 Welcome to the Green Market Summit. We're here to talk about the economics of cannabis. I know everyone is really, really excited about cannabis. And we're going to turn it way down and talk about compliance, which is coming to a cannabis convention and talking about compliance is a lot like flicking on Comedy Central and finding C-SPAN. And it was kind of, I wanted three amigos, and you guys are talking about soy tariffs? No, thank you. Anyways, just quick rundown our panel. Furthest away from me, bookending our little row is Aaron Lachante. He's the founder of MMLG. Give him a round of applause. To Aaron's immediate left is the wonderful Dr. Julie Crockett. She's MMLG's director of compliance. To Julie's left is Harry Nelson, the founding partner of Nelson Hardiman, one of the country's leading health care law firms. And immediately to Harry's left is Clint Armstrong, the founder of Skill Set, as well as the founder of Growstaff. Clint just did a TED talk. Guys, let's talk a little bit about investment and regulatory risk. And maybe even before that, let's touch a little bit about what compliance entails in cannabis. Because it's a term that's thrown around a lot in a lot of highly regulated industries. But in cannabis, it seems to go even deeper. So Aaron, do you want to lead? Sure. I mean, compliance in cannabis is multi-level. And it's going to be the foundation of any successful cannabis company. At a high level, you have things like tax compliance and IE280E. But you're also dealing with operational compliance, which is really going to make or break your company. Because we're seeing a lot of folks who are making large investments in cannabis companies. And it's operational compliance all the way down to the lowest level employee that can make or break your business. Under most states regulations, the licensee is responsible for the acts of their employees. So it's completely the goal of every cannabis company to be instilling this culture of compliance from the top all the way down if the enterprise is going to be successful. One of the common things that's been shared a lot at a lot of the recent events that I've been to for the past couple of years, especially in California, is it's common for people to say, this is no longer the cannabis industry. This is now the compliance industry. Because that is the main term and method of engagement at all levels. And I also think that compliance is such a giant word right now, where it's almost like saying math. Where it's like, what do you mean by that? Are you talking about algebra? Are you talking about geometry? Where there's a lot of gradations in terms of what facet of compliance are you talking about? Because it is so comprehensive and essential to all aspects of operation. I mean, the only thing I'd add is, I think when you start talking to your comments, compliance is often thought of as a grudge purchase. This is something I have to take care of. What we've seen, I think what I can say is that we've been in this a decade now. And we've seen these rolling waves where different players just get taken out because they haven't been paying attention to it. So you have two choices. You can see it as a growth. This is like the minimum I have to do. Or given the uncertainty, given that we're still learning how the state agencies and local agencies are policing what they care about. And then this big question of what the federal government is going to be doing behind it, you can say, you know what, this is a strategic imperative. If my business is going to be one of those ventures that's still going to be there a decade forward and is going to be a leader, you can actually invest in this and make this a driving factor in your success. Yeah. I think that something that a lot of people miss out on is that the smartest investment you can make for your business is into compliance, right? Where it's the best way to ensure that you're going to be around in a decade. Clint, I know that you have done a lot of work in terms of compliance with payroll and things like that in terms of training. So what do you think from a compliance standpoint are some of those bigger issues in terms of payroll, taxes, workers' comms? I think that what you really want to do in terms of investing in compliance is investing in actually your staff and training your staff in compliance. And by doing that, you're taking actually a really proactive approach rather than a reactive approach. And you can see this in all different areas of your business, whether it's accounting and finance and dealing with the actual cash management of your business or the workers' compensation and dealing with the actual liability and the actual workers, if they get injured on the job, what do you do about that? And do you actually have your illness injury prevention programs in place and maintaining and making sure that your actual lockout tagout procedures on your equipment are in place and that your actual chemical distributions and everything is basically properly handled so that you're fully compliant in the event that government does come in like OSHA and the different regulatory agencies to actually see what you're currently doing. That's a really good point about regulation in terms of local, state, OSHA. And OSHA, I mean, that's a federal entity that still is touching. Federal and state level OSHA. And they're always gonna ask you and actually look at your processes to see what you're actually doing. How are you actually extracting? How