Standard Wellness unlocks financing and saves +10 hours a week

We are a MSO and we are a vertically integrated company, which means that we have like a cultivation license, processing license, and a dispensary license. So we are in Ohio and Utah in our medical markets. And we just recently opened up a new facility in Missouri. It's our first recreational market. And then those are those are the places that we have current moving operations at right now.

It's like a lot of shopping. No, it's a lot of.. it's forecasting, it’s planning, it’s everything. I purchase everything from gloves for our facility to the soil that we grow with to raw materials for our processed goods to our packaging and our labels and everything. So it's every day is a little bit different, but it's just a lot of project management getting everything taken care of, a lot of tracking, shipping, anything like that, anything you can think of.

I wanted the opposite of what I was used to, which was like one of the oldest institutions with one of the most new and upcoming avenues. It was a lot of budget planning, project management, facilitating between departments. So a lot of it actually applied. You know, I worked at a non-profit, so it was another highly regulated field in terms of like legal legalities on purchasing. A lot of that actually transitioned quite well. The position requires someone to be pretty organized and catalogued, which is something that I have a lot of familiarity with.

We have gotten calls from certain companies that kind of want our business now. One of our head accountants said that she had a list of all of the people that had turned them away when we were founded a few years ago. And there was quite a few of them who have like changed their tune and started contacting us. I've encountered my own vendors who would not go on terms.

The purchaser before me was part time — I don't think they leveraged Order.co as much as they could have. A huge task that I took on when I was early was basically — I really switched a lot of our reoccurring purchases over to Order.co. We used to spend quite a bit of money on our credit card that we don't anymore.

I installed the chrome extension. So it's really as easy as when you're on a page is just clicking that button and then just waiting for it to upload into your cart. So I don't know if anyone was really taking advantage of that before. I've used it since day one of using Order.co.

Just checking out a cart on a website, sometimes they ask you for a lot of information or it can take a lot of time. And if I have one order that has six different vendors on it, I only have to enter my phone number, address, and where it's going once. I don't have to enter my credit card information, my billing and shipping address multiple times for multiple vendors. 

The amount of minutes that I can devote to other things, I'm sure is a huge time saver. Being able to have one centralized place that has all of the orders in it with the day, the vendor numbers and then the tracking is also extremely helpful. Instead of just having to search around my email inbox for every individual item. I think those are probably my two.

It's great because we'll be purchasing, say, product packaging that will get in about seven days. That gives us three weeks to sell through that product to cover the purchase that we made to package it. So it's just all of that like to maximize our cash flow. When you work in an industry that is owned by like harvest cycles and production schedules where we are, we're physically growing our products.

It really helps because you take a lot of capital to grow during your cycle. So it's really helpful for a lot of situations when we're trying to be in production on something before we have anything to sell.

Well, the crazy thing is that while Order.co does save me a lot of time, I still spend a lot of time in Order.co. But that's just because I'm buying so much. So, it has to at least save me ten hours a week, which is 25% of my work time.

Approvals. I do have like a few people at different entities who used it before I started. They had a lot of people had access to Order.co. And there was no rule of what got to be purchased. So I oversee everything. Nothing is bought without me being able to look through it. It's really helpful to be able to know what they're getting for their facilities. So it gives just eyes and like a level of security before things are purchased. The approval features is my favorite.

What's great is that all of our items that are already in our Order.co system, so hiring new team members and building that out, everything's already there that they would have needed. So it's not the daunting task of kind of building it out or for them to understand like what production items they need. You know, everything's already kind of in there on a list. So that's been really helpful. Keeping things consistent and streamlined across these people’s work in different states and they don't communicate with each other. So it's kind of all held in like that one central location.

We were looking for large scale capital equipment for our facility. This instance was a flower filling machine. And I can say that it was hard finding traditional financing for it. And then the financing that we could find that was available was a very convoluted process and that when we had our call with Order.co, it was explained to my vice president of finance how it works. And I think we were able to secure the cash in two days and we had been working a lot longer than that previously with a more traditional partner. So it was quite convenient.