ABOUT THE BOOK
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Are you a dispensary who is looking to increase your sales? Are you a budtender who is looking to advance your career? Are you looking to open a cannabis store in your state? If so, Breaking the Stigma is the book for you!
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As a cannabis retailer, you face the same challenges as every business today, but there are more obstacles for you than the local brick-and-mortar shops or dominating online stores.
Being successful means creating a customer experience fueled by a thorough understanding of the consumer. For retailers in the still newly-forming cannabis industry, this knowledge only comes from breaking through barriers of a deeply-ingrained stigma—one with catastrophic consequences.
In Breaking the Stigma, Fortune 500 business executive Charlena Berry provides a framework for becoming a prosperous cannabis retailer, showing you how to overcome your product’s negative connotations and impart vital, need-to-know truths about your industry. With first-hand experience of the devastating opioid endemic, Charlena’s fight for cannabis’s legitimacy is a personal one. She shares decades of business insight to show you how to gain market share using traditional retail strategies to improve the customer experience and ultimately gain profitability. Ensure your business and product sustainability and be part of the solution to society’s deadliest problem with this emotionally-driven, factually-based strategy for long-term success.
Why did I write this book?
When I was a little girl, I always fantasized about writing a book. I would start writing in notebooks that were exclusively dedicated to my future book. It would always start with a little girl with a best friend who was a troll or a dragon living in some faraway place.
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While Breaking the Stigma is a long way from a fantasy novel, it is still a compilation of villains and heroes.
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As I celebrated my 5th year running my consulting company, Cannabis Business Growth, I felt compelled to share everything I have learned working in the Cannabis Industry. However, what started as a business writing project turned incredibly personal.
As a non-user, I started working in the industry with a bit of shame and embarrassment. My thoughts rang with the words from campaigns during the War on Drugs. After a long journey, I have learned that cannabis is in fact a legitimate medicine that should not only be studied but should be made accessible to anyone who is looking for alternatives to traditional medication.
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Driven by curiosity, I needed to understand how we got here. In a history that is not often told, I discovered the incredible number of lies about not only the plant but about how pain should be treated, including the huge lie that opiates are non-addictive. I also learned that these lies were told to us by malicious individuals in acts of greed and self-preservation.
With these lessons, I'm mortified that cannabis is not accessible to everyone, and while we have come a long way, there is still a long way to go.
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Cannabis retailers are on the front lines of the industry and that in order for us to continue to fight for legitimacy and common sense drug reform, we must approach operations with lessons from traditional retailers.
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In Breaking the Stigma: Racism, the Opioid Endemic, Lies, and Inviting Grandma to the Dispensary, I reveal this narrative and provide tangible business strategies to help each of us overcome the plants negative connotations.
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