Harnessing actionable data from touchpoints across your business helps you increase profitability in both the short and long term. Read our insights to find out how.
What’s Unknown is Unprofitable
Cannabis business leaders are sitting on a gold mine, and most don’t know it yet. Between operations, growing processes, point of sale systems, and marketplaces, there’s a constant stream of data points stacking up behind the scenes of your business.
Though cannabis companies already use software like METRC, QuickBooks or LeafLink to track data points and analytics, manually compiling spreadsheets means lag time– by the time you collect and interpret the data from the platforms, chances are, it’s already stale. Other companies tend to view data through a short-sighted lens, never really comparing the numbers from touchpoints across their business to create actionable insights. Using these methods, unfortunately, is a costly mistake.
Repeatability: A Building Block to Success
In order to create a sustainable, successful business, you need repeatability. When you’ve had a few great successes, the ability to optimize all areas of the operation in a methodological way helps you ensure– not just hope for– more.
Let’s examine a hypothetical example. One of your strains, Strain A, was released into the market in early February. Profits hit a record high in February. Obviously, you’re looking to repeat that success, and leveraging your data is the way to do it.
If you decided to leverage the data to increase profitability, first, you’d begin with the proof: checking that the profit itself is not a result of other factors, like increased capacity or volume. Once you can be sure that this jump in profit is organic, you’d want to examine where it came from.
Let’s say you pore over both METRC and your wholesale platform to determine how much that strain yielded per plant, what product was sold and when. As it turns out, Strain A had the highest yields and was the most profitable that month. You’d then want to examine this profit as it correlates to advertising insights or other marketing initiatives– was the strain a standalone success, or did profit increase as a result of a new or improved marketing technique?
If you determine that the analytics of the marketing technique used to launch Strain A were similar to past marketing campaigns, you’d want to know where your sales were made. Perhaps a new wholesaler brought in Strain A, and it was through their platform that most sales were made, an insight worth noting when deciding where to place the next batch of products.
If all of your correlating control factors were relatively similar, you could chalk Strain A’s profitability up to the plant itself– in which case, you’d want to replicate the conditions in the greenhouse, which you can do with time stamped conditions reports from your growing equipment.
Without using the full range of available data– advertising insights, growth conditions, points of sale, wholesaler and marketplace reports, operations data, and more – any attempt to replicate your successes is just that– an attempt. Basing decision-making on actionable insights with proven, interpretable data helps cannabis cultivators devote time, energy, and spend to the areas of business that have proven impact on return.
Time Is Money in Analytics
If a cannabis cultivator spends weeks replicating the optimal growing conditions of a yield that was actually successful because of an email marketing campaign, those weeks’ worth of time and energy have been sunk into the wrong area of the business, to a likely frustrating and unprofitable end.
A similar problem is presented by “DIY” accounting and analytics methods: CSV exports and complicated spreadsheets take time: they don’t offer the minute-by-minute state of data. Any pivot in the numbers made in the time it takes to account by hand can be an undetectable hairline fracture in your upcoming operations. When you try to take a stride, you’ll likely stumble and spend the coming weeks (or months) trying to catch up– and it’s much harder when you start from a disadvantaged point.
So, how do you harness data from across business touchpoints in order to interpret the numbers into an actionable plan? Simple: you use Appature.
Appature Helps Cannabis Cultivators Increase Profit with Data
Appature is a new data management platform, launching in June, that empowers growers to collect and track data– and put it to good use. The software collects data from all of the important pulse points and consolidates these numbers into an easy-to-use platform to help cannabis cultivators, growers and other professionals manage their data touchpoints and keep a handle on compliance, profitability and fundraising necessities. Appature can accomplish what DIY-reporting can’t: real-time information that leads to useful, actionable insights.
Join our live panel discussion. Register today!
In preparation for the Appature launch later in June, we’re hosting a webinar to help cultivators with a roadmap for using their data. Panelists include Brain Gruber of Franklin Fields, David Murray of Redbud Roots, and Sarah McGuire of MGO. We’re offering a full scope of insight on creating a business powered by data, increasing visibility, profitability, and security in stature within the industry.