are you actually growing and cultivating? How are you actually distributing the actual cannabis? Taking a step back, what do you guys think from an investment standpoint are some of the most important priorities from a regulatory and compliance standpoint? Erin, I know that you've done a lot of work with this in terms of M&A, in terms of investment. Yeah, so it's interesting. A lot of the deals we see folks are rightly so are very much focused on the financial side of things. Determining potential tax liability that may be out there and audit risk with I-280E. And that's huge because with I-280E, a lot of retailers definitely do have a lot of financial exposure that's out there. But one area we often see people missing is the regulatory risk. It's almost like people are way too excited to close the deal and finally get their seat at the cannabis table that they forget to take a look at operations and see what sort of risk might be out there with regards to a company's past operation. And a lot of times regulatory compliance when you're on the investor side, if things aren't done properly from the previous owners, it can turn into a money pit. I like to point to manufacturers. I think in California, manufacturers have the highest standards as far as quality control for product manufacturing. And we've seen a number of folks who have rushed out there to buy an interest in a manufacturing business only to realize that good manufacturing practices weren't implemented. The building wasn't built out to the building code and that great deal that they got. They're now looking at six figures of build out and planning out the facility so that it does meet regulatory requirements. I think it's really important to pay attention to the financial side because obviously dollars and cents drive these businesses but the regulatory risk can lead to big costs down the road and you could also be inheriting someone's mess. One other area we see a lot of problems with is record keeping. A lot of legacy operators don't have the systems in place to keep seven years worth of records like state's mandate. And so as an investor, when you're coming in buying somebody's existing business, one of the things you're looking at is do they have the records in place? Do they have the systems in place? Or am I buying into somebody's regulatory mess that they created three years ago? And just to tag on to that record keeping requirement in a lot of states like California, it's not just that you have to have these records, it's that you must be able to immediately produce them when they're asked for them. So it isn't just a matter of that you have a database somewhere, it's that your staff is trained enough and everybody who's there can actually locate something that's requested by an agency who has a tendency to show up unannounced and say, hey, we wanna spot check this aspect of your business and if you can't respond to one of those requests when the full strength of enforcement is in place, every single failure on a record keeping request is a $30,000 fine. Now guys, wait a minute, this sounds like fear mongering and we're talking to a room full of investors and we want them to be excited about cannabis, okay? We don't wanna be, I'm kidding, sort of. But what do you guys think of from a regulatory and compliance standpoint, what are some of the benefits for a business when you're looking at compliance? What are some of the best sort of case studies or examples, Aaron, Julie, Harry, Clint, whomever that you guys have seen in terms of a company using compliance to their advantage to stay ahead of trouble? Well, I think it was already said, compliance should be proactive rather than reactive and I think one of the best case studies is this company out of California called Candescent. They're a cultivator flower brand and they're just a company who was ahead of the curve with every single rule change. I remember last July, folks were operating in California and then an article comes up on MJ Biz Daily saying, hey, there's lab testing requirements now, there's new packaging requirements and folks are having a fire sale to get rid of everything before their product becomes non-compliant. Candescent was one of those companies that took compliance proactively. They had the right testing done ahead of time, they had the right packaging in place ahead of time. So as a result, after that July 1st deadline, their product was on every single store shelves while everybody else was being thrown away after the date. When rules are changing so quickly, if you have a proactive compliance team, it really allows you to have a strong space in the marketplace. I would just add to that that we get, every week I get a couple phone calls from you get a problems come up in businesses, right there are gonna be accusations, there's a whole stream of lawyers. I was with a lawyer Saturday night and he said to me, I had my first wage an hour, this is a lawyer who sues for not paying overtime, not giving rest to meal breaks. He said, I had my first case with a cannabis business and they wanted to pay me off in cash. And he goes, you know what that tells me is there's a lot more opportunity here. So there's a lot of forces coming at you and I can tell you as a lawyer, when we get these calls, they filter very quickly, they bifurcate into the cases where people have the records, have the process and there are small complaints and then you have the ones that are big ones and it's often like heartbreaking candidly, like