10 Questions With Tom Wilczynski

After expanding and rebranding, the owner of Smokey’s 420 House hopes everyone will watch them grow.


Tom W Initial 28 Fmt
Photos: Brian Kraft Photography

When Tom Wilczynski was starting to connect to the world of medical cannabis, it was mostly out of public sight. He tracked down treatments for his wife, who was fighting cancer, and did it quietly. After starting Cannabis Care Wellness Center in Colorado with a focus on medical cannabis, he had some compliance issues and was shut down; but he reworked the dispensary and cultivation facility, took major steps to stay ahead of changing regulations and was able to get his license reinstated. Now, with a more specialized staff and a brand-new brand, he is comfortable moving into the public eye. And, in fact, he wants everyone to see Smokey’s 420 House, in real time, online, through a live video stream of one of the flowering rooms — so anyone can watch the plants as they grow and the growers at work, and behold a truly professional cannabis cultivation facility that stands as a visual testimony to the professionalism of the industry. Here, CBT Managing Editor Kyle Brown interviews Wilczynski about his start in the industry in 2008-2009, and everything from the live video feed to strain selection and compliance.

Kyle Brown: How did you get started in the cannabis industry?

Tom Wilczynski: I was in the financial world, and the company I worked for filed bankruptcy. I was out of a job and not really wanting to get back into the financial world.

I had lost my previous wife [Wendy] to breast cancer in 2005. During that time, she was … using marijuana to get her through treatments.

I was in a position in my life where it was like, “Well, this is it. You either do it or you don’t.” I spoke to people in the industry, and also to a lot of the officials, and everyone was saying, “Yes, this is for real. You can do this.” We opened up three stores, up here in Colorado, and the grow.

Brown: You had a background in finance. Why get into cannabis?

Wilczynski: Because of the education I received during my wife’s treatment, and what I experienced. The cancer had progressed so much that they said, “OK, there’s nothing modern medicine can do you for you.”

So I took a big risk – we both did. ... And I saw it work. ... There were some complications, but I and my wife got five more years. I knew it helped her with her appetite. It helped her get over her nausea with the chemotherapy. It helped her relax.

But a light went off with a buddy one night. We were sitting around talking about life. I was in-between jobs. He [said], jokingly, “Hey, let’s open up some shops.” And within four months of us … talking about it, I put together a business plan. And next thing you know, I pulled together partners and raised money. No borrowed money at all.

Brown: Let’s talk about the Cannabis Care Wellness Center — which Smokey’s started as. What was your goal there?

Wilczynski: It was all medical, back then, and we were happy with that. But basically, it was all founded on what my experience had been with marijuana and cancer patients.

But nobody really knew the benefits, other than … it made their body feel better. At the time, nobody really knew CBDs. It was new. Everybody went by strains, or different edibles.

We were attacking it through the medical side, helping people who needed it … providing an alternative to pharmaceutical drugs. We had a lot of patients in the beginning who were trying to get off of pharmaceutical drugs because their bodies were so toxic from taking all these different drugs.

Brown: What brought on the name change to Smokey’s 420 House?

Wilczynski: We decided to make a name change when I had a new CFO come on board, who is actually my partner, Melinda Kadinger. Melinda is our compliance administrator and our CFO.

When I started in the industry, it was 90 percent growing, 10-percent compliance. It quickly became 90-percent compliance, 10-percent growing. As the owner, managing partner and CEO of the company, I was wearing several hats.

We considered ourselves a boutique dispensary, a boutique grow. We took pride in quality. We can’t keep up with the guys who have 100,000-square-foot grows. Do we sell out to them? Or do we … bring in more suitable people to help us take the next step? … We hired Melinda away from Wells Fargo. We hired a compliance officer, Jeremy Goldstein. And we hired a full-time product auditor.

At the point that we were making those changes with compliance … Melinda said, “On one condition, I will come to work for you: You need to change the name of the company.”

I had just lost my 17-year-old Australian shepherd named Smokey. He was my best friend, and was there the whole time Wendy was going through her cancer treatments. And you know, ... if I hadn’t had my dogs when I was going through that period when she was really sick and in the hospice, and when I lost her, I would’ve been lost.

So Melinda said, “Let’s get away from the old Rastafarian kind of hippie appeal, look, colors, name. Let’s just re-brand the company.” We came up with Smokey’s House … and on our logo, our colors are now gray, black and a light purple. It’s a picture of Smokey, and it’s very tasteful.

Brown: There’s a dog motif throughout your website now. Is there a larger effort to build the brand?

Wilczynski: [Melinda] wanted to change the whole outlook and perspective that we’re projecting in the industry. You know, we’re not just another pot shop. It was a concerted effort.

We ... changed the color schemes and remodeled our first store in Fort Collins. We’ve remodeled our store in Garden City, which is still in process. But our third store, in Fraser, is certainly going to be the full-blown model store that we’re going to use as our [plan for] future locations.

We want to keep things consistent. We want to be able to deliver a consistent product and service to our customers.

Brown: Let’s talk about how you choose strains.

