I was talking with a group of other long-time marijuana growers about selling marijuana.
Ten years ago no matter if you were in California, Colorado, Florida, New York, Oregon, and other states you’d be getting 300-500 an ounce retail, and $2400-4300 per pound wholesale.
These days, the law of supply and demand has turned against us.
With totally legalized recreational marijuana and medical marijuana selling in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, and almost-legalized marijuana in California, Michigan, and a couple of other states, there’s more marijuana, and easier, legal ways to get marijuana.
The days when the “black market” underground marijuana selling industry easily dominated the marijuana marketplace are over.
What have professional marijuana growers done to adapt to the changing marketplace and marijuana prices so we can grow the plant we love and still make a fair profit selling marijuana?
Here are our tactics:
Maximize Your Cost-Benefits Ratio: Now more than ever you want the most-productive hydroponics nutrients, grow media, grow lights, grow room conditions, cannabis strains and other materials/tactics.
At BigBudsMag.com we’re always encouraging you push for optimized conditions, cultivation strategies, equipment, and materials.
The core message is instead of running a grow op the way you always have, examine every facet of your marijuana grow room, including the cannabis strains you grow.
Look for creative, cost-effective ways to improve your cannabis plants’ growth rate, resin percentages, and yields.
When you’re selling marijuana, you want your cultivation situation totally maximized.
Grow Marijuana Strains Nobody Else is Growing: The marijuana marketplace is dominated by about a dozen popular strains derived from Kush, Diesel, the “Berry” family, Jack Herer, Haze, and Purps.
These marijuana strains are pretty good if not always great, and customers tend to want what they’re used to.
But marijuana users also want new and better choices.
We can make it easy for you to access a big menu of new, top-shelf strains: just go to the website for award-winning cannabis seed breeder TGA Subcool.
TGA Subcool has a very diverse range of Indica, Kush, and Sativa strains that also have tastes, aroma, and highs unique to the TGA Subcool breeding program.
When you grow TGA strains, you’re still growing cannabis strains that have popular strain names and genetics like Kush in them.
But the characteristics of the marijuana strain will be rare when compared to the same old same old—which translates into better outcomes for selling marijuana.
When you’re selling marijuana, you want to give people what they’re familiar with, but offer them exclusive strains too.
Minimize Waste. Other than stems, fan leaves, and roots, you can use almost every part of the plant in your marijuana selling business.
Grow high-crystal cannabis strains known for coating every leaf and flower with lots of resin glands.
Then, instead of getting rid of trim leaves and smaller sun leaves, you use them to make butane honey oil, C02 concentrates, budder, tinctures, medibles, extracts, medibles, and other cannabis products.
Provide clean, well-manicured properly cured buds, and tell your customers about it.
You’d be surprised how many cannabis growers spray poisons on their crops, have insects, molds, or fungus on their crops during flowering, or don’t flush their crops properly.
Sometimes, the bud customer can’t tell if the crops are polluted with those problems.
The problems might be invisible or otherwise undetectable, but still harm your cannabis clients.
But your customers may well detect that the buds taste bad, make their throat hurt, or don’t stay lit properly.
If you’re growing superior buds that are unsprayed, totally cleansed through flushing, and look nice and clean even under a microscope (instead of being contaminated with dog hair, other debris, insect bodies, etc.), tell your people about it.
Those things are worth money.
You’re selling marijuana high in quality and health, not just in potency and taste.
Make Sure Customers Love Your Cannabis!
There’s an art to selling marijuana that involves presentation, ethics, and style.
For example, package your buds in glass jars instead of plastic bags.
Explain that plastic bags have chemicals in them and are otherwise not safe for storing marijuana.
Give your cannabis customers a variety of ways to try out your product, such as a vaporizer or a custom glass piece.
Treat them with respect.
Find out if there are cannabis strains they want you to grow.
Ask them what they love about the marijuana high, and then guide them to the strains you offer that suit their desires.
I look at selling marijuana as being a high-end form of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which is sometimes known as “farm to table.”
Give Them a Phat Marijuana Menu.
See yourself as a personalized marijuana dispensary that provides not just buds, but also hashish, medibles, honey oil, and other cannabis products.
More and more people want something other than just cannabis flowers.
Give them hashish, honey oil, and medible choices, and they’ll be more loyal to you.
Explain your marijuana prices, and offer creative discounts and frequent flyer benefits.
Selling marijuana for top dollar is easier if they’re top-shelf and you build a good relationship with your customers.
Remember that legal marijuana dispensaries are selling marijuana for inflated prices.
I heard an Oregon marijuana dispensary owner bragging that he was selling marijuana for $150 a quarter ounce.
That’s $600 an ounce!
Surely you and I as marijuana growers can sell marijuana for a lower price than that and still make good money!
One way to do that is by explaining all the costs and labor that goes into growing connoisseur cannabis.
Explain that you use the finest nutrients, water, air filtration, cannabis genetics, and resin-building cultivation strategies…and this means what they get from you is better than what they get anywhere else.
People are willing to pay more when they believe they’re getting more.
Not just more quality, but more quantity.
Whether you give discount prices for larger-quantity purchasers or a system where every fifth purchase they get a gram free, the same types of tactics that work to get return customers into a Starbucks also build relationships/customer loyalty in the marijuana selling business.
My marijuana grower friends and I believe that the days of $500 per ounce retail cannabis prices are gone forever.
We’re glad about cannabis legalization, but we know that in strict drug war states that aren’t close to legalized marijuana states, prices per ounce can still go pretty high.
The bottom line is that growing and selling marijuana is a public service.
You deserve a fair profit for the recreation and medicine your marijuana crops provide.
