DOPE CFO

One of our members got onto the board of a major cannabis industry trade organization, and the way it happened is worth studying.

The organization was active, with regular Zoom calls and international chapters expanding into LatAm. He showed up to the calls and listened.

On one of those calls a couple of board members mentioned offhand that they needed volunteers in Illinois. He jumped on it, said he'd help, and the call moved on. When a board seat opened up shortly after, one of the people he'd met on that earlier Zoom call vouched for him: "Use him, he's a great guy." He's now on the board.

Ray put it best on a coaching call when we were talking through it. Getting involved early in a group that's actively growing can be trajectory changing. You're not competing with a crowd of strangers for visibility. The room is smaller. The work that needs doing is obvious. And the people running the organisation remember the ones who said yes when they asked.

Joining a board is one of the most direct ways trust gets built in this industry. Most accountants don't realise that until they've done it. Operators in your state will see your name attached to the organization. Other professionals will start treating you as a peer rather than a stranger. The introductions follow naturally, and the conversations and clients tend to follow from there.

You don't have to start with a national board seat. A state association is fine. So is a treasurer role on a local advocacy group, or showing up to the Zoom calls and saying yes when someone needs help. Plenty of our members have built their practices through exactly this kind of slow, visible, useful presence.

I've been in the cannabis industry almost 15 years. The last few weeks have changed it more than the previous decade did.

When I tell people that outside the business, most of them don't see what I'm talking about. They saw the rescheduling headline, registered it as news, and moved on. They aren't in the operators' inboxes the way I am. A guy in my hometown who owns three dispensaries texted me a few days ago. He's been trying to sell for two years. He told me his asking price is 30% higher than it was two weeks ago, and they aren't even talking to anyone yet.

He's not wrong to hold the price. Medical cannabis is now Schedule III. For dispensaries with a proper financial foundation already in place, 280E no longer applies to medical sales. The tax savings come immediately, cash flow responds, and over time the valuations climb to reflect both.

The second piece is the June 29 hearing. There's a real chance the entire industry moves to Schedule III, not just medical. Investors who were skeptical two months ago are watching that date. Capital that sat out the cannabis cycle is paying attention again.

Change like this moves outward unevenly. The operators feel it first, in their inboxes. The professionals advising them feel it in their calendars not long after. Most everyone else reads about the shift months later, when prices have already moved.

That's the part I keep coming back to. If you're working with cannabis businesses right now, this is the cycle to stay in.

I've watched enough members build their cannabis CFO practices now to see patterns in how clients actually show up. It's rarely one channel. But a few paths keep producing results, and they come from completely different directions.

The first is startup founders raising capital. Before a cannabis company can raise money, investors want to see a world-class team on the pitch deck, this has to happen before funding.

The founder needs a CFO who can build the financial model, ensure the pitch deck is accurate, structure the projections, and sit in the room when questions come up about cash flow and burn rate. I tell our members to build the model together with the founder and they will be happy to include your monthly fee in the operating plan because you’re bringing real and tangible value. When the raise closes, you're already baked into the budget and the founder won’t question your value because you’ve already proven yourself.

The second path is referral networks, and this one is wildly underrated. Richard mentioned that 60 to 70 percent of his business over the years came from maybe four or five people. Former clients, people he'd worked alongside on projects, a former employee who moved into a different role. A small, tight group who knew his work and sent people his way because they'd seen the results firsthand. Building a core group of reliable referral partners is probably the single most underrated piece of client acquisition I see our members overlook. They spend hours on LinkedIn when one lunch with a cannabis attorney would do more for their pipeline than a month of posts.

Then there's what I call the client-as-gateway effect. One of our members landed an ancillary client, a company that manufactures scanners for dispensaries. She cleaned up their books, tightened their reporting, and delivered consistent work. The founder started introducing her to his dispensary customers. One client became four, then five, and the introductions kept coming because the quality of her work made the founder look good for recommending her.

What ties these together is worth paying attention to. None of them reward the loudest marketer or the flashiest website. They reward competence. Do the work well, make the relationship real, and the next client appears through the reputation you've already built. The founders talk. The attorneys talk. The existing clients talk. Your job is to give them something worth talking about.

If you want the systems, the financial models, and the support network to build a practice this way, DOPE CFO 6.0 gives you the ready-to-go CFO advisory business so you can focus on the work that actually brings clients in.