you work with entrepreneurs building ventures and to see them fall on stupid technical things that they didn't pay attention to is just a, it's just unnecessary and it doesn't happen if you invest in this area. Go ahead, Clint. Yeah, I was just gonna say just to add in on that, I think that the cannabis industry can really learn from other industries, particularly the TPS model, the Toyota production system model and continuous improvement and developing Kaizen programs and pokey events. These are systems that have been systematically grown over the decades by other companies that make them highly, highly compliant and make them extremely well at quality assurance and making sure that they find immediately the main issue with whatever manufacturing system within that day so that you don't have a ton of product out there that's not going to be contaminated and so I think that we can look at other areas and other industries and actually learn from them from a compliance aspect. Julie, what do you think are some of the main sort of factors or components of compliance done right? And how do you think to Clint's point about the TPS system where it's just continual improvement, what do you see as the necessary components and how do they continually evolve? I think we're in such an interesting place. It's important to remember in all the enthusiasm and open-mindedness that we're experiencing right now that in effect we're kind of just coming out of prohibition and not even fully out of it yet. Prohibition was, I think, settled back a few decades ago. For something, enough of this. So there really is, I mean, I do feel like a lot of the operators and people along the supply chain are in this trust-building exercise with each other, with agencies, with the state, with the federal government. It's a very interesting evolution that for so long people in the cannabis industry were saying, oh, we just wanna be treated like every other industry. And it's kind of one of those, be careful what you ask for, because now you're being treated like every other industry simultaneously where you're being treated like a pharmaceutical company, you're being treated like a nutraceutical company, you're being treated like an alcohol company, like everything's kind of coming to roost. So one of the difficulties, I think, with a lot of these businesses, when we were talking about record keeping, that for legacy operators and people who have been doing this for a long time, you're coming out of an environment where you never wanted to put anything on paper and you didn't keep any records because that was the way that you handled things to immediately reporting your activities to the government, which is a big phase shift for people. And then while creating these processes and these networks, it's doing so under these states of extreme scrutiny and also with still evolving rules. So there is a lot of, I mean, one of the things that's very critical at this time, like Erin was saying with Candescent, is this ability to look forward in terms of not just responding to the rules as they are, but having a real sense of what the rules are going to be. So for a lot of those packaging companies or people who were doing their labeling who were shocked by the change of rules in California, for example, on July 1st, if they had looked at federal standards, if they had looked at California weights and measure standards for any consumer product, you would have been able to predict ahead to like, I can look at a Pepsi bottle in my house and tell you what's supposed to be on a label. Now with that being said, what do you think are some of the key components of a well thought out compliance plan? Yeah. We don't have to reinvent the model because it exists, right? By the way, just for historical record, compliance, we first see the term compliance in 1992 show up in the federal sentencing guidelines. What happened was companies that were repeat offenders of in these corruption cases, defense contractors and other companies, the government started saying, hey, wait a second, you're claiming this is just one rogue bad actor and that you're really a well run company, prove it to us by having a compliance program. So the government came up with seven elements that were basically intended to show transparency, accountability and integrity. And those elements were compliance being driven by senior leadership, meaning from the top down, this has to be messaged appropriately. There have to be personnel who are liaison so that information gets to the head of the company and that everything's dealt with. There have to be clear rules, policies and procedures. There has to be training of staff on those policies and procedures. There has to be enforcement of the policies and procedures and there has to be a continuing look at what's going on in self auditing so you're not waiting for the government to show up. So those are, we don't have to, you can look at this as Julie says, industry by industry, the pharmaceutical industry was forced into this. And now you can go on the website of Amgen or any of these other large pharmaceuticals and what you'll see is their whole compliance structure, how it runs, how the committee on their board reports on these issues, everything is transparent and that's what this industry has to do. The challenge here is we're in new territory so there's more work to put those rules together. I mean, that's a lot of the work that MMLG does is because it's not, this is fast moving