Elliott Marshall lost his grandma to breast cancer when he was five. She was 54. That’s when he first learned how dangerous the terminal illness can be. Unfortunately, he would be reminded 29 more times.
“I’ve probably lost upwards of 30 family members to cancer,” Marshall says. “It instilled something into me at a young age.”
Witnessing the pain and suffering his family endured, Marshall vowed to help those incapable of helping themselves. It’s what motivated him to open Proper RX in 2010, a delivery-only medical dispensary serving California’s Bay Area.
“Our whole goal was to focus on the folks [who had limited access to their meds], the truly sick, the bedridden,” Marshall says. “That was who we wanted to focus on because we noticed the [brick-and-mortar] dispensaries had all the active people.”
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Today, Proper RX employs 22 people, has an award-winning edibles line, serves roughly 130 patients daily and has an average delivery time between 30 and 60 minutes—depending on traffic. Despite not having a brick-and-mortar storefront, business is booming, according to Marshall, but it wasn’t always that way. Especially in the beginning when he was trying to break into the industry.
A Bahamas-native, Marshall made his way to California via Nebraska. In 2010, Marshall reconnected with his friend Erika McCartney (now vice president of Proper RX), and after working as distributors for a while, the two founded Proper RX when they realized “no one was focused on delivery,” says Marshall. The two quickly ran into challenges, most notably with access to funds. “That’s still my burden today as I try to compete with these conglomerates. I’m not part of a huge ownership group,” Marshall says.
Another issue was convincing customers to believe in his business and product, but due to limited cannabis marketing options at the time, Marshall couldn’t communicate with the public to make his case.
“The only things we could do was attempt to get more involved in the industry. So, we started doing a lot more events and started showcasing our quality,” Marshall says. “That really helped a lot in our local areas.”
Obtaining the products Proper RX needed to carry to compete with big, well-funded dispensaries was also difficult for Marshall. “There were a lot of people that when we had appointments to meet, they would come to the meeting and see that I was a black man and leave. They would say, ‘I don’t do business with people like you.’” So, Marshall grew his own.
"Our SOPs [standard operating procedures] are such that I would send my mom on a delivery. That’s how comfortable I am.”
He estimates that he grew roughly 80 percent of Proper RX’s products personally during the business’s first four years of operation. During that time, Marshall was the only employee. He served as the grower, dispatcher, delivery driver and manager. The business was also operating 14 hours a day and, “it burned me out,” Marshall says. Growers noticed the quality of Marshall’s products, he says, and that is what allowed him to “start breaking some barriers.”
Today, Marshall has cut back on growing, and Proper RX has its own producers and distributors, and Marshall is receiving access to more products than ever before. “The reason we exist here is because we’ve built a really strong network of vendors and we carry a lot of exclusive products,” Marshall says. Proper RX offers flower, extracts, topicals, CBD products and its own edibles line, “Infusion,” the latter being its most popular product line. Marshall says Proper RX’s menu offers a minimum of 30 strains at all times. Proper RX has a 3,000-square-foot cultivation facility in Oakland and a 2,100-square-foot facility in San Francisco.
Proper RX currently uses a mix between company cars and employee cars for delivery. The company eventually wants to have all delivery vehicles be company cars, according to Marshall. Regardless if the car is employee or company owned, there won’t be any markings on it so it will be as discreet as possible. Marshall says customers ask for discretion, but that the policy also stems from previous experiences.
“I was robbed twice in my first year when I was a delivery driver. The mistake I made was that I put we were a dispensary on wheels on my card. So, people would call, and I’d come do a sign up and that’s when I would get robbed. I had two people pull guns on me,” Marshall says. “We put things in place after that, and we haven’t had one problem since. Our SOPs [standard operating procedures] are such that I would send my mom on a delivery. That’s how comfortable I am.”
Marshall and upper management are the only employees who visit new patients and perform in-house consultations. Not only does this protect employees, but it also ensures the patient has a positive first experience with the company. Proper RX employees go through 90 days of training to help ensure that after the in-home consultation, the patient receives the same level of service and care.
“It is imperative that our drivers are knowledgeable,” Marshall says. “They have to know everything on our menu. If a patient comes to us and says they are looking for an edible, and we also know that that patient has cancer, I don’t want that driver recommending any products that have sugar in it.”
Despite the success and growth Proper RX has enjoyed over the years, it still knows it’s a small fish in a big pond. Marshall must constantly look for ways to set himself apart. “We compete with the big dogs, and in order to compete, we have to innovate, and that’s what we do,” Marshall says.
“The reason we exist here is because we’ve built a really strong network of vendors and we carry a lot of exclusive products.”
Proper RX has much planned for 2018, including its newly minted Blunt Bar. The Blunt Bar is a “build-your-own-blunt” option that will feature different companies’ flower and concentrate products each month, wrapped in a paper of the patient’s choosing. The idea came to Marshall after a patient with rheumatoid arthritis asked the company to roll her a blunt because her hands hurt too badly.
Proper RX has also applied for a recreational license. If all goes according to plan, Proper RX will open a storefront in 2018 and serve only recreational patients from the location. Marshall also has developed “weekend” boxes to serve the recreational market. The boxes will include various cannabis products and accessories. Marshall has lined up various celebrity endorsements to market the product.
While Marshall does plan to cross into the adult-use market, his focus will always be on delivering medicine to those in need and who are unable to go to a dispensary. “Right now, you can get groceries delivered, you can get everything delivered. I believe once people trust [delivery services] and once [delivery services] maintain a high level of integrity with themselves and the people they hire, it will be a beautiful thing.”
Top image: Proper RX logo and Elliott Marshall, Courtesy of Proper RX
