How Rebel Grown’s Dan Pomerantz Works: Cannabis Workspace
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Melissa Schiller from Cannabis Business Times, thanks to a kind introduction from my friends at Sun + Earth Certified. I think Melissa did a wonderful job. Reading back on the interview, it felt like I was reading someone else’s story. Sharing my insight and experience in a candid way, this is not the type of knowledge or game you typically get from the standard corporate Cannabis CEOs I usually associate with this type of media publication. I hope you enjoy the read and take something from this small piece of my story.
Written By: Melissa Schiller | January 24, 2024
Name: Dan Pomerantz
Title: Founder & CEO, Rebel Grown
Location: Craftsbury, Vt.
One word to describe your cultivation style: Diversified organics
Indoor, outdoor, greenhouse or a combination: Combination, but mostly outdoor
Can you share a bit of your background and how you and your company got to the present day?
I became really passionate about cannabis when I first smoked it, when I was 13 years old, and I basically started selling weed when I was 13. I realized that this wasn't a bad thing, and I know it was so taboo and you can get in trouble, but I felt that it was really helping me and other people. Then, when I discovered High Times magazine, I couldn't believe how beautiful the plants were. I was looking at the centerfolds of the genetics that were being grown in Amsterdam at the time, in the mid-nineties, and I was like, that doesn't look like what I'm seeing.
So, I set myself up for a life goal when I was 13, 14 years old to learn how to grow the plant [and] learn how to experiment with genetics. I moved to Vermont when I was 17 years old for the purpose of growing weed. I grew here underground for about 10 years, moving around, mostly [growing] indoors at the time. After 10 years, I moved out to Humboldt County and I ended up in a small subdivision that is really the geographical epicenter, but also the cultural origin and epicenter of the entire Emerald Triangle. I came out there to learn from the masters [in] Humboldt County, and especially this region of southern Humboldt.
That's what they know. That's what Humboldt County was. Southern Humboldt County, we call it America's cannabis heartland. And when I ended up there, I found that as well as learning from those old timers, I had a lot to offer them in terms of my intentions with organics, sustainability and genetics work, and finding stuff that was really special. I was able to quickly rise up.
Next thing I knew, I was a 27-year-old kid running some of the largest outdoor farms in southern Humboldt. I started a medical collective in 2011 and started doing my genetics work. I went to the dispensaries and realized there were no seeds in them, and I couldn't believe that I'm in the mecca of cannabis and you can't buy seeds. So, I started the first seed company in Humboldt County back in 2011 [or] 2012.
From there, it just kind of evolved. I ran other people's operations. I had a stint where I was director of operations for Steve DeAngelo's cultivation in Monterey County. I was technically the first operator in Monterey County. I got a taste of the corporate cannabis world, and it just wasn't for me because I'd been living deep in the woods in Vermont and Humboldt County for 15 years at the time. So, when my girlfriend and I started having children, we bought an old homestead in the hills of Southern Humboldt where I made my bones and set up the farm and a license, and moved back to Vermont to focus on raising my kids and building a cannabis business here.
What tool or software in your cultivation space can you not live without?
My intuition with cultivation. A lot of it is based off of science and understanding plant science, but experience is the best tool that you can get. Understanding plant science is incredibly important for modern cannabis cultivation, but the most important thing that I believe that we have is experience in being around the plants and growing for so many years. I can generally look at anybody's cultivation setup, and I can notice anything that's out of place. So, the biggest tool that I have is my experience.
What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your business in the last six months?
One is [a] low height rolling stool. It’s made working in our mom [room] and keeping our plants manageable a breeze recently.
The other thing on my list is an inventory tracking/organization app we use. We use this for everything from products inventory, cultivation/nursery, to packaging/labels and apparel inventory. I’ve seen lots of cannabis businesses pay tens of thousands, even millions [of dollars] for inventory tracking software. This costs me about $40 per month. It’s been incredibly helpful in keeping me and my business organized.
What cultivation technique are you most interested in right now, and what are you actively studying (the most)?
The goal here is to strive towards natural production to the point where we're creating everything that we use. Currently, we buy compost, but we also make compost. We buy organic inputs, but the goal would be to become a closed-loop farm where we create everything that we use from our own ecosystem on the property. Regenerative cultivation is really about restoring the earth and leaving the earth and the soil better than when you started. That's the goal and what I've been working on for a long time. In California, back in the day, you didn't know if the cops in the helicopters were going to come and bust you, so a lot of people would grow in pots. It was quick and temporary, but the real goal is to grow in the earth and build a living soil that's regenerating the ecosystem and creating a healthy microbiology and allowing things to thrive naturally to the point where you don't need to add things because everything is so balanced.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
I've made every mistake that you could possibly make, and I'm still standing. I've had hash deals go bad with manufacturers in California where I've been ripped off for $700,000—situations that caused me to struggle to support my family and put food on the table for two years. I've survived a lot of things that would definitely break most people and destroy their business or their entire lives.