and complicated but you've got to, to Julie's point, you've got to be on this in the same way that every other, this is not, the legality may be changing but the structure that exists, that this is gonna have to fit into, we already know what it is, yeah. Clint, what do you think from a training standpoint, Harry mentioned that leadership is so integral to compliance but then it also comes down to on a business by business, at a business level, ensuring that your staff knows what they're doing and with gross staff, you guys, you look at this quite a bit. All the time and it really starts once you hire an employee and what you wanna do is you actually wanna be transparent by building out the actual job requisition for that individual and what that's gonna do for you, that's gonna allow you to add all the different job duties that they're doing and the different type of equipment and processes and items that they're gonna be dealing with and this is gonna transcend into your 280E expenses. This is gonna allow you to become much better and more profitable because you actually have these different light items that this individual is doing and by doing that you're becoming more compliant and then you can also go ahead and train other employees in those processes and procedures to make sure that you're fully compliant and intertwined with your different illness injury prevention programs while you're manufacturing and your SOPs as well. Aaron, you've talked a lot or you've seen a lot of non-compliance matters as well based in Los Angeles, you've been in the game since 2009, can you speak to the costs of non-compliance? I know that everyone in the room is probably very curious about what happens if the money they've invested and something goes awry. Yeah, I mean it's a really simple value proposition, investing in compliance on the front end is much more cost effective than responding to a compliance crisis on the back end. We've worked with one client who was a pretty good operator, they've been around for a while and they had pretty good, a couple issues on the compliance side, they received a visit from state investigators where they identified some compliance issues and the operator had to bring in a law firm to respond to state allegations, they had to implement a new compliance program, additional training, and we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars on the back end plus having the risk of losing a license due to the compliance violations when for a fraction of it, you can put in the systems and trainings and implement that robust compliance program to ensure the violations don't happen. Whether you're self auditing, you're bringing in a third party to come in and audit you, it's always going to be much more cost effective to identify your compliance issues before there's a problem than when you're responding to an actual complaint and allegation from the government and that's just responding to the investigation. Once a regulator decides to take action on a license, it's just like any other lawsuit in the sense that you're potentially looking at six figures in regulatory defense just to keep your ticket to keep working and running your cannabis business. So we strongly push for businesses to implement that robust compliance program on the front end. Yeah, I would just add, there's a, you only have one chance to make a first impression and you have a certain amount of capital built up in your brand and what state regulators, what local authorities think of you, eventually what federal authorities think of your business, it matters. And if you don't get a lot of chances at this. So I can tell you the biggest challenge we face when we get a serious compliance problem is if it's the first time there's a chance to show prompt, serious, corrective action and say, we made a mistake, we were fixing it. But on the second time, on the third time, you just don't, there's not an unlimited well to keep going back to. And so it's a lot, Terence point, it's a lot smarter to do this up front and make sure that you're in a position to retain that brand integrity. And operationally, I've seen it work where it does mean something to the agencies when they come in to do an inspection and they identify problems and the operator pulls out their internal audit report or their internal corrective action plan or their internal SOP and says, oh, well, this is what we had and this is what we're doing and this is what we submitted to you and how can we correct this? So it does mean a lot to them to know that even the operators, the boots on the ground, down to the retail counter workers or whoever's position it is, has a cognizance of what are the rules? Where are we meeting these requirements? Where are we not meeting the requirements? What are we still working on? So it does become critical again in that training that because the inspectors are interesting where they will kind of come in and find the person hiding in the corner and go, you, you tell me what you're doing. I want to know your job to understand really what is the operating level of each person who's working at this facility because it is so critical that every single person is participating in creating this compliant environment. Julie, let's stick with you for a minute. I love picking on you. You're welcome. Let's talk a little bit about the how and the why of compliance violations where if it's a local official, if it's a state regulator, whatever, people are coming in, they're finding