What Happens When a Weed Nerd Runs the Numbers
Make Great Weed. Know Your Numbers. Pay Your Debts.
By Nicholas Sosiak via Cannabis Confidential
In 2018, Canadian cannabis was supposed to be the surest bet in the market.
Billions of dollars were raised.
Valuations went parabolic.
Everyone promised global domination.
By 2025, a lot of those stories had ended the same way, with shuttered facilities, broken balance sheets, and disappointed consumers.
My path in cannabis took a different route.
What began as a personal relationship with the plant, followed by some painful lessons as an investor, eventually turned into helping build a business in Quebec that crossed C$100M in revenue while many better-funded competitors disappeared.
We did it by obsessing over the plant, the product, and the math, in that order, and by being comfortable growing slower than the hype cycle.
This is how it happened.
From Audit Files to Grow Rooms
On paper, my path to cannabis is straightforward. I am a CPA, CA, and started my career in audit, working at firms like KPMG and Ernst & Young. I spent my days buried in financial statements from industries like real estate, energy, and manufacturing.
I later joined Dundee 360 Real Estate Corporation as VP of Finance, helping manage large-scale resort developments in places like Cuba, China, France, and across Canada. It was complex, capital-intensive work that taught me how to think about risk, cash flow, and long-term asset value.
In my early twenties, cannabis became more than something I used personally. I developed a genuine respect for the plant and watched legalization approach in Canada. Like many others, I poured my life savings into some of the first licensed producers.
Let’s just say emotional investing is a fast way to learn very expensive lessons.
Over time, it became clear that many companies were chasing the wrong things: vanity acreage, rushed M&A, and glossy marketing that was not backed by consistent product or sound unit economics. That realization arrived just as my investment portfolio was circling the drain.
I could have taken the loss and walked away. Instead, the failure turned into motivation. I decided the only way to own the kind of cannabis company I wished I had invested in was to help build one from the ground up.
Why Quebec, Why Vertical Integration
Around 2018, we secured a 625,000 square foot warehouse in Farnham, Quebec, converting about 170,000 square feet into premium indoor cultivation with post-harvest capabilities, while leasing the remaining space to long-term tenants.
The thesis was simple. Quebec offers some of the lowest electricity costs in the world for indoor cultivation, along with competitive labor costs. In cannabis, those inputs drive cost per gram.
If we could pair that structural advantage with real craft quality and disciplined capital allocation, we believed we could offer consumers something the market was missing: flower and derivative products that felt premium without being priced out of reach.
I joined the company as VP of Finance in April 2019 with a deliberately boring mandate: build a finance function that ran cleanly, fix public reporting, and make sure we always knew our numbers.
Once that foundation was in place, I left my desk.
I knew the spreadsheets cold, but I also knew that if I stayed in Excel, other people would define what this company became. I spent time in the grow rooms, trimming and curing, learning post-harvest, packaging, and sitting with cultivation, sales, and marketing teams to understand how decisions showed up in the real world.
We pushed for hand trimming. We committed to a fourteen-day hang dry followed by a fourteen-day cure. We put harvest dates on packaging because freshness should be a fact, not a slogan.
When I disagreed with the direction marketing was taking, I stayed up late sketching what became the NUGZ logo, making sure the brand actually reflected what was inside the bag.
I never wanted to be a finance guy who only understood cannabis through spreadsheets. I wanted fingerprints on the flower, the brand, and the experience, along with the financial statements.
Craft at Scale
From the beginning, our founder and CEO, Zohar Krivorot, took a deeply hands-on approach to cultivation. When it became clear that scaling would require true mastery, he stepped into the master grower role and brought in experienced large-scale talent from the Netherlands.
For a full year, he took daily notes, refining everything from irrigation strategy to plant density to how a room should smell on the perfect day of flower. At roughly one harvest per week, the learning curve compressed decades of experience into a single year.
We made a decision that still defines us: all flower is hand-trimmed. We hang-dry for around two weeks and cure for another two. Quality without scale is an expensive hobby, but scale without quality is pointless.
In 2021, we acquired a one million square foot hybrid greenhouse in Valleyfield, Quebec, a purpose-built cannabis facility that cost more than $250 million to construct and had never seen a plant. We acquired it for $27 million.
Rather than using it as a traditional greenhouse, we combined natural sunlight with supplemental lighting to mimic indoor conditions while benefiting from the full spectrum of the sun.
Across Farnham and Valleyfield, we now operate approximately 1.6 million square feet of cultivation and processing space, with capacity to produce up to 100,000 kilograms annually at full build-out, without abandoning the craft standards that matter to consumers.
Three Brands, One Promise
Our brand architecture followed the same philosophy.
Orchid CBD focuses on wellness-forward consumers seeking CBD-rich formats.
Tribal is built for terpene-driven consumers who care about genetics and experience.
NUGZ is a nod to the legacy market, offering larger formats and value without compromise.
We invested heavily in genetics, becoming the exclusive Canadian partner of Exotic Genetix and building a library of nearly 2,000 strains. I spend a meaningful amount of time pheno-hunting, deciding which genetics deserve to move from test rooms into commercial production.
My title may be Chief Financial Officer, but in practice, I am equally involved in genetics, product development, and brand execution. You cannot separate the numbers from the plant. Every decision shows up in both the grinder and the financials.
Price Compression and Discipline
The last five years of Canadian cannabis have been shaped by relentless price compression and disappearing institutional capital.
Early on, we accepted two realities. First, outsourcing cultivation means surrendering control when margins collapse. Vertical integration is harder, but it preserves quality and accountability. Second, in a capital-starved environment, operating cash flow is the only oxygen that matters.
We priced aggressively in Quebec, pairing disruptive pricing with quality that could compete with any premium offering. It forced movement across the shelf, but it built loyalty and volume without sacrificing standards.
What the Numbers Reflect
By fiscal 2025, the business generated C$107.3M in net revenue, with adjusted EBITDA of C$28.1M and net income of C$13.1M. Operating cash flow reached C$20M, and we ended the year with positive retained earnings, still a rarity in Canadian cannabis.
We grew from no sales license in early 2020 to a meaningful national market presence, ranking among the top producers in Quebec and expanding across Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and beyond.
In late 2025, the launch of our first vape products in Quebec helped propel us to the top spot in provincial sales, underscoring what disciplined execution can unlock.
These results are not the outcome of a single decision. They are the accumulation of hundreds of unglamorous choices around genetics, harvest timing, trim standards, pricing, and capital discipline.
Love the Plant, Respect the P&L
If there is one lesson worth sharing, it is this: you can love the plant and respect the P&L at the same time.
Some companies fall in love with the story and ignore the numbers. Others obsess over spreadsheets and forget that consumers buy what is inside the jar, not earnings per share.
My role lives at the intersection of those worlds. I am as comfortable running financial models as I am walking grow rooms, and I believe the people signing the financial statements should understand the product at a sensory level.
There is still work ahead. Facilities are not fully built out. Genetics libraries remain underexplored. Markets and regulations will continue to evolve.
But this journey has shown that a disciplined, product-first, vertically integrated approach can work at scale.
In an industry known for broken promises, that might be the most meaningful outcome of all.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting, but has not been edited for content and accuracy.
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