“I wanted to make budtenders feel supported and provide a service and a community that wasn’t available when I first started.”
Budtending is hard work.
As a longtime cannabis industry manager, Megan Hansen knows what it is like to have impatient lines stretch out the door while you are trying to move inventory and follow innumerable rules with only two people helping on registers.
After spending eight years in those kinds of industry trenches, Hansen recently broke out on her own with Canna G.E.M.S. A network for cannabis professionals, the company focuses on training courses for budtenders, with topics like product testing, financial literacy, lab basics, and others that are especially valuable for newcomers.
“I’ve been to so many dispensaries where I’ll ask the bud tenders, what do you think? And they immediately reference potency. It’s never really personal,” Hansen told Talking Joints Memo.
She continued, “I am a firm believer in real-time training. I said if I was going to do anything, I wanted to be a part of the front lines. I wanted to make budtenders feel supported and provide a service and a community that wasn’t available when I first started.”
Hansen started as a budtender at the now defunct Sage Cannabis when it opened in 2017. The company faced an uphill battle and was eventually bought by a competitor. Nevertheless, it’s where Hansen cut her teeth in those earliest years of licensed Mass cannabis. She learned quickly, and eventually wound up at Apothca in Lynn, where she became the lead trainer. In time, Hansen became a general manager, and then a district manager, helping open more Apothca stores and punching straight through the pandemic. Then she had a baby.
“I thought that was going to be it for me,” she said. “Then the tides turned again where it just wasn’t the best fit for me anymore.”
After a subsequent two-year stint as director of retail at Apex Noire in Boston, Hansen felt rudderless. “I wanted to stay grounded,” she said. “Before getting into cannabis, I was a [certified nursing assistant] for five years, taking care of a lot of people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s. And just having the experience of starting as a CNA and wanting to be a nurse, I felt so powerful and I really correlated that with the cannabis industry.”
With Canna G.E.M.S., Hansen said she has become the connection between brands and budtenders, providing an inclusive space where the two can intermingle while keeping things casual. The company hosts trainings at the start of the week and leans into weekends for networking events.
“Trainings are more formal,” Hansen explained. “I also provide a certificate of completion for their employee files with the information that the CCC requires for training documentation. We’re now moving on with topic-focused workshops on things like financial literacy trainings. … Normalization is important too.”
While Canna G.E.M.S. doesn’t have any union affiliation, Hansen said she sees the benefit of the collective, especially when it comes down to addressing pay and harassment in the industry.
“There are sexual assaults that go on and that aren’t spoken about,” she said. “There is a lot of mistreatment in the cannabis grow industry and in retail. These people are getting paid the minimum rate, maybe $17 or $18 per hour, but they’re just grateful for the opportunity. I’ve even seen budtender rates as low as $15 and $16.”
So, what if you want to join the cannabis industry today? Hansen said prospective workers should first talk to the team that’s currently working.
“Do all the research you want, but it’s the people that make the place, you know, no matter where you go,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to truly get out there and go to different events and see how these people are outside of the store.
“What communities are they supporting and engaging with? And aside from Black History month and Pride, what are they doing throughout the year?”
On July 28, Canna G.E.M.S. is hosting “E-Rigs & Concentrates” at the Summit Lounge in Worcester with MPX.