I would say compliance, also—I've lost cultivation licenses and had things expire, and have hired people in the past to do things who were misleading about their qualifications. So, I would say the biggest mistake that I have made would be not being careful enough with business deals in the legal market. There's a lot more integrity in what I call the “traditional” market. Before weed was legalized, if you did somebody wrong or you burned somebody, your reputation would be tarnished. Nobody would work with you or even speak to you. It was that simple. You did a bad deal, and people are going to find out. Nobody's going to pick up your call. In the legal market, all those rules have gone out the window. I've always maintained my integrity and my honor, but I would say that the biggest mistake that I've made is trusting the wrong people on the legal side of the business and getting burned.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven grower about to enter the legal, regulated industry? What advice should they ignore?
The No. 1 advice that I would give to people is to figure out where they can add value to something. It's really hard to start up your own business at this point if you're not extremely established or don't have connections with the right partners. What I do tell people when I speak on educational panels or when people ask me this question, [which] comes up a lot, is think about what it is that you think that you have the most skills towards, and find a way to build on those so that when you join any group of people—any cultivation, any organization—you are only going to make it better. Find a way to, anything that you put your name or your stamp or your work into, have people notice that it's been improved. That just takes some soul searching to find out what you can strive towards. That's my best advice to people, is really dive deep into where you think you can add value.
Trust your instinct and don't worry about what the bigger companies are doing and what you hear from the so-called “industry leaders.” Most of the industry leaders have raised a lot of capital. When people raise capital and they put together all their financial documents, they're making assumptions about what they think they can generate for business. And assumptions are just that—they're completely made up, they're hypothesized. When you're trying to raise money and you have someone making assumptions, very few times do people hit those benchmarks. A lot of the big company CEOs and big industry leaders don't actually have proven track records of actual success. A lot of them just have a lot of financial backing and big fancy marketing companies, but they haven't actually made people a ton of money. They haven't actually built successful businesses. Most of them are negotiating terms with the IRS on huge amounts of federal tax debt and continuing to raise capital at lower valuations and really leveraging their own debt.
How do you deal with burnout?
I've been burned out for more than a decade, but I think the answer is to keep finding inspiration and to keep pushing through. I've been a fighter my whole life, and so when you get burned out—whether it's pushing yourself working 16- to 18-hour days, too much time away from your family [or] struggling financially—it's not going to get better if you stop. At times in the cannabis industry, we can all feel like Atlas holding up the earth. If you stop, the earth is just going to come crumbling apart. So, you don't have that option. You’ve just got to find a way to stay inspired and motivated and push through it no matter what.
I think having a positive attitude can really work because there are times that I've been in dark places and close to failure, and your whole job as a CEO becomes solving problems. Your whole life is just figuring out solutions to things. It can definitely become overwhelming, but if you keep that positive attitude, you can create reality through your intentions and what you're manifesting. If you really work at having a positive attitude, next thing you know, everything feels positive towards you, and the grind can be a fun grind instead of a grueling one.
How do you motivate your employees/team?
I've been managing people since 2011, and I've done every possible job there is to do in cannabis. I believe that you treat people the way that you would like to be treated, and you compensate people the way that you'd like to be compensated. When I would run somebody's grow, I know what my time and energy and my commitment would be worth to me. I have a director of cultivation here who's responsible for all the plants in our mother room. I come and go, but I'm mainly running the business. I'm even doing deliveries. We're vertically integrated with a small team, so I appreciate people. When somebody shows their value, they're worth their weight and gold. So, let people know when they're appreciated [and] pay people generously because your company isn't going to have any revenue or especially any profit if it doesn't have good people doing the jobs behind the scenes.
What keeps you awake at night?
There's the rule of the universe: for every action, there's an equal or an opposite reaction. So, for everything that's good in the world, there's also bad. And when you pay attention to the media and you see a lot of the tragic things that are happening around the world, it's easy for us to ignore a lot of that stuff. There are children who are going to starve to death right now within the minute that we're on this meeting speaking, there are people in our world who are going to die out of starvation, there's unbearable suffering that happens all over our planet, and most of us ignore that and turn the other cheek. I certainly do a lot of the time. And what I found is I might not be able to do much about the starvation that's happening, but what I do is I use cannabis as a catalyst to do whatever good I can do— giving back to different charities, food banks, drug rehabilitation centers [and] helping anywhere in my community locally where I can, paying people generously.
I might not be able to do a lot about these world problems that are so big, but I can use cannabis in every way I can to just do good where I can with it. I'm not in a position where I'm going to go join the Peace Corps, but I can grow weed and hopefully be profitable and share some of those profits with some causes that can help other people that are struggling.
What helps you sleep at night?
I think what helps me sleep at night is having a clean conscience. As I mentioned, I've been selling weed since I was 13. I made a choice at a young age to be a career criminal, hoping that one day I wouldn't be doing things that were illegal. I'm still getting past the PTSD of everything that I've been through on the illegal side and learning to feel normalized with a legal business, even though I've had a legal business now for many years. But having a clear conscience, values, integrity and morals is really everything to me. All that really matters in the world is being a good person and doing the right thing. And if my impact in the universe is positive and I know that I'm not harming anybody or the earth or the environment, and I'm putting my best effort in to make decisions objectively by what's right within the universe, then I'm going to sleep great at night because I'm not going to have any regrets about my actions and my behaviors.
