest lessons, although this has been part of our philosophy since the beginning, is the people you have in the stores make a huge difference. Hiring the right kind of people and making sure they have the right training and that they have fully bought into the philosophy we try to run our stores by I think is incredibly important. We really pride ourselves on not just hiring anybody who could be working in any retail store … but really hiring people who are happy, humble and hardworking. They have to check those boxes in the first 10 minutes of the interview, otherwise they don’t get that job. They have to be happy to help people and love talking to people about cannabis. The customers really pick up on that and appreciate that, and it’s a great way to build brand loyalty.

CD: What have you done to ensure you hire the right people, especially as you expand to new markets across multiple states?

KK: Centralizing that type of hiring protocol and the training around it has been really critical. It’s not that difficult … with one or two stores and you have all the same people doing the hiring and training. But if you’re trying to build a retail brand where you have that same culture across multiple states, in different parts of the country, in different demographic areas, too – that’s much more challenging. It’s difficult to have a very similar feel inside of a store say in Georgetown, Massachusetts, as it is in the South Shore of Chicago. In order to do that, you have to really be able to centralize those hiring practices. You have to be able to document [hiring practices] and train the people who are doing the hiring and centralizing the training itself. We have a whole training team that’s largely based out of Phoenix, and when we open a new store, the team goes to that state and trains the staff and makes sure they not only know the nuts and bolts of their position, but the culture that we are trying to build. I go to every one of these trainings. I don’t necessarily stay all week, but I go give a talk on the history of the company, why we do what we do, our roots in advocacy, and why it’s important to make sure our patients feel valued and respected in the stores. That’s difficult to do across so many stores unless you’ve documented that and assembled a team that’s responsible for maintaining that documentation and running those training programs.  

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CD: What would you do differently today when launching a dispensary?

KK: I think we would probably build our stores from the get-go to better handle expanding volume. All of the stores we opened, we opened in medical markets. We were not seeing crazy numbers or crazy volume by in large, [which allowed us to] build a certain kind of patient and customer operational culture. We’ve been learning, particularly in Illinois, as you scale up to a really high-volume store, you can lose some of what made that experience unique early on because you can’t spend as much time with every customer. I think we would have thought more early on about how do we make sure that as we expand into adult-use and higher sales volumes, we’re able to adequately handle the increased customer volume without losing the really important one-on-one consultations. Ultimately the answer there is you need to be able to target those patients in particular who really need that extra care and make sure there are people there to provide that for them. But also come up with a system that works for the customer, particularly in the adult-use market, who doesn't want a lot of one-on-one time, who just wants to be able to buy their products and go.

CD: How do you encourage your team to do this kind of reflection about how to improve, and why is it important?

KK: You have to make sure the team understands how to be nimble and make adjustments as things go along, but I don’t think that has been too much of a challenge for us. I think people understand the industry that we’re in. Employees in a medical store understand that this may go adult-use down the road. You make sure everyone understands from the beginning that this is an ever-evolving industry that will require adjustments as the industry grows and changes.

CD:  What is one key takeaway you hope attendees will bring back to their business after your sessions at Cannabis Conference?

KK: Customer service really matters, and having an authentic brand that really reflects the values of your company really matters in terms of bringing in customers who are going to be loyal to you. Customers generally can tell when they go into a store if that store stands for something more than just selling them a product. I think people connect more with brands that they can really connect with. Younger consumers, millennial consumers want to shop at places where they feel a connection to something bigger, and when you think of stores that are going to win out, it’s going to be the ones that connect to their customers. That’s not to take away from quality product at a good price point. It’s a combination. If you can strike that balance of providing a great experience and great culture with good quality product at a good price point, that’s the winning formula for retail operations.

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