that guy in the corner and asking him what he's done or what he does, how and why do violations occur? I think, guys, am I right? You guys probably want to know why these things happen. No? Well, Julie, go ahead anyways. I mean, again, it's so interesting because I do feel like just as we're talking about training for operators and for licensees, you have local and state governments that are going through their own training processes for training their own staff. So in every state right now, there's RFPs going out for how are we going to train our local enforcement so that they understand what they're looking at and what they're looking for when they walk into these environments. So it is such an interesting time because there's so much subjectivity as well, which is never fun, so that when you have, you might have some get up and go inspector who's going to come in and he's got on his list today that he's going to take somebody down and you just don't know who you're dealing with. So it's really important to go through those drills and those practices for your staff and for everyone of how you're going to interface with the enforcement agencies when they come. And we've already seen problems of people pretending to be enforcement agencies. So it's important to clarify with the enforcement agencies how do they present themselves? What does their ID look like? Because you'll have a bud tender and a retail thing that gets all, you know, fluffled when somebody comes in in a suit and says, I'm from the BCC, I want to see you're safe. When you're doing an audit, do you ever walk in and with like sheriff, aviator glasses on or just like show me? The joys of my life is just messing with people. I mean, it's really, I mean, again, it's just an interesting process to take people through. So one of the things, I mean, one of the things that we work very, very hard with in our position kind of as consultants because we have these multi-tiered relationships where I have really great relationships with the local agencies, with the state agencies to be able to kind of get into their intent as a non-licency to understand what are their enforcement priorities? And here's a list of a hundred regulations that you have to comply with. But here's the 22 things that are actually on their inspection sheet. So that's really critical for a business to know that if you're gonna pick 22 things to like really have a gold star on, it's gonna be the things on their inspection sheet. And so keeping up with those enforcement priorities, understanding what's important for the different license types to their, like what are those critical checkpoints? What are the things that they're not gonna let slide where yeah, maybe they don't mind if your windows don't have 50% transparency but if your sanitation procedures aren't up to spec, you're in big trouble. So I think those things are really a big part of how we work with people is in being able to build your program responsibly to those enforcement priorities because that's ultimately who you're dealing with. Clint, what have you seen with your team in terms of training companies, clients, in terms of auditing? Sure, I would probably say why compliance comes up is because people make mistakes. And because of that, you're gonna have a plethora of issues that happen. And one of the major issues that I see is that if you're working in cannabis and you have a cultivation center, an extraction center, and you have these employees operating these machines, in this case cannabis, there's probably a high percentage of those individuals actually actively using cannabis while at the job. And just how we prohibit the use of alcohol while operating every machinery, you can't have people under the influence of cannabis doing this as well. And once that occurs, once a simple injury or a situation occurs, you have all the agencies coming in, right? And so if you have an amputation or anything of that nature, this is gonna come up. And so you have to make sure that you have a program in place on how you actually hire these employees. What's your drug and alcohol program look like? How are you actually going to run a background check on these individuals and rug a drug test? Are you testing for all cannabis compounds in their system when it actually pops up? And after the injury, are you gonna go and drug test them again? What else are they on? And is the actual insurance carrier going to go in and say, hey, I'm gonna insure this, because they weren't high or they were high on the job. And so these aspects come up. And what I do is I try to go in there and train people on there and ask them, hey, what does your illness injury prevention program look like? What are you actually proactively doing to making sure that these mistakes aren't gonna occur and that people aren't showing up high on the job? Yeah, folks, just to be clear, write this down in your notepads. Don't hire people who are high on the job. This is compliance 101. That's a freebie, you know, ask us more questions afterwards, but. Highly overlooked though. Absolutely. And it's something we see a lot, at least on the employee level. Most compliance violations aren't malicious. You know, folks aren't showing up to work with the intention that, you know, they're just gonna flout the rules and do what they wanna do. It really is a result of a lack of systems, a lack of training, and to make sure that workers understand the regulation. One of the things we've seen, even with some of the