End-to-End Cannabis Supply Chain Operator

Most operators know one vertical. I've built and run all five.

I'm Sara Connolly, a full end-to-end cannabis supply chain operator. Cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, distribution, retail — teams built, systems stood up, P&L carried. I embed with two to three companies at a time and fix what's actually broken, not where it happens to show up.

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5 of 5: Cannabis verticals personally built and run, cultivation through retail
67: Dispensaries operated across 14 states — 32 opened from buildout through opening day
$56M: Retail chain exit inside 18 months, on infrastructure built deliberately for that outcome
2–3: Clients at a time. A hard cap, because embedded work doesn't scale by dilution

The standard

What full-chain actually means

A full-chain operator has personally built the teams, stood up the systems, and carried the P&L in all five verticals.

Vertical integration is common as a corporate structure in cannabis and uncommon as a résumé. Most senior operators came up through one vertical and were promoted above the other four. That is why a stockout at retail gets diagnosed at retail, and why the cause — six weeks upstream in cultivation — goes unnamed for another quarter.

Cultivation

Harvest scheduling, yield planning, and the timing decisions that set everything downstream.

Extraction

Input quality, throughput, yield loss, and the lab constraints nobody upstream accounts for.

Manufacturing

Packaging, batching, COGS, and the production planning that decides what retail can actually sell.

Distribution

Fulfillment, compliance, seed-to-sale tracking, and the handoffs where accountability disappears.

Retail

Store operations, assortment, sell-through, and the place every upstream mistake finally shows up.

Runs across all five Procurement S&OP Regulatory compliance Security Human resources Business intelligence Program management

Five verticals built and run. Every function above stood up from nothing.

Why it matters

Operational failures almost never originate where they surface.

Retail sees a stockout. The cause was a cultivation scheduling decision six weeks upstream that nobody connected to the promo calendar.

Extraction blames input quality. The real driver was harvest timing. Manufacturing misses a packaging run and it reads as a vendor problem, but the batch sizes were set against a forecast that distribution never saw. Margin erodes across four quarters and every department can prove it wasn't them.

An operator who came up through one vertical diagnoses locally and fixes symptoms — competently, expensively, forever. Tracing a failure back to its origin requires having stood in all five rooms and knowing what each one is quietly optimizing for. That's the actual service. Correct diagnosis across the chain.

Right now

The scheduling split is a full-chain problem

In April 2026, state-licensed medical cannabis moved to Schedule III and out from under 280E. Recreational did not. Dual-license operators now run two federal tax and scheduling regimes through one facility, one seed-to-sale system, and one inventory.

It touches every vertical at once

Segregation starts at cultivation and has to hold through extraction, manufacturing, distribution, and the point of sale. A fix designed inside one vertical breaks the next one.

Cost accounting has to be rebuilt

Chart of accounts, allocation methodology, and COGS treatment all change when part of your business can deduct ordinary expenses and part of it still can't.

Operational gains finally reach the bottom line

Under 280E, cutting cost barely moved after-tax profit. For medical operations that constraint is gone — which means operational work now converts to margin for the first time.

Selected work

What full-chain diagnosis looks like in practice

A multi-dispensary operator Midwest · Vertically integrated Manufacturing → Retail

A product pipeline with no gate between "good idea" and "in production"

The client was launching products across a multi-store footprint with no consistent way to kill a weak SKU before it consumed capital, shelf space, and team attention. The symptom looked like a retail assortment problem. The cause sat upstream in production planning, where nothing forced a margin conversation before tooling.

I built a Gate 0–7 new product development framework with named owners, required evidence, and explicit kill criteria at every gate — then wired it to a live scorecard covering pipeline stage, margin, and store-by-store velocity.

Result: Documented go/no-go decisions on every SKU, portfolio performance visible store by store, and a framework the team runs without me in the room.

MedMen 20 people → 2018 CSE listing, $1.6B All five verticals

Running every operational department, from twenty people to a public company

I ran operations at MedMen from the company's earliest days, standing up every operational department from scratch. I owned the retail footprint I opened alongside five production facilities spanning cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, and distribution, through the 2018 public listing on the CSE at a $1.6B valuation. My scope narrowed to production and brands only as the company continued to scale afterward.

The listing is the headline. The useful part is the failure catalogue: reporting cadences that quietly stopped being true, vendor relationships that hit a hard ceiling at volume, decisions made twice because nobody owned them, and the specific way a company loses the ability to see itself once it grows past the founder's direct line of sight.

Why it matters to you: I've seen the ceiling and the floor of this industry. Most of what I prevent, I've already had to fix at scale.

See all work

Engagements

Three ways in

Every engagement starts with a diagnosis across the full chain. Where it goes depends on whether you need a map, an operator, or one specific thing built by a specific date.

Full-Chain Diagnostic

Two to three weeks. Assessment across all five verticals and the seven operational pillars, with failures traced to origin rather than logged where they surfaced. Ends with a prioritized 90-day roadmap.

Embedded Operator

Three to twelve months inside your business. Weekly operating cadence, vendor and supply chain ownership, KPI reporting, and hands-on execution. Scaled to the hours the business actually needs.

Operational Sprint

Ninety days, one outcome. A state launch, a distribution buildout, a dual-license segregation project, a supply chain overhaul. Fixed scope, fixed end date, full handoff.

See scope and pricing

How I work

I'm not retired from operations. I'm running them right now.

Most advisors left the operating seat years ago and are selling a version of the playbook that worked when they last used it. I'm in the seat this week. What I recommend to you is what I'm running somewhere else today.

I don't hand you a deck and leave. I build the distribution network, design the workflows, write the SOPs, sit in the leadership meeting, and own the vendor call. If an engagement ends with a document and no working system, it failed.

More about how I work

Find out where it actually started.

Most operators know something is wrong. Fewer can name which vertical it originated in, which pillar failed to catch it, or what it's costing them per month. Start there.

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