The day before we were supposed to leave for Chicago, my would-be partner called to cancel.
He brought the building, the one we would turn into a destination dispensary, and the job of raising the money. I brought the license, the plans, the vision, and the sweat.
The trip was a financing conference, the one everyone in our industry said we could not skip. This was the room where the money was supposed to happen.
I went anyway. I drove there alone, and the empty passenger seat should have told me something. If you have a big venture on your desk right now, a key hire, a second location, a partner who says the money is close, this is about the one number I skipped and the $300,000 it cost me.
The conference was excellent. I walked the floor in a hard hat with a QR code on it that linked to our investor deck. I met a gaggle of sharp people and learned a ton. And a financial mentor I trust told me the truth in one sentence: right now, there is no money for cannabis businesses that are not already generating revenue. Not slow money. No money.
I heard it. When I got home, I shared it with my would-be partner. It was a solid reality check.
I kept going anyway.
By then I held a seed retail license and was running a small online business selling seeds and grow kits. I started it to get my feet wet in one of the most regulated industries there is. I had applied for a microbusiness license to grow, make, and sell under one roof: cultivation, manufacturing, a dispensary, and a lounge. I found a seed supplier in Massachusetts after traveling the country. I went to bank after bank until one would hold a cannabis account. I lined up lawyers, accountants, manufacturing partners, and architects. A city council rezoned land for the manufacturing site. And I was doing the demolition on his building myself, sixty hours a week.
Every one of those was real work, and every one felt like progress. A full calendar of setup looks exactly like a business moving forward, right up until someone asks how much money has come in.
I was blinded by my own sweat equity. The more of it I put in, the harder it was to walk away from it.
He kept saying the same thing. He had someone on the hook. The money was ready to come in.
Thirteen months in, not one dollar had come in. Eventually we had a falling out and went our separate ways.
We never signed a partnership agreement. Looking back, that was the one thing I got right. It is the only reason I walked away with my shirt.
It would be easy to tell this as a story about a bad partner. It isn’t. It is a story about me. I handed the most important number in the whole project, the money, to someone else, and I never made him show it to me.
We were not running on feel. We had a business plan. We had a working P&L. Our investor deck projected $13 million a year by year five. We even had deadlines: if we cannot raise the funds by a certain date, we skip cultivation and put everything into the dispensary.
That deadline did not end anything. It changed the plan. Every time a number came up short, the project got a little smaller and kept going.
A projection tells you what the business will make if it works. It tells you nothing about when to stop paying to find out.
I now call this missing piece the Walk-Away Number: the amount of real money, in the bank, by a real date, below which you stop. Not shrink. Stop.
A deadline that only changes the plan is not a deadline. It is a negotiation, and your own vision wins it every time.
I did not have a Walk-Away Number because I believed in what I was building. I wanted to bring jobs paying $21 an hour with healthcare to a rural town like mine, and set the bar for what a cannabis business could do for a community. The warning lights were flashing. The vision was brighter.
Good intentions make it worse. When the reason is a good one, walking away feels like letting people down.
There was a second number I never wrote down, too: what the project was costing me. Our P&L had no line for the work I was not doing. Three years of not serving my regular clients, not taking on new ones, not building my own business. When I finally ran it, the lost revenue came to about $300,000.
And that is only the part I can put a dollar figure on. Two and a half years into the project, the week before the license application was due, I had a heart attack. I was in Arizona. They put a stent in my heart, I traveled back to Minnesota, and I worked the next six days straight to get the application in on time. I was awarded the license.
Read that again, because I had to. I could hit a deadline six days after a heart attack. I never set one for walking away.
The most expensive line in the whole project never showed up on the spreadsheet. It was me.
You are probably not opening a dispensary. But I would wager this is already happening somewhere in your business.
You hire a sales manager and give him two quarters to ramp. The quarters pass, the pipeline is “building,” so you give him one more. Then another.
Or you open a second location. It is not hitting its numbers, so you trim the hours and keep it open one more season.
Each time, the deadline arrives, and instead of a decision you get a smaller plan. Each of those had projections. Almost none of them had a Walk-Away Number.
Here is what I do now.
After it fell apart, I built a system for scoring every opportunity before it gets my time, mine or anyone else’s. I wrote about using it in What I’m actually listening for on the first call. I would like to tell you I built it for clients. The truth is, part of the reason was that I did not want to get burned like that again.
One of the first rules I wrote into it: first dollars matter more than projections.
So anything that wants my sweat has to answer one question first. How fast can this produce its first paying customer? Not the forecast. A real dollar, from a real customer.
That project would have failed that question on day one. The earliest possible first dollar was always one milestone away: after the license, after the funding, after the build-out.
Ask that question before you put another month into it, so you find out now whether you are building a business or funding a hope.
If you are already in, ask it the other way: how many real dollars have come in, and since when? If the answer is none, set your Walk-Away Number today, while you can still see clearly.
And stop doing two things. Stop counting promised money as money. Stop letting a missed deadline shrink the plan instead of ending it.
The vision will always ask for one more month. Decide your answer before it asks.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription