The Roots of Operational Excellence

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Vivid Integrated Solutions helps cannabis and hemp companies cultivate success

“When you’re operationally and financially proficient, you understand that the devil is in the details and that having the ability to adjust rapidly and strategically is the path to sustainable growth,” says Shelly Tallabas, co-founder and CEO of Vivid Integrated Solutions LLC. “As financially minded operations experts, our goal is to extract breakthrough productivity and boost overall performance so our client partners gain or remain profitable for scale or sale.  We’re business transformation experts; that's what we do.” And that’s exactly the kind of hardcore support struggling and startup companies need to plant deep roots, grow, and succeed.

Vivid Integrated Solutions partners with owner-operators in the cannabis and healthcare industries to strategically assess their business models and identify the challenges and opportunities that impact their success. Tallabas and her co-founders are veterans of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) and pharmaceutical industries, and bring best-in-class, battle-tested best practices to the complex issues players in nascent and evolving industries often face.

With over 20 years of CPG marketing leadership, including stints at Yum! Brands (Taco Bell and KFC) and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Tallabas entered the cannabis industry in 2018 before many dispensary owner-operators were ready or willing to engage strategic business consultants from “adjacent” industries.

In the cannabis trade, these outsiders are called chads, referring to posers who know little or nothing about the product and are in the space to scoop up easy money. “With that in mind, we had to ‘cannabitize’ our custom operating model to ensure that what we deployed aligned with the intent and capability of the operating team without diluting the efficacy of the outcome,” she told BOSS.

As the cannabis market has progressed and investors from large enterprises have entered the space, Vivid Integrated Solutions is emerging as the go-to strategic partner and consulting team to help owners successfully launch their operations. Based in Las Vegas, Vivid Integrated Solutions maintains a presence in Colorado, California, New Jersey, Texas, and Florida.

“We are battle-tested operational excellence experts with decades of experience in highly regulated, hypercompetitive industries,” she explained. “We’re committed to bringing proven best practices to small and startup entities that are struggling to make a profit or facing challenges with their product quality, manufacturing practices, or market share.”

Our experts get into the nitty gritty, providing instruction, guidance, and implementation while diligently measuring the effectiveness of strategies that enhance productivity and profitability. They consistently apply the core principles of operational excellence and rapid continuous improvement, drawing from best practices employed by some of the largest corporations to maintain a competitive advantage.

Typically, business owners in the cannabis and hemp space have strong backgrounds in product development but lack expertise in conventional business management. As such they are faced with a plethora of barriers that can be impossible to discover, let alone leap because they have no way to identify and eliminate their root causes.

Company-killing problems such as failing product quality tests, losing market share, falling revenue, overpaying for packaging or hardware, and meeting the challenges of running a cultivation or manufacturing facility are the demons that our operational excellence experts slay on a daily basis.

Some of the most pressing issues for cannabis company owners and operators are compliance related challenges that may put their license at risk or result in steep fines. Inadequate documentation, weak or non-existent standard operating procedures, poor document control and governance are only a few examples of operational risks commonly seen in the emerging industry.

“We bring our team in, we assess every facet of the organization and deliver a data-driven roadmap that ties to the bottom-line results,” she said. “We identify the strongest ROI opportunity levers and the lowest cost to implement infrastructure changes that will help owner operators sustain a profitable business model and maintain operational maturity and integrity (from A to Z) to keep you safe if a regulatory audit comes your way or you need to seek outside funding.” Tallabas likens their role to an operational “broom and mop brigade, because we tidy up the foundational components of the operation, standardize operational tools and procedures for each workflow and implement a custom data-driven performance measurement and monitoring system so every level of the organization has visibility to their area of responsibility and can steer the business with fewer surprises.”

In addition to driving financial and operational maturity in these organizations, Vivid’s support solutions include ERP/MRP implementation, supply chain negotiations, employee training and development, and corporate hygiene. Vivid Integrated Solutions maintains partnerships with ancillary providers in the industry to stay abreast of trends and best practices.

Talabas added, “We named our company Vivid Integrated Solutions with the promise that our solutions lead to vivid outcomes that are memorable, measurable, repeatable, profitable, obvious, and sustainable.”

Battle tested transformation experts

When it comes to retail operations, Vivid teaches their customers how to go to market, assists with setting pricing infrastructure, their retail strategies, and category management. They then tackle forward-looking issues such as shelf share. “What is a fair shelf share? Do you know how to get there? We mentor our customers on how to use analytics to drive competitive selling solutions,” Tallabas said.

“I used to think that the food & beverage and pharma industries were complex, but cannabis is even more so because every municipality is different and cannabis is still federally illegal,” she said. “Every state has its own regulatory body that oversees compliance and the track and trace systems and standards.”

It’s a systemic problem the industry as a whole is grappling with. There are no federal solutions for safe banking and the legal and technology solutions the help traditional companies manage their payroll, human resources, and employee benefits are remain very limited (and expensive) to cannabis owner operators.

Another issue is the lack of meaningful benchmarking tools. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done or monetized,” Tallabas stressed. Vivid connects all parts of the business though a custom data-led operating system so owners can steer their companies proactively, rather than reacting to events and relying on guesswork. The team goes through over 500 metrics and KPIs to properly apply them to what a particular company should be measuring.

Many startup or small business owners haven’t had the opportunity or previous experience speaking to investors so, “We help our customers prepare for board meetings and investor calls,” Tallabas said. We give owners the ability to reliably answer basic questions around internal and external ROI, scaling and growth, exit strategy, projected earnings, and other essentials.

“We aim to be soft-handed in our approach though we’re often seen as strategically disruptive.  When we’re on-ground for six to nine months transforming parts of the business from art to science (operational maturity) it can make people uncomfortable – especially if they’ve never seen the tools we’re building or experienced traditional business reporting methods. Change is hard enough and when workflow performance is suddenly being reported daily, it changes the game,” she concluded. “It’s a delicate balance, we need to maintain the integrity of what the owners created while ensuring they deliver sustainable operational and financial improvements and become masters of the bottom line.”