This article originally appeared in the December 2017 print edition of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.
Patrick Pooler knows that an individual’s success is built with the help of a supportive community. Without his mother’s support, Pooler never would have made it to Oregon to attend Windells Snowboard camp in 2004. Without attending Windells, Pooler never would have made long-lasting friends who introduced him to the West Coast cannabis culture. And without those friends, Pooler never would have become the owner of Sandy, Ore.-based Heroes of the Farm.
Community is a big part of Pooler’s personal and business ethos: He would rather lose a sale than a friend. “My company was originally built on those friendships, because before this was an industry, this was a community,” he says.
And since industry friends helped him launch this company, Pooler now is doing his best to pay it forward.
‘Heroes’ Origins
Pooler’s cannabis story begins where many others do: at a hydroponics store, where talking about marijuana could promptly get you thrown out the door.
Talking about tomatoes, the vendor sold him a 1,000-watt HPS light for 10 freshly sprouted cannabis plants in a 4-foot by 6-foot cubbyhole inside a closet with no ventilation. Pooler remembers returning “a couple hours later,” he says, “and it was like 140 degrees in my closet, and those plants were definitely dead.”
With a valuable lesson learned, Pooler had more success on subsequent attempts, in part by moving to a different location. He also changed hydroponics stores to Northern Lights and Garden, whose owner, Trace Myers, spoke to Pooler about cannabis, not tomatoes. Pooler’s thirst for more cannabis knowledge kept him coming back to Myers’ store, to the point where he would volunteer labor just to be around the place.
“I ended up one day coming in there, and an 18-wheeler of Fox Farm Soil pulled up, and they literally had like a 36-inch [wide] ... door, and they had, I think, 13 or 16 pallets of soil that they had to pull every bag off—it was pouring down rain—and bring [them] inside, [and] stack [them] up to the ceiling. So I offered to help.”
To read the full article in Cannabis Business Times' December issue, click here.
Top photo by Jake Gravbrot