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One of the most effective things anyone in this program has ever done came from a member a few years back. He didn't do anything complicated. He opened his phone contacts and scrolled from top to bottom. Everyone he hadn't talked to in a while got the same short message letting them know he'd started building a cannabis CFO advisory practice and asking if they knew anyone in the industry.

He sent it to about 150 people. Within days, he was hearing back from contacts who had connections he'd never thought to ask about.

I tell this story on almost every coaching call because it works every single time someone actually does it. The connections are already in your phone. You just haven't asked yet.

This week we had three new members join from Texas, New Jersey, and Georgia. For every one of them, the same thing applies. You don't need to wait until your logo is finished, your LinkedIn is polished, or you've completed every module. While you're building those pieces out, open your phone and start texting.

The members who land their first client fastest aren't usually the ones with the best marketing. They're the ones who actually told people what they were doing. Your old college roommate might know someone. Your former manager might have a friend who just got licensed. The accountant you worked with five years ago might have a cannabis client they don't know how to serve. Your neighbour might have a cousin with two dispensaries.

You won't know until you ask, and each message takes about thirty seconds to send.

Every cannabis trade association and nonprofit has to file a tax return. Most of them are small operations run by volunteers, and a surprising number of them are behind on their filings or have never filed at all.

Andrew Hunzicker has been teaching DOPE CFO members a specific play for years: look up an organization's public 501(c)(3) filings, find the ones that are late or missing returns entirely, and offer to prepare and file them for free. The ask in return is simple: a seat on the board.

Three VIP members have used this exact approach to land board positions at cannabis industry organizations that put them in direct contact with dispensary owners, cultivators, and ancillary operators who need financial help. One tax return a year, maybe six to eight hours of work total, and you're sitting at the table with every decision-maker in your region's cannabis industry.

The preparation matters as much as the offer. Before reaching out, members are using AI research tools to pull together everything publicly available about the organization: who runs it, when it was formed, what its stated mission is, whether it's current on filings. Going in armed with that knowledge means you're not cold-calling with a generic "how can I help?" You're walking in and saying "I noticed your most recent return hasn't been filed yet, and I'd like to take care of that for you."

That's a very different conversation. You've done something useful before you've even asked for anything.

The pattern works because most of these organizations don't have a CPA on their board. They don't have anyone who actually wants to deal with the compliance side. When you show up as the person who solves that problem, you're not selling. You're filling a gap nobody else is lining up to fill, and every meeting, every event, every introduction that comes from that board seat compounds over time.

One of our members was tracking her outreach in five different Excel spreadsheets. Who she'd contacted, what events they'd be at, who had responded, who needed a follow-up. Every few days she'd lose track of where a conversation was and end up sending the same message twice or forgetting someone entirely.

She did some research and found a free CRM tool that let her upload everything in one place. Connected it to her email and calendar so meetings, follow-ups, and new contacts all flow into the same system. It took an afternoon to set up and now she opens one screen instead of hunting through tabs.

This is one of those things that sounds obvious but most people in our community skip it. They'll spend hours perfecting a LinkedIn headline or tweaking a logo, then track their actual business development conversations in a messy spreadsheet or, worse, in their head. The outreach is the work. The system that tracks it is what keeps the outreach from falling apart once you're juggling six or seven conversations at the same time.

You don't need an expensive tool. You need one place where you can see every contact, every conversation, and every next step. If you're still running your pipeline off memory and scattered notes, that's the thing to fix this week.

One of our newer VIP members lives in a small rural town in Oregon, hours from Portland. Not exactly a cannabis hub. But she'd been reading the local paper and noticed a dispensary nearby that kept showing up in community stories. They'd donated $250 to the high school graduation and they'd sponsored a $2,500 summer event. They were clearly trying to be good neighbours in a small town.

So she drove over, walked in, bought some CBD oil for her dog, left her business card, and told the manager what she does.

That same evening, the owner emailed her and they've got a meeting set up this week.

This is what networking looks like when you're not in a major city and there's no expo to attend. You pay attention, you notice who's active in the community, and you show up in person, because in a small town, showing up means something different than it does online. And you lead with genuine curiosity about the business, not a pitch about your services.

The same member had already been connecting with people in New Mexico's cannabis association, which only formed last August. She met the executive director, a board member who's running his own events, and offered to help set up their chart of accounts as a favour. That kind of generosity compounds. The board member has connections across the state. The executive director knows every operator in the programme. A free favour today turns into an introduction tomorrow that you couldn't have engineered any other way.

You don't need a conference badge or a booth. You need to be paying attention to what's happening around you, and then actually walk through the door.