Joy and Raft Hollingsworth run The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company. Their problem: How do you help more Black people get into the legal weed industry?
They faced this problem from the very beginning as they tried to start a marijuana farm from scratch in rural Washington. The Hollingsworths lived their entire lives in downtown Seattle and didn’t know anything about farming.
It's a story that includes a paper bag full of cash, dinner with Anthony Bourdain, and hundreds of millions of dollars in weed taxes.
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Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where entrepreneurs and engineers talk about the world they're going to build once they solve a few problems. My guests today are Raft and Joy Hollingsworth, the brother and sister team that runs the Hollingsworth Cannabis Company aka thhc Co. Joy and Raft run a farm in Washington State where they grow and sell about six hundred thousand dollars of marijuana a YEurope. Their problem, how do you help more black people get into the legal weed business. They've been working on this problem for a long time. It started about a decade ago, right after Washington State legalized recreational marijuana, and Joy and Raft decided to start their own farm from scratch in rural Washington State, despite having lived their whole lives in downtown Seattle at the time. Their dad had just retired after a career at the Seattle Parks Department, and he put up a big chunk of his retirement savings to fund the farm. Joy and Ralf told me, like a lot of entrepreneurs when they started out, they really didn't know what they were doing. You got to be a little crazy. You know how they say entrepreneurs, you jump off a cliff and you're going to figure out how to build your plane on the way down. That's what it kind of felt like. Yeah, and who started driving out found the property on Craigslist. It was six acre plot of land in Mason County. You know, we see this land, we like it. I say, I'll take it. And the real estate agent, Larry at the time, said, okay, we'll meet me at the Mason County Title Office. Okay, great, Larry. So we go down there and I had a Safeway bag, like a paper bag full of cash. Oh my god, we're gonna pay for this land. And we were so like EVA at the time, we didn't want to tell anybody our plans. What are these two black eyes from Seattle want with six acres off of this private dirt road by the prison? What do they want? It was ridiculous in hindsight, But I mean, you're telling it as as funny, right, But like, were there any other black people there? Was that scary? Was it fine? Like? How was that part of that? There's no other black people out there? And the neighbors have been really nice to us to this day. They've been great stewarts as neighbors, and so how did you get from there to hear? Right? So you got your farm, you get to know the neighbors. Kaus. It was chaotic. We had a fence, we had cameras, we had a couple of buildings, but the rest was just we're in the open field. We don't really know what's going on. We're gonna grow plants. We're gonna not only we're gonna grow plants, We're gonna grow four thousand plants in the dirt. We buy dirt from this guy down the road because we heard from a friend that he has good dirt. And it's like landscaping there. It's not even dirt you grow. We like plants. It so like you bought the wrong dirt. You bought the wrong dirt. Yeah, that sounds like a problem. This guy would be like seven thousand dollars. It was a problem. I mean, there was just so many different things. We're freaking out. I moved to the farm. I'm living in the construction trailer that we have, you know, put on the farm as our office space. I'm sleeping in the office. We hire a guy on um Craigslist. We hire everybody that first year from Joy tell me, Yeah, it's been all Rafts so far. Tell me what what listening to? Yeah, No, I'm I'm sorry. We're still on year one and I think you want to get from year one now, So Joy, you pick up the story here. No, I love it, but Joy, you pick up the story. Get me over the next nine years. Here. I'm listening to year one right now, Jacob, and I'm like, bro, we'll get us to twenty twenty one. Lad. Hey, Joy, you got it, you got it. Joy, this is your moment. I want to hear you're good. I'm sorry, No, I mean it. I mean it. Joy, you tell me the story of the next nine years. Raff is right. It was such a learning piece and a learning curve with everything, and it felt like an experiment for year one, and we didn't know what we were doing wrong. We just kind of like it just felt like it was this whole entire thing of solving problems one after the other. So every year it felt like we got better. It just kept continuing to get better and better until that moment right in twenty seventeen, which I think switched us when we were on and got to have dinner with Anthony Bourdain and crew. And that was really the year that really, you know, put us on the map for so many different reasons. And just to be clear, here, a producer for Anthony Bourdain's CNN show read an article about your farm in a in a Seattle newspaper and then like a month later there's a TV crew filming you at the farm and you're having dinner with Anthony Bourdaine and you wind up on his show on CNN. What does that do for your business? Right after that show, all these people hit us up and said, hey, we'd love to buy your product. Can you ship us a pound? I live in Texas, I live in California. It's like, no, that's actually illegal. We can't do that. And so it's hard to monetize that piece when you can't be close to the consumer. But on that branding