most prominent cannabis companies, is that when the end of the month is coming along and folks are paying attention to sales figures, oftentimes, you know, compliance takes a back seat to hitting end of the month numbers. And that's a huge mistake, you know, as executives and management, you know, the culture of compliance starts at the top and works its way down. And while in the short term, you may be hitting your numbers for the month or the quarter or whatever time period we're looking at, long term, it's not going to be a sustainable model because ultimately the compliance violations catch up to the business. Not any wise pound foolish, just like Mayor Daley's billion dollar parking deal for Chicagoans of a long time. Never mind. To go off that point though, from a manufacturing perspective, at the, what I see is at the end of the very month, you see complete chaos and everyone's frantic and they're just trying to push product out and that's where you start to see mistakes happen. You see it with forklift drivers, people, I've seen people run people over. They're just trying to get the product out the door to meet the numbers, you know? And so you want to make sure that you're taking things step by step and you're just not pushing things out the door as quickly as possible because that, and those are the instances where big mistakes happen and then all of a sudden the compliance umbrella opens up. Exuberance and enthusiasm is one thing. I'm getting this on a number of levels, on a macro level in terms of investors making sure that they're not rushing to the table and just signing anything and not doing their due diligence. But then it sounds like, Clint, what you're saying, enthusiasm and exuberance about sales even in a warehouse situation is... Well, it comes from the top to the bottom, right? So it's gonna come down to the factory worker. Your factory worker is gonna be the one pushing that product out, making sure that they get it out and they're the machine that makes it happen. Folks, when we're talking about state and local officials, we're talking about sort of the intermediate stage, right? It's not the short term, but it is immediate, but we're also, you know, if an investor is looking down the road, potentially at federal legalization as well, what do we think are some key aspects of compliance and how things like the States Act are being integrated, things on, you know, in terms of what you need to be paying attention to, from an investor standpoint, from a management standpoint for compliance. Julie, Aaron? I wanna take this one, Harry. Harry? So we spend a lot of time, I actually engage with some senior people at the EA and FDA, and we spend a lot of time, I have some embarrassing white papers that we wrote years ago, predicting what the Clinton, the second the Clinton administration was gonna look like and what their cannabis policy was gonna be. But no, so we spend a lot of time on this question and you alluded to the States Act, people should be paying a lot of attention here. Our assumption all along has been that at some point, you know, this whole architecture of federal laws is going to change, and we're gonna see a rescheduling on the controlled substances list to move cannabis into a status where the FDA can actually adopt a process. It's extremely unusual in the history of products, of food, drug, cosmetic products, to have the FDA basically standing down as it has been throughout the coal memorandum since 2013. So we're living in a very unusual time period and I think, you know, there's this possibility of the States Act proposed by the Warren campaign is an interesting idea that perhaps will enshrine these state-by-state systems. But personally, I'm a skeptic. I just think if you'll take a long view of how the FDA has policed products, drugs, botanicals, the whole range, food products, we can fully expect that that's the infrastructure that ultimately we're gonna have to live under. And so the question is, nobody knows exactly when the shift in law is gonna happen and more importantly, what the pathway is gonna look like because it's not gonna be as if Congress votes and the President signs into law a new bill rescheduling cannabis and then the next day you're gonna be expected to live under a completely different regime. But what we expect is there will be a pathway, a one to two year pathway, where you'll be expected to go from meeting the current good manufacturing practices that the state of Illinois or whatever state you're operating in passes to all of a sudden having to do so under the FDA expectations. And so I think as you're building in this space you need to be building in that respect. And to me, the critical thing you need to be paying attention to is it's going to take capital reserves to get through the FDA process, right? We work on a lot of these on the regulatory pathway for a lot of different kinds of products and it's not an inexpensive process to go through human safety testing if you're gonna need approval, which most products will. The only product category right now that seems to be promising for not having to do so is the cosmetic category. But I fully expect that there will be human safety testing, efficacy testing and that's gonna take a lot of capital and it's gonna mean that you have to be building a product that's built for a larger market and that big hurdle that's coming even though we don't know if it's not next year because there's gonna be a multi-year pathway but I would expect that