Vanessa Oliver

My success comes from a couple of parts. One is the challenges that I've faced and my perseverance. My life has not been easy whatsoever - going through the pandemic as a single mother, going through a divorce, getting my money stolen from me. If I hadn't gone through these lessons, I wouldn't have learned how to make a way for myself. The second part is my community. When you're the common denominator of who you surround yourself with, and you surround yourself by phenomenal people who are doing phenomenal things, and you recognize through empathy that they're all going through their own circumstances and issues at all times, having a compassionate heart for people really fuels me to support them in their business. It's also the reason why I'm so passionate about educating people around cannabis, because I want people to have access to the tools that they need to talk to their doctors about holistic health, when they feel like I felt when I wasn't being listened to, and they tried to prescribe me antidepressants. Compassion and integrity is something that I'm very focused on.

You are the common denominator of who you surround yourself with. It is absolutely true. I found that when I started being more discerning about who I operated with personally and in my business, and when I was more discerning about what I invested my energy into, it really did just open doors for me. I am somebody who loves all, but my energy budget is very bougie, that's for sure. I think that has really helped me in my business career, and I always pass it on to other people as well.

Talk to everyone. Speak to everyone. Don't be afraid to ask how you can support or help, because you never know who's going to open a door for you. You never know who's going to give you that opportunity that's going to lead you to the next best thing. I think it's always important to know that I don't believe that there's such a thing as wrong choices. We work so hard to try to perfect our choices, hoping that'll get us to the right place. Every choice is a good choice, but as long as you trust and believe that you are making your decisions with integrity, any choice that you make will have the best result come from that, even if it doesn't feel like it at the time. So, just always persevere, and always make yourself available to trying and asking people to participate in any way possible.

The biggest challenges are capital, for sure. I mean, the industry is an impacted industry. The biggest opportunities are marketing, and I'm very much operating within a white space right now with marketing. Marketing is very difficult for a lot of brands, which is the challenge, especially with capital. So, it's an opportunity for us, because we have figured out the algorithm to be able to overcome a lot of those marketing challenges without getting our brands shut down, while still being able to build the followers and engagement and so forth. The other challenge is that we're fighting the industry against the industry. It's an echo chamber. A lot of the people who are coming from the legacy market understand that consumers are their buyers, but they don't know how to communicate with those buyers because they've been in this industry for so long. That's also our opportunity, because we're such good translators to those consumers. So, it always means that we always seem to have work and growth to kind of bridge the cannabis industry with the conscious consumer market together.

Being in integrity in this industry is most important to me. This industry does a lot of trying to mirror off of the hip-hop industry, and it's a bit of a disservice to brands of equity, or social equity brands. I really want to be a representation for not just women, but for Black and Brown people in this space, especially with so many of them still being locked up and this plant not necessarily being an opportunity to give them generational wealth. So my values are that everything I do, I really lead first with how am I supporting this community? How am I negotiating ways and opportunities that they wouldn't readily have access to? And giving them back to the community so that they have access to it in an affordable way, but we're also teaching them how to utilize these tools properly. Whether they get funding or anything, we help them develop business plans. We really help them build the knowledge, because knowledge is power. You can get money for days, but if you don't know how to utilize it, then you're just kind of screwed. That is my investment, and I think it's interesting because it's full circle, again, about education. Everything I do is about education, because I think education is power.