piece, absolutely absolutely, it gave us a lot of credibility in spaces that we weren't really we didn't know existed. So let's just talk about the business today, like sort of what it is, how it works. I pulled it up on Google Maps on the like satellite images one. If you just Google map, Hollingsworth cannabis company. It comes up and like I'm zooming in. But first of all, it is clearly like way out in the middle of nowhere, right, it's just trees and farms and what is that maybe a creek all around. But if I zoom in more like I can actually see like it looks like mostly greenhouses and that's where you grow the weed, grow the cannabis. Correct. So we have eight greenhouses. We have three shipping containers, and we just modify them to the buildings like wired and with doors. So there, I mean they feel like you know, steel frame buildings. But then we have a converted construction trailer and that's where we do all the processing and it's renovated, hardwood, floors is painted. It's nice. Tell me about the plants. They're living, breathing beings. They are very much alive, and at one point in time we'll have two thousand, one hundred plants alive growing and it's like it's a symphony. It's beautiful and they're very resilient too. A plant can look a hot mess one week, give it a little nutrient, little sunlight and figure out what's wrong, and it looks like a million dollars the next week, so they bounce back really fast, and like Raft said, they're actually living and breathing organism. We play the music. What music do you played? The plans? It was like two straight weeks he was playing gospel music and I was like, oh, he's going through something right now, no please, okay. And then the next day he's playing just you know, some nil soul music. Now he's good. So it just really depends. Okay, are you okay? Raft? You came through it, Okay, Yeah, that's accurate. How like, how is the business doing? Like is your dad's life savings safe? Yeah? When we started, our first order was for two thousand dollars and it took that joy way to take us three weeks to Yeah, it was three weeks to process it. That's not a living between four people, not going to make a living that way. So how about now we could probably get a two thousand worder out in like a day, maybe less right the same day annually more or less. How much do you sell? About five to six hundred thousand dollars wholesale? Okay in marijuana which was quatest like twelve hundred pounds, and that's that's grown and sold grows, right, so that minus your costs is your profit exactly. And so there are people in Washington who sell millions of dollars a year certainly, right, million dollars a month? Yeah? Oh wow? Okay, So how do you compete? Man? I feel like this is like small business lessons here, like how do you compete against a business that's more than ten times your size? Joy? How do we compete with business? Like? We really have to focus on our brand, what we do better than anyone else? You ask Joy, but then you answered Joy, how do you compete? There's a demographic and people they want cheap weed, people like going to Walmart and Costco. But there are people that really value knowing who grew their weed, who grew their weed, how did they grow it? And then when you can connect to the consumer with that via Instagram, online story connecting, building relationships, then they feel like, you know what, I want to be connected to them and I want to support them. I want to support this black business, this family owned and operated business. And a lot of people have told us they see their family in us. Every time they look at us, are like, you remind me of my sister or my mom. Is or I love your mom, she's smokes, she's really funny. Or your grandmother she's one hundred and one, I love her. We connect people on that family piece, and that's really huge. You mentioned your mom and your hundred and one year old grandmother. Are they part of the business. They certainly consume part of the business. They're part of the cost side of the revenue side. Yeah, my mom's a designated tester. You know, we have name tax for everybody, and that's her title. My kids want to grow up to be ice cream testers. I feel like your mom really hit the jackpot on that one too. After the break, the problem Joy and Wrapped are working on now, how do you help more black people get into the weed business. That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. Back before weed was legal or quasi legal whatever it is now in America, black people made up a disproportionate share of the people arrested on marijuana related charges. Now that weed is legal or quasi legal, black people are underrepresented in the marijuana industry and this is a problem that Joy and Raft are working on now. We wanted to use our platform of being one of the only black farmers in the SATA Washington. Not the only, but one of the few to use our platform to help bring attention and awareness to that. Did I read raft that you were on some kind of a state committee that recently changed a rule that was keeping people out of the legal weed business. Yeah. One of the things that we talked about, amongst a million other things, was this rule that the Liquoring Cannabis Board had that would disqualify you from owning a marijuana business essentially if you had a non violent drug offense conviction or charge in your past. And they changed that rule finally, which is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough. And you've also worked on this Washington state law that's addressing some of these some of these social issues. Right. We helped, you know, draft the bill. Connect with people will