Wilczynski: One way this industry has progressed is the amount of testing we have to go through. We cut down from 57 to 15 [strains], and they’re all tested. What’s driven [the reduction] is that it’s cost-prohibitive to have that many strains; … it’s expensive to test them.

So we kept our top 15 to 20 strains. One of them, Pandora’s Box, is a ... pure CBD strain. It’s our own [strain], and it’s fantastic. It’s purely for body pain. … That’s [part of how we decided which strains to keep], based on how [the strain] affects people. We [give] a lot of questionnaires to our patients. We do constant education, not only with all of the state compliance, but also on strains, and we break it down to the sativas, the indicas and the hybrids.

It limited us to what we have, so … we started building relationships with some of the retail/wholesale growers in Denver, and buying from them. We bring it in to our store …, package it up, and sell it under our label.

[But] we are going to promote the growers that we’re buying from, in our stores. They’re going to have their counter space, their logos behind them. Our new position is “Come to Smokey’s and get a taste of Colorado — of the top growers in Colorado.” We’re bringing the growers into our shops and giving them face time with our customers.

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Brown: What do you think is the biggest challenge for the industry’s future?

Wilczynski: Right now, [cannabis is classified as] a Schedule I [drug], and people want it to change to a Schedule II. ... We feel very strongly here at Smokey’s that we need to deregulate marijuana, just like alcohol was. But changing it to a Schedule II drug is probably not going to be good for our industry as a whole.

Once it’s changed to a Schedule II drug, they are opening the gates for the pharmaceutical companies to come in. And believe me, brother, it’s going to happen. They’re seeing the money the industry is making, and they are just standing by on the sidelines … waiting to come into the game. We’ve got to keep the industry out of the hands of the pharmaceutical companies.

Brown: Smokey’s ran into some issues with compliance a few years ago, when you were shut down. What did you learn?

Wilczynski: We hold weekly and monthly meetings with our employees. We have a compliance administrator, a compliance officer and a product auditor who is constantly reading through the rules.

... Our goal is to stay ahead of the rules. We’re constantly [consulting with] the state. We are always ahead of the game, and that’s the way you have to be in this industry. That’s one thing we do pride ourselves on, and Melinda prides herself on, is that training is an ongoing thing.

Our standard operating procedures, which we have to have for the state, are constantly growing. It’s a living document, and we’re always adjusting and adapting. We work with the state and local municipalities … too.

My growers are wearing jumpsuits, hairnets, beard nets. We decontaminate with hydrogen peroxide before going into rooms. We use blue lights. We take precautions with compliance and contamination. ...

Now, it’s like a laboratory. It’s a clean room. And you’ll see, everything is stainless steel, people are wearing gloves.

And the employees have been great. ... Some of them have been with us for a long time … but it’s all changed for the good, and they’ve accepted it.

I go in there now, and look at what we have going on and where we started, and I’m like a proud father. It was a lot of hard work, by a lot of people.

The people who are in this industry right now are the professionals who are left, and the people who had to change. I mean, everyone likes grassroots businesses. I used to finance them, the mom-and-pops, the startups. They’re still out there. But with the rules and regulations, and the standards and costs associated with [cannabis], I hate to say it, but it’s going to be hard for a lot of these people to stay in business.

Brown: You’ve got a unique setup for your grow, where everything is streamed via live feed online. How did that come about?

Wilczynski: Actually, it was my idea. I had a manager ... in Fort Collins who knew Jeff Gasman [president of Pro MAX Grow] out of New York. We wanted to do something different with lighting, to see what works. At the time, there were a lot of different companies promoting their LEDs. We did some research, tried some out. Jeff sent [Pro MAX Grow lights] to us for free. He said, “Hey, try these out for a couple months.” We put them on some test tables ... in our normal grows, and liked the results.

I converted one of our flowering rooms to the LEDs, the 1200 MAXes. So I had to negotiate with them … and … I said, “I beat you down pretty good on the price, but here’s what I’m going to do … What if I allowed you to put a live camera in our grow room, so people can see the plants grow under the LEDs?” Needless to say, Jeff was all over it.

We had a live feed on our last cycle ... in that room. ... We’re in between right now. We’re just getting our plants in there again.

Brown: Do you have a goal with the live cam?

Wilczynski: I want people to be able to see my growers in there. Not only for Jeff — you know, he wants to promote his lights. One thing … my growers like is [that people] can actually get online anytime and see real growers in there, and see people working. It’s a testimony to our industry in Colorado, where they can see our growers are wearing gloves, jumpsuits, hairnets, beard nets if they have facial hair.

They’re not going to see just a bunch of guys. They’re going to see a very professional environment. And that’s how we treat this industry. And I hate to say it, it’s cliché, but there’s a lot of love in our company. It all comes back to our roots of being medical, and taking care of our patients and caring. And that’s what we promote.


Watch Smokey’s 420 House Live

Check out the live feed from the grow at Smokey’s 420 House at http://bit.ly/CBTSmokeysLive.  
For more information on Smokey’s 420 House, visit http://smokeys420.com/.

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