within the next five to seven years we're gonna see a shift to a federal system and you've got to have that baked into your business plan. And I do think it's important to think from the compliance and enforcement perspective that when you are then looking at dealing with an agency like the FDA, they have over doubled the enforcement budget of an agency like the DEA. So they really have a well-developed enforcement aspect to them as well so that you're gonna be in the crosshairs and some companies already are, especially in the CBD markets where it's like the FDA is starting to target not just bigger egregious actors but even just smaller players who are not playing by the rules. Zooming back in on Illinois for a moment, gang, what do we think are some of the priorities that from an investment standpoint, from a management standpoint, where do we see in this intermediate stage pre what Harry's talking about? But obviously JB Pritzker made a splash over the weekend. So if you're thinking about marijuana in Illinois in 2020, what are some steps that people can start to take today? I'm hearing crickets. I think the steps that people can be taking today, and whether it's Illinois, New York, New Jersey, all of these proposals right now are fluid. And so it's gathering capital. It's putting together your ownership team and making sure you're well-capitalized and nimble. I think it's interesting to start looking at real estate now because we've seen so much in other places that once laws and local ordinances become final, real estate prices go through the roof. And so these times when you can get a location at market and be able to hold on to it, put a different business in for the time being, I think that's smart. But ultimately from what we've seen with New York and New Jersey that it's great that the governor came out with a solution. Let's see what the final product looks like and if there's going to be a final product. In the meantime though, I would just same to any other state. It would just be get your capital together because this is an expensive undertaking. I also think it's critical to deeply engage with these political and rule-making processes as these rules are being written. Because I think California is a great example right now of unintended consequences sometimes of some of these rule-making packages where it's so critical to have a lot of informed eyes on these local ordinances, on how they interface with state ordinances, on how state might influence federal ordinances and really be kind of plotting that longing from the beginning to make sure that you're not ending up with a local ordinance or a state set of regulations that's going to prevent growth, prevent innovation, prevent diversity, prevent access, like that those things kind of have to be baked into it because some of that is what we're coming up against but there's a lot of great ideas but sometimes especially too looking at as they're setting these tax rates and what the local tax structures will be in making sure that that's not going to be over overreaching in synch the ship in advance because we're seeing a lot of that play out where you have a lot of hands in the bucket where between local taxes and state taxes and excise taxes and the looming prospect of a federal excise tax of there's kind of only so much that a market can bear in those situations. Aaron I have a specific question and I think for you anyone really but I'm asking my boss. What do we think in terms of Illinois you know from a policy standpoint because Julie is absolutely right about policy and being at that table in terms of getting those rules, those regulations drawn up so where can people inside the state of Illinois the land of Lincoln, where can they turn to? I mean do they seek out people in other states? Do they seek out people in California? What's the best way to go? Where you've done work in California obviously but other where is as well? Yeah so listen at this point I think it's best for folks to engage lobbyists if they wanna be involved in the political process or get involved with trade groups because the trade groups who are representing multiple stakeholders they enjoy a unique spot at the rulemaking table because they represent so many stakeholders and they have this industry expertise that folks and government don't necessarily have at this point. I've been surprised over the years the amount of influence that these trade groups have when working with state officials and coming up with cannabis policy and this is really the time to shape the conversation. New York has been very vocal about having a strong social equity program allowing folks who have been impacted by the war on drugs to benefit from cannabis licensure. We're doing a number of projects in Missouri and in Missouri there is no talk about social equity. It's merely an exercise in capitalism. And so here when we're at this proposal stage is when folks can weigh in on this conversation of what do we want the Illinois cannabis program to look like? What policies and priorities are important to us? And there's a lot of benefit to having numbers when you go to a state capital and weigh in on these issues. Great. Anyways, we can't thank you guys enough for your rapt attention at our compliance panel. I'd like to thank Aaron, Julie, Harry, Clint, all of you for joining us up on stage. We will be mingling about. So if you have questions, reach out. Follow us on LinkedIn. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah.