Pharmacy Technician

Stacey Rusch broke A barrier in Virginia's cannabis industry, and now she's scaling her brand into new markets. Stacey Rusch spent years selling other companies' products on QVC. Now she's focused on her own. The Real Housewives of Potomac star is the founder of Shayo, a cannabis-infused wellness brand that launched in Virginia's medical cannabis market in partnership with Jushi Holdings. And she wants to be clear about her role. "I'm not the face of the brand," Rusch told AfroTech Culture. "I own the brand." Back to her entrepreneurial roots. Before reality television, Rusch was already working for herself. "Many people don't know that before I joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Potomac, I was a yoga teacher full-time," she said. "So I essentially was self-employed." She taught private and public clients, including the White House Athletic Center, the CIA, NASA and American University. Television brought her a lot of success, she says, but she never let go of the idea of building something of her own. "I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to come back to wellness, and, of course, entrepreneurship," she said, "and establishing something that I could own, that I could grow, that was a reflection of who I am." For Rusch, launching Shayo was "sort of like returning back to who I was." Spotting a gap in the market. When Rusch started looking into the cannabis industry, the numbers on ownership stood out. "I learned that less than 5% of entrepreneurs in the cannabis industry in our country are of African American descent," she said. "And when you throw in being a woman, that number decreases significantly." She saw that as an opening. "I knew that this was not only a great opportunity to step into wellness, but to also get into a booming industry where people like you and me were underrepresented," she said. Along the way, Rusch says she became the first African American woman to own a cannabis brand in Virginia. She says she didn't realize it until the business was already up and running. "I honestly didn't start my wellness company and get into the cannabis industry wanting to make history," she said. "My intention was to create a brand that could help people, with a focus on women, starting in the cannabis industry, which is so underserved when we talk about Black ownership and entrepreneurship." More than a cannabis company. Shayo, which means "to be happy" in Yoruba, launched with fruit chew gummies and has since added an all-in-one vape. But Rusch says cannabis is only the entry point. "I want to be clear, Shayo is a wellness brand," she said. "We're just starting with cannabis, so there's much more to come." The business is growing, too. After its Virginia debut, Shayo expanded into Nevada's adult-use market last year. "We are booming here in the state of Virginia," Rusch said. "We've expanded into Nevada, with many states to come, God willing."

"We measure success by selecting genetics that meet commercial needs and consistently deliver strong results at our facilities" Jushi was already growing on two tiers in three states when Bradley Lorbach arrived as Regional Director of Cultivation. He came to it from seven years at Native Roots in Denver, growing single tier under HPS. "They called it the dinosaur of build-outs, but we learned how to make it work," he says with a chuckle. "When I joined Jushi in Virginia, the setup was a double-tier cultivation system using rockwool. By refining our plant work, adjusting the production schedule, and training the team, we quickly raised yields from 60 grams per square foot to 90. It's a great system, but working at height and on ladders is part of the job, an important consideration when hiring." One facility still runs on a single tier. Jushi bought the Nevada site from New Leaf and kept its layout. "In Nevada we purchased the facility as is. It was a well put together facility, designed as single tier, very well run, with smaller rooms. But doubling the tier gives us double the square footage and double the biomass," Bradley says. That leaves three large facilities and one smaller one across Virginia, Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania, flower on two tiers, veg rooms running two and three high, and one set of procedures covering all of them. "Each facility had a double-tier system when I arrived, but horticultural practices varied from site to site," Bradley says. "We now use our SOPs to bring consistency to how those systems are managed across facilities. Growing is the easy part. It's the training and the labor strain that's difficult when you're handling a footprint that size." Room sizes and plant counts vary widely across the five states, and each build feeds back into how the next one gets specified. "In Nevada, in a small single tier room, we run 350 plants on average. In Pennsylvania, we put up to 2,000 plants in double tier," he notes. Watching it run Jushi selects equipment suppliers the way it does with genetics suppliers. "We try to choose wisely, to select those companies that have proven themselves in the market. Every system we bring in, we go and see it at one site or several, as much as possible. We see the systems in action, and we understand top to bottom what the approaches are, and what experience those facilities have had," Bradley says. Pipp came through that process, and Jushi had the racking running in front of it in other people's buildings before any of it went into its own. "As we've become familiar with Pipp, we've become accustomed to how the system works. Whatever issues we've had in cultivation, Pipp's team has been there to work through them with us and make sure we're getting the most out of the system," he says. The relationship carries into the training material, where Bradley works with L&D on the learning modules and onboarding. "Whenever we have a question about safety or compliance, we're always connecting with Pipp to make sure we understand the parameters we need to know, and they're always there to support us," he explains. The same racking is used after the plants come down. "We're using Pipp racks for some of our dry rooms. They're very much integrated into the design and they're working very well. It's a good setup, it makes it very easy on the crew. They have the tools they need to be successful every day." Equipment gets specified from the cultivation numbers, and Bradley came up doing the workarounds when that did not happen. "If you don't get the irrigation inputs correct, your HVAC is going to suffer, so we plan accordingly," explains Bradley. "Now, we can nearly hand the cultivation SOPs over to the engineers who build our facilities, helping them match system specifications to our operational needs and avoid costly under- or oversizing." Standardizing the plant Jushi grows from both clones and seed, and the choice gets made facility by facility rather than company-wide. Seed removes the mother stock, which changes both the labor and the space the company has to carry. "We measure success by selecting genetics that meet commercial needs and consistently deliver strong results at each of our facilities," Bradley says. "Along with that, we need to figure out whether you can grow clones and seed together in the same flower room, or whether you need to separate them. But we don't plan to go all seed, for now. We like a balance of both, for the genetic diversity and for the way they grow." In Colorado he avoided seed entirely, and the caution has stayed with him as a set of procedures. "In Colorado we never grew from seed, for fear the genetics weren't stable enough, and you end up getting males or herms," Bradley says. "The cannabis seed industry is still evolving, it's still not at the same level as traditional horticulture, where cucumbers and tomatoes have been stabilized for decades. That's why when we bring in new sources, we quarantine first." Everything Jushi grows gets sold, through its own retail and wholesale to producers who cannot fill their own orders, and each state carries price tiers that run back to the genetics. "The market eventually moves beyond just THC. I compare it to the alcohol business: in an emerging market, THC is king, and the focus is on strength, think moonshine. But on the East Coast, particularly in Virginia, some people are returning to cannabis after decades away. They're looking for the Cabernet or an IPA, not necessarily the strongest stuff."