help lobby the bill. We were out there testifying. It was a big heavy lift and it passed. Yeah, we can't take all the credit for it, it was It was definitely a community push. And the biggest piece is Washington brings in over They've brought in over the last two years over a billion dollars in tax revenue, and so a lot of those funds. We have been using our platform to try to get those back into neighborhoods, which is important. And how this, you know, how amazing would it be that these neighborhoods that were torn up by the War on drugs, affected poverty, homelessness could go back into those communities from cannabis tax dollars and continue to repair those communities with those tax dollars that were generated. I think that is really the goal. And Jacob I just want to give a shout out because yesterday the governor came out with his proposed budget and it allocated one hundred and twenty five million dollars for disfortunately impacted groups community reinvestment from the cannabis tax dollars. I mean, that's a huge The effects of the bill are going to be felt for generations. Great. So people are sort of talking about this idea that marijuana might be legalized at the federal level. Right right now, clearly you're operating and you know under all these state rules. What would it mean for your business if we were just legal in America? Oh my goodness, what would it mean? Itould be amazing. You know, right now, we grow twelve hundred pounds to fifteen hundred pounds depending on the weather of marijuana, you know street, if that was marijuana we can sell directly took the consumer, I can imagine. I mean, look, a thousand pounds convention has kind of put that at ten dollars a gram, one pounds, four hundred and fifty four grams, you're talking about forty five hundred dollars a pound. If we could produce four to five million dollars in marijuana, actually six million dollars in marijuana every year, it would change dramatically. Would it also mean you would have to compete against you know, these giant even in some cases publicly traded weed companies that have been kind of building up in Canada and waiting to like sweep into the US when marijuana is legalized here. Yeah, I think we would. But at the end of the day, everyone has to grow the plan. We focused on efficiency in growing it for an environmentally friendly impact. You know, we grow for nine dollars a day in power, and I don't think anybody really can compete with that in terms of price in economies of scale. Now, obviously people can produce more or marijuana, but I think what we offer that those other companies don't. It's just that authentic, lovingly produced product that corporate marijuana really can't replicate at that scale. It's like craft beer your craft weed. That's exactly right. We don't produce a lot of it, but what we do produce, we produce it, you know, with love and attention and dedication and service. And we really care about what you experience when you use our product because we put our name on you know, so basically you can't wait until we It is just legal in America, Me and everybody else in a minute, the Lightning Round, including Joy and Rap's favorite things to do when they smoke, and the best and worst things about working with your family. Okay, let's get back to the show. We're going to close with the Lightning Round. Are you ready? I want you guys both to answer. We can interrupt each other, you can talk over each other, but I want everybody on this one. What's your favorite thing about working with your family? You can't get fired. You spending time with my dad and my sister and my mom. What's your least favorite thing about working with your family? Same answer, Joy, Yeah, the same. I can't fire rafts if we have a problem. I can't fire him the same answer. I don't want to presume that you guys smoke weed. But if you do smoke weed, what's your favorite thing to do when you smoke? I smoke before I go to bed. My favorite thing to do is to sleep. I don't smoke. I'll take some edibles, and then I like to do design stuff, so, like, you know, some high level stuff because it makes me super creative. So it might be the website, might be some cool pictures, might be a label design, might be some inspiration that type of thing. So your answer is work joy your favorite thing to do when you get highest work? Yeah, isn't that crazy? It's okay, No, it's great. If you have just like a ten minute break in the middle of the day, what do you do to relax? I watch unintentional as mr videos on YouTube, especially the medical variety. It's my favorite. Well, like doctors just sort of like rustling little like plastic rappers as they're doing a surgery or something. Yeah, oh, you know, my favorite thing is the lymph node check. I'll watch a compilation of that. Did they just like gently touch your lymph nodes around your neck and clavical do you, guys think you'll work on the farm forever? No, probably not. How will you know when it's time to go do something else? When I do not love going to grow plants, there's still that like just pure amazement at the growth a week over week where I'm just I'm enthralled like a little kid. Great. Thanks so much to both of you for your time, Thanks for talking to me. Thank you guys so much for thinking of us. Really yeah, it's great. Thank you, Thank you guys. Joy and Ralph Hollingsworth run the Hollingsworth Cannabis Company phc CO. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo. It was edited by Robert Smith and Kate Parkinson Morgan and engineered by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